Andrew Ager: From The Rubáiyát, text by Omar Khayyám
Violet Archer: A Sprig of Flowers, text by Kuan Han-Ching
Helen Bowater: He Does Not Come, text by Ono no Komachi et al.
Alastair Boyd: Rondel, text by Charles d’Orléans
Scott Good: Deuil Engoisseux, text by Christine de Pisan
Lester Trimble: Four Fragments from The Canterbury Tales, text by Geoffrey Chaucer
Kurt Weill: Frauentanz, texts by various authors

    The image of a tapestry for this evening’s programme is an apt one, as weft-threads of text from earlier ages have been laid skilfully into the warp threads of more contemporary musical language, creating a final product whose colours may be those of an archaic textile, but whose structure and design are much more recent. The cultural textures are rich and varied, formed by elements brought together from widely-separated lands – medieval texts from China, Japan, Persia, Germany, France, and England, set by composers with backgrounds in Canada, the United States, Italy, England, Germany, and New Zealand – bringing to mind the trade in dyestuffs and fabrics which was the reason for so much medieval travelling. Some of the figures on the tapestry have their faces turned away from us, anonymous, their faces hidden, but their individuality is unmistakable. Others, like the protagonist of the Rubáiyát, the narrator in the poems of Kuan Han-ching, or Chaucer’s Wyf of Biside Bath, almost reach out of the fabric to impress their identities upon us. Even the self-effacing persona whose gentle praise of nature breathes through Charles d’Orléans’ Rondel reveals itself in the tapestry, lighting the scene with the freshness of spring. 


Andrew Ager (b. 1962) – From the Rubáiyát, for tenor, horn, and string quartet (2004)
    Frequently featured on Talisker Players’ programmes, Andrew Ager has also recently been the composer-in-residence of the Georgian Bay Symphony and of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church. His orchestral and chamber works have been performed abroad, at such venues as Winchester Cathedral, the Ajijic Festival in Mexico, and the Klangfrühling Music Festival in Austria.

    From the Rubáiyát is a setting of selections from the Victorian poet Edmund Fitzgerald’s loose translation of quatrains attributed to the Persian mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), on the subjects of love and fate. Fitzgerald produced five editions of the work, and Ager has chosen extracts from the fifth edition of 1889. The texture throughout the single-movement work is richly orchestral; the instrumental quintet supports and connects the contrasting moods of the quatrains.

    An introduction dominated by passages of paired sixteenth-notes sets stanzas 31 and 32, from the middle of the text, leading into a marked rhythmic declamation of Fitzgerald’s dramatic opening, “Wake! Wake!” A gentler section in triple metre sets stanzas 21-24, a meditation on life’s brevity and the inevitability of death. The animated finale of the work registers a protest against the end of youth and decay of beauty, pleading that “some wingèd Angel” might alter the course of destiny (Fitzgerald’s stanzas 96 and 98, taken from near the close of the translation). A brief instrumental postlude recalls the figures of the opening, before tapering off in hushed resignation. 


Violet Archer (1913-2000) – A Sprig of Flowers, for tenor, flute and piano (1979)
    Distinguished Canadian composer Violet Balastreri Archer studied with both Bartók and Hindemith, and her work was strongly influenced by neo-classicism, “characterised by economical, almost lean, textures, skilful manipulation of form, and counterpoint”. While she studied and taught serial methods of composition, she preferred to create melodic structure through aesthetic choice, and often made creative use of “folk” models.

    Archer composed more than 280 works, with an emphasis on chamber and vocal music, and A Sprig of Flowers combines these two interests. The texts are by Kuan Han-ching (1241-1320), one of the foremost playwrights of the Yuan dynasty, and Jerome Seaton’s translations convey the vividly ironic humour and rhythmic musicality for which Kuan Han-ching is well-known. Archer’s flute and piano accompaniment alludes to Chinese melodic idioms without actually imitating them, and the solo voice moves from light recitative to high dramatic self-parody, as expressions of philosophic balance, elegant dalliance and innuendo, romantic braggadocio, and fatalistic stoicism unfold in quicksilver succession through the four songs of the cycle. 


Helen Bowater (b. 1952) – He Does Not Come, for soprano, electric violin, electric viola, and piano (1988)
    An active composer and performer in New Zealand’s new music scene, Helen Bowater has studied piano, violin, singing, and ethnomusicology, as well as composition, and could probably undertake any of the parts in He Does Not Come! Her works have been performed by most of New Zealand’s major ensembles in concert and on radio, and she has been an active member of various vocal and instrumental ensembles, including a Javanese gamelan orchestra.

    The poems of He Does Not Come are all by medieval Japanese female poets: three are attributed to Ono no Komachi, ca 825–900, and the others are anonymous lyrics from the 12th-century collection known as the Ryojin Hisho and the epic Heike Monogatari, ca 1240. All are on themes of disappointed love, and all represent the woman’s point of view. The language (except for the colourful curses on the unfaithful lover, taken from the Ryojin Hisho) is terse and concentrated, and Bowater has exploited the full atmospheric resources of the small ensemble to amplify the underlying passion, frustration, and melancholy of the poems. The vocalist and the three instrumentalists are independent dramatic actors in these five small music-dramas, and the use of percussive effects, eerie harmonics, and the electronic transmission of the string sound expand the stage on which the psychological action unfolds .


Alastair Boyd (b. 1957) – Rondel from Ancient Songs, for soprano, violin and piano (1997)
Alastair Boyd was born in Gloucester, England, but has lived in Canada since the age of 10, and studied music in Ottawa, at the University of Toronto, and at the Guildhall School of Music in London. He now lives and works in Toronto, and his career has included the roles of teacher, arranger, music copyist, and accompanist, as well as composer. His music has been performed in both Canada and England, and has been broadcast on the CBC’s Two New Hours and In Performance; in 1998 his orchestral work Reflexions was performed as part of the Winnipeg Symphony’s New Music Festival.

The “Rondel” on this evening’s programme comes from a set of three Ancient Songs on medieval and Elizabethan texts. The poem is by Charles d’Orléans (1391-1465), sometimes called the father of French lyric poetry, and is in one of the complex and elegant forms beloved of late-medieval court culture: the opening two lines are repeated in the middle of the song, and the first line is repeated to close the work. Boyd’s setting is adventurously chromatic; the overall arch of the vocal line reaches its peak at the return of the opening two lines – not an exact recapitulation, but a reminiscence of their first appearance – and pitch relationships of a third are important throughout the piece. 


Scott Good (b. 1972) – Deuil Engoisseux, for soprano and string quartet (2002)
    Scott Good, based in Toronto, is a composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal works, and a bass trombonist. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Toronto, and has received numerous awards for his music, including the Howard Hanson Prize (1995) and the first prize at the Winnipeg New Music Festival Composers Competition (1996). More recently, he has received the John Weinzweig Prize (1999) and two prizes in the SOCAN Competition for Young Composers (2000-01).

    Deuil Engoisseux was premiered by the Toronto baroque ensemble I Furiosi in 2002. The text is by Christine de Pisan (1365-ca 1430), the first professional female writer in Europe whose name we know; well-educated and prolific, she celebrated the achievements and abilities of women in such works as Le Ditie de Jehanne d’Arc and Le Livre de la Cité des Dames. The elegy Dueil Engoisseux was composed on the death of her beloved husband Étienne du Castel, and already circulated in musical settings during the 15th century.

    Good’s setting opens with a brief instrumental larghetto section, which climbs gradually into a contrapuntal, almost mock-baroque allegro furioso; the voice finally enters, more than 100 measures into the piece, low in the soprano register. The text is declaimed like a recitative, or a baroque arioso, arching to a climax of grief and loss at the end of the third stanza, on the refrain line Et si ne puis ne garir ne morir (“…and thus I can neither be cured nor die”). The final short stanza, in which Christine names death as the only cure for her anguish, returns gradually to the dark bleakness of the opening lines, and the work closes with the acerbic counterpoint of the allegro furioso. 


Lester Trimble (1923-1986) – Four Fragments from The Canterbury Tales, for soprano, flute, clarinet, and harpsichord (1967)
    The American composer Lester Trimble studied with Schoenberg, Copland, Honegger, and Milhaud, and taught at the University of Maryland and the Juilliard School; he was also a distinguished music critic. Trimble won numerous awards for composition, among them one from the American Academy of Arts for his Four Fragments from the Canterbury Tales, which sets brief excerpts from the great collection of stories which occupied Geoffrey Chaucer from 1387-1400.

    According to Trimble, he did not set out to create a deliberately neo-classical work, but an homage to the essence of Chaucer’s masterpiece: the colourful characters, and their robust and forthright language. He offered the alternative of a harpsichord as the keyboard instrument, in order to create an “archaic” (if admittedly not medieval) flavour for the work, and provides the soloist with ample guidance in the pronunciation of Middle English, but the melodic and harmonic idiom throughout is clearly twentieth-century.

    In the famous Prologue, the full ensemble is called upon to portray the arrival of spring, complete with chirping birds, falling rain, and babbling brooks. Trimble chose wind instruments to portray particular characters introduced in the Prologue: the clarinet represents the stately maturity of the Knyght, the flute the brilliant romantic “courtesie” of his son, the Yong Squire, and the full instrumental complement is required to depict the extraordinarily energetic Wyf of Biside Bath, with her earthy account of her five marriages and her scriptural rationalisations. 


Kurt Weill (1900-1950) – Frauentanz: Seven Poems from the Middle Ages (Op. 10) for voice, viola, flute, clarinet, horn and bassoon.
    Weill came to international recognition in two markedly different arenas, first as an important figure in the German avant-garde movement of the 1920s, and later, after his escape from the rise of National Socialism, as a composer of Broadway musicals. The work on this evening’s programme is one of the earliest to have won public recognition, paving the way for his success in the area of musical theatre.

    The seven songs are settings of excerpts (translated into modern German) from the works of several medieval Minnesänger, the poets of courtly love; Dietmar von Aiste and Der von Kürenberg date from the 12th century, Johann von Brabant from the 13th, and the authors of the remaining texts are anonymous. All the poems are delicate courtly-love lyrics, some from a woman’s point of view and some from a man’s, and all have in them an element of something promised but not (or not yet) attained.

    Weill’s surviving sketch for the work suggests that he originally intended to link the songs with instrumental interludes, perhaps to heighten the dance element, but even without such interludes, it was performed in a dance version in 1924. The full instrumental palette – flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon, and viola – is used only in the first and fourth songs, while others are accompanied by duos, trios, and quartets, and the fifth by viola alone. The idiom of Frauentanz owes little to Viennese expressionism, but much to the sturdy angularity of early Hindemith.


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