Reflections on the cost of human conflict and the hope for lasting peace in the world
Tuesday and Wednesday November 15 and 16, 2011
Programme notes by Andrea Budgey
Gloria Coates: Cantata da Requiem, text by women in WWII
Earl Kim: Now and Then, text by Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats
Robert Rival: Red Moon and Other Songs of War, text by various authors
Erik Ross: Corpses Have Grown, text by Ken Saro-Wiwa
Alec Roth: Songs in Time of War, text by Vikram Seth, after the poet Du Fu
While all wars are begun by human beings (and presumably for explicable human reasons), once a conflict is under way, it seems to take on an impersonal force and momentum, and stopping it sometimes appears to require efforts out of all proportion to the initial causes. Against the impersonal energy of war, however, the writers and composers on this programme set smaller forces – the memory of past joys and past sufferings, truthfulness, compassion, duty, conscience, honesty, and the fidelity of one human heart to another.
The power of these “rumours of peace” comes from their clarity and sharpness of focus: Kim’s scrupulous faithfulness to his own refracted memories of desolation, Ross’ insistent depiction of the devastation of genocide, Rival’s breadth of understanding and ability to hold different views in tension, Coates’ deeply expressive juxtaposition of small moments in the lives of women in wartime, and Roth’s precise and elegant recollection of the pain of war, even after twelve centuries. Perhaps, if we can learn to arrange them in an impenetrable formation, such small defences may indeed provide a barricade against the advances of war.
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Gloria Coates (1928- ): Cantata da Requiem, for voice, viola, cello, piano and percusson (1973) Recording available.
Gloria Coates studied in Louisiana, Chicago, and New York, and her teachers included Alexander Tcherepnin and Otto Luening. Since 1969 she has lived in Europe. She devotes her time primarily to composition, but has also lectured, written musicological articles, and worked for German radio. She is known as the composer of 14 symphonies, numerous vocal and choral works, solo and chamber pieces, electronic music, and music for the theatre, and as a tireless advocate for contemporary American music on the European stage. The critic Kyle Gann has called her an “atonal-expressionist post-minimalist”, and compared her style to that of Krzysztof Penderecki.
The Cantata da Requiem (originally entitled Voices of Women in Wartime) dates from a period when Coates was working as a tour-guide for the American army. Her tours often included the concentration camp at Dachau, and the work responds to the emotions which the camp evoked in her, as well as to the final stages of the conflict in Vietnam. She chose texts by German, English, and American women, speaking of the human losses and ironic futility of war.
Coates rejected serialism as a compositional technique, but evolved an atonal language of her own, in which semitones and glissandi are important expressive features. Both are already in evidence in this early work: she uses the semitone extensively to set texts of loss and emotional compression, as in “Junge Witwe”, and glissandi are used throughout the work, in both the vocal and instrumental parts, to echo the cry of the wounded human spirit. Only in the final section of the last movement, which expresses the hope that some hard-won wisdom might be wrung from all the sufferings of war, does the musical language expand into more straightforward tonal patterns, closing with almost startling optimism in C major
There is a recording of the piece, a video, on Youtube. It is in two parts:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE-5ADYtKtg and
www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-k4yg6eYxM.
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Earl Kim (1920-1998 ): Now and Then, for soprano, flute, harp, and viola (1981)
The Korean-American composer Earl Kim began piano studies at the age of ten, and rapidly demonstrated a gift for composition. He studied in Los Angeles and Berkeley, and his teachers included Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions, and Ernest Bloch. During the Second World War, Kim served with Air Force intelligence, and flew over the devastated remains of Nagasaki one day after the atomic bomb was dropped. His response to that experience found musical expression thirty-six years later in Now and Then, and in the founding of Musicians against Nuclear Arms.
Commissioned by the University of Chicago and dedicated to the musical patron Paul Fromm, the condensed and austere song cycle Now and Then combines texts by Kim’s favourite writer, Samuel Beckett, with an opening movement by Anton Chekov and a closing song by W.B. Yeats. Of his poetic selections, Kim wrote that they “cover a range of poetic images dealing with the death of friends, the innocence and vulnerability of daffodils, the loneliness of one’s final moment, and Chekov’s prophetic image of an earth which for thousands of years has borne no living creature”.
The first, third, and fifth movements feature wide vocal arcs alternating with smooth, conjunct motion, while the second movement, repeated as the fourth, is a chain of tiny fragments of text and melody. Throughout the cycle, there is almost always at least one instrument in unison with the voice, emphasizing the overall terseness of the musical language and calling for tremendous precision from the performers.
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Robert Rival (1975- ): Red Moon and Other Songs of War, for voice, piano, clarinet / bass clarinet, and percussion (2008)
Currently composer-in-residence with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Robert Rival completed a doctorate in composition at the University of Toronto in 2010. His works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, voice, and stage have been broadcast on CBC radio and performed by leading Canadian musicians, ensembles and orchestras. His principal teachers have been Alexander Rapoport and Steven Gellman.
The chamber arrangement of this song cycle was commissioned by the Talisker Players and premiered at Festival Vancouver. The texts, by seven different poets, represent very different responses to war. Bret Harte, an American writer and journalist who protested the massacre of native people in California, lends the language of love-song to the voice of a lethal bullet, while Thomas Hardy recognizes the irony which makes enemies of people who in other circumstances might have come to be friends. Sandburg and Teasdale acknowledge the futility of human combat against the broader background of nature and the passage of time. The second poem by Sandburg sets in parallel the objects of war and death (“The shovel is brother to the gun”), and the 18th-century Quaker pacifist and social activist John Scott contrasts the triumphal language of the military drum with the reality of the end to which it summons its hearers. Only Bethune’s short lyric, written during the Spanish Civil War, finishes with a tribute to the nobility of fallen comrades.
Rival’s approach is ironically tonal, referencing conventional styles: waltz, dirge, jazz, cabaret, and march, especially in the instrumental accompaniments. The most expansive and lyrical of the movements, the fourth, is also the one which turns its back most resolutely on humans and their rivalries.
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Erik Ross (1972- ): Corpses Have Grown, for soprano, oboe, vibraphone, harp, piano, and bass (1996)
This is an early piece of vocal-instrumental chamber music by the award-winning and versatile Toronto composer Erik Ross, whose recent work includes commissions for accordionist Joseph Petric, the Music Gallery, Toca Loca, the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. The text comes from the collection Songs in a Time of War by the Ogoni writer and human-rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged by the Nigerian government in 1995 after a trial on manufactured charges of conspiracy to murder – a so badly mishandled that his lawyers withdrew in protest. Its verdict and sentence generated international outrage.
The text depicts a land ravaged by genocidal oppression, a people’s traditions rendered mute and ineffectual by force of arms. Ross has set it in a single seamless movement, with three instruments capable of both block sonorities and melodic figuration – the vibraphone, harp, and piano – and two in melodic counterpoint to the voice – the oboe and double bass. The oboe, in particular, frequently plays with and against the voice, creating sharp and unresolvable dissonances. To begin with, the vertical sonorities change slowly, but the rhythmic movement builds in waves of controlled fury to burst after the final line of text: “And the harsh face of war fills the land with abomination.” The ensemble then fades almost immediately to a harsh and sterile quiet.
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Alec Roth (1948- ): Songs in Time of War, selections, for tenor, violin, harp, and guitar (2006)
British composer Alec Roth has worked with the Royal Festival Hall Gamelan Programme and South Bank Gamelan Players, the English National Opera, Opera North, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and has been Lecturer in Music at the University of Edinburgh. Songs in Time of War was commissioned jointly by the Salisbury, Chelsea and Lichfield Festivals (Britain) and first performed in June and July 2006. The Talisker Players gave the North American premiere performance at the Elora Festival in July of 2010.
The 8th-century Chinese poet Du Fu was born into a noble family which had fallen into relative poverty. His great ambition to serve his country was frustrated by repeated failure in the civil service examinations. He finally attained a minor administrative post but almost immediately the country was plunged into civil war. Du Fu managed to get his family to safety but was himself captured by the rebels. He later escaped and joined the court in exile. The war dragged on for years and ruined the country – millions were killed or displaced.
Du Fu’s precarious itinerant existence throughout the turmoil of these years provided the inspiration for some of his finest poetry. He wrote about what he saw and heard around him – the lives of his family, friends, neighbours and strangers – with great honesty and deep compassion. He is now regarded as one of China’s finest poets, but received no recognition in his own lifetime.
Vikram Seth has adapted texts which create a tapestry of small, circumstantial observations, which Roth has set with extraordinary delicacy and restraint. The vocal part moves syllabically, expressing the text clearly and faithfully, without virtuoso display. The instrumental textures shift from one song to another, achieving maximum variety of texture with remarkable economy of means. After the scene of complete human devastation depicted in the penultimate movement, “Ballad of the Army Carts,” the first movement returns to close the cycle with the voice of the poet – a single, detached individual.
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