Mid Summer Modern: Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and Paul Zukofsky

26 July 2011 8pm Loke Yew Hall The University of Hong Kong Hong Kong New Music Ensemble Paul Zukofsky: Conductor PROGRAMME IGOR STRAVINSKY: Septet (1952-53) for clarinet, horn, bassoon, piano, violin, viola, and violoncello Allegro Passacaglia Gigue MILTON BABBITT: Composition for Four Instruments (1948) for flute, clarinet, violin and violoncello (*Hong Kong Premiere) [5 minute intermission] ARNOLD SCHOENBERG: Suite, Op.29 (1924-26) for 3 clarinets, violin, viola, cello & piano (*Hong Kong Premiere) Ouverture [Overture] Tanzschritte [Dance steps] Thema mit Variationen [Theme with variations] Gigue [Gigue] [After the performance, there will be a Meet-the-Artist session in Loke Yew Hall. All welcome]

HellHOT! New Music Festival 2011

PROGRAMME NOTES In January this year I invited Paul Zukofsky to choose a program for the opening of the 2011 HellHOT! New Music Festival. Following Paul's belief that new music can best, perhaps only, be understood in relationship to the "modern" masterworks of the 20th (even if some of today's music represents a rejection of those works, one needs to know what one is rejecting), Paul chose a group of three works connected in various ways. Stravinsky and Schoenberg were purportedly the great rivals of modern music, although in hindsight there is more in common than one normally assumes. Babbitt is the American amalgam of these two composers. The Schoenberg and Stravinsky are both early examples of their 12-tone "style". Both works are "neo-classic". Both works have a theme with variations (called "Passacaglia" in the Stravinsky), with the underlying "ground" having curious similarities. Both works have "Gigues". Both works are "late-middle" or "early-late" period compositions. The Babbitt is an early example of his expansion of the 12-tone row to include rhythm, as well as other aspects of the composition. For Babbitt, his idea starts with the Schoenbergian "row"; takes the intervallic manipulation of Stravinsky, and introduces the use set theory to create new ways to think about manipulating pitch and rhythm (while still maintaining a great lyrical quality). Without Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the Babbitt could hardly exist, or would certainly be enormously different, although it is worth noting that the Babbitt predates the particular Stravinsky work we program tonight. We hope you will enjoy this program of modern masterworks. (William Lane/ HKNME) STRAVINSKY (1882-1971) Septet (1952-53) Arnold Schoenberg died in Los Angeles on Friday, July 13, 1951. Suddenly Schoenberg (via Webern), became a new subject for Stravinsky's long-running love affair with the past. Now the last chapter of Stravinsky's own career could begin. (Stravinsky is the Picasso of twentieth-century music the great chameleon who continued to fascinate the public through the many changes of a very long and prolific career.) Although they had become the great rivals of modern music, Stravinsky and Schoenberg started out, four decades earlier, on friendlier terms. They first met in Berlin in 1912. Each had just completed what would become his most notorious work for Stravinsky The Rite of Spring, and for Schoenberg Pierrot Lunaire. They were seen together several times in Berlin: Schoenberg and his wife joined Stravinsky and Diaghilev at a performance of Petrouchka; Stravinsky met the other young Viennese revolutionaries, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, at a dinner party at Schoenberg's house, later remembering it as "the First and Last Supper with the hypostatic trinity of 20th century music." After that, Stravinsky and Schoenberg never met again as friends. They were quickly designated opponents in the great war of twentieth century musical style, much as Wagner and Brahms had been pitted against each other two generations before. By the time they both appeared at the festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Venice in 1925, their sides seemed so irreconcilable that they made no effort to see each other.

They met once again in 1945, for the first time in decades, at the funeral of Franz Werfel, an important writer, a mutual friend, and one of Alma Mahler's celebrated ex-husbands. Stravinsky remembered standing in the mortuary, and being confronted

with "the angry, tortured, burning face of Arnold Schoenberg." They were by then the most unlikely of neighbors, living just eleven miles apart in the comfortable suburbs of Los Angeles. (They still didn't speak; musicians would come from all over the world to visit them, never mentioning to one their meeting with the other.) Schoenberg's death was not the only factor in the transformation of Stravinsky's style around this time the most radical change in his music in three decades. In 1949 the young composer and conductor Robert Craft had become a member of the Stravinsky household, and his enthusiasm for the Second Viennese School may have finally piqued Stravinsky's curiosity. When Stravinsky went to Europe for the premiere of The Rake's Progress, shortly after Schoenberg's death, he met a new generation of European composers, many of whom were strongly under the spell of serialism at the time. (When he returned to Paris the following year, to conduct Oedipus Rex, he heard Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen give the first performance of Boulez's groundbreaking Structures.) Stravinsky's own conversion was slow and cautious. He finished his big Mozartean opera, The Rake's Progress, only weeks before Schoenberg's death. The Cantata that immediately follows flirts intermittently with certain serial procedures. The Septet written the following year confirms the unexpected, though not entirely unpredictable, direction Stravinsky was now headed. Stravinsky was apparently inspired to write his Septet the day he sat in on Craft's rehearsal of Schoenberg's Suite, Op. 29, scored for seven instruments. In fact Stravinsky's ensemble is a similar mix of wind trio, string trio, and piano. Progress on the music was surprisingly slow. Craft later admitted that Stravinsky suffered from a creative block around this time, but he was also no doubt stumped by the difficulty of adapting a rigorous system (devised for a very different kind of music) to suit his own needs. A row of eight notes governs much of the septet. Although it is not used strictly, according to the Schoenberg law, for the first time one senses the presence of Schoenberg and also that of his student Webern in Stravinsky's music. The year after the Septet, Stravinsky composed his first totally serial work (based on a five-note row), In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, written on the death of the great poet, with whom he had been planning to compose an opera, ironically, about the reinvention of language following a catastrophe. In the works that followed, Stravinsky was in command of the serial technique in a new way; in fact, he had made it his own. Ironically, Stravinsky proved what Schoenberg had always preached: serialism is a language that allows each composer to retain his or her own voice. (Phillip Huscher) BABBITT (1916-2011) - Composition for Four Instruments Composition for Four Instruments (1948) is an early serial music composition written by Milton Babbitt, and is also his first published ensemble work. Composition for Four Instruments is considered one the early examples of totally serialized music, and foreshadows the style and complexity of Babbitts later work. It is remarkable for a strong sense of integration and concentration, qualities that caused Elliott Carter, upon first hearing it in 1951, to persuade New Music Edition to publish it. We could discuss in depth "serial" aspects of the work. For example see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_for_Four_Instruments OR http://www.musicalobservations.com/publications/purloined_too .html But it is far more important to listen to the work as a long, lyrical presentation of an idea, and to try to first accept the work as "music" rather than as theory.

SCHOENBERG (1874-1951) - Suite, op. 29 (1924-26) The first drafts of the Suite, op. 29, originate from the autumn of 1924 when Schoenberg planned a sequence of lively movements in his 5th sketch book. The cheerful, vibrant character of the Suite, which was completed on 1 May 1926, is a perfect reflection of Schoenberg's enjoyment of life at the time. He was newly married, and dedicated the work to his "dear wife" Gertrud, whose musical monogram "eS-G" [E flat-G] is integrated into the music at the beginning and end of each movement. The sequence of the four-part Suite, which incorporates elements of the old tonality into dodecaphony (in the third movement, for example, where references to the song "nnchen von Tharau" can be heard), combines three movements of the traditional Baroque suite with a set of variations on a song. In a manner similar to several movements from the earlier piano compositions opp. 23 and 25 as well as the Serenade, op. 24, the Suite is dominated by dance rhythms, with the first two movements in particular recalling the dance music of the 1920s. The unusual scoring, with its affinity to the "reeds" section of a swing band - three clarinets, string trio and piano - contributes to this feeling.

BIOGRAPHIES

A presentation of
Paul Zukofsky - Conductor (USA/ Hong Kong) Paul Zukofsky is a violinist, conductor, and chamber musician. He is generally associated with the advancement and performance of 20th Century music, having premiered and recorded works by Babbitt, Cage, Carter.........Xenakis, and numerous other twentieth century composers; but he has also divulged a sympathy for the music of Bach and Paganini in his well-received recordings. Zukofsky showed interest in music before the age of four and started taking his first lessons on the violin shortly thereafter. He began studies with Ivan Galamian when he was seven. Beginning in the late 1970s, Zukofsky started what developed into the Icelandic Youth Orchestra, regularly appearing in concerts and conducting seminars in Iceland. He also appeared in many concerts as conductor at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in the last two decades of the twentieth century, often leading the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble and the Juilliard Orchestra. Zukofsky inspired Glass to write his Violin Concerto (1986-87) and gave the work's premiere on April 5, 1987. From 1992-96, Zukofsky was director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at the University of Southern California. As both a conductor and violinist, he remains active in the new century, and has made over 60 recordings for a number of labels. At this point, many of his recordings are available on CP2, of whose parent company, Musical Observations, Inc., he is president. He has extensively recorded for this label since the early 1990s, issuing, often in premiere issues, works by Cage, Feldman, Kondo, Scelsi, Schnabel, and many other composers. http://musicalobservations.com/ http://musicalobservations.com/recordings/index.html

With the kind support of:

Supported by

Hong Kong New Music Ensemble Megan Sterling: Flute Leung Chi Shing: Bb Clarinet (Babbitt, Schoenberg) Stephen Chong: Bass/ Bb Clarinet (Stravinksy, Schoenberg) Sunny Tang: Eb Clarinet (Schoenberg) Hani Molles: French Horn Leung Tak Wing: Bassoon Euna Kim: Violin William Lane: Viola/ Artistic Director Laurent Perrin: Cello Linda Yim: Piano The Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (HKNME) was founded in 2008 with an aim to present high quality performances of contemporary music to Hong Kong audiences. Since its inception, the group has been widely praised for its innovative programming and interdisciplinary collaborations with artists from different mediums. The groups versatile repertoire includes works by local and overseas composers, as well as contemporary pieces that are seldom heard in Hong Kong. In October 2008, members of the HKNME were resident at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Since 2009, the group has presented regular concerts in Hong Kong, and has toured to China, Malaysia, and Singapore. The HKNME was featured at Hong Kongs New Vision Arts Festival 2010, and its touring schedule in 2011 includes performances at international festivals in Australia, Taiwan, Singapore and Cambodia. http://www.hknme.org