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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth David N. Baker Concertino for Cellular Phones and Orchestra David Baker is the Chairman of the Jazz Department at Indiana University’s prestigious Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington. He also serves as an adjunct professor for Indiana’s African American and African Diaspora Studies Department. He is the conductor and artistic director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, as well as a senior consultant for the Smithsonian’s music programs. Baker is credited with 2,000 compositions, 70 books, and over 400 articles. As a trombonist, he worked with such luminaries as Lionel Hampton, Stan Kenton, and Quincy Jones. He also led his own big band. When an injury prevented him from playing trombone for several years, he moved to the cello and recorded with Charles Tyler. This formidable musician has received over 500 commissions from individuals and ensembles over the years, and has been honored with many prestigious awards, including the Kennedy Center’s Living Jazz Legend Award. The idea for a composition featuring cell phones came from Paul Freeman, founder of the Chicago Sinfonietta. In 1996 Freeman began serving as music director for the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, leading to many international flights. He says, “I was sitting at the gate in the Prague airport one day and saw so many people using cell phones for last-minute conversations before boarding their flights. I thought there must be some way of combining this technological accomplishment with music.” Baker accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. It took five weeks, including several sleepless nights, for him to move from concept to concertino. He had to admit that he could only do so much as the composer. “Once you’ve established the basic form of the piece and the tempo, then you don’t know,” he said. “There’s just no way to replicate 1,000 cell phones going off at once.” Baker’s artistic aim in the Concertino was to explore the balance between organization and chaos and to place audience members into a position in which they might start listening more closely to their everyday lives (following the aesthetic lines of American composers like Charles Ives and John Cage). Just before the 2006 premiere of the piece by the Chicago Sinfonietta, Freeman told his audience, “You may use as much imagination or as little as you like.” We are sure you will enjoy the chance to play along with the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra tonight. Duke (Edward Kennedy) Ellington The River Duke Ellington began playing professionally around 1916 and was ruling the Cotton Club in New York City ten years later. He won national attention through his constant tours and radio performances in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Once he began writing music for the revues at the Cotton Club, Ellington was set on a creative course as a composer that, given his genius, had to lead to the concert hall. The “Ellington sound” brought out both the individual voices of his soloists and the exciting combinations of sounds he had discovered through early experiments with exoticism. His music became more tonally and formally complex over the years as he stretched away from simple dances and call-and-response pieces to concert suites and film scores. A wonderful example of Ellington’s expanded work is the piece Harlem, written in 1950 for a commissioning project of Arturo Toscanini. By the late 1960s, Ellington’s interest was turning from entertaining the masses to leaving a legacy. Ellington’s long-form works from this time period include his three Sacred Concerts ( San Francisco, New York, and London). He composed The River for Alvin Ailey and the American Ballet Theatre. In his score, Ellington wrote the descriptive phrases “of birth…of the wellspring of life…of reaffirmation…of heavenly anticipation of rebirth” as a description of the thoughts behind the music. He provided a more detailed, less spiritual program for the piece in his memoir, Music is My Mistress. Here he describes the “river” in anthropomorphic terms. The river begins as a bubbling spring, which is “like a newborn baby.” The baby river contemplates his existence at a meander, “where he is undecided whether to go back to the cradle or pursue his quest.” Deciding to go on, the water flows through the vast beauty of a lake before reaching a whirlpool or vortex. More mature now, the river flows past human habitations, including the “ Village of the Virgins.” The river finally flows back to “The Mother, Her Majesty the Sea.” As Ellington writes, “The mother, in her beautiful romantic exchange with the sun, gives up to the sky that which is to come back as rain, snow, or fog on the mountains and plains. So the next time we see it, it is like a newborn baby.” The ballet ends with a reprise of the opening music, “The Spring.” The music of The River is powerful and sophisticated, reminiscent of Ellington’s film scores. The ballet debuted to critical acclaim at the New York State Theatre on June 25, 1970. George Gershwin Piano Concerto in F George Gershwin began to publish songs in his teens and had a hit musical on Broadway before he was thirty. While conquering musical theater, he also turned his attention to more serious composition. Gershwin was able to recognize his own limitations and began musical studies with some of New York’s finest teachers. One of his greatest assets was his instant access to the finest minds in the arts and letters living in New York or visiting there on tour. Although the composition of his extremely popular Rhapsody in Blue was spurred by happenstance in 1924, the Concerto in F resulted from a formal commission. Gershwin accepted a contract for a new piano concerto with the Symphony Society of New York and their conductor, Walter Damrosch, in April of 1925. They agreed that the work would receive its premiere during the fall season with Gershwin himself at the piano. He began work on the new piece immediately, but he found it impossible to make any progress in his usual venues around New York as his growing fame led to a wealth of visitors. He escaped to a cabin at Chautauqua in western New York state and finished the piece, taking three months to write and one to orchestrate. Although critics were more than happy to point out formal flaws in the completed work, the Concerto in F stands in the repertoire as a wonderful evocation of American energy in a very European framework. The opening movement, with its inventive percussion “fanfare,” is almost in a sonata form. Two dominant themes are introduced, developed in a string of variations, and restated. The quiet and bluesy second movement features the winds. The bright finale is a dynamic rondo in which we can hear more than a little of the late Romantic voice. In fact, as a whole the Concerto in F is quite solidly in the tradition of Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff — performing composers who had no problem cutting formal corners as long as the presentation sparkled for the audience. At one point Gershwin told an interviewer, “Many persons thought that the Rhapsody was only a happy accident. Well, I went out, for one thing, to show them that there was plenty more where that had come from. I made up my mind to do a piece of absolute music.” His success with the Concerto gave him the confidence to tackle grand opera and certainly would have led to further developments if he had lived longer. © 2010 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth |