Rainbow Music

Donor Acknowledgement

This event is made possible by the David and Irmgard Dobrow Fund. Classical music was a passion of the Dobrows, who established a generous endowment at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music to make programs like this possible. We are proud to celebrate this program as part of the 2024 – 25 Dobrow Series.

Program Notes

Happenstance by Derek Tywoniuk

The composer’s website provides the following program notes:

“Derek Tywoniuk (b. 1988) is a Grammy-nominated percussionist and composer based in Los Angeles.  As a percussionist, he has performed with Wild Up, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Spoleto Festival USA, the Lucerne Festival Academy, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Upside, at the Ojai Music Festival, and with the Smoke and Mirrors Ensemble, the last of which recorded two albums on the Yarlung Records label.

Tywoniuk received his PhD in Music Composition from UCLA, where he taught musicianship. Prior to that, he studied percussion, earning a Master of Music and Artist Diploma from The Colburn School’s Conservatory of Music as a student of Jack van Geem, and a Bachelor of Music degree as a student of Richard Weiner and Paul Yancich at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

At its heart, Happenstance is a piece about camaraderie. Relationships are often the result of relative coincidence, be it a brief moment (for example, running into someone at a coffee shop), or a larger time span (being at the same point and place in your career or personal life at the same time). This piece resulted from the latter. As I began composing this work for the Smoke and Mirrors Ensemble, I thought about our good fortune—specifically, that the four of us ended up in the same institution during the same period of our lives and, because of this, how privileged I was to be inspired every day by these three great musicians and friends: Joseph Beribak, Edward Hong, and Katalin La Favre.”

The Drums of Orpheus by Lou Harrison

From Harrison’s ballet, Orpheus, The Drums of Orpheus (1969) for eleven percussionists displays an interest in color and rhythmic treatment omni-present in many of the works of Lou Harrison, a giant of 20th-century music composition. This gamelan inspired work draws upon a large and eclectic inventory of instruments, including those inspired by non-Western sources such as temple bowls, temple bells, and gongs, as well as “found” instruments such as flower pots, brake drums and musical saws. Most unusually, he includes a string bass, that is played as a percussion instrument, on a table with dowels and mallets.

In The Drums of Orpheus, five different rhythmic patterns are repeated to create over-lapping musical statements several measures in length, forming a complex musical fabric comprised of as many as 11 different strata of sound. The over-arching organizational principal in this work, however, is that it is a palindrome; it could be read both forward or backwards, and it would sound the same.

Lou Harrison, one of the great composers of the 20^th century, was a pioneer in the use of alternate tunings, integrating world music into classical music, and inventing new instruments out of common objects.  Born in 1917 in Portland, Oregon, he spent much of his youth in Northern California.  He studied with Henry Cowell, also a notable composer in the percussion ensemble genre, in his early twenties, composing at the time extensively for dance and percussion.  He befriended another of Cowell’s students, John Cage, and the two of them established the first concert series devoted to new music specifically for percussion.  Notably, Cage and Harrison would go on to collaborate on the immensely popular and historically significant percussion ensemble piece, Double Music. In 1942, Harrison moved to Los Angeles to study with the famous composer Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA.  Moving to the East Coast a year later, he studied with Virgil Thomson and worked editing and promoting the scores of American composer Charles Ives.  In 1953, he returned to rural Northern California, where he lived for the rest of his life.  With his friend and mentor, John Cage and Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison represented most of the early canon of excellent percussion chamber music, planting the seeds of what would become an important new and interesting musical genre.

Pulses, Cycles, Clouds by Nico Muhly

The composer’s website provides the following program notes:

“Nico Muhly, born in 1981, is an American composer who writes orchestral music, works for the stage, chamber music and sacred music. He’s received commissions from The Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys (2011), and Marnie (2018); Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Tallis Scholars, and King’s College, Cambridge, among others. He is a collaborative partner at the San Francisco Symphony and has been featured at the Barbican and the Philharmonie de Paris as composer, performer, and curator. An avid collaborator, he has worked with choreographers Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opéra Ballet, Bobbi Jene Smith at the Juilliard School, Justin Peck and Kyle Abraham at New York City Ballet; artists Sufjan Stevens, The National, Teitur, Anohni, James Blake and Paul Simon. His work for film includes scores for for The Reader (2008) and Kill Your Darlings (2013), and the BBC adaptation of Howards End (2017). Recordings of his works have been released by Decca and Nonesuch, and he is part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks Volumes (2006) and Mothertongue (2008).

Pulses, Cycles, Clouds is a piece for large mixed percussion ensemble written for the 50^th Anniversary of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute (BUTI).  At the work’s core is a group of four marimbas, surrounded by various bells and other metal ringing mallet instruments. “Pulses” refers to the beginning minimalist chugging of the marimba quartet, interrupted by a singular chord presenting a harmonic progression of 11 “pulses.”  “Cycles” represents the cellular motivic material layered in the marimbas at the center of the piece, plus the metal instruments polyrhythmic interjections.  “Clouds” represents the eventually disintegration of the pulse into a vision of the night sky: insects, unexpected interruptions – a walk around a quiet landscape.  At the end, the pulse returns, but is nocturnally subdued.”

Living Room Music by John Cage

Living Room Music (1940) is a quartet for unspecified instruments, all of which are to be found in the living room of a typical house.  John Cage gives the following guidance for the performers to select appropriate instruments: “Any household object or architectural elements may be used as instruments, e.g. magazines, newspaper or cardboard, table or other wood furniture, largish books, floor, wall, door or wooden frame of a window.”  The objective is to find a natural gradation of high to low sounds in the quartet of the performer’s chosen instruments.

Dedicated to Cage’s then-wife Xenia, the work consists of four movements: To Begin, Story, Melody, and End. The first and the fourth movements share a similar use of found instruments. The second movement explores the idea of speech or language as music, using fragments of Gertrude Stein‘s short poem, The World Is Round (1938). The third movement stands alone amongst the four as traditionally melodic, played by one of the performers on, as Cage suggests, “any suitable instrument.”  This evening, we embrace the steel drum for its melodic qualities.

“Once upon a time the world was round

and you could go on it around and around.”

-Gertrude Stein

Barber Shop Fugue by Samuel Barber, Arr. Didier

The Piano Sonata in E-flat minor, Op. 26, by the American composer Samuel Barber, was commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the League of Composers by famed song-writers Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers. Composed between 1947 and 1949, the Sonata is in four movements. It was premiered by Vladimir Horowitz in December 1949 in Havana, Cuba. When written, the Sonata was considered virtually unplayable but has since become a cornerstone of American piano literature and one of Barber’s greatest achievements.

Initially conceived as a traditional three movement sonata, Horowitz, the pianist, suggested a four-movement structure with a “flashy last movement”. This advice led Barber to compose a virtuosic four-voice fugue as the final movement, marked Allegro spirito. The fourth movement is written in Gb major. While conventional in structure, it employs syncopated rhythms and “blue note” harmonies, characteristic of American jazz-two things not usually found in classical sonata form. Also odd is the fugue’s first countersubject, derived from the main theme of the first movement.  All these elements add up to a decidedly 20^th Century twist on the Baroque fugal form.