SHOWS

Classical Revolutions

***POSTPONED***
Living Waters Brewing
1056 E Trinity Ln #101, Nashville, TN 37216
Free Admission

 
 

Program:

Ornery Prelude - Don Freund


Untitled - Daniel Krenz


sestina - Rodney Lister


Soldier’s Tale Suite - Igor Stravinsky


The Soldier Dances with Tom Sawyer - Stefan Freund

Our program opens with Ornery Prelude, a pocket-orchestration of Don Freund’s Piano Prelude ’96, which was written for Duquesne University’s Accidental Collective ensemble. The prelude focuses on a boogie-woogie moto perpetuo bass line, whose “ornery” roughness is amplified by a series of rugged textural variations before suddenly melting into a 4-against-3 walking bass line counterpointed by a pearly Baroque trumpet riff. 

Next up is the world premiere of Untitled by the ensembles’ conductor Daniel Krenz. Written for Jack Lorens, the performing soloist, this work is in three movements. The first being fast and technical, the second exploring extended techniques on the instrument, and the third consisting of melodic fragments gradually emerging as one long solo line.  This piece quotes extensively from the group of composers known as the Second Viennese School. The first movement borrows from works by Anton Webern and Alban Berg. The second movement shadows Arnold Schoenberg’s Op. 19 VI. The last movement Krenz’s contribution to the ideas put forth by those group of composers. 

Sestina was written by Rodney Lister and dedicated to Valerie Coleman. The sestina is a poetic form where there are six stanzas, each six lines long. Those stanzas are then followed by an envoi of three lines. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern. Those six words are then in the envoi, two in each of the lines, in the middle and at the end. Although originally in Italian poetry, there are examples in English by W.H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop, among others. Lister’s Sestina is a realization of that form as a piece of music which follows that general plan. In this case there are six stanzas (or phrases), each consisting of six measures, each of which is five seconds long. In the first phrase those measures have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 notes, respectively; in the second 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 and so on. The notes of each phrase, although intervalically related, are different. They are followed by a concluding stanza, which has three sections, each which has two measures 5 seconds long, containing all the notes of the six previous stanzas. The musicians play their notes wherever they choose in the time of each measure. All the stanzas are separated by five seconds of silence. 

The largest piece on the concert is Igor Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale. This piece, originally written in 1918, tells the story of a soldier home from war who owns a magic violin. He makes a deal with the devil to trade the violin to the devil in exchange for fulfillment of his every wish. In the pieces full manifestation, the parts are acted and sung and a performance takes over an hour. In the year 1920 Stravinsky created the concert suite where he selected excerpts from the full performance. This is the version we are performing today. There are nine movements in the suite: 

  1. The Soldier’s March

  2. Airs by a Steam

  3. Pastorale

  4. Royal March

  5. The Little Concert

  6. Three Dances: Tango – Waltz – Ragtime

  7. Dance of the Devil

  8. Grand Choral

  9. Triumphal March of the Devil

Many people know Stravinsky’s music through some of his larger works: The Firebird or the Rite of Spring but after World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919 Stravinsky turned his attention to smaller orchestral forces. These circumstances produced Soldier’s Tale and it has quickly gained its’ place among Stravinsky’s finest works. This works has many of the traits the Stravinsky is known for: asymmetric and jagged rhythms, motivic fragments that appear all over the score and reoccur throughout the piece, and dramatic music (despite the small size of the ensemble). Pay particular attention to the first two movements; themes from these pieces will come back in our final piece.

The piece that closes out our concert is Stefan Freund’s The Soldier Dances with Tom Sawyer. In the score Stefan writes: 

“When asked to write a piece for the Deviant Septet’s debut, my attention immediately turned to another piece of the ensemble’s instrumentation, Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale. During the same time, I was a bit obsessed with an mp3 CD of some progressive rock tunes I had been listening to in my car. I was especially attracted to the drum set parts in Rush tunes, played with incredible precision by Neil Peart. Perhaps that’s because when you’re driving in a car, the only thing you can really hear are the drums. Anyway, I was intrigued by the idea of layering ideas from Soldier’s Tale on top of the energetic and meticulous drumming of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer.” I was quickly amazed by the natural fit this created. The hard rock style of the song’s opening meshed very well with the martial figures of Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s March” while the violin licks in “Airs by a Stream” were begging to be paired with the 7/8 groove from the middle section of “Tom Sawyer.” In between, the mixed meter screams of the march were perfect for Peart’s head-banging-inducing open hi-hat eighths. I had great fun pulling material from Stravinsky and placing it over Rush, but eventually, during a clarinet feature, Rush takes over as a brief transcription of Alex Lifeson’s guitar solo leads to the epic drum solos of Peart. After a pseudo-recap (mirroring the form of “Tom Sawyer” as well as the march’s reprise) a coda allows material from Rush to peek through, combining melodic ideas from both sources.” 

Contributing Composers:

Don

Freund

Don Freund has been described as “ a composer thoughtful in approach and imaginative in style” (The Washington Post), whose music is “exciting, amusing, disturbing, beautiful, and always fascinating” (Music and Musicians, London). He is an internationally recognized composer with works ranging from solo, chamber, and orchestral  music to pieces involving live performances with electronic instruments, music for dance, and large theatre works, and is recipient of numerous awards and commissions including two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim fellowship. Don Freund has served as guest composer at a vast array of universities and music festivals, and presented master classes throughout Europe, Asia and South America. A Professor of Composition at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music since 1992, teaching composition continues to be a major component of Freund’s career. His students from 45 years of teaching continue to win an impressive array of awards and recognitions. Freund’s piano concert repertoire extends from new music to complete performances of Bach’s WTC Book I and his own pianistic realizations of Machaut. Up-to-date news on works and performances, and videos, audio files and pdf scores of over a hundred of Freund’s compositions can be found online at DonFreund.com.

Daniel Krenz

Conductor & Composer Daniel Krenz is the founding Music Director of the Blueprint Ensemble, the Assistant Rehearsal Conductor for the Belmont University Opera Theatre, and a contributing composer for the Nashville Composer’s Collective. 

In 2021 he participated in the  Domaine Forget de Charlevoix International Music Festival, the Parnu Music Festival, and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music where he studied with numerous teachers including Bramwell Tovey, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Paavo Järvi.

During his studies in Boston Daniel co-created Mahlermania! a festival dedicated to the life and work of Gustav Mahler. The festival culminated in a partial re-creation of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1913 Skandalkonzert where he led mezzo-soprano Rebecca Printz in Zemlinsky’s Maeterlinck Songs, Berg’s Altenberg Lieder, and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. In 2019 he made is operatic debut at the 23rd annual Opera Fringe Festival leading a run of performances of John Musto’s Later the Same Evening. Previously he served as the Assistant and Offstage Conductor for a joint production between the Glimmerglass Festival and Boston University in Janàcek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.

Stefan Freund

Stefan Freund received a BM from Indiana University and an MM and a DMA from the Eastman School of Music. He is presently Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri. Previously he was Assistant Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music.

Freund is the recipient of prizes from BMI, ASCAP, MTNA, MU, and the National Society of Arts and Letters. He has received commissions from the Barlow Endowment, Carnegie Hall Corporation, the Lincoln Center Festival, the New York Youth Symphony, Town Hall Seattle, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Sheldon Concert Hall, and other ensembles and venues. His music has been performed by ensembles such as the St. Louis Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, and the Copenhagen Philharmonic. Internationally, Freund’s music has been played in ten European countries, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. His works have been recorded on the Albany, Innova, Crystal, Centaur, and New Focus labels.

Freund is the founding cellist of the new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, described by the New York Times as “the future of classical music.” His cello playing can be heard on 18 released albums featuring Alarm Will Sound. In addition, he serves as the Artistic Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative and the Music Director of the Columbia Civic Orchestra.

 

Rodney Lister

Rodney Lister grew up in Nashville, where he received his early musical training at the Blair School of Music; he studied piano there with Enid Katahn. He was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music (Bachelor of Music degree, with honors) from 1969 to 1973 and at Brandeis University (Master of Fine Arts degree) from 1975 to 1977, and from which he received a doctorate in 2000. He studied privately with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, and was a member of Davies's composition seminar at the Dartington Hall Summer School of Music (1975, 1978, 1980-82). He was a Bernstein fellow at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in 1973. His composition teachers, aside from Davies, were Malcolm Peyton, Donald Martino, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, and Virgil Thomson. He also studied piano with David Hagan, Robert Helps, and Patricia Zander. Rodney Lister has received commissions, grants, and fellowships from the Berkshire Music Center, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress, the Fires of London, the Poets' Theatre, the Virgil Thomson Foundation, the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, the Master Singers, the International Barbara Pym Society, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. He was co-founder and co-director of Music Here & Now, a concert series of new music by Boston area composers at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1971-1973), and from 1976 until 1982 was music coordinator of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble. His music has been recorded on the Albany, Arsis, Summit, and Metier labels, and his recording with David Kopp of music for piano four hands by Virgil Thomson, Harold Shapero, and Arthur Berger is on the New World label. He is currently on the faculties of Boston University School of Music, where he teaches composition and theory and is the director of Time’s Arrow, a new music ensemble, and of the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory, where he teaches composition, theory, and chamber music and is director of the school’s annual contemporary music festival. He is also a music tutor at Pforzheimer House, Harvard University, and is on the faculty of Greenwood Music Camp. Rodney Lister’s works have been performed by Joel Smirnoff, Tammy Grimes, Phyllis Curtin, Jane Manning, Mary Thomas, Michael Finnissy, Kathleen Supove, Jonah Sirota, Rebecca Fischer, Boston Cecelia, the Blair and Chiara Quartets, the Boston University Wind Ensemble, Collage New Music and the Fires of London among others, at Tanglewood, the Library of Congress, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and in New York and London, among other places. As a pianist, he has been involved in premieres, first US performances, first UK performances or first Boston performances of works by Virgil Thomson, Peter Maxwell Davies, Milton Babbitt, Michael Finnissy, Philip Grange, Lee Hyla, and Paul Bowles, among others. His articles and reviews have appeared in Tempo, Sequenza21, and The Paris New Music Review. He is the author of the article on Arthur Berger in the Grove Dictionary of American Music. His articles on the music of Peter Maxwell Davies were published in Tempo and in Peter Maxwell Davies Studies edited by Nicholas Jones and Kenneth Gloag.

Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia and died on April 6, 1971, New York, N.Y. Son of an operatic bass, he decided to be a composer at age 20 and studied privately with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1902–08). His Fireworks(1908) was heard by the impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who commissioned Stravinsky to write the Firebird ballet (1910); its dazzling success made him Russia’s leading young composer. The great ballet score Petrushka (1911) followed. His next ballet, The Rite of Spring (1913), with its shifting and audacious rhythms and its unresolved dissonances, was a landmark in music history; its Paris premiere caused an actual riot in the theatre, and Stravinsky’s international notoriety was assured. In the early 1920s he adopted a radically different style of restrained Neoclassicism—employing often ironic references to older music—in works such as his Octet (1923). His major Neoclassical works include Oedipus rex (1927) and the Symphony of Psalms (1930) and culminate in the opera The Rake’s Progress (1951). From 1954 he employed serialism, a compositional technique. His later works include Agon (1957)—the last of his many ballets choreographed by George Balanchine—and Requiem Canticles (1966). - From the online Britannica Encyclopedia

 

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