SAN FRANCISCO
COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Mark Alburger, Music Director
A Free and Frank Exchange of Ideas
8pm, Saturday, November 4, 2017
St. Mark's Lutheran Church, 1111 O'Farrell Street, San Francisco, CA
Mark Alburger and John Kendall Bailey, conducting
Program
Kat Walsh
Driven (2017)
William Severson
Harry Bernstein
Stringtet (2017)
Stringing me along in the key of U
Mystery (Theme and Variations)
Stringing me along in the key of X
Nancie Kester
Turkish Impressions (2016)
Steve Eulberg, Hammered Dulcimer
Stardust
True of Voice Finale (2017)
Intervention
Portal
Recovery
Radicalized
Guilty?
Protest
Ideology
Nationalism
Liberation
Impossible Until It's Done
Mark Alburger
2017, Op. 261 (2017, Website transcripts / YouTube videos)
I. Farewell Address
II. Press Conference
III. Confirmation Hearing
IV. Tweets
V. Phone Calls
VI. Meet the Press
Valerie Salcedo - Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Tamara Keith,
Scott Simon, Chuck Todd
Mark Alburger - Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Michael Flynn, Sergei Kislyak,
John Lewis
John Beeman
Ishi (2017, Carla Brooke)
Scene 4: The Demon Train
Scene 6: The Dinner
Jacqueline Goldgorin - Mother
Robert Vann - Ishi
Carley Neill - Grace
Victoria Ko - Helen
Nikolas Nackley - T.T. Waterman
Erling Wold
The Sinking of the Szent István (2017)
The Strait of Otranto
The Unloved War
Blessed are the young men who hunger and thirst for glory
Ich hatt' einen Kameraden
How beautifully the rockets illuminate the night
SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Mark Alburger Music Director and Conductor
Erling Wold Associate Music Director
John Kendall Bailey Associate Conductor
Martha Stoddard Associate Conductor
Piccolo / Flute / Alto Flute
Harry Bernstein
Bruce Salvisberg
Martha Stoddard
Oboe / English Horn
Philip Freihofner
Stardust
Clarinet / Bass Clarinet
Tom Berkelman
Michael Kimbell
Bassoon / Contrabassoon
Lori Garvey
Michael Garvey
Trumpet
Michael Cox
Horn
Bob Satterford
Alex Strachan
Voice
Jacqueline Goldgorin
Victoria Ko
Nikolas Nackley
Carley Neill
Valerie Salcedo
Robert Vann
Hammered Dulcimer
Steve Eulberg
Piano
Erling Wold
Percussion
Victor Flaviani
Anne Szabla
Violin I
Kristen Kline
Violin II
Kat Walsh
Viola
Harry Bernstein
Nansamba Ssensalo
Cello
Ariella Hyman
String Bass
John Beeman
MARK ALBURGER (b. April 2, 1957, Upper Darby, PA) studied with Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti at Swarthmore College (B.A.), Karl Kohn at Pomona College, Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.), Tom Flaherty and Christopher Yavelow at Claremont Graduate University (Ph.D.), and Terry Riley. He is Founder and Music Director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and The Opus Project, Conductor of San Francisco Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions, Professor in Music Literature and Theory at Diablo Valley College, and Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal. Alburger has been the recipient of many honors, awards, and commissions -- including yearly ASCAP Standard Awards; grants from Meet the Composer, the American Composers Forum, MetLife, and Theatre Bay Area; funding from the Marra, Zellerbach, Hewlett, and Getty Foundations; and performances by ensembles and orchestras throughout the world. Alburger's concert and dramatic compositions combine atonal, collage, neoclassic, pop, and postminimal sensibilities -- often in overall frameworks troped on pre-existent material. His complete works (271 opus numbers to date) are being issued on recordings from New Music. 500+ videos of his compositions can be found on the DrMarkAlburger YouTube channel, as well as many other websites. Mice Suite No. 3, Op. 59 (1998), will be heard at Diablo Valley College Music Building on November 18.
2017, Op. 261 (2017), is a "Fake 12-Minute Opera, written in 12 days, about the same -- from Barack Obama's Farewell Address to the Nation (January 10), to the inauguration of a Fake President, and the Women's March on Washington (January 21), with a cast of mutually-suspicious characters including Vladimir Putin, Elizabeth Warren, Ben Carson, Tamara Keith, Michael Flynn, Sergey Kislyak, John Lewis, Angela Merkel, Steve Mnuchin, Sherrod Brown, America Ferrara, and The Egomaniacal Lying Tweeter-in-Chief. Texts are drawn exclusively from the public record; music is minimalistically / post-modernly corrupted from Richard Wagner's Das Reingold (trolls, etc.), Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose, and YouTube political commentary and hearings." The work was premiered this past summer to rave reviews as part of Goat Hall Production / San Francisco Cabaret Opera's Fresh Voices VII programs -- in Albany, San Francisco, and Vallejo -- by Patrick Brancato, Valerie Salcedo, and Ryan Swale.
JOHN BEEMAN studied with Peter Fricker and William Bergsma at the University of Washington where he received his Master’s degree. His first opera, The Great American Dinner Table was produced on National Public Radio. Orchestral works have been performed by the Fremont-Newark Philharmonic, Santa Rosa Symphony, and the Peninsula Symphony. Mr. Beeman has attended the Ernest Bloch Composers’ Symposium, the Bard Composer-Conductor program, the Oxford Summer Institutes, and the Oregon Bach Festival and has received awards through Meet the Composer, the American Music Center, and ASCAP. Compositions have been performed by Ensemble Sorelle, the Mission Chamber Orchestra, the Ives Quartet, Fireworks Ensemble, Paul Dresher, the Oregon Repertory Singers and Schola Cantorum of San Francisco.
ISHI, the last survivor of the Yahi tribe, lived alone for three years in the wilderness near Mt. Lassen following the massacre of his people. In 1911, he was discovered by a sheriff, trembling with starvation, and soon taken to the Oroville prison. The news of Ishi’s discovery reached anthropologists T.T Waterman and Alfred Kroeber who were curating the museum of anthropology in San Francisco. In this excerpt from Scene 4 of the opera, Ishi is fearful as he travels by train to San Francisco. Train sounds segue into a mythical encounter with his mother. Ishi arrives in San Francisco with an expression of wonder, wearing a suit and barefoot. In Scene 6, Ishi is invited to Waterman’s home to share dinner with his wife and daughter. This scene serves as a close up look at the intimate friendship that has developed outside museum walls. John Beeman, composer, and librettist Carla Brooke convey the timeless story of Ishi through the emotional power of opera while hoping to bridge the cultural divide.
HARRY BERNSTEIN (b. 1948) has been involved in the Bay Area for many years as a performer, teacher and composer. He began his musical training on the trumpet, later learning the recorder as well as the baroque flute and the modern flute. He began to study singing while in graduate school and continued to do so for several years after completing his studies. Not long after earning a D.M.A. in early music performance from Stanford University, he moved 30 miles north to San Francisco where he has lived ever since. He has studied composition with Jerry Mueller and has written vocal and instrumental music that is occasionally performed by local musicians/ensembles. He is an instructor in both the Music and Older Adults Departments at City College of San Francisco, and also lectures and teaches privately. He was co-founder of the Golden Age Ensemble, a duo presenting varied programs of instrumental and vocal music around the San Francisco Bay Area and was also a partner in Micro Pro Musica Press in San Francisco, which offered music engraving, arranging and transcription services. A few years after beginning his association with City College, he took on the challenge of learning to play the viola in order to explore both orchestral and chamber music, and to learn how to write more effectively for strings. He is currently active with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra (flute), the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (viola), and Irregular Resolutions, an irrepressible composers' circle which was formed in 2004. Other musical activities are an ongoing though nameless piano quartet, besides occasional sessions playing with the Chamber Music Society (of UCSF), the Awesöme Orchestra, and chamber music workshops offered by the Chamber Musicians of Northern California. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, hiking, playing chamber music, and learning more about Brazilian music. He remains fascinated by language and tickled by humor. Finally, since he has become involved in efforts to "save City College," he looks forward to the day when the College fulfills its promise to San Francisco voters and completes the Performing Arts Education Center on the site of the Balboa Reservoir, which has been dry since it was constructed back in 1957.
STRINGTET is "admittedly not an original work by a single composer. I wanted to contribute something to the current San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra program. To be honest I not only enjoy the sonority of the string quintet but, after my earlier appearance with the SFCCO string section in 2013 with my short piece titled Plan B, I wanted to be able to play the viola with them again. The requirement for a second viola part in the quintet provided the opportunity. I chose to modify the instrumentation of one of my previous pieces, written for a performance of Irregular Resolutions, whose second concert was given in October, 2006, with all the music performed by the Presidio Ensemble. This group consisted of a string quartet, plus flute, and one condition of their participation was that at least half of the pieces should include the latter. Accordingly, some of us adjusted our music to satisfy their request. I asked for an alto flute, as well as a second viola, perhaps because I had begun playing this instrument in the Oakland Civic Symphony the year before. Mystery (Theme and Variations) is based on a theme from the slow movement of an even earlier piece called Improvisation that I wrote for men's chorus and flute for a performance in 1991. For today’s concert, I gave the alto flute part to the second violin."
NANCIE KESTER teaches piano and music composition in her private studio. She recently retired from her long-standing faculty position at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, CA. In addition to her teaching, Kester is an award-winning composer and arranger, having won prizes in the 2012, 2013 and 2015 MTAC Composer’s Today competitions for her choral triptych, California Collage, and for various piano works. She received a BA in Piano and Music Composition from California State University, East Bay, and an MM in Kodaly Music Education from Holy Names College with piano as her instrumental focus. Kester has continued her piano and composition studies with Julian White, Jason Levis, and other master teachers. She has composed and arranged numerous works for chorus, piano, and instrumental ensembles. She is an author and partner in Calicanto Associates -- publisher of books, CDs, choral arrangements, and musical plays featuring songs with historical relevance. Kester resides in Berkeley, CA.
TURKISH IMPRESSIONS (2016) was composed following a trip to Turkey in 2013. There, Kester was inspired by the Whirling Dervish dances, the grand geologic formations towering throughout Cappadocia, and the accidental antiphonal effect of several Muezzins' Calls to Prayer from one mosque to the next throughout the day. The piece is written in a modified ABA form and is scored for winds and strings, including hammered dulcimer. To capture the quality of Middle-Eastern music, Kester utilized quartertones with bending pitches and a Phrygian melody, a mode found frequently in traditional Turkish music. She also incorporated specific Turkish rhythmic patterns, plus the alternation between 4/4 and 5/4 meters. "It is an honor to have this work performed by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, featuring Steve Eulberg on hammered dulcimer."
WILLIAM SEVERSON (b. 1941, Modesto, CA) grew up in towns all over Northern California. At age 8, while living in a small California mountain town, he negotiated piano lessons with a local piano teacher before informing his parents, but he waited until he was 27 to begin vocal lessons while singing with the Honolulu Chorale in Hawaii. He later sang the 1977-78 season with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus -- a volunteer professional chorus associated with the Boston Symphony; this attests to the success of his lessons. The last half of his childhood was in Burney, California, where he lived when he graduated from Fall River High School in 1959. His parents insisted that he have a livelihood so he earned a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, and worked in the computer field for forty years or so. He rarely mixed music with his professional life, except to be one of the partners of Micro Pro Musica Press. Severson started to compose in 1979 and was a founding member of the Society of Gay and Lesbian Composers in 1985. He has studied composition with Rebeca Mauleon-Santana at City College of San Francisco, and has had a number of compositions performed by local choruses and at concerts given in the San Francisco Bay Area by the Society of Gay and Lesbian Composers, the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, and Irregular Resolutions, of which he has been a member since about 2009.
Two of the movements written by William Severson for STRINGTET have similar names. The two Stringing Me Along pieces are companion pieces, both being string quintets with two violas. "Stringing Me Along In the Key of U is a nice little odd-sounding march due to its unusual scale. It uses the so-called oriental scale, which differs from the natural minor scale by raising the fourth and seventh degrees by a half step. The piece is a reworking of the second part of my Rhapsody, originally written for flute and piano. One of my friends, a non-musician, claimed some pieces of music were in the key of X, so I decided to write Stringing Me Along In the Key of X. Any residual key feeling is unintentional, though not unlikely, since it seems natural to me to use a key center of some kind when I compose. This quintet is also an exercise in layering, in which contrasting musical ideas may be heard simultaneously."
STARDUST (b. 1962) is "an animist radical faerie composer living in the somewhat embattled and mythical sanctuary of San Francisco. Stardust is currently obsessed with True of Voice activities, including this season's TRUE OF VOICE FINALE, which follows the SFCCO performances of the True of Voice Overture and the True of Voice Entr'acte. Stardust's previous SFCCO offerings included A la recherche des danses perdues and Railway Sonata. Other works include chamber music and symphonic music prepared for encouraging musician friends at events such as the Humboldt Chamber Music Workshops and welcoming ensembles such as the Opus Project Orchestra, the Golden Gate Symphony, the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Band, and of course the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra." Stardust plays the oboe and the English horn.
TRUE OF VOICE is a musical dance-theatre production in development. Set in ancient Egypt and modern times, the spectacle will include incidental music performed by a hip-hop orchestra and an ancient Egyptian orchestra playing period instruments -- including ancient flutes, two-barreled oboe-like instruments, Hathor-decorated sistrums, and two ancient Egyptian curved harps a Portland artisan is currently crafting for the production.
"Plotwise, a powerful polyamorous Egyptian priestess queen magically transports three pivotal people through time to assist her king and his male lover with the pressing political and social needs of the Old Kingdom, despite the efforts of a mysterious spy who tries to thwart their plans. Transformed by their experiences in the past, the trio return energized to create change in our present-day world, each in their own unique way. These key characters are an innocent young black man shot by police, a lesbian couple turned out from a San Francisco restaurant on their tenth anniversary, and incarcerated transgender private Chelsea Manning awaiting trial for leaking military secrets.
The TRUE OF VOICE FINALE is part of the composer's continuing attempt to spark composition of the incidental music for True of Voice, following on the True of Voice Overture and the True of Voice Entr'acte previously performed by SFCCO. The overture, to be presented before the curtain rises, covers the beginning scenes of the production, while the entr'acte, to be presented during intermission of the production, covers scenes from the middle of the production before the time-traveling characters return to modern times. The TRUE OF VOICE FINALE, covering the final scenes in modern times, will be presented at the end of the production.
Selections from this season's TRUE OF VOICE FINALE evoke theatrical scenes from the production in miniature, including Intervention (paramedic discovers ankh pendant protected Neferkare), Portal (Neith thankful to see Iput), Recovery (paralyzed Neferkare discusses politics), Radicalized (Neith accepts Iput’s advice to protest), Guilty? (Chelsea receives guilty verdict, prepares gender announcement), Protest (Queer Nation protest at restaurant), Ideology (discussions about violent vs. non-violent strategy and appropriation), Nationalism (ICE threatens Iput with deportation), Liberation (Chelsea announce gender and applies for medical treatment), Impossible Until It's Done (from a Mandela quote about the utopian future).
The TRUE OF VOICE FINALE will no doubt whet your artistic appetite for the production of True of Voice the musical appearing in workshop during 2018 and, assuming funding, in mature theatrical glory by 2019 (more info at http://trueofvoice.com)."
KAT WALSH (b. 1982) is a bassoonist, violist, violinist, and composer based in Mountain View, CA. She has performed with groups including the Pan American Symphony Orchestra, Orlando Opera, Central Florida Lyric Opera, and Southern Winds, and currently plays with a variety of casual ensembles around the Bay Area. Walsh has a BA in music from Stetson University in DeLand, Florida and a JD from George Mason University in Arlington, VA, and when not behind a music stand is instead practicing law, in technology, IP, and internet policy.
DRIVEN (2017) for string quartet, is a "short exploration in three parts of the feeling of pursuing an idea you are compelled to follow. The opening is the anxiety and anticipation before getting started, with the cello providing a heartbeat as the upper strings build in intensity with minor-key counterpoint. It is followed by action, relentless motion with a steady sixteenth-note pulse laying the foundation for a syncopated melody, in a modal feeling. The driving rhythm pauses for a brief interlude as flow state is reached. Finally, the viola takes up the pulse and the piece continues in a major key as the idea is successfully realized.
ERLING WOLD (b. 1958) has written eight operas, at least four of which have been produced in both English and German versions. He is working on two more: one about the sinking of the Szent István, RATTENSTURM, for the Austrians and featured here, and a film-opera adaptation of Robert Harris’s surreal fascist thriller She Who Is Alive. By day he thinks of himself as a mathematician, working in signal p"rocessing and, of late, computational geometry, with an Erdős number of 4, and on nights and weekends sharing with Charles Ives a music-composer avocation, but besting Ives’ Sabbath number of 6 by 2. He should write more orchestral suites of his operas, since he loves doing them, and since a high point in his young life was when his suite from Certitude and Joy shared a program with the aforementioned Ives as well as Lenny Bernstein in an all-American pops program by the Sofia (Bulgaria) Philharmonic."
THE SINKING OF THE SZENT ISTVÁN (2017) "is an instrumental suite from my soon-to-be-written opera on the sinking of the Tegetthoff-class battleship SMS Szent István, an event which, as it happened on the maiden voyage due to a series of mishaps and foolishnesses, was an embarrassment for the Austro-Hungarian empire, already in rapid decline post Franz Josef. However, in Italy, the country that provided the torpedoes that dealt the blow, it is still commemorated as Navy Day, June 10th, the day in 2018 the opera will premiere, the 100th anniversary of the awesome event. In five sections:
1) A few years ago, a former attendant of the Empress took me to see A Winged Victory for the Sullen, and something about the calmness of their music has infected me. So when the librettist's stage directions commanded that the music starts in a calming and smooth manner, in the first section, The Strait of Otranto, where the battle eventually takes place, I said OK I will and let the infection run its course. In the opening, we hear that the Strait of Otranto, the Otrantostrasse, is for sailors what Verdun is for the foot soldiers at the front.
2) As the ship sails, the mishaps accumulate. They have set off late, so will not arrive under cover of darkness, and the coal is damp, sending dense black smoke, signaling the enemy. Those that love war love this, The Unloved War.
3) I was improvising at the piano and came across some chords which, after some time, I realized were thinly disguised versions of chords I have used many times before, but shortly thereafter noticed a modal similarity to the chords that begin Schubert's Der Doppelgänger, and since the librettist is liberally quoting lots of pro and anti war poetry I thought why shouldn't I do some quoting, so in the section Blessed are the young men who hunger and thirst for glory, from Gabriele D. Annuncio's beatitudinal Bergpredigt, I mixed in some of me with some of Mr. Schubert's song. My favorite Schubert musics are the dark musics, e.g. the above, Die liebe Farbe, etc., and that darkness here is featured in the contrabassoon doubling bits of the melody.
4) The librettist, Peter Wagner, said to use Ich hatt' einen Kameraden -- the German equivalent of Taps -- might be too heavy-handed, but I arranged it anyway.
5) Which leads us attaca to How beautifully the rockets illuminate the night, a repurposing of a piano piece of mine, arranged for the small orchestra. A pulsing but slowly changing harmony, and a dropping melody in the bells. Orchestration can do many things given a piano piece as its source: in this case, providing the swell of the dynamics and the pedaling of the piano."
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****
What a concert!
The day including rehearsal with Valerie,
errands
about
town,
then
heading
down
with Harriet to program reproduction at Cybercopy,
and
on
to
SF for the fantastic show. Third day of fall, high coldest of this season thus far... 64, with .21 additional precip... almost tripling the meager rainfall since July 1 to .33 (Pleasant Hill, 65 / San Francisco, 60), finishing Tropes on Benjamin Britten's Songs from the Chinese, Op. 271: V. Depression (2 pages total) upon late return...
