Sixth Annual
American Music Week in Bulgaria
November 14-20, 2003
Sofia, Bulgaria

Introduction | Guest artists | Schedule of events | Programs | Composer Bios and Program Notes | 
Performer Bios | Thanks/Venues | Organizing Committee/Contact | Archive: 2001 and 2002 

Nov 16: wordplay Notes

Terry Winter Owens, born and educated in New York, began composing at age 10.  A scholarship student of Lisa Szylagi Grad, her principal composition teacher was Ralph Shapey.  She has also worked with Mark Brunswick at the The City College of New York, where she earned her undergraduate degree before pursuing graduate studies in musicology at New York University.  As a pianist, she specializes in the music of Gurdjieff - de Hartmann in performances in the United States and Europe, and teaches piano and composition in Manhattan as a recipient of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts.  In 1988 she collaborated with the Kurt Weill Foundation in the Carnegie Hall performance of Gold. Her compositional output, consisting primarily of solo and chamber works, often with narration, reflects her lifelong interest in astronomy, which has led her to philosophy, mathematics, neurobiology, and quantum physics.

For Cellestial Music Book I: The Facts of Light (for cellist/narrator, 2003), the composer draws on various astrophysical concepts as inspiration for both the music and text, without attempting to musically  “describe” any particular process or phenomenon.  She provides these notes for the movements:

“The Visible Universe…Visible light rays are but a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which ranges from gamma rays to radio waves—all of which are invisible to our eyes. The concept of a universe expanding in all directions suggests that all observers seem to be at the center.

“Photons are energy packets of electromagnetic radiation. Light can be thought of as streams of such discrete particles.  Our eyes are able to absorb photons which, collectively, are interpreted by our brains as images…Some of the light from the further reaches of the visible universe has taken billions of years to reach our eyes.

“Gravitational Lensing refers to the deflection of light rays by the gravitational pull of massive celestial bodies.  Predicted by Einstein and confirmed by observation, it can result in the magnification, brightening and distortion of the image of a more distant object, and can even create multiple images of a single object.

“Eclipsing Binary Stars…appear as a single point of light [but] are actually two stars bound together by gravity and orbiting one another.  Because one star may hide the other, they are referred to as eclipsing. The two stars that comprise Beta Lyrae, one of the strangest of the known eclipsing binary stars, will eventually collide.” (T. Owens)

Dimiter Christoff (1933), a former composition student of Marin Goleminov at the State Music Academy in Sofia, is a long-standing Professor of polyphony at that institution.  A Doctor of Science and Senior Research Worker, first degree, at the Institute for Art Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, he served as Secretary General of the UNESCO International Music Council from 1975 to 1979.  Since 1989 he has been editor-in-chief of the Bulgarsko Muzikoznanie journal, and since 1994, of the Music: Yesterday and Today review.  His large creative output covers many genres, from song cycles and solo sonatas to large-scale symphonic works.  Among his numerous critical writings are the books A Hypothesis on Polyphonic Structure (1970) and Theoretical Bases of Melody, Vol. 1-3 (1975, 1982, 1989).

Etudes, Book II (nos. 5-8), were completed during the summer of 2003 for harpist Anna-Maria Ravnopolska-Dean, for whom Dimiter Christoff also composed the previous set.  The composer, writing of the first four etudes, explains that his interest in the harp “was awakened by Dr. Ravnopolska-Dean’s dissertation, The Harp as a Coloristic Instrument in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.  Each piece presents a specific technical problem, and has a brief title to orient the listener.” (D. Christoff)  

Anna-Maria Ravnopolska-Dean is a graduate of the State Music Academy in Sofia and the Indiana University School of Music, where she received the coveted Artist Diploma for superior achievement in harp performance.  She also holds a doctorate in musicology from New Bulgarian University.  She has performed internationally since 1987, when she represented Bulgaria at the third World Harp Congress in Vienna, and made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1992.  Her diverse repertoire includes many of her own transcriptions and works composed especially for her, some of which are featured on her five solo recordings for the Gega New and Arpa d’oro labels.  This past July, at the invitation of HarpCon2003, she made her debut as a composer, performing her own works on the final concert of the international harp conference in Bloomington, Indiana. 

Haiku Suite was composed in collaboration with the Bulgarian poet Ginka Bilyarska, who suggested the texts.  Each of the four movements is a musical response to a group of three haiku:

1.

Тhe apple tree gave no fruit                                             Не даде ябълката плод
And so much was its blossom                                         А колко цвят по нея
In the spring                                                                    имаше през пролетта!
 
A puff of fan                                                                    Полъх на ветрило
Blew off a cherry – blossom                                            вишнев цвят отрони
Bygone laughter                                                               Смях отминал.
 
Sky splits in two –                                                           Раздира се небето -
This is the painful giving birth                                            болезненото раждане на дъжд
To rain by a globe-shaped cloud                                      от кълбовиден облак.
 
(Ginka Bilyarska)                                                                  (Гинка Билярска)
 
2.
The cadenced footsteps                                                     Тактуващи стъпки
Of one million black men                                                  на милион чернокожи
A warm fall day.                                                                Превалящ топъл ден
 
Sun plaza                                                                          Sun плаза
One million shadows darken                                             милион сенки го смрачават
Foot by foot                                                                      стъпка по стъпка
 
(Leonard Moore)                                                                  (Леонард Мур)
 
Sharp wind                                                                       пронизващ вятър
The metal gate bangs shut                                                  металната порта се удря и
Bangs shut                                                                         звънва,се удря и звънва
 
(Jim Kacian)                                                                          (Джим Касиян)
 
3.
Song of a bird                                                               Песен на птица
Rustles through the branches –                                      шумоли из клоните -
It rains wet blossom                                                      вали мокър цвят
 
Summer is over.                                                            Лятото свърши.
Rain washes our dusty                                                   Дъжд мие прашните ни
Sights.  Autumn.                                                            Погледи. Есен.
 
Тhe wind plays                                                              Вятърът свири
With its breathe on the strings                                        С дъха си по струните
Of the lake.                                                                   На езерото.
 
(Ginka Bilyarska)                                                                  (Гинка Билярска)
 
4.
Squirrel drinking                                                                Катеричка пие
From one small puddle –                                                   от една малка локва
Tank tracks                                                                       следа от танка
 
Seattle spring –                                                                  Пролет в Сеатъл -
One cherry tree blooming                                                   едно черешово дърво цъфти
Another not                                                                        а друго не
 
Newborn calf                                                                    Новородено теленце
Still wet, stands, trips,                                                        все още мокро,изправя се
Stands again                                                                      препъва се и се изправя пак
 
(Kylan Jones-Huffman)                                                               (Кайлан Джонс-Хъфман)
 
 

Greg Steinke (1942) is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and holds a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. A former composition student of Joseph Wood, H. Owen Reed, Richard Hervig, Paul Harder and Lawrence Moss, he has served as professor of composition, theory, and oboe at Ball State University and the University of Arizona, as Chairman of the Music Department at San Diego State University, and as Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Millikin University.  Until his retirement from academe in 2001 he held the Joseph Naumes Endowed Chair in Music at Marylhurst University.  He is the recipient of awards from BMI and ASCAP, numerous university grants, and first prizes in the University of Louisville First International Composition Contest (1979), Bergen Festival Composers’ Competition (1994), and the Delta Omicron Composition Competition (2002). As an oboist he has performed in professional woodwind quintets throughout the United States, as the principal oboist of the Winnipeg Symphony in Canada, and as a soloist specializing in contemporary music for his instrument, which is also featured in many of his own solo and chamber works.

According to the composer, Music for Chief Joseph “grows out of an increasing fascination with and study of Northwest Native Americans. Having just recently refreshed my memory of Chief Joseph in recent readings, I felt I must compose a piece to honor the memory of a noble and great American. As I recalled past visits to White Bird Canyon, the Lolo Pass, and thought of his unfulfilled wish to return to his beloved Wallowa Valley, the metaphor of an oboe as Chief Joseph and a trombone "orchestra" as his milieu occured to me. Thus, this commentary represents, metaphorically, Chief Joseph calling out to a world not yet ready to accept nor understand a people who were native to the land ...a call which echoes to us today ... can we now not only hear, ... but also listen?”  G. Steinke

Song of Chief Joseph’s guardian spirit:

Thunder strikes out from the water;
From the water flashes thunder;
The waves shoot thunder out of them;
See thunder whipping from the water:
From the water flashes thunder;
Thunder strikes out from the water

Stefania de Kenessey (1956), was born in Budapest of mixed parentage (her mother was originally from Popovo, Bulgaria) and came to the United States as a child.  After early training as a pianist, her musical education culminated in a doctorate in composition from Princeton University, where her principal teacher was Milton Babbitt.  Honored repeatedly with awards from ASCAP, her music has been heard on four continents and includes chamber music, concertos, opera and smaller vocal works, all composed in a highly accessible tonal idiom. Recent operatic successes include The Monster Bed, a comedy, and The Other Wise Man, a holiday fable, premiered as a double bill by the Mannes Opera in 1998. The Other Wise Man was subsequently performed by the Singapore Symphony in 2000. Featured in a recent PBS documentary on the return of classicism in the arts, she is also the founder and artistic director of The Derriere Guard, an alliance of traditionalist contemporary artists, architects, poets, and composers.

Her song cycle The Muse Is Not Amused, on poems by Lou Rodgers, was premiered at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 1999, and has since been recorded and broadcast by WNYC-FM in New York.

William Bolcom (1938), born in Seattle, Washington, began private composition and piano studies at the age of 11.  Graduating with Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington in 1958, he went on to study with Darius Milhaud at Mills College in California and at the Paris Conservatoire de Musique. He holds a doctorate in composition in from Stanford University (1964), where he worked with Leland Smith. Among his compositions are four violin sonatas, seven symphonies, two operas, several musical theater operas, eleven string quartets, two film scores, and various chamber and vocal works.  The 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner in music, he has also received awards and grants from the Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, and Rockefeller Foundations, and has been commissioned by leading orchestras in the United States and Europe.  He is Distinguished Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan.  

Briefly It Enters and Briefly Speaks, one of Bolcom’s many song cycles, is based on poems by Jane Kenyon.

Robert Beaser (1954), was born in Boston, Massachusetts and studied literature, political philosophy and music at Yale University, where he earned his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1986. His composition teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Earle Brown, Toru Takemitsu, Arnold Franchetti and Goffredo Petrassi. Presently in his fourth season as Meet the Composer/Composer in Residence with the American Composers Orchestra, at Carnegie Hall, he uses new tonal grammar and a wide range of media in a compositional language which synthesizes European tradition and American vernacular.  In 1977, he became the youngest American Composer to win the Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.  Among recent commissions is a work for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra commemorating their centennial season at Orchestra Hall.

Lee Hoiby (1926), born in Wisconsin, studied piano with Gunnar Johansen and Egon Petri before turning to composition as a student of Gian Carlo Menotti at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Like Menotti, Hoiby has distinguished himself as a composer of opera. His first opera, The Scarf, was premiered at the first Spoleto (Italy) Festival in 1957. The New York City Opera presented A Month in the Country in 1964 and Summer and Smoke in 1972. Hoiby's most recent operas are based on Shakespeare: The Tempest, premiered at the Des Moines Metro Opera in 1986 and produced by the Dallas Opera in November 1996, and Romeo and Juliet.  He has also composed much choral and chamber music, and several instrumental concertos.  The recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, Hoiby was the 1996 composer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Hoiby's songs, many set to distinguished texts by Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, are widely performed, notably by soprano Leontyne Price.

Stan Link holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition and Music History from the Oberlin Conservatory, where he studied with Ed Miller and Richard Hoffmann, Schoenberg’s last student and amanuensis.  He received his M.F.A. and Ph.D. in Composition from Princeton University, where he studied acoustic composition with Steve Mackey and Claudio Spies, and computer music with Paul Lansky. He has also studied with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati at the Institute for Experimental and Electro-Acoustic Music at the Vienna Hochschule fuer Musik, with Mario Davidovsky at the Wellesley Composers Conference, and with Louis Andriessen at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. The recipient of an ASCAP composition prize, his acoustic and electro-acoustic music has been programmed in the United States, Europe, and Australia, including Electronic Music Midwest, Third Practice Festival, and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U. S.  He is currently the Assistant Professor of the Philosophy and Analysis of Music at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, where he teaches composition, theory, interdisciplinary arts courses, and theory of film soundtracks.  Stan Link has been honored as one of Vanderbilt University’s top five professors by its Student Government Association Arts and Science Council and its Mortar Board Honor Society.  

Of Groundswell (2002) for soprano, recitation, and computer-generated accompaniment, the composer writes:

“On what can we base our claim to an identity? And why do we want one in the first place? Surely not just to “express”—a grubby little term that means less than nothing (lies) when not claiming that “I” knows what an “I” is.  And without that, “I” can never be justified in hoping to understand what “you” is. Under those circumstances, what would be the point of expressing anything anyway?  Groundswell concerns itself with, and models itself on, the emergence of identity through memory, experience, the experience of memory, and the memory of experience. The computer generated accompaniment is mostly derived from Mark Jarman’s reading and explanations of three of his poems that take up the theme of emerging identity. Though never fully articulating any of the texts, or even itself at times, the soprano part is also drawn from those same poems, The singing voice remains in a constant state of formation from both the musical and verbal elements.  Mark Jarman’s spoken recitation, then, ultimately serves as the fully formed reflection as well as the source of everything else. Like “I,” we may trace our way backwards and forwards from it and within it.” (S. Link)  

Nov. 17: Dialogues with Two Bulgarian Duos Notes

Valeri Dimchev (1963), a native of Blagoevgrad, is a graduate of the Folk Music School in Shiroka Luka and the Academy of Music and Dance Art in Plovdiv.  He has composed original music for a number of television programs and movies for Bulgarian National Television, and won a 1995 Golden antenna award for the soundtrack of Haramijska zalba.  A virtuoso tambura player, he performs his own compositions on six recordings released in Bulgaria, the United States, and Canada.  Three of these also feature Dessislava Dimcheva, voice and tambura.  Through their performances as a duo and in the Valeri Dimchev Quartet, they have increased international awareness of the richness of Bulgarian folk traditions and the unique sound of the tambura, a traditional instrument of southwestern Bulgaria.

Peter Petrov (1961) is a native of Stara Zagora.  A graduate of the Stara Zagora Music High School and the National Music Academy in Sofia, where he studied composition with Prof. Alexander Raichev as a recipient of the Pancho Vladigerov composition scholarship.  Further composition studies were with Prof. Anatol Vieru in Rumania.  His works, which in addition to many solo and small chamber pieces include four symphonies and a violin concerto, have been performed widely and have received prizes in several international competitions.

Dialogues with Silence (1994), according to the composer “are inspired by the purely constructivist idea of creating a dialogue with the help of two (different) instruments – clarinet and cello – (a self-styled conservation with myself).

Milko Kolarov (1946) was born in Varna, graduated from the National Music Academy in Sofia with majors in composition (under Pancho Vladigerov) and conduction (under Konstantin Iliev), and later studied in Paris.  He has received a number of important prizes for his wide-ranging creative activities, including the award for high achievements in the field of musical art given by the International Biographical Center in Cambridge, England.  His compositions, including symphonic and operatic works, song cycles, and instrumental pieces, have been performed throughout Europe and Asia and are featured on ten commercial recordings.

Nov. 18: Generation Gaps notes

This concert explores little-known American violin music, pairing works in a German-romantic musical language by Arthur Foote (1853-1937) Daniel Gregory Mason (1873-1953), both from Boston, with those of two of the twentieth century’s most significant American masters, Henry Cowell and William Bolcom.   

Henry Cowell (1897-1965), composer, performer, teacher, and advocate of new music, was a California native who first attracted attention as a violin prodigy.  His early musical interests, ranging Chinese opera to American shape-note singing, embraced many cultures and genres, and would later be reflected in his own music.  He became a major force in bringing American music to Europe and Asia during extended tours during the 1920’s and 1930’s.  In 1928 he was the first American composer to be invited to Russia following the Revolution.  The year before he had founded the New Music Society, an organization which introduced works by Crawford Seeger, Ives, Nancarrow, Ruggles, and others through publication and recording long before commercial firms took interest in their music.  In 1930 his groundbreaking book New Musical Resources, begun over a decade earlier, was published.  As a teacher and director of musical activities at New York’s New School for Social Research (1928-1963), Cowell’s students in composition and non-Western music included Gershwin and Cage.  In works such as Sound-form for Dance (1936), Cowell called for both Asian and Western instruments, as in his two concertos for the Japanese koto and orchestra.

Nov. 19: Toward the New World Notes

Mihail Pekov (1942) is a Professor of Harmony at the State Music Academy in Sofia. He is well-known as a prolific composer in a variety of mediums, with a preference for large-scale instrumental cycles.  His works have been performed throughout Bulgaria and Europe by many leading soloists and ensembles.

String Quartet No. 13 was composed in 2002 and is dedicated to the members of the Sofia Quartet:  Angel Stankov and Nikolai Gagov, violins, Valentin Gerov, viola, and Geoffrey Dean, cello.

Like Antonin Dvorak, Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) came from Europe to the United States, but unlike the Czech master, he stayed in the New World, becoming at the age of twenty the assistant concertmaster of the newly-established Boston Symphony Orchestra.  He made his debut as a composer in the 1890’s with works which allied him with French artistic tastes, using texts by Symbolist poets and showing a preference for color over form.  Among the most significant of these was La Mort de Tintagiles, a tone poem (1897, revised 1901) for viola d’amore (Loeffler’s other preferred performance instrument) and orchestra based on Maeterlinck’s marionette drama of that name.  Later in life, Loeffler, by then established as one of the foremost American composers, discovered jazz, became a staunch supporter of George Gershwin, and even wrote several pieces for jazz orchestra. 

Historiette des tribulations de M. Punch, composed in 1921-2, is the second in a set of four pieces which Loeffler described in a letter to Boston arts patron Isabella Stuart Gardner as “Preludes to Imaginary Tragedicomedies…little observations on the criminal ‘insouciances’ of the modern, developped [sic] Gorilla called man.” Dedicated to Pablo Casals, Historiette No. 2 “deals with the medical man Mr. Punch, who in all disagreeable situations helps himself with the one simple medicine, namely the cudgel!  Quarrels with his wife (Judy), bawlings of the kids, meddling of the police, even at the end that of the devil who would fetch him are successfully fought out by the universal character Punch with his cudgel.”  The work received a private reading in July 1922 at Seal Harbor, Maine, with the French-American harpist Carlos Salzedo and students of Loeffler’s former Boston Symphony standpartner Franz Kneisel, but apparently has never had a public performance.  Historiettes is one of the earliest compositions to employ the new harp effects introduced by Salzedo a few years before in his groundbreaking L’Etude moderne de la harpe (1917). 

Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) composed the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96, “American,” in the summer of 1893 in the Czech colony at Spillville, Iowa.  During the period 1892-5, Dvorak served as director of the National Conservatory in New York City.  While in the United States, he also composed the Cello Concerto, Op. 104, and the Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.”

Nov. 20: Variations on "American"

The Voice of One Who Spoke

This work is based on the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel, the account of the prophet’s vision of the four creatures, the wings, the wheels, the fire, the throne. Verses 16 and 17 were the inspiration for the musical setting of the chapter: “The appearance of the wheels and their workmanship was like the color of beryl, and all four of them looked alike, their appearance and their workmanship as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. As they went, they went in any of their four directions, without turning as they went.”

In addition to an introduction and Coda, there are 28 sections, corresponding to the 28 verses of the chapter (although sections 4 and 27 involve repeated material). All of the pitches in this work, except for the Coda, are generated from the letters of the Hebrew text. A system was devised converting the letters into numbers, and from there to musical notes. The first letters of words provide most of the pitches, and certain words ending in Hebrew finals, which are special forms of certain letters, take on added significance. These words provide more pitches, and sometimes an underlying tonality.

Musical decisions based on the sense of the text, rather than any further systematizing, guided the handling of whatever pitches presented themselves. Word and letter order were not followed slavishly, but were manipulated as the music seemed to suggest. However, the integrity of the individual Hebrew sentences, which correspond to the verses (except for 8 and 9, which are one sentence), was always honored. The sentences provided their own tonal centers, which were followed from sentence to sentence, however they led. Sometimes tonal centers are strong, sometimes not.

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