ALEXANDROS D. FRAGISKATOS,
PERCUSSION

WITH

SARAH HARTONG, FLUTE
ALEX RESNICK, GUITAR

DOCTORAL REC IT AL SERIES
KATZIN CONCERT HALL
SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2016 • 12:00 P.M.

A511 Herberger Institute
FOR DESIGN AND THE ARTS

ARIZONA

STATE

UNIVERSITY

School of Music

Program
Peeping Tom (1987)

Peeping Tom for solo snare drum and voice
Dan Senn
Dan Senn
(b. 1951)

Mundus Canis (1998)
1. Tammy
2. Fritzi
3. Heidel
4. Emma-Jean
5. Yoda

As an intermedia artist, composer Dan Senn has built a career upon several
artistic outlets including kinetic sound sculpture and experimental and
documentary film. He works in the fluxus tradition, a movement that rose to
prominence in the 1960s which melds a variety of artistic media and disciplines.
As an undergraduate music education major at the University of Wisconsin at La
Crosse, Senn first trained as a French horn player and vocalist. After studying an
ancient ceramic method called "raku," he began trying to emulate this process in
musical composition through software he developed. Other influences on Senn's
work include his personal journals, which have been incorporated into many of
his performance and instillation works. He regularly tours Europe and the U.S.
as a featured artist at festivals and experimental venues. In 2014, Senn was artistin-residence at Marshall University, where he had several of his compositions
performed and presented his own kinetic sound sculptures and a new film. He
has also held teaching positions at the Canberra School of Music in Australia,
Ball State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where
he received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Music Composition.

George Crumb
(b.1929)

with Alex Resnick, guitar

Le Livre des Claviers (1987-88)
IV. Solo de Vibraphone

Philippe Manoury
(b.1952)

-IntermissionTo the Earth (1985)

Asked to compose a piece in 1986 by Stuart Saunders Smith, Senn wrote
Peeping Tom for The Noble Snare - a collection of snare drum solos aimed at
creating new repertoire suitable for concert performance. The semiautobiographical text of the piece comes from one of Senn's journal entries, and
he had already performed it publicly using instruments he had built himself. The
performer in this version is required to use wire brushes throughout, while
speaking and sometimes singing in prescribed rhythms that were influenced by
the text. Senn uses a technique of "phrase resetting," in which the first rhythmic
phrase of each section is the source for the rhythmic fragments found
throughout. The two-part formal design of the piece is largely determined by
tempo and dynamic structure. Senn writes:

Frederick Rzewski
(b. 1938)

Six Elegies Dancing (1987)
I. Adamantly, vigorously
II. Intensely
III. Ginger, very stable
IV. Furiously
V. With deliberate concentration
VI. Elegiac
Navi (1992)

Jennifer Stasack
(b. 1956)

Noriko Nakamura
(b. 1965)

with Sarah Hartong, flute

***************
Out of respect for the performers and those audience members around you, please
switch all beepers, cell phones, and watches to their silent mode. Thank you.

I

lj

The title of this piece came from a lecture given by Herbert Briin at the
University of Illinois in the early 1980s where he remarked that
listening to music intended to send an emotional message about the
author, like that of angst, suffering, love etc., made him feel
uncomfortable and like a "Peeping Tom." He was referring specifically
to art which was narcissistic by nature and inevitably limited by
existing language. Briin was not opposed to evoking emotions in art but
was uncomfortable with the restraints imposed by art originating as
such.
The piece's text:
As a kid I was rapt by one-way mirrors. NOT because I was a voyeur.
Though indeed I was. BUT because of an idea. I knew that light bounced

off mirrors. So it seemed possible to trap light within a sphere surfaced
with this one-way mirror stuff. A cheap source of light! The sphere
would collect light until it blew up or some of it was let out.

Les Livres de Claviers, IV. Solo de Vibraphone
Philippe Manoury
French-born Philippe Manoury has become one of the most respected figures in
contemporary Westem art music. It may be hard to believe that he failed the
entrance exam to the Conservatoire de Paris twice before being admitted.
Nonetheless, he studied composition with Max Deutsch at the Ecole Normale de
Musique de Paris before eventually continuing with lvo Malec, Michel Philippot,
and Claude Ballif at the Conservatoire. Though, strongly influenced by
composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Manoury has been able to synthesize their styles in a highly personal way. His
initial studies in computer music with Perrie Barbaud, a student of Xenakis,
heavily informed Manoury's use of electronics with music, so much so that in
1980 he was invited to the Institut de Recherche et Coordination
Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) as a composer and electronic music researcher.
Other positions held include teacher of the Ensemble Intercontemporain,
composer-in-residence at the Orchestre de Paris, and Professor of Composition
and Electronic Music at the Lyons Conservatoire. Manoury also taught
composition at the University of California, San Diego before retiring in 2012.

A friend of mine has a brain like that. And to keep it - his brain - from
exploding he expresses himself. He writes music. And he does this by
transcribing the sounds he hears inside his head. He copes this way. And
when I hear his music I feel like a voyeur again.

Mundus Canis for guitar and percussion
George Crumb
A pillar in contemporary music, George Crumb has made a monumental impact
with his unique compositional style, which explores extended techniques, graphic
notation, and timbral relationships. Born on "Black Thursday" in 1929, his first
musical exposure was to country, church music, and band concerts directed by his
father. Crumb began clarinet lessons at the age of seven, but piano eventually
became his instrument of choice. By the age of ten, he was composing in the
styles of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and Brahms. Crumb earned
degrees in composition and piano at Morris Mason College and the University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana before completing his doctorate in composition at
the University of Michigan in 1959. While Crumb has composed several works
for orchestra, many of his compositions are chamber pieces for both
instrumentalists and vocalists. Percussion and piano are among his most utilized
instruments, and Music for a Summer Evening, written for two pianists and two
percussionists, is one his most celebrated works. The endless possibilities of
timbre achievable with percussion make it ideal for Crumb's music.

·Its title French for "The Book of Keyboards," Les Livres de Claviers is a sixmovement work written for the famous percussion sextet Les Percussions de
Strasbourg. This piece makes use of sixxens - microtonally-tuned bars of
aluminum invented by Xenakis for his percussion sextet, P/ei"ades, also written
for the group. Not all movements of Les Livres require six players, however. The
second, a marimba duo, and the fourth, a vibraphone solo, can be performed
separately. With the vibraphone solo, Manoury aimed to develop the practice of
independently dampening individual pitches, which he sees as one of the
instrument's most unique and defining capabilities:

Commissioned by guitarist David Starobin, Mundus Canis (Latin for "A Dog's
World") is a collection of five short humoresques. The piece is a musical homage
to Crumb's own dogs, each movement serving as a character portrait of the dog
after which it is titled. He says:

There is a polyphony of appearance and disappearance of different
sounds in which the performer has the choice to dampen sounds using
fingers or mallets. As such, the fingers (or mallets) are frequently
playing the role of filters in electronic music. Formally the piece is quite
elaborate and functions as a series of free transformation[s] of a basic
musical structure, each one with varying degrees of different
manipulations.

I have always known that dogs, like their biped masters, have various
and distinct personalities. The addition of percussion, which supplies a
specific instrumental color for each piece, helped me to delineate each
canine character.
The percussionist is called on to use maracas, frame drum, claves., cymbal, tamtam, water gong, castanet, and giiiro. Though many of the instruments have
Central American origins, they are not used in a traditional manner. The guitarist,
like the percussionist, is asked to perform extended techniques, often in order to
imitate the latter. These include Bart6k pizzicati, knuckles on the guitar body, and
scraping the strings. The varying timbres help to sonically portray each dog.
Mundus Canis was premiered in France by Starobin and Crumb in 1998.

l

To the Earth for speaking percussionist
Frederic Rzewksi
Composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski's music has long expressed a deep
socialist-political concern with modem society. With compositions like Coming
Together, What Is Freedom?, and The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,
Rzewski uses music as a means to address injustices and problems within

\1

humanity. Educated at Harvard and Princeton, he studied composition with Roger
Sessions and Milton Babbitt at the latter while attending courses in philosophy
and Greek. A Fulbright scholarship enabled study with composer Luigi
Dallapiccola in 1960-61, and a grant from the Ford Foundation brought him to
Berlin, where he supplemented his studies in 1963-65 with Elliot Carter. Rzewski
has built a career not only on composition but on piano performance as well,
having toured Europe and taken part in important premieres such as those of
Stockhausen's Klavierstucke X and Plus Minus. As a teacher, he has held
positions at numerous universities in the U.S. and abroad, including the
Conservatoire Royal, Yale University, the Royal Conservatory of the Hauge, the
Berlin Hochschule der Kiinste, and the Universities of Cincinnati, Buffalo, and
San Diego.
"The Earth -

and their houses are full of good things.
Their cities are governed with just laws; their women are beautiful;
good fortune and wealth follow them.
Their children are radiant with the joy of youth.
The young women play in the flower meadows,
dancing with happiness in their hearts.
Holy Earth, Undying Spirit,
so it is with those whom you honor.
Hail to you, Mother of Life.
You who are loved by the starry sky;
Be generous and give me a happy life in return for my song,
so that I can continue to praise you with my music.

whatever it is," says Rzewski -

is a myth, both ancient and modem. For Heraclitus, it is a ball in the
hands of a child. For the Kabbalists, it is the stuff of creation, an act so
dangerous that it must never be undertaken alone. For Columbus, it is an
egg. For us today as well, it appears increasingly as something fragile.
Because of its humanly altered metabolism, it is rapidly becoming a
symbol of the precarious human condition.

To the Earth attempts to convey this sense of fragility. Written at the request of
percussionist Jan Williams, Rzewski chose to score for flower pots after reading
an article about newly-discovered properties of clay including its capacity to store
energy for long periods of time. For Rzewski, this makes flower pots "a kind of
transitional medium between organic and inorganic materials." The recited text
comes from a Homeric hymn, a prayer to the goddess of Earth, Gaia. Though the
text is written in Ancient Greek, it is most commonly performed in the provided
English translation. Today's performance, however, will be spoken in Ancient
Greek. Below is an English translation.
To the Earth, Mother of all, I will sing:
the well-established, the oldest,
who nourishes on her surface everything that lives.
Those things that walk upon the holy ground,
and those that swim in the sea, and those that fly;
all these are nourished by your abundance.
It is thanks to you if we humans have healthy children and rich harvests.

Great Earth, you have the power to give life to and to take it away from
creatures that must die.
Happy are the ones whom you honor with your kindness and gifts;
what they have built will not vanish.
Their fields are fertile, their herds prosper,

A sincere thank-you to Dr. Mike Tueller, Associate Professor of Ancient Greek
Language and Literature at Arizona State University, for his generous guidance.

Six Elegies Dancing for solo marimba
Jennifer Stasack
With a passionate ethnomusicological interest in non-Western musical systems,
Jennifer Stasack often draws upon her studies of Javanese, Korean, Indian, and
Japanese music when composing. She has extensive fieldwork experience, and
she has held numerous summer residencies in Eastern countries. Though she was
born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Stasack was raised in Hawaii, where she also
completed her bachelor's and master's degrees in music at the University of
Hawaii, Manoa. She received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 1991, where she is
recognized as a Distinguished Alumna. Stasack has received numerous
commissions across a broad range of styles, although she primarily composes for
chamber ensembles, mixed and women's choruses, and percussion. She also
holds the distinction of being the first female composer commissioned by
Cincinnati radio station WGUC 90.9 FM for her composition Casandra. Other
honors include grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,
the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Korean Performing Arts Institute.
Currently, Stasack is Professor of Music at Davidson College in North Carolina.
Commissioned by Swedish percussionist Mikael Ericson, Six Elegies Dancing is
a marimba solo in six movements, each with its own distinct character. Stasack
offers these words about the piece:
Elegy:

1. A poem composed in elegiac distichs (couplets). 2. A
mournful poem; especially, a poem composed to lament one
who is dead.

Dance: 1. To move rhythmically to music, using prescribed or
improvised steps and gestures. 2. To leap or skip about
excitedly; caper, frolic. 3. A particular set of prescribed
movements.
Six:

1. One of a series of symbols of unique meaning in a fixed
order which may be derived by counting. 2. A member of the
set of rational numbers .

. . . thus, the set of prescribed movements composed to frolic in a fixed
order derived by a series of symbols, of unique elegiac meaning. In the
fifth movement, energy lines that prepare, conclude, and connect
individual music events are illuminated through choreographed
movements of the marimba player. The dance, here, becomes both
auditory and visual.

Navi for flute and percussion
Noriko Nakamura
Born in Shiga, Japan, composer Noriko Nakamura's compositions have been
performed all across the world in countries such as Korea, China, Mexico,
Germany, France, Switzerland, Finland, Mexico, and the y.s. Completing both
her bachelor's and master's degrees at the Kyoto City University of Arts (KCUA),
there she studied with Ryohei Jirose, Michio Kitazume, Masahisa Fujishima,
Shuichi Maeda, and Wataru Tahjima. In 1997, she received the Ogura Risaburo
Music Scholarship for her research into traditional east-Asian music. Though
many of Nakamura's compositions call for traditional Japanese instruments, she
does have a large output of vocal and chamber music written for various Western
instruments, including percussion. Currently, Nakamura is Associate Professor of
Composition at KCUA.
Scored for flute, toms, bass drum, mukosho (Japanese woodblocks), cymbals,
gong, sistrum, stones, and windbells, Navi was premiered in December 1992 at
the Kyoto International Festival. The title, according to the composer, is "from
Japanese ancient times. Perhaps it concerns animistic and spiritual tradition.
Sometimes it means religious mountain and often it means holy forest." These are
the images that Nakamura attempts to evoke in the piece. The flute employs
various techniques such as portamento/glissando, mixing of breath, and slow
vibrato speed; these techniques combine to mimic of the sound of a shakuhachi
(Japanese end-blown flute). Unique among the percussion instruments used in
this piece are the windbells, a kind of hybrid between wind chimes and handbells.
For Navi, the percussionist is required to use rocks and their hands to activate
some or all of the. bells. The combinative effect with the flute adds to the
mystique of the piece and its possible programmatic meanings. The Soleri
windbells used in today's performance are courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation.

)