Photos
EARPLAY 25: Ports and Portals
in association with the
San Francisco International Arts Festival
Monday, May 24, 2010, 7:30
PM
Herbst Theatre
The
Earplay Ensemble
Mary Chun, conductor
Tod Brody, flutes • Peter Josheff,
clarinets • Karen Rosenak, piano
Terrie Baune, violin • Ellen Ruth
Rose, viola • Thalia Moore, cello
Guest Artists
Stacey Pelinka, flute, Shoko Hikage, koto, David Tanenbaum, guitar Hrabba Atladottir, violin, Joe Edelberg, violin, Dan Reiter, cello and Leighton Fong, cello
Pre-concert talk 6:45 p.m.
Dr. Bruce Bennett in conversation with Chris Trebue Moore, Hyo-shin Na, Wayne Peterson and Toga Yayalar
Wayne Peterson
Scherzo for Mixed Quartet (2009)
flute, clarinet, violin, cello
This music is light, simple and direct. It is infused with the SPIRIT of the classical Scherzo rather than its Eighteenth Century formal plan. The initial twenty measures present motif and rhythmic gestures which permeate the remainder of the work.
Three contrasting textures regularly appear: (1) short, hyperactive, contrapuntal fragments; (2) sustained tremolos; (3) homophonic passages (often heard at the end of phrases). overall, a gradually increasing tension-curve ultimately asserts itself, culminating in a brilliant, rhythmically irregular coda. -- W.P.
 Wayne Peterson (b. 1927) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1992 for the San Francisco Symphony commission, The Heart of Dark, crowning a distinguished career which includes a catalog of more than 60 works and numerous fellowships and awards. He has been honored by the Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, Fromm, and Gerbode Foundations in addition to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Peterson has been a Professor of Music at San Francisco State University for more than three decades and has also been active as a guest composer at universities across the country. He was guest Professor of Composition at Stanford University from 1992-1994; other guest teaching positions have included those at Indiana University, Brandeis University, and the University of Minnesota. The Wayne Peterson Prize, which is awarded annually for outstanding musical excellence in composition, was established in his honor by San Francisco State University in 1998.
Chris Trebue Moore
Amnesia Barrier (2008-09)
World premiere
Earplay commission
flute, clarinet, piano
The title of this piece refers to an effect that can occur as a direct result of prolonged sessions of ECT, otherwise known as “electroshock therapy.” At the behest of certain secretive elements of the CIA, between the years 1957 and 1964 numerous individuals were deliberately subjected to regular sessions of ECT (often at 30 to 40 times the level of power normally considered “effective” by standards of the time) supposedly intended to treat disorders as common as postpartum depression and ordinary anxiety, without the informed consent of the patients. However, in reality the true motivation for such a crude, despotic approach was far more duplicitous, having more to do with a conscious attempt on the part of megalomaniacal doctors to create brainwashed sleeper agents through a process of wiping a patient’s memory clean with ECT and subsequently inducing a prolonged state of coma using a combination of powerful drugs. This technique would hypothetically create the opportunity for a psychiatrist to ultimately rebuild the psyche in whatever way he chooses by planting false memories. Naturally, the only tangible effects of such a barbaric method were long-term brain damage and permanent memory loss, hence the term “Amnesia Barrier.” -- Chris Moore
 Chris Trebue Moore originally is from Houston before migrating to the west coast. His formal studies include a B.M., San Francisco State University, M.M., University of Oregon and D.M.A., Stanford University. He has studied with Saul Gropman, Carlos Sachez-Gutierrez, Ronald Caltabiano, Richard Festinger, David Crumb, Robert Kyr, Brian Ferneyhous, Mark Applebaum and Chris Chafe. Awards include Jury Selection, Gaudeamus Music Week and Young Composer Awards, International Contemporary Ensemble.
Tolga Yayalar
Terâneler (2006)
violin, viola, cello
2009 Winner Earplay Donald Aird Memorial Composition Competition
I have always found it difficult to work with short forms. As I set out to write Terâneler, I took inspiration from shorter forms of poetry. In this piece, I took as my starting point a Persian verse form often made up of four line verses, called Terane. This form, made famous by the 12th century poet Omar Khayyam, has a very specific meter and rhyming scheme, which is often AABA.
Instead of simply carrying this form to music, I made use of the double meaning of Terane which means melody in Persian and tedious repetitiveness in Turkish. The two movements take up each of these meanings. The first one grew out of harmonizing a simple chant-like melody with the harmonies derived from ancient Greek tetrachords. This movement is quite homophonic. The second movement takes from where the first one has left, but this time adding some heterophony and polyphony to the texture but this texture is disrupted by constant repetition of perfect fifths. Each movement also uses the idea of repetition in different ways. While the first one has a very subtle ABAB form, in the second one, the contrast between sections (A and B) are much more dramatic and disconnected from each other.
This piece is written for Gabriela, Wendy and Alexei and dedicated to them.
---Tolga Yayalar
 A native of Istanbul, Turkey, Tolga Yayalar (b. 1973) studied Jazz Composition at Berklee College of Music. He is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University. He has studied with Harrison Birtwistle, Joshua Fineberg, Brian Ferneyhough, Chaya Czernowin and Helmut Lachenmann. Tolga Yayalar played electric guitar in rock and jazz bands before taking up composition. Upon his encounter with the music of Webern, his first serious works incorporated serialism with jazz. Since then, texture and timbre have always been in the center of his music. To overcome the harmonic and sonic limitations of the tempered system, his music focuses on different systems of microtonality. While harmonic series constitute the harmonic focal point of his compositions, he also fuses parts of the eastern tuning systems with the Western tradition.
Ensembles and performers who have played Tolga's music include Le Nouvel Ensemble Modern, Ensemble FA, Ying Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, The Cullithumpian Consort, Chamber Players of the League/ISCM, Orchestre National de Lorraine, Adorno Ensemble, Yesaroun Duo, Samual Z. Solomon, Benjamin Schwartz, Seda Roeder and Garth Knox.
Jorge Liderman
Swirling Streams (2003)
(Earplay commission)
David Tanenbaum, Peter Josheff, Terrie Baune, Ellen Ruth Rose, Thalia Moore
SWIRLING STREAMS, Earplay Commission,
(2002), scored for guitar, bass clarinet, and string trio, is a one movement work which oscillates between gradually unfolding streams of sound and whirling successions of events. Although the guitar and bass clarinet have a prominent role in the piece, the string trio actively interacts with the duo producing varied instrumental surfaces.
Swirling Streams is dedicated to David Tanenbaum, with whom I have collaborated on several occasions. It is also dedicated to Earplay bass clarinetist, Peter Josheff, who has performed my music in the past and has shown a great interest in a new piece for this instrumental combination.
---Jorge Liderman
 JORGE LIDERMAN (1957-2008)
Born in Buenos Aires, Jorge Liderman began his musical studies at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem, under Mark Kopitman. In 1988 he received his doctorate in composition from the University of Chicago, where he worked with Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran. A year later, Liderman, joined the composition faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Hyo-shin Na
Song of One Lost in the Fog (2010)
World premiere
(Earplay/San Francisco Foundation commission)
SONG OF ONE LOST IN THE FOG (2009)
(for alto flute/flute, clarinet in B flat, violin, viola, cello, and piano with koto)
I wrote SONG OF ONE LOST IN THE FOG out of an interest in the works of the American anthropologist/linguist/poet Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950), particularly his book "The Music of the Indians of Northern California", which includes his idiosyncratic graphic-notation versions of songs of the Pit River Indians as well as his own original melodies, and a collection of his poems, “Home Among the Swinging Stars”.
SONG OF ONE LOST IN THE FOG has five sections, each section related to material by de Angulo:
- the first section
de Angulo’s poem “Fog”
fog coming up in streams
from the sea
In the pasture the old black mare stands
with her head bent.
- the second section
de Angulo’s poem “Redwood in the Night”
Foggy rain, foggy rain, gentle rain,
dripping under the tall redwoods.
Shaggy horse with your tail to the storm,
aren’t you cold?
- the third section
de Angulo’s music in graphic notation “Song of Night Falling”
- the fourth section
de Angulo’s music in graphic notation “Song of One Lost in the Fog”
- the fifth section
de Angulo’s music in graphic notation “Song of the Horse”
An extended passage in the first section has a rhythmic pattern of 25 beats - divided into 6, 4, 5, 4, and 6 beats - in celebration of the 25th year of Earplay, during which this piece was written. As part of the koto solo (Song of the Horse), I included the Korean melody “Garden Balsam”, from a song which became very popular in the 1940s during the Japanese occupation of Korea (the song was written in 1920 by Nan-pa Hong).
Dear garden balsam by the fence,
How plaintive you now look…
Remember?
During those long summer days,
Beautiful young ladies used to play under you
In full bloom…
SONG OF ONE LOST IN THE FOG was commissioned by Earplay and the San Francisco Foundation. It was funded in part by the Composer Assistance Program of the American Music Center, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the LEF Foundation and generous donors.--Hyo-shin Na
 After studying piano and composition in her native Korea, Hyo-shin Na came to the U.S. in 1983 to do graduate work at the Manhattan School of Music and the University of Colorado, where she received her doctorate. After moving to San Francisco in 1988, she met Cage, Rzewski, Wolff and Takahashi, and encountered the music of Nancarrow. At the same time, she made return trips to Korea to hear and study traditional Korean music while also taking a broad interest in the music of other regions of Asia.
Hyo-shin Na has written for western instruments, for traditional Korean instruments and has written music that combines western and Asian (Korean and Japanese) instruments and ways of playing. Her music for traditional Korean instruments is recognized by both composers and performers in Korea (particularly by the younger generation) as being uniquely innovative. Her writing for combinations of western and eastern instruments is unusual in its refusal to compromise the integrity of differing sounds and ideas; she prefers to let them interact, coexist and conflict in the music.
In Korea, she has twice been awarded the Korean National Composers Prize, and in the west she has been commissioned by the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations among many others. Her music has been played worldwide by ensembles as varied as the Barton Workshop, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Kronos Quartet, and the Korean Traditional Orchestra of the National Theatre. Portrait concerts, consisting solely of her music, have been presented in Amsterdam by the Barton Workshop (2006), in Seoul by JeonGaAkHoe (2009) and Buam Arts (2009), and at Texas A&M University (2007).
She is the author of the bilingual book Conversations with Kayageum Master Byung-ki Hwang (Pulbit Press, 2001) and the translator into Korean of Christian Wolff's article Experiments in Music around 1950 and Some Consequences and Causes Social-political and Musical (Soomoon-dang Press, 2011). Her music has been recorded on the Fontec (Japan), Top Arts (Korea), Seoul (Korea) and New World Records (US) labels and has been published in Korea and Australia. Since 2006 her music has been published exclusively by Lantro Music (Belgium).
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Guest Artists
 Stacey Pelinka (flute) is a member of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and the Worn Chamber Ensemble, and has also performed contemporary chamber music with the San Francisco Symphony’s Mavericks Festival, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Earplay, and the Silk Road Ensemble, among others. Stacey is principal flutist with San Francisco Opera's Merola Program productions, and plays second flute with the Santa Rosa Symphony and the Midsummer Mozart Festival. She is also a certified Feldenkrais Method practitioner and teaches workshops for musicians. She attended Cornell University and the San Francisco Conservatory, where she studied with Timothy Day.
 Shoko Hikage (koto) began playing Koto at age of 3. In 1988, she graduated from Takasaki College with a major in Koto music and she was accepted as a special research student in Sawai Sokyoku under Tadao Sawai and Kazue Sawai, and received her master's certificate. In 1992, she moved to Honolulu Hawaii to teach koto at the Sawai Koto Kai Hawaii. There she held her first American solo recital at the Honolulu Academy of Arts Theater as part of the New Music Across America Series. In 1997, she moved to San Francisco where she performs regularly as a solo artists as well as collaborating with other artists in the Bay Area and internationally.
 David Tanenbaum (guitar) has performed in over 40 countries, and he has been soloist with
prominent orchestras around the world including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San
Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra and London Sinfonietta with such eminent
conductors as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Kent Nagano. He has been featured
at many leading international festivals, including those of Vienna, Frankfurt, Barcelona
and Bath as well as numerous guitar festivals.
While David Tanenbaum’s repertoire encompasses a wide diversity of musical styles, he
is recognized as one of the most eloquent proponents of contemporary guitar repertoire.
Among the many works composed for him are Hans Werner Henze's guitar concerto: An
Eine Äolsharfe, which he performed throughout Europe and recorded with the composer conducting; four works by Pulitzer Prize-winner Aaron Jay Kernis as well as works by Terry Riley, Lou Harrison and Roberto Sierra. He has toured extensively
with Steve Reich and Musicians and performed in Japan in 1991 at the invitation of Toru
Takemitsu. He has had a long association with the Ensemble Modern and is a member of
the Pacific Guitar Ensemble and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. As a chamber musician he has collaborated, among others, with the Kronos, Shanghai, Alexander, New Zealand String Quartets, Cuarteto LatinoAmericano and guitarist Manuel Barrueco.
David Tanenbaum can be heard more than thirty recordings on EMI, New Albion, Naxos and other labels
His Nonesuch recording of John Adam's Naive and Sentimental
Music with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic was nominated for a
2002 Grammy as “Best New Composition.” Mr. Tanenbaum is Chair of the Guitar Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of
Music. For more information please visit www.davidtanenbaum.com.
 Icelandic violinist Hrabba Atladottir studied in Berlin, Germany with professor Axel Gerhardt and in Klagenfurt, Austria with professor Helfried Fister. After finishing her studies, Hrabba worked as a freelancing violinist in Berlin for five years, regularly playing with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Deutsche Oper, and Deutsche Symphonieorchester. Hrabba also participated in a world tour with the Icelandic pop artist Björk, and a Germany tour with violinist Nigel Kennedy.
In 2004, Hrabba moved to New York, and continued to freelance, playing on a regular basis with the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Orchestra of St. Luke's and New Jersey Symphony Orchestra among other orchestras.
Hrabba also plays a lot of new music, most recently with the Either/Or ensemble in New York in connection with their Helmut Lachenmann festival.
Since August 2008, Hrabba is based in Berkeley, California, where she has been performing with various ensembles, such as the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, The Empyrean Ensemble and the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players to name a few.
 Joe Edelberg (violin) has performed for many years with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, and the American
Bach Soloists. Concertmaster of the Santa Rosa Symphony, he has appeared as guest leader with many Bay Area groups, including the symphonies of Berkeley and Marin, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Magnificat Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, the San Francisco Opera Merola Grand Finals Orchestra, and the California Symphony. Farther afield, he has appeared at the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming, as concertmaster at the festival orchestras of Mendocino and San Louis Obispo, and as guest principal second violin of the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra.
Edelberg has made solo appearances with the symphonies of Oakland and
Berkeley, as well as with the Santa Rosa Symphony. He is a graduate of
Amherst College in his native Massachusetts, and has studied with Phillip
Naegele, Felix Galimir and John Baron.
 Dan Reiter (cello) is principal cellist with the Oakland East Bay Symphony (OEBS), Festival Opera Orchestra, Diablo Ballet Orchestra and Fremont Symphony. His solo work has included Leonard Bernstein's Three Meditations (OEBS, 2000) and Robert Schumann's Cello Concerto (Fremont Symphony, 2002). Dan is also a former Earplay member (1989-90).
As a composer, Dan has written varied chamber works. In 1999 he won an Izzy Award for is composition Raga Bach B Minor featuring dancer Robert Moses. He has had the privilege of working with India's master musician Ali Akbar Khan and has recorded two CDs (Garden of Dreams and Legacy) with Khansahib. In addition, Dan produced Cello and Harp, a CD of his own compositions for cello and harp with his wife, Natalie Cox.
 Leighton Fong (cello) is a longtime member of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and serves as Principal Cello with the California Symphony. He joined the San Francisco Contemporary Players in 2006. He plays regularly with the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players and the Empyrean Ensemble. Mr. Fong has taught at University of California, Berkeley since 1997. He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory, the New England Conservatory, the Bern Conservatory in Switzerland, and the Royal Danish Conservatory in Copenhagen, Denmark.
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