SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Mark Alburger, Music Director
presents
Bring 'Em Back Alive!
8pm, Saturday, May 28, 2022
Lakeside Presbyterian Church
San Francisco, CA
Our 20th-Anniversary Celebration
and Return to Live Performances!
Hussein Al-Nasrawi (b. 1991)
A Day at the California Academy of Sciences (2022)
Lisa Scola Prosek (b. 1958)
The Bells of Santo Stefano (2022)
Soave Luna
Stardust (b. 1962)
Wiggle (2022)
Cold
Pastorale
Calliope
Nursery Fanfare
Wiggle Bit
You Can Do Whatever You Want...
Pastorale Encore
Finale
John Beeman (b. 1954)
Rogue River Canyon (1995)
III. Day's End to Canyon Night
IV. Deep Canyon
Mark Alburger (b. 1957)
Three George Crumb Tropes, Op. 392 (2022), from
The Decameron: Fifth Day
Novel III. Pietro Boccamazza runs away with Agnolella,
and encounters a gang of robbers...
Novel VII. Pietro Teodoro, being enamoured of Violante,
daughter of Messer Amerigo, his lord, gets her with child, and is sentenced to the gallows...
Novel VIII. Nastagio degli Onesti, loving a damsel of the Traversari family,
by lavish expenditure gains not her love...
Michael Cooke (b. 1970)
Symphony No. 4 ("Deconstructing Beethoven") (2019)
I. Allegretto
HUSSEIN AL-NASRAWI is an accomplished pianist who graduated from San Francisco State University (B.M., 2018, and M.M., 2020), and was born to Iraqi parents. His passion for music is showcased through improvisation, by playing pieces by various composers, and by composing pieces representing people and places.
A DAY AT THE CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES is about the California Academy of Sciences, narrates parts of the academy (The Kimball Natural History Museum, the Rainforest, the Aquarium, and the Planetarium), and was composed for string quartet (Violin I, Violin II, Viola, and Cello) and piano.
LISA SCOLA PROSEK is published by Theodore Front. Her operas can be found in the permanent collections of the San Francisco, University of California, and Stanford libraries. Winner of the NY Center for Contemporary Opera award for her opera The Lariat, she is also a recipient of the SF Arts Commission ward, the NEA, the California Arts Council, and many other awards for her operas and choral music. Lisa is a graduate of Princeton University where she studied with Milton Babbitt, and privately with Lukas Foss and Gaetano Luporini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Scola_Prosek
Soave Luna is an excerpt of THE BELLS OF SANTO STEFANO, which is part of a longer madrigal collection. The text, by the composer, begins with the image of the bells of Santo Stefano, which ring in the quiet afternoon. The church bell has fallen in love with a beautiful cloud floating towards the western horizon.
Nuvoletta,
rosea e chiara Nella quiete pomeridiana
Per te suona la campana.
STARDUST is an animist radical faerie composer living in the somewhat embattled and mythical sanctuary of San Francisco. Since 2014, Stardust's SFCCO offerings have included A la recherche des danses perdues, Home, Railway Sonata, and a theatre triptych of True of Voice Overture, True of Voice Entr'acte, and True of Voice Finale. Stardust also playwrights, most recently creating Lucia, a play about a lesbian anarchist revolutionary organizer of a group called "Mujeres Libres" ("Free Women") during the Spanish Civil War and Social Revolution. Other works include chamber music and symphonic music prepared for encouraging musician friends at events such as the Humboldt and Calcap 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.
WIGGLE is an extensive exploration of the C Major triad with dalliances among rewarmed reverberations of Purcell's The Cold Song, a recurring pastoral horn, a circus calliope, and fanfare-introduced nursery rhyme fantasies, all concocted by a composer in love. Deftly and/or desperately surfing subconsciousness to lucidity, this love performs for the audience of displaced, degendered, and chrono-divergent lovers: awkward circus mechanics, the "wiggle", at once symbol and actuality of a bodily tic -- that which in the other cannot change -- and of radical acceptance, evolving in a way -- that perhaps only music could navigate -- into the freedom of You Can Do Whatever You Want and the simultaneously obsessive ostinato control of "(As Long As You Do Exactly What I Want You to Do)". In the end, love exhausts infatuations seeking authenticity and finding -- moment by moment, for self and other, resolved in the bond -- authentic care.
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.
Two movements from Beeman’s 1995 ROGUE RIVER CANYON, a five-movement suite for chamber orchestra, will be premiered. The first is Day’s End to Canyon Night which is followed by Box Canyon. The movements are very programatic. Moving water is suggested by shimmering percussion, swelling woodwind lines, and surging strings. Open harmonies portray the temperate forest and its inhabitants. Bird calls are heard as fluttering woodwinds and violin trills. Hoots sound in English horn and a lumbering bear are suggested by thumping percussion and strings. The overall effect creates an impression of the rich diversity of nature found in the beautiful canyon.
MARK ALBURGER is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of SF Composers Chamber Orchestra, SF Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions, and The Opus Project; Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music; Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College; and Musicologist for Grove Online and Grove Dictionary of American Music. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti (Swarthmore College, B.A.); Jules Langert (Dominican University, M.A.); Christopher Yavelow (Claremont University, Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 399 major works, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is available from New Music. YouTube/DrMarkAlburger, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Alburger, imslp.org/wiki/Category:Alburger,_Mark, markalburger.blogspot.com, markalburgerworks.blogspot.com.
Alburger writes "In memoriam George Crumb (October 24, 1929, Charleston, WV - February 6, 2022, Media, PA), who I have known since the 1970's when playing oboe in Delaware County Youth Orchestra, directly adjacent to his assisting as last-chair violist. THREE GEORGE CRUMB TROPES, Op. 392, drawn from The Decameron: Fifth Day, Op. 247 (2015), utilize analogues of Crumb's works. The rather lengthy titles for the Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) Novels conclude as follows:
III. ...the girl takes refuge in a wood, and is guided to a castle. Pietro is taken, but escapes out of the hands of the robbers, and after some adventures arrives at the castle where Agnolella is, marries her, and returns with her to Rome.
VII. ...but while he is being scourged thither, he is recognized by his father, and being set at large, takes Violante to wife.
VIII. ...At the instance of his kinsfolk he hies him[self] to Chiassi, where he sees a [ghost] knight hunt a [phantom] damsel and slay her and cause her to be devoured by [apparitions of] two dogs. He bids his kinsfolk and the lady that he loves to breakfast. During the meal the said damsel is [again] torn in pieces [now] before the eyes of the lady, who, fearing a like fate, takes Nastagio to husband."
The multi-instrumentalist MICHAEL COOKE is a composer of jazz and classical music. This two-time Emmy, ASCAPLUS Award, and Louis Armstrong Jazz Award winner plays a variety of instruments: you can hear him on soprano, alto, and tenor saxophones, flute, soprano and bass clarinets, bassoon and percussion. A cum laude graduate with a music degree from the University of North Texas, he had many different areas of study: jazz, ethnomusicology, music history, theory, and, of course, composition. In 1991 Michael began his professional orchestral career, performing in many North Texas area symphonies. Michael has played in Europe, Mexico, and all over the United States. Cimarron Music Press began publishing many of Michael's compositions in 1994. After relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, he has been exploring new paths in improvised and composed music, mixing a variety of styles and techniques that draw upon the creative energy of a multicultural experience, both in and out of America. In 1999, Michael started a jazz label called Black Hat Records (blackhatrecords.com) and is currently on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and the San Mateo County Astronomical Society. The San Francisco Beacon describes Michael's music as "flowing out color and tone with a feeling I haven't heard in quite a while. Michael plays with such dimension and flavor that it sets (his) sound apart from the rest." Uncompromising, fiery, complex, passionate, and cathartic is how the All Music Guide labeled Michael's playing on Searching by Cooke Quartet, Statements by Michael Cooke and The Is by CKW Trio. His release, An Indefinite Suspension of The Possible, is an unusual mixture of woodwinds, trombone, cello, koto and percussion, creating a distinct synergy in improvised music that has previously been untapped.
Cooke writes "SYMPHONY NO. 4 ('DECONSTRUCTING BEETHOVEN') poses the question, what if Beethoven traveled in time to now and absorbed many of the modern music advancements over the last 200+ years? The second movement is based on Beethoven's Symphony No. 7: II. Allegretto, which is quite a popular one. As a bassoonist, it is definitely my favorite to play and, in my section, the melody assumes the character of an anguished lament. Then it makes use of some techniques that the first movement explores, conflicting rhythms that clash painfully with each other. For me, it just seemed like a natural fit for my symphony. So I planned to deconstruct it by pairing down the melody to just the essentials -- give it an aleatoric feel and continue to explore some ideas I use thoughout the whole symphony. There is a rhythm permeating the Allegretto: a single long note followed by two short notes. While this appears from time to time in mine, I mostly switched to a heartbeat rhythm, which is heard in the timpani and bass drum right after the first chord. The five-note rhythm in the first movement is inverted and slowed down. Here it creates a subtle unbalanced rhythmic feel, as 3 against 2. Time is also manipulated, in sections where instruments play mostly the same motive but not at the same time. In some sections, whole-tone or octatonic scales are used, which creates a transformed sense of harmony. In other places, chords have 'extra' tones added, making a more contemporary and richer sound. Beethoven kindly provided me a fugue section, which helps to link this movement with the 4th, and some figures of the 2nd moment reappear in the 3rd."
SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Mark Alburger Music Director and Conductor
Erling Wold Associate Music Director
Martha Stoddard Associate Conductor
Flute / Piccolo
Bruce Salvisberg
Martha Stoddard
Oboe / English Horn
Stardust
Clarinet / Bass Clarinet
Tom Berkelman
Bassoon
Michael Cooke
Kat Walsh
Horn
Bob Satterford
Soprano
Shauna Fallihee
Lisa Scola Prosek
Ukulele
Bruce Salvisberg
Piano
Hussein Al-Naswari
Lisa Scola Prosek
Percussion
Hussein Al-Nasrawi
Victor Flaviani
Lisa Scola Prosek
Violin I
Kristen Kline
Violin II
Kat Walsh
Viola
Harry Bernstein
Kat Walsh
Cello
Doug Machiz
Bass
John Beeman
***
Great performances, an effective rehearsal schedule, and nice new venue --
all turns out well
on a day
that begins
with
errands about town,
including
printing
up
the
program,
then
heading
southwest
on
I-80
with
Harriet,
over
the
Sulfur Springs
Mountains,
across
Napa River
Marsh to
Sonoma and
Marin via 37,
then
south
on
101
into
the
headlands
beyond
the
Golden Gate,
and
San Francisco
along
Lincoln,
Legion of Honor,
Seal
Rocks,
and
Pt.
Lobos,
on the
86th day of summer,
high back down 3 to 81 (ABA of 81-94-81 last 3 days)
Fairfield, 75
Petaluma, 67
San Rafael, 68
San Francisco, 64
The SF weather rendering a bit irrelevant the confirmation anniversary (585 BC) of the first successful prediction of a solar eclipse, by Thales (624-545 BC).
In other earthshaking news,
edit pages 25-26 of
Viola Concerto ("Felicitations"), Op. 119 (2004)
I. Allegro moderato
create a cover and
complete works page for
Harp Concerto ("Ballerina"), Op. 123 (2004)
continue edition (pg 5) re
Jeremiah (Lamentations), Op. 278 (2018)
VIII. Bones / Balm
and letter-up more pseudo-incidents of
Book of Dreams, 2022, Op. 376 (2022)
May 27-28
3am Multiple Metal Masks On -- How Are You Going to Deal with Them? --
He Just Easily Takes Them All Off at Once...
4am Trying to Get to Right of Incoming Bus, Instead, at Last Minute, Blocked,
Have to Stay on Left Side; There Is Now a Line of Cars Extending Behind the Vehicle for
Miles, in Open Rolling Countryside...