January 7, 2008 Program Notes

by Paul Griffiths

This concert’s missing link is Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, which—among other things—created a new kind of implicit musical theater on a small scale, threw a bridge from high art to popular genres, and introduced what was to become a standard instrumental ensemble, comprising flute and clarinet with violin, cello, and piano, to which quintet many composers have added a percussionist. Donald Crockett’s piece, written in 1999 for the California EAR Unit, is a brilliant and fresh reconception of this “Pierrot Plus” grouping, which it treats as two treble-bass pairs (violin and cello, flute and bass clarinet) with piano and an array of unpitched percussion instruments, some of them standard, some not.

The piece starts out with whistling—the flute at the top of its range, harmonics on the strings, plucked sounds from within the piano—and such whistling recurs, along with the dark of moments when the work’s general rhythmic liveliness is held back. That liveliness is first manifested by the piano, in an idea that could easily have been created in homage to Conlon Nancarrow for its perkiness, oddity, and strict tempo—an idea developed and remembered in much that follows. A chain of episodes, gaining in intensity, weight, and drive, is completed about halfway through the thirteen-minute expanse by a return of the piano’s idea in its pristine form. There follows a “slow dance,” swinging between sultriness and innocence, and then, at the insistence of the piano again, a “fast dance,” with which the piece moves toward its conclusion and dissolve.


A “cantata” is, in etymology as in usage, a vocal piece; Knussen aptly appropriates the term for this instrumental composition, in which—to accompaniments, atmospheres, and prompts from string trio—an oboe sings. Within the context of tonight’s program, the work provides a lyrical interlude.

Knussen is among the most respected composers of his generation—if also among the most painstaking and self-critical, to the point where new works from him have become scarce. In his youth, though, things were different. He conducted the London Symphony in his First Symphony when he was fifteen, and within the next decade built up an impressive catalog. During this period, he was regularly at Tanglewood, beginning a long and passionate association with the United States, and it was at Tanglewood in 1975 that he began Cantata, completing the score back home in England two years later.

The piece is in ten linked episodes, and lasts as many minutes. Some of the episodes are very short—blocks or turnings in what might seem in retrospect to have been a continuous search for the true song, eventually discovered in the penultimate section. This song, marked “Very intense and inward, like a disembodied lullaby,” sets out from a high C sharp, the note that had been the destination of the first episode. Having found its song, the singer is finally at peace.


Born in the Italian city of Macerata, Carlo Boccadoro studied composition in Milan while also working with jazz artists. His music is exuberantly impure. “I don’t have a style,” he has said, “I have many styles, depending on the moment when I’m composing....I seek to reunite different kinds of music, to use all the languages that interest me at that moment, to find the common threads. Correspondingly, the music I like belongs to what I would have to call different genres, as it might be Stockhausen and African music.” His output consists mostly of instrumental music, but also includes operas, among them most recently one for young people based on Robinson Crusoe. He has also concerned himself with broadening the audience for new music through his work with the group Sentieri Selvaggi (Wild Paths), which he founded in 1997.

Of Bad Blood, he has said: “The title refers to a non-existent illness, invented by torturers disguised as scientists during atrocious experiments carried out on African American men, women, and children in a town in Alabama for over thirty years. The music does not describe the events, but serves to keep alive the memory and the anger, and most of all to affirm that these events were not invented by some imaginative writer, but represent a horrific reality, which, despite human ‘evolution’ over the centuries, remains unchanged and immutable.”

The piece plays for eight minutes; a recording is available on Sentieri Selvaggi’s album AC/DC (Cantaloupe CA 21030).


I. dead calm
II. they are far out
III. gooseberries, she said
IV. rattling on

Born in the small town of Dinuba, near Fresno, California, Earl Kim was the son of Korean immigrants, and had the luck to study with Schoenberg in Los Angeles and with Ernst Bloch and Roger Sessions at UCB. A man as modest as he was musical, he devoted himself for almost forty years to teaching, first at Princeton (1952-67), then at Harvard (1967-90). His compositions he left to make their own way, and this they go on doing. Several of them, beginning with Exercises en Route (1961-70), he based on texts by Samuel Beckett, a writer famously persnickety about the composers he allowed to set his words. In Kim, evidently, he recognized a companion. “I am reducing everything to its maximum,” Kim said of his creative ideals. Beckett could not but have concurred.

Spending a decade over a work that lasts under half an hour, Kim wrote the four parts in order, starting with dead calm, for soprano with three woodwinds, violin, cello, and two percussion players (1961-2), and continuing with they are far out (1967-8), without the woodwinds, followed by gooseberries, she said and rattling on, both using the full ensemble again. The slow, exacting pace of composition is written into the music. Having established a beach-head, with dead calm, Kim waited. He seems to have written nothing else. Five years of silence are subsumed at this point. Then he went on.

He found the texts in various of Beckett’s works. That of dead calm constitutes one of the “addenda” to the novel Watt (1945): passages that, printed at the end, are at once outside the book and within it. The next piece, they are far out, is verbally the most complex, with the soprano switching rapidly most of the time from point to point within the closing passage of Malone Dies (1951). Then Kim turned to Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), a cauterized one-man show in which the character is listening to—and commenting on—tapes of his younger selves, the passage gooseberries, she said coming from, indeed, the last tape. The final text is extracted from The Unnamable (1953), again ending with the final passage.

In Kim’s setting, the four narrators—Watt, Malone, Krapp, and the unnamed unnamable—are fused into one, a solo soprano, but, at the same time, that one is multiform: she flickers, in the brilliant ash-gray light of this music, between singing and speaking, as also between declaiming the text and possessing it, acting as narrator or protagonist.

As for the instrumental parts, they for much of the time are bound closely to the voice, following the soprano’s melodic contours and speech rhythms. Or is it rather that she is bound to them, forced by the music to voice these words? So close is Kim’s identification with Beckett that it could seem so, seem that these words come from the spirit within the music.

After Exercises en Route, Kim set other works by Beckett, including two plays: Eh, Joe (1974) and Footfalls (1981). He also composed a violin concerto for Itzhak Perlman, other champions of his work being Benita Valente (to be heard in a recording of Exercises on an all-Kim album, New World 80561) and Dawn Upshaw.


Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.