American Composers Orchestra & Carnegie Hall Co-Present

The Natural Order

October 20, 2022 at 7:30pm

Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall

Featuring
AMERICAN COMPOSERS ORCHESTRA

Mei-Ann Chen, Conductor
Jeffrey Zeigler, cello
Attacca Quartet
Sandbox Percussion
Yvette Janine Jackson, electronics

MARK ADAMO: Last Year: Concerto for Cello and String Orchestra (New York Premiere, Commissioned by ACO, New Century Chamber Orchestra, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra and River Oaks Chamber Orchestra)

VIET CUONG: re(new)al for chamber orchestra and percussion quartet (New York Premiere)

INTI FIGGIS-VIZUETA: Seven Sides of Fire (World premiere, ACO commission)

YVETTE JANINE JACKSON: Hello, Tomorrow! (World premiere, ACO commission)

About the Program, Composers & Works

American composer-librettist Mark Adamo’s work has returned to the stage in force. Opera Holland Park gave the U. K. premiere of his first opera, Little Women, in July of 2022; Pittsburgh Festival Opera completed and introduced its filmed version his second opera, Lysistrata, that same month, which also saw the Tanglewood Institute’s premiere of the wind-orchestra version of the Overture to Lysistrata, arranged by Peter Martin. Up next is the New York premiere of Last Year, his concerto for cello and string orchestra which refracts Vivaldi’s Four Seasons through the prism of a changing climate; Mei-Ann Chen leads soloist Jeffrey Zeigler and the American Composers’ Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in October. Teatro Colón, in Buenos Aires, gives the Argentine premiere in Buenos Aires of Little Women in November; that same month, Boston Modern Orchestra Project gives the East Coast premiere of The Lord of Cries, the opera he co-created with composer John Corigliano for Santa Fe Opera in 2021. These performances will be recorded for the work’s premiere release on CD. The autumn of 2021 saw the first performances of Last Year in San Francisco and in Houston, followed, in December, by Chicago Opera Theater’s new production of Becoming Santa Claus, Adamo’s fourth opera, which was conducted by Lidiya Yankovskaya and directed by Kyle Lang. This followed the warmly received Dutch premiere by the Dutch National Opera Academy of Little Women, given in Amsterdam in January of 2020. Read More

Becoming Santa Claus was released on DVD/Blu-Ray in September 2017; it was commissioned and introduced by Dallas Opera in December 2015. The DVD release followed a new production in Boulder, Colorado, which Adamo directed, of a chamber version of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, his third full-length opera, which was commissioned and introduced by San Francisco Opera in June 2013 and which itself followed a busy season of opera and chamber premières. In May 2012, Fort Worth Opera opened its first production of Lysistrata; that September, the Constella Festival in Cincinnati opened their season with August Music, for flute duo and string quartet, commissioned by Sir James and Lady Jeanne Galway: in December, Sasha Cooke and the New York Festival of Song introduced The Racer’s Widow, a cycle of five American poems for mezzo-soprano, cello, and piano; and, in April 2013, baritone Thomas Hampson and the Jupiter String Quartet introduced Aristotle, after the poem by Billy Collins, in concerts at the Mondavi Center in Davis, California before continuing to Boston and New York under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Adamo first attracted national attention with his uniquely celebrated début opera, Little Women, after the Alcott novel. Introduced by Houston Grand Opera in 1998 and revived there in 2000, Little Women is one of the most frequently performed American operas of the last fifteen years, with more than 135 national and international engagements in cities ranging from New York to London, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Minneapolis, Toronto, Chicago, San Francisco, Adelaide, Perth, Mexico City, Brugges, Banff, Calgary, and Tokyo, where it served as the official U.S. cultural entrant to the 2005 World Expo. The Houston Grand Opera revival (2000) was telecast by PBS/WNET on Great Performances in 2001 and released on CD by Ondine that same year; in fall 2010, Naxos released this performance on DVD and on Blu-ray. (Little Women was the first American opera recorded in high-definition television.) Comparable enthusiasm greeted the début of the larger-scaled Lysistrata, Adamo’s second opera, adapted from Aristophanes’ comedy but also including elements from Sophocles’ Antigone. Lysistrata was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera for its 50th anniversary and introduced in March 2005: its New York City Opera debut in March 2006 led to concert performances by Washington National Opera (May 2006) and Music at the Modern by the Van Cliburn Foundation (May 2007) before the new staging of the work at Fort Worth Opera in spring 2012, which was included on the best-of-2012 lists of both D Magazine and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

While Adamo’s principal work continues to be for the opera house, over the past five years he has ventured not only into chamber music but also into symphonic and choral composition. In addition to Last Year, Adamo’s first concerto, Four Angels, for harp and orchestra, was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and debuted in June 2007: the Utah Symphony, led by their Music Director Emeritus, Keith Lockhart, presented Four Angels in January 2011. In May 2007, Washington’s Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, for which Adamo served as its first composer-in-residence, performed the revised version of Adamo’s Late Victorians, a cantata for singing voice, speaking voice, and orchestra: Naxos released Late Victorians in 2009 on Eclipse’s all-Adamo CD, which also included Alcott Music, from Little Women, for strings, harp, celesta, and percussion; “Regina Coeli,” an arrangement of the slow movement of Four Angels for harp and strings alone; and the Overture to Lysistrata for medium orchestra. In April of 2010, Harold Rosenbaum’s New York Virtuoso Singers paired six of Adamo’s newly published choral scores with the complete chamber-choral work of John Corigliano. This concert featured the New York premières of Cantate Domino (after Psalm 91), Pied Beauty and God’s Grandeur (Gerard Manley Hopkins; commissioned by the Gregg Smith Singers), Matewan Music (Appalachian folk-tune variations), Supreme Virtue (Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao te Ching), and The Poet Speaks of Praising (Rilke: commissioned and introduced by Chanticleer).

Composer-in-residence at New York City Opera from 2001 through 2006, where he led the VOX: Showcasing American Composers program, Adamo also served as Master Artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts in May 2003. Since 2007 he has served as the principal teacher of American Lyric Theatre’s Composer-Librettist Development Program in New York, in which he coaches teams of composers and librettists in developing their work for the stage.

Adamo began his education in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where, as a freshman in the Dramatic Writing Program, he received the Paulette Goddard Remarque Scholarship for outstanding undergraduate achievement in playwriting. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Music Degree cum laude in composition in 1990 from the Catholic University of America. He and his spouse, the composer John Corigliano, divide their time between Manhattan and Kent Cliffs, New York. His music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer, Inc. More at www.markadamo.com

In the Composer’s Own Words

In 2018, for reasons that don’t really matter now, I’d listened—really listened—to a new-to-me recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. And I marvelled: not only at the score’s vigor and clarity, but at its innocence, too—as it portrayed each season offering its own delights and terrors while still yielding, safely, to the next. The recording finished: I turned to the news, and learned that—due to the latest in our series of once-in-a-lifetime-except-now-every-year storms—a hurricane had left the city of Houston nearly drowned. Read More

Vivaldi couldn’t write those scores today, I thought. But—if he were alive now, and knew what we know—what would he write?

Last Year is my answer. While Four Seasons is a cycle of four concerti for violin and strings, mine is a single concerto in four movements (the last three played without pause) for the richer-voiced cello; I also add to the string ensemble a choir of piano,

harp, timpani, and ringing percussion. A fanfare that shifts, uneasily, between the major and minor modes precedes I: Autumn: Dismissing Eunice. The title remembers Eunice Foote, the American scientist who was the first scientist— in 1856!—to describe and theorize what we now call the greenhouse effect. This music weaves a single melodic thread from Vivaldi’s Autumn concerto into a polymetric scherzo of nervous and glittering character; it’s interrupted, twice, by a tolling procession of chords in the percussion choir—too slow and separated in register, just now, to comprise a recognizable theme. Ignoring those interruptions, the scherzo barrels headlong to an ambiguous conclusion.

In January of 1998, a once-in-a-lifetime ice storm struck North America, causing so much havoc that Canada had to deploy more military personnel than the country had sent during the entire Korean War to address the damage. Because the available images of that storm remain stunningly beautiful—the Canadian terrain seems rendered an eerily silent ice-sculpture of itself—one could forget that the area south of Montreal was without power for so many weeks that English media nicknamed it “The Triangle of Darkness.” Remembering this, my second movement, Winter: Le Triangle Noir introduces an original theme of hushed, awed character as more rumours of Vivaldi murmur in the background: when the percussion choir

interrupts again as it had before, its material accelerates and condenses until we can identify it as one of our oldest musical tropes of warning.

The text which gives that trope its name can be read in the title of the next movement. Two solo cadenzas—one stunned, one vehement—frame Spring: Zephaniah 1:14-15, in which the motto from the Vivaldi’s Spring alternately outruns itself at breakneck speed or slows to a crawl in the lowest registers of both cello and orchestra: spurred by the racing soloist, the ensemble attempts a final time to retrieve the feeling, the faith of that baroque theme. It cannot: and the orchestra refracts into, almost literally, a thundercloud of sound—a cluster which begins in noise, little by little acquires pitch, and just as gradually loses pitch, evanescing until only the soloist, serenely maintaining a low B-natural, can be heard.

Now begins, without pause, the finale: Summer: For Julia, born 2045, in which the cello, in a harmonic landscape emptied of everything but sustained bass tones and the cries of seagulls, attempts to speak a promise into the future. But—even as the orchestra takes up and develops, harmonically, that determined theme—the solo cello cannot help, for a moment, but lose itself in recrimination. Memories of chaos, and that opening premonition, return to haunt the final moments: but the cello maintains the last word.

It’s hard to claim that I enjoyed composing Last Year: to try to give voice to the fears and hopes we experience during this moment of crisis pushed me both emotionally and technically in ways I’ve never experienced before. But I was, and am, humbled to have been offered the privilege to attempt it. I thank, generally, the consortium of four ensembles—American Composers Orchestra in New York, New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco, River Oaks Chamber Orchestra on Houston, and Manitoba Chamber Orchestra—who committed to the work of a composer who is, after all, scarcely known for his work outside the opera house; and, specifically, the woman who has done as much as, if not more than, anyone else of her generation to support the institutions, composers, and performers who host and make and play the music that tries to sing the way we live now. This piece—but not only this piece—would not exist without her. With all warmth, gratitude, and admiration, I dedicate Last Year to Susan W. Rose.

Listen to Mark Adamo’s Last Year

Called “alluring” and “wildly inventive” by The New York Times, the music of American composer Viet Cuong has been performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Eighth Blackbird, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Atlanta Symphony, Sandbox Percussion, Albany Symphony, PRISM Quartet, and Dallas Winds, among many others. Viet’s music has been featured in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center, and his works for wind ensemble have amassed hundreds of performances worldwide. Passionate about bringing these different facets of the contemporary music community together, his upcoming projects include a concerto for Eighth Blackbird with the United States Navy Band. Viet also enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying. His recent works thus include a snare drum solo, percussion quartet concerto, and, most recently, a double oboe concerto. He is currently the California Symphony’s Young American Composer-in-Residence, and recently served as the Early Career Musician-in-Residence at the Dumbarton Oaks. Viet holds degrees from Princeton University (MFA/PhD), the Curtis Institute of Music (AD), and Peabody Conservatory (BM/MM).

In the Composer’s Own Words

Cooperation and synergy are also core themes of the piece, as I believe we all have to work together to move forward. All of the music played by the solo quartet is comprised of single musical ideas that are evenly distributed between the four soloists (for those interested, the fancy musical term for this is a hocket). The music would therefore be dysfunctional without the presence and dedication of all four members. For example, the quartet divvies up lighting- fast drum set beats in the second movement and later shares one glockenspiel in the last movement. But perhaps my favorite example of synergy in the piece is in the very opening, where the four soloists toast crystal glasses. We always toast glasses in the presence of others, and oftentimes to celebrate new beginnings. This is my simple way of celebrating everyone who is working together to create a cleaner, more efficient world.

Re(new)al is constructed of three continuous movements, each inspired by the power of hydro, wind, and solar energies. The hydro movement transforms tuned crystal glasses into ringing hand bells as the wind ensemble slowly submerges the soloists in their sound. The second movement turns each member of the quartet into a blade of a dizzying wind turbine, playing seemingly-impossible 90’s-inspired drum and bass patterns. The closing movement simulates a sunrise and evokes the brilliance of sunlight with metallic percussion instruments. This piece was originally written with a sinfonietta accompaniment, and in its original form was commissioned for the 2017 American Music Festival by David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire in partnership with GE Renewable Energy. This full orchestra version was commissioned in 2018 by the Albany Symphony and is dedicated to Sandbox Percussion.

I have tremendous respect for renewable energy initiatives and the commitment to creating a new, better reality for us all. Re(new)al is a percussion quartet concerto that is similarly devoted to finding unexpected ways to breathe new life into traditional ideas, and the solo quartet therefore performs on several “found” instruments, including crystal glasses and (reusable) compressed air cans. And while the piece also features more traditional instruments, such as snare drum and vibraphone, I looked for ways to either alter their sounds or find new ways to play them. For instance, a single snare drum is played by all four members of the quartet, and certain notes of the vibraphone are prepared with aluminum foil to recreate sounds found in electronic music. The entire piece was conceived in this way, and it was a blast to discover all of these unique sounds with the members of Sandbox Percussion.

Cooperation and synergy are also core themes of the piece, as I believe we all have to work together to move forward. All of the music played by the solo quartet is comprised of single musical ideas that are evenly distributed between the four soloists (for those interested, the fancy musical term for this is a hocket). The music would therefore be dysfunctional without the presence and dedication of all four members. For example, the quartet divvies up lighting- fast drum set beats in the second movement and later shares one glockenspiel in the last movement. But perhaps my favorite example of synergy in the piece is in the very opening, where the four soloists toast crystal glasses. We always toast glasses in the presence of others, and oftentimes to celebrate new beginnings. This is my simple way of celebrating everyone who is working together to create a cleaner, more efficient world.

Re(new)al is constructed of three continuous movements, each inspired by the power of hydro, wind, and solar energies. The hydro movement transforms tuned crystal glasses into ringing hand bells as the wind ensemble slowly submerges the soloists in their sound. The second movement turns each member of the quartet into a blade of a dizzying wind turbine, playing seemingly-impossible 90’s-inspired drum and bass patterns. The closing movement simulates a sunrise and evokes the brilliance of sunlight with metallic percussion instruments. This piece was originally written with a sinfonietta accompaniment, and in its original form was commissioned for the 2017 American Music Festival by David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire in partnership with GE Renewable Energy. This full orchestra version was commissioned in 2018 by the Albany Symphony and is dedicated to Sandbox Percussion.

Excerpt of Viet Cuong’s re(new)al

“[inti’s] music feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn” writes the Washington Post.

NYC-based composer inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993) writes magically real musics through the lens of personal identities, braiding a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools—in Chocolate City (DC)—with direct Andean & Irish heritage and a deep connection to the land. Her musical practice is physical and visceral, attempting to reconcile historical aesthetics and experimental practices with trans & indigenous futures. Read More

In the Composer’s Own Words

The increasing intensity of wildfires in the United States, alongside shifts in mainstream conversations regarding decoloniality, has made clear the need for the traditional Indigenous knowledge of fire ecology. Controlled burns were integral to Indigenous peoples as part of land stewardship and modification; fire was a source of regeneration and cultivation that cleared open areas for grazing/hunting, increased regrowth of foods and medicinals, and decreased the risk of large, uncontrolled fires drawing on built-up fuel. The genocide and displacement of American Indigenous peoples in the past 400 years disrupted the caretaking of the land and introduced the colonial practice of total fire suppression. There have been recent collaborations between government environmental agencies and tribes regarding new fire regimes, but there has yet to be any significant systemic change that would ensure continued access and stewardship by American Indigenous peoples. Read More

Recent Work

Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer of electroacoustic, chamber, and orchestral musics for concert, theatre, and installation. Building on her experience as a theatrical sound designer, she blends various forms into her own aesthetic of narrative soundscape composition, radio opera, and improvisation. Her works often draw from history to examine relevant social issues. Read More

In the Composer’s Own Words

Hello, Tomorrow!, for orchestra and electronics, takes its title from George Lefferts’ story that was adapted for the radio drama series Dimension X and X Minus One in the 1950s, and is a response to reading Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization. Both use science fiction to depict a future made unrecognizable by human (in)actions. This composition is a reflection on the actions that can be taken today to bring about positive change. Building on Yvette Janine Jackson’s body of electroacoustic radio operas, Hello, Tomorrow! invites the listener to draw upon personal experiences and knowledge to construct the narrative.

Yvette’s Featured Work for EarShot in 2016

About Featured Artists

Praised for her dynamic, passionate conducting style, Taiwanese American conductor Mei-Ann Chen is acclaimed for infusing orchestras with energy, enthusiasm and high-level music-making, galvanizing audiences and communities alike. Music Director of the MacArthur Award-winning Chicago Sinfonietta since 2011, Ms. Chen has been named Chief Conductor of Austria’s Recreation Grosses Orchester Graz at Styriarte beginning fall 2021 after two seasons as the orchestra’s first-ever Principal Guest Conductor, making her the first female Asian conductor to hold this position with an Austrian orchestra. Since September 2019, she also serves as the first-ever Artistic Partner of Houston’s ROCO (River Oaks Chamber Orchestra). Ms. Chen also has served as Artistic Director & Conductor for the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra Summer Festival since 2016. Highly regarded as a compelling communicator and an innovative leader both on and off the podium, and a sought-after guest conductor, she has appeared with distinguished orchestras throughout the Americas, Europe, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Scandinavia, and continues to expand her relationships with orchestras worldwide (over 110 orchestras to date).Honors include being named one of the 2015 Top 30 Influencers by Musical America; the 2012 Helen M. Thompson Award from the League of American Orchestras; Winner, the 2007 Taki Concordia Fellowship founded by Marin Alsop; and 2005 First Prize Winner of the Malko Competition (she remains as the only woman in the competition history since 1965 to have won First Prize), and ASCAP awards for innovative programming. [/read]

Jeffrey Zeigler is one of the most innovative and versatile cellists of our time. He has been described as “fiery”, and a player who performs “with unforced simplicity and beauty of tone” by the New York Times. Acclaimed for his independent streak, Zeigler has commissioned dozens of works, and is admired as a potent collaborator and unique improviser. As a member of the Kronos Quartet, he is the recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize, the Polar Music Prize, the President’s Merit Award from the National Academy of Recorded Arts (Grammy’s), the Chamber Music America National Service Award and The Asia Society’s Cultural Achievement Award.

This Fall, Zeigler will release his next album, Houses of Zodiac: Poems for Cello with music by Paola Prestini. It will be a multimedia experience that combines spoken word, movement, music, and imagery into a unified exploration of love, loss, trauma and healing. The project takes its title from the twelve houses of the zodiac as facets of the self, and draws inspiration from explorations of the subconscious including Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest and the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Natasha Trethewey. Filmed by Murat Eyüboglu at MASS MoCA and Studio Polygons in Tokyo, Japan, the digital experience will feature the performances and original choreography of New York City Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin and Butoh dancer Dai Matsuoka, a member of the acclaimed Butoh troupe Sankai Juku.

“Their playing is exuberant, funky and more exactingly nuanced.” (New York Times)

Grammy award-winning Attacca Quartet, as described by The Nation, “lives in the present aesthetically, without rejecting the virtues of the musical past”, and it is this dexterity to glide from the music of the 18^th through to the 21^st century repertoire that places them as one of the most versatile and outstanding ensembles of the moment – a quartet for modern times. Read More

Described as “exhilarating” by The New York Times, and “utterly mesmerizing” by The Guardian, GRAMMY®-nominated ensemble Sandbox Percussion has established themselves as a leading proponent of this generation of contemporary percussion chamber music. Brought together by their love of chamber music and the simple joy of playing together, Sandbox Percussion captivates audiences with performances that are both visually and aurally stunning. Through compelling collaborations with composers and performers, Jonathan Allen, Victor Caccese, Ian Rosenbaum, and Terry Sweeney seek to engage a wider audience for classical music. Read More

Sandbox Percussion’s 2021 album Seven Pillars was nominated for two GRAMMY® awards – Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and Best Contemporary Classical Composition. This evening-length work by Andy Akiho with stage direction and lighting design by Michael Joseph McQuilken is Sandbox’s largest commission to date. In addition to the album, Sandbox commissioned 11 films that accompany each movement of the work.

In addition to the world premiere of Seven Pillars at Emerald City Music in Seattle, the 2021/2022 season includes many highlights – Sandbox Percussion will perform concertos with the Albany Symphony and UMKC Conservatory Orchestra, travel to Northern Ireland, Lithuania and many cities across the United States, perform at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, and premiere new works by David Crowell, Molly Joyce, Loren Loiacono, Jessica Meyer, Tawnie Olson, and Tyshawn Sorey.

Sandbox Percussion has performed throughout the United States and made their United Kingdom debut in 2019 at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in Cardiff where they premiered a work by Benjamin Wallace for percussion quartet and fairground organ. In the 2019-20 season, Sandbox Percussion premiered Don’t Look Down, a work by Christopher Cerrone with pianist Conor Hanick, at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts. They also presented the first-ever percussion quartet performance at Dumbarton Oaks, on a program that included world premieres by Andy Akiho and Viet Cuong. Sandbox Percussion has collaborated closely with composer John Luther Adams, presenting programs of his music at venues such as Storm King Art Center, Tippet Rise Art Center, Trinity Church Wall Street, Caramoor, and String Theory at the Hunter in Chattanooga. Sandbox has performed Viet Cuong’s concerto Re(new)al with the Albany Symphony and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, as well as premiered a wind ensemble version of the work with the Brooklyn Wind Symphony. Sandbox has collaborated with actor and writer Paul Lazar on a portrait concert of music by John Cage at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and gave three sold-out performances of Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians with Emerald City Music in Seattle.

In addition to maintaining a busy concert schedule, Sandbox was appointed ensemble-in-residence and percussion faculty at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2021, where they have created a curriculum with entrepreneurship and chamber music at its core. Sandbox has led masterclasses and coachings all around the United States, at institutions such as the Peabody Conservatory, Curtis Institute, the Juilliard School, the University of Southern California, and Cornell University. In 2016, Sandbox Percussion founded the annual NYU Sandbox Percussion Seminar – a week-long seminar that invites percussion students from across the globe to rehearse and perform some of today’s leading percussion chamber music repertoire at the iconic Brooklyn venue National Sawdust.

In 2020, Sandbox Percussion released their debut album And That One Too on Coviello Classics. The album features works by longtime collaborators Andy Akiho, David Crowell, Amy Beth Kirsten, and Thomas Kotcheff.

Sandbox Percussion endorses Pearl/Adams musical instruments, Zildjian cymbals, Vic Firth sticks and mallets, Remo drumheads, and Black Swamp accessories.

American Composers Orchestra & Carnegie Hall Co-Present

The Natural Order

October 20, 2022 at 7:30pm

About the Program, Composers & Works

About Featured Artists

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