46 2014 Program Notes, Book 10
Friday, August 15 and Saturday, August 16, 2014
carlos kalmar’s
biography can be found on page 16.
Christopher Bell’s
biography can be found on page 18.
William Bolcom’s
biography can be found on page 34.
Tromba lontana
(“
Distant Trumpet
”)
(1986)
John Adams (born in 1947)
Adams’
Tromba lontana
is scored for twopiccolos, two flutes, two
oboes, two clarinets, four horns, percussion, harp, piano, strings
and two solo trumpets. The performance time is 4 minutes. The
Grant Park Orchestra has never performed this work.
John Adams is one of today’s most acclaimed composers,
and enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron
Copland’s career: in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for
On the Transmigration
of Souls
, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first
anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and was also recognized by New
York’s Lincoln Center with a two-month retrospective of his work titled “John Adams:
An American Master,” the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer
ever mounted at Lincoln Center; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal
of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions
to society” and became the first-ever recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Music
Composition, which included residencies and teaching at Northwestern University;
and he has been granted honorary doctorates from Juilliard and Cambridge,
Harvard, Yale and Northwestern universities, and the California Governor’s Award
for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.
Tromba lontana
(“
Distant Trumpet
”), composed in 1986 as one of twenty
fanfares commissioned by the Houston Symphony Orchestra in celebration of the
sesquicentennial of the declaration of independence of the Republic of Texas,
eschews the brilliance and festivity of most fanfares, favoring instead music that is
atmospheric rather than aggressive, “incredibly quiet, slowly moving, mysterious,
almost ethereal,” in the composer’s own description.
Millennium: CONCERTO-FANTASIA
William Bolcom (born in 1938)
Bolcom’s
Millennium: Concerto-Fantasia
is scored for piccolo,
two flutes, two oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, bass
clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp,
piano and strings. The performance time is 22 minutes. This is
the work’s world premiere.
Bolcom wrote of
Millennium
, composed for premiere during this week’s residency
with the Grant Park Music Festival, “In 2000 a fascinating Cambridge University
conference on all aspects of time discussed among other things the history of century-
marking, the presence of the number 60 in minutes and seconds (which comes from
the Babylonians), the ancient Roman priestly use of moon phases and star positions
to determine planting times for farmers (who ignored the priests totally), and why
the millennium year and the century year are not the same (the Venerable Bede is
somehow to blame). I was invited to give a paper on the difference between real
time and musical time, real time being calibrated by the steady beat of the cesium
atom used in Greenwich time and musical time guided by how music goes — fast or
slow, excited or calm, formally loose or tight.
