Today we offer music of three American composers of our time. Each of them has written works in many genres, putting his own individual stamp on music which finds its roots in highly varied musical forms, popular as well as classical. Each of these men has received many commissions for works in vastly contrasting forms, and each is a noted performer and teacher.Eric Ewazen (b. 1954) became a faculty member of the Juilliard School of Music in 1980, and has lectured for the New York Philharmonic’s Musical Encounters Series. His works have been performed by numerous ensembles and orchestras in the U.S. and overseas, and at many festivals.
Frost Fire was commissioned by the American Brass Quintet for its 40th Anniversary season and has become a staple of the brass quintet literature. One review of the work praises its “Brilliantly idiomatic part writing, not too distant from Bernstein and Copland, tinted with passagework that recalls the bell-like sonorities beloved of Gabrieli and Monteverdi.” {16th-17th Century composers}
Stefan Freund (b. 1974) is Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Missouri School of Music, ‘cellist of the new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Columbia Civic Orchestra. A recent work of his is Paper Trails, a dramatic piece about a Florida town whose mayor wrote a decree banishing Satan (in 2001). The score draws on rock, jazz, and gospel music.
Metal was composed in 2000 for the Prism Brass Quintet. The composer’s own notes tell how the titles of the work as a whole and of its three movements reflect the music. “Metal refers obviously to the material of the instruments, but also to the pop-rock influence that pervades the work. Forged uses a repeating rhythmic mantra to steadily hammer forward. Molten flows along like liquid, with voices that blend together in ambiguous meters. Shine provides a bright finish, presenting a mixed-meter pop tune that gradually evolves.”
Frank Proto (b. 1941) earned his living as a free-lance bassist in his early 20’s, performing in symphony orchestras, Broadway show bands, and jazz clubs. Joining the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s bass section in 1966, he began to bloom as a composer and became the orchestra’s composer-in-residence in 1972, remaining in that post until 1997. He has written music for forces as large as symphony orchestras and as small as jazz rhythm sections, and he believes strongly in maintaining the connection between composing and performing. Proto’s Casey at the Bat, composed for the Cincinnati Pops, has received well over 500 performances, and his Carmen Fantasy, written for trumpeter Doc Severinsen, has been played more than 400 times.
Fulcrum Point’s Artistic Director, Stephen Burns, tells us Mr. Proto’s Quintet for Brass 77-01 (or Proto5) had its genesis some thirty years ago, when the Queen City Brass requested a work with the drive and feel of the times, utilizing a deft blend of classical and jazz/rock styles. The first movement languished in the archives until Spring of 2000, when it was recorded. The second and third movements were created for Fulcrum Point at the beginning of 2001 at the request of Mr. Burns. The music holds classical traditions as well as the influence of Tiajuana Brass and big band. The brooding, bluesey second movement segues directly into a hard-bopping finale that expresses the darker perspective of a more mature musician.
Today’s performers are a brass quintet drawn from the ranks of one of Chicago’s most adventurous music ensembles, Fulcrum Point New Music, a nine-year-old group, currently with a roster of eighteen players of the gamut of musical instruments. The group’s stated mission is to present multi-disciplinary performances and educational programs which explore the marriage of classical and popular cultures. Their concerts are an effort to champion new art music and highlight contemporary composers by placing the music in more familiar contexts and attracting a diverse audience to new art music, and every performance begins with commentaries which draw the audience in.
Fulcrum Point is currently in the midst of a five-year concert series inspired by water, earth, wind, and fire. Dance, literature, and the visual arts are incorporated, as are an almost dizzying variety of world musics, folk, rock, jazz and blues, as well as Buddhist, Christian, Hebrew, and Islamic traditions. Next year the series will conclude by celebrating each element with a world première.
More information about Fulcrum Point, its history, aims, and activities, can be found on its website.
You may remember the word “fulcrum” (“the support, or point of rest, on which a lever turns in moving a body”) from late grammar school. One literal definition of the term “fulcrum point” is: “The point on a truck between which balances the weight of the truck and the weight of the load being carried.”
How are you on the subject of contemporary music? You might be interested in the following comment from Nicolas Slonimsky (1894-1995), one of the 20th Century’s greatest writers on music, and a man of great wit and perception. In his Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953), he wrote: “It takes approximately twenty years to make an artistic curiosity out of a modernistic monstrosity, and another twenty years to elevate it to a masterpiece.”
Then there‘s composer Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) who – apparently tired of people disparaging contemporary music (his, especially, one supposes) – said, “The public doesn’t want new music; the main thing that it demands of a composer is that he be dead.”
…back to program notes.
