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On Friday, May 9, at 8:00 p.m., the Williams College Symphonic Winds, under the direction of Steven Dennis Bodner, will present its final concert of the academic year, entitled “Excavations of Nostalgia and Myth: reclaiming the past, reexamining the present, re-imagining the future.” While in our post-modern (or post-postmodern) era it is virtually impossible to write a musical work that is not situated in some relationship with past (musical or extra-musical) traditions, each of the four works presented tonight takes this relationship as the central theme. With evocations including myths, mariachi bands, Georgian singers, stride pianists, and singing shamans, tonight’s concert attempts to excavate past musical traditions in the hopes of offering new visions for the future.

Program (PDF)

The concert will feature the American premiere of Kyle Gann’s Sunken City (Concerto for Piano and Winds in Memoriam New Orleans) (2007), with Brian Simalchik ‘10 and Noah Lindquist ‘08 as soloists for a movement each. Composer Kyle Gann was new-music critic for the Village Voice from 1986 to 2005, and since 1997 he has taught music history and theory at Bard College. He is the author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (1995), American Music in the 20th Century (1997), and Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (2006). In 2003, the American Music Center awarded Gann its Letter of Distinction, along with Steve Reich, Wayne Shorter, and George Crumb. Gann often writes microtonal music, and he has described his style as largely post-minimalist. Inspired by Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke about the government’s reaction (or lack thereof) to the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina, Kyle Gann has tried to evoke two notions of New Orleans—one before the storm, and one after—in his Sunken City. As he has written:

The first movement is pure fun, the Mardi Gras New Orleans of my imagination, a stylized portrait of the energy level and harmonic language of the 1920s music of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbecke. Precedents to this kind of symphonic jazz exist, of course, in Copland, Gershwin, and Milhaud, that are bound to be evoked here, but I hoped that the deliberate naivete would all the better set up the second movement1s desolation… Premonitions of the tragedy cloud the coda, which ends in a hasty retreat. The much longer second movement is a kind of interrupted chaconne, based on its opening 17 chords (spelling out the repeated-note theme). Successive variations suggest stages of grief, outrage, nostalgia, and acceptance, but finally the piano drifts into Jelly Roll Morton’s “Dead Man Blues” (or rather, its chord changes, with some abstracted bits of the tune), which spreads into the orchestra. The last few minutes return to the chaconne chords, no longer in strict order… I had planned to suggest some sort of transcendental acceptance, but as a friend reminded me, there can be no acceptance of what happened in New Orleans; not the natural tragedy, which was so foreseeable (and actually didn’t happen, since Hurricane Katrina devolved into merely a level 3 storm before reaching the shore), but the unforgivable political tragedy: the levees never built to last in the first place, the uncaring abandonment of the population to heat, thirst, and death by drowning, the politicized gutting of government agencies meant to respond to disasters, the turning back at gunpoint of honest citizens trying to escape the city by walking over bridges. My friend was right, and the piece ends as the Katrina debacle itself has so far ended, in bitter inconclusiveness.

Sunken City was commissioned and premiered in October 2007 by Orkest de Volharding with pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge.

The concert will open with the recently-rediscovered original chamber version of Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá: Chant for the Killing of the Snake (1938). While the work is well-known in its version for large orchestra (no doubt in part to Leonard Bernstein’s 1960s recording of this brilliant showstopper), it was originally conceived for an intimate ensemble of only sixteen musicians. Based on the homonymous work of the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, Sensemaya not only captures the atmosphere and mood of the poem, but rather it follows the structure of the poem, at times mirroring the rhythms of certain words or phrases (e.g., the violin theme is a “setting” of the words “¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!”), while also relating the story of the ritualistic killing of a snake and the transference of the snake’s power into the people. While during his brief life, Revueltas (1899-1940) was overshadowed by his Mexican countryman Carlos Chavez, today he is regarded as one of the most significant modernist composers from the first half of the twentieth century for his unique ability to evoke and capture the spirit of indigenous musics without resorting to “normalizing” or trivializing the material.

Likewise, Georgian composer Giya Kancheli has further advanced Revueltas’s view of traditional musics. He has professed to often being overcome by a bitter sense of nostalgia, a longing for the past. When he was living in Berlin, he was asked by the organizers of the music festival in Witten to write a piece containing Georgian folk tunes; he declined, stating that he did not want to use folk music in his work. As he elaborated:

Georgian music is a unique phenomenon. I say this quite consciously, as I believe that it is music created by great people whose names we do not know. For me they remain the great and anonymous. What does “folk music” mean anyway? Has there ever been a “folk” that, one fine day, assembled in the village square and decided to write a “folk song”? I shouldn’t think so. I believe it was the product of a concrete human being with an extraordinary gift. I often imagine a Georgian three-part song being written something like this: one day Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart met and decided to sing a song for three voices. I understand this music as a form of composed music. And the more I admire the composers, the more clearly I understand that I have no right to interfere with what they created. I avoid using folkloric material in my works; my dream, on the other hand, is to come closer to the spiritual sphere of sacred chant.

The Witten festival directors, however, insisted that Kancheli reconsider their offer, and so he agreed to write Magnum Ignotrum (1994), integrating authentic Georgian folk materialÑranging from the High Priest of the cathedral of Anchiskhati reading the Gospel on Christmas Eve, to an archival recording of a polyphonic Gurian song, to a performance of a beautiful male-choral piece Upalo Ghmerto sung by the Tustavi Choir. In the end, though, it is the stirring combination and provocative juxtaposition of the “folk” music with Kancheli’s score (for nine winds and bass) that creates the timeless (eternal) and haunting evocation of both times past and present.

The final work on the program is Michael Colgrass’s Winds of Nagual (1985), based on the writings of Carlos Castaneda about his 14-year apprenticeship with don Juan Matis, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer from Northwestern Mexico. Castaneda met don Juan while researching hallucinogenic plants for his master’s thesis in Anthropology at UCLA; however, Castaneda became Juan’s apprentice, training in techniques of pre-Colombian sorcery, the overall purpose of which was to find the creative selfÑwhat Juan calls the nagual. As Colgrass writes, “[Although] the score is laced with programmatic indications…, the listener need not have read Castaneda’s books to enjoy the work, and I don’t expect anyone to follow any exact scenario. My object is to capture the mood and atmosphere created by the books and to convey a feeling of the relationship that develops as a man of ancient wisdom tries to cultivate heart in an analytical young man of the technological age.” One of the techniques Juan utilizes to enable Carlos to alter his view of the world is to induce experiences of what Carlos labels “states of non-ordinary reality,” through the ingestion of peyote buttons or mushrooms. In Winds of Nagual, Colgrass vividly captures several of these hallucinogenic episodes. As Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe wrote after the work’s premiere, “Winds of Nagual is extraordinarily visual, story-telling music in a way that has gone wholly out of fashion since the great Strauss tone poems like Don Quixote… The music is full of the mystery and the matter-of-fact, it has mountains and rivers and bubbles in it, singing and dancing, meditation and the moon, all precisely, colorfully and imaginatively caught. There is even an audible philosophical point about coexistent worlds of spirit and body.” Just as Carlos was initially caught-up only on the superficial aspects of his experiences, trying to understand every nuance and detail of his hallucinations while missing the deeper message of his mentor don Juan, so does Winds of Nagual overwhelm with the dazzling and intricately-detailed surface of Colgrass’s compositional and orchestrational craft. This is music, though, of great depth and emotional potency which, despite its vastly different language, is not far removed from the Andriessen’s philosophical masterpiece, De Materie, performed by the Symphonic Winds this past February. Winds of Nagual won First Prize in the Barlow and Sudler International Wind Ensemble Competitions in 1985.

Michael Colgrass (b. 1932) was first drawn to music when he saw drummer Ray Bauduc in a movie playing Big Noise from Winnetka with the Bob Crosby Band. When he entered the University of Illinois as a percussion student of Paul Price, he had every intention of studying only jazz; in fact, he made his living as a jazz drummer, performing 5-6 nights a week. Eventually, his interests began to widen, encompassing composition studies with Darius Milhaud, Wallingford Riegger, and Lukas Foss. After graduation, he spent twenty-one months as timpanist in the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, Germany, before moving to New York City in l956, where he free-lanced as a percussionist with such diverse groups as the New York Philharmonic, Dizzy Gillespie’s band, the original West Side Story orchestra on Broadway, the Columbia Recording Orchestra’s Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky series, and numerous ballet, opera and jazz ensembles.

Colgrass has an uncanny ability to write accessible music that simultaneously challenges the intellect and stirs the emotions. His highly personal compositional technique draws on a diversity of styles, reflecting his widespread interests, and involves a free-flowing mixture of tonal and atonal harmonic language. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by such groups as the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, the Manhattan and Muir String Quartets, the Brighton Festival in England, and numerous other orchestras, wind ensembles, chamber groups, choral groups and soloists. Colgrass is the recipient of many grants and fellowships, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Déjà vu and an Emmy Award in 1982 for the Public Broadcasting System documentary “Soundings: The Music of Michael Colgrass.” Besides composing, Colgrass has for twenty-five years been giving workshops throughout North America in performance excellence, combining Grotowski physical training, mime, dance and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). He is the author of My Lessons with Kumi - How I Learned to Perform with Confidence in Life and Work.