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AXIOM

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The Juilliard Schoolpresents

AXIOMJeffrey Milarsky, Conductor

Friday, February 2, 2018, 7:30Peter Jay Sharp Theater

HANS Schnee, Ten Canons for Nine Instruments (2006–08)ABRAHAMSEN Canon 1a(b. 1952) Ruhig aber beweglich

Canon 1b Fast immer zart und still

Canon 2 Lustig spielend, aber nicht zu lustig, immer ein bisschen melancholisch

Intermezzo 1

Canon 2b Lustig spielend, aber nicht zu lustig, immer ein bisschen melancholisch

Canon 3a Ser langsam, schleppend und mit Trübsinn (im Tempo des “Tai Chi”)

Canon 3b Ser langsam, schleppend und mit Trübsinn (im Tempo des “Tai Chi”)

Intermezzo 2

(Program continues)

Please make certain that all electronic devices are turned off during the performance. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not permitted in this auditorium.

Support for this performance is provided, in part, by the Muriel Gluck Production Fund.

Cover photo by Hiroyuki Ito

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Canon 4a (minore) (Homage à WAM) Stürmich, unruhig und nervös

Canon 4b (maggiore) Ser stürmich, unruhig und nervös

Intermezzo 3

Canon 5a (rectus) Einfach und kindlich

Canon 5b (inversus) Einfach und kindlich

Leerone Hakami, ViolinSofia Basile, ViolaYu Yu Liu, CelloLorenzo Morrocchi, FlutePablo O’Connell, OboeSunho Song, ClarinetTyler Cunningham, PercussionChristopher Staknys, Piano 1Irfan Tengku, Piano 2

Performed without intermissionPerformance time: approximately one hour

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About Schnee By Matthew Mendez

Though he began his musical career in the late 1960s, Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen has been one of the unlikely artistic success stories of recent years. Initially recognized at home as a leading representative of the Ny Enkelhed (New Simplicity) movement, whose objectivist, stripped-down sensibilities were a sort of analog to the ethos of early American minimalism, Abrahamsen began to secure an international reputation soon after that, as a catholic-minded figure aiming to bridge the cool, impartial frame of modernist construction and the richly associative aesthetic legacy of romanticism. Yet this early precocity came at a devastating price: by the end of the 1980s, Abrahamsen found himself mired in the first throes of a creative block (“I felt like a singer who had lost his voice”) that would last more or less unabated until 1998. At least in part, it was a redoubled embrace of the practice of recomposition (which Abrahamsen had already begun to investigate prior to the hiatus of the 1990s) that finally gave him the conviction to let go and break the silence. That is to say, Abrahamsen’s recourse to material borrowed from his previous works—though always overwritten, subtracted from, or otherwise radically altered, so that it never sounds like mere recycling—was a practical strategy for ensuring that he never again found himself paralyzed by ta blank sheet of paper. The past 20 years have thus seen the compositional faucet very much turned back on, and indeed, Abrahamsen’s 2013 voice-and-orchestra piece let me tell you has been one of the most celebrated of recent scores on the international scene.

Wordsmith and critic Paul Griffiths calls Schnee “one of the first classics of 21st-century music.” It put the capstone on the composer's return to compositional fluency. Schnee was initially unveiled in 2006 as what became Canon 1a and 1b only. Right off the bat, though, Abrahamsen sensed that the music warranted inclusion in a broader, more multilayered formal scheme, and he proceeded to compose four more pairs of canons, in which each pair was to be perceived as more fleeting than the last, so that “time runs out, just as that of our lives runs ever faster to its end.” (Having said that, the slow Canon 3a and 3b became something of an aberration in this regard, as Abrahamsen himself admits.) However, the first, and longest, of all the pairs may still be performed separately, as AXIOM did during the 2016–17 season—an event that prompted founding director Jeffrey Milarsky to program Schnee in its entirety tonight.

Snow and related winter imagery have been a longstanding source of fascination and inspiration for Abrahamsen, and Schnee (the German word for “snow”) stands at the very core of this tendency. Within the bounds of Abrahamsen’s poetic universe, newly fallen snow, on the one hand, and the blank canvas that had once immobilized him so, on the other, have been parallel phenomena. Both are basic, elemental objects that allow us to imagine something different—and in the case of snow, because it can utterly transform a familiar landscape in just a couple of minutes into something uncannily pure. Nor is it just a question of the visual: snow has its sonic dimension, too, and as Abrahamsen reminds us, it often “dampens all the usual noises.” Hence the preponderance

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About Schnee By Matthew Mendez (Continued)

of muted or upper-register effects in Schnee, and all manner of other forms of muffled sound production.

Yet compared to earlier works—even ones in Abrahamsen’s snow family, like the darkly nostalgic 1978 septet Winternacht (Winter Night)—the composer observes that “somehow the music comes more down to its essence” in Schnee. Abrahamsen traces this distilled quality to an encounter with a set of canons by J.S. Bach, which he arranged in the early 1990s—a practice that often kept him busy during his creative fermata, and one that Abrahamsen came to view as a kind of “dialogue through which I find myself in aspects of another composer's music.” Since at least Igor Stravinsky’s day, however, the specific gesture of going back to Bach has been synonymous with a return to professed musical fundamentals, although in Abrahamsen’s hands, the move did take on a unique spin. In particular, he reimagined the Bach canons as if they were repetitive, proto-minimalist objets trouvés, probing the ambiguities of passing time. Given the nature of canonic imitation (repetition at a temporal remove), “depending on how one looks at these canons,” Abrahamsen points out, “the music stands still, or moves forwards or backwards.”

Perceptual ambiguity is indeed one of Schnee’s key preoccupations. In composing the score, Abrahamsen took some of his bearings from stereoscopic optical illusions (so-called 3D posters), which use two nearly indistinguishable images to generate the sense of a third that, if one squints just the right way, will give the impression of depth. Correspondingly, the Schnee ensemble is divided spatially, into stereoscopic pairs: three strings plus piano and three woodwinds plus piano, with the percussionist at the center. With its arresting, almost unpitched string harmonics, marked “like an icy whisper,” Canon 1a features only the first group, and probes an insistent descending figure whose sound Abrahamsen likens to falling snow. By contrast, Canon 1b is for the whole ensemble; note the percussionist’s unorthodox mode of sound production—brushing a sheet of paper over a tabletop. It contains, in essence, the same music as Canon 1a, but with a new canonic layer now above it. Ultimately, Abrahamsen hopes the listener will be able to perceive the two canons additively, with “distant, unfocused ears,” so that the pair together can be imagined as somehow producing “a deeper, three-dimensional time” and, indeed, a third, unheard canon. In short, each canonic pair is to be listened to as a different iteration or perspective on a shared, imagined sound event—as products of the insight (reached during Abrahamsen’s years of transcribing) that “the way one says something also changes what one says.” Particularly if one selects a simple enough (“haiku-like”) original, “new things can come out from making a new version”—a revelation Abrahamsen claims only to have properly absorbed in his composing with Schnee.

New things certainly arose with Canon 2a and 2b, whose starting point was Abrahamsen’s 1973 recorder ensemble piece Flowersongs, here repurposed—ironically?—for the frostier context. Not so much a transcription as, indeed, a wholesale recomposition, Canon 2a takes its

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inspiration from the original’s wooden flute sonorities, which the breathy winds and muted piano emulate. Again Abrahamsen had precise snow images in mind—here, children “trying to catch the snow and sometimes the children are too slow and then they try to be fast to get it.” Unlike the first pair of canons, Canon 2a and 2b are separated by a brief but continuous Intermezzo, a composed-out detuning of the strings and winds. As a result, Abrahamsen postulates, Canon 2b also features a kind of stereoscopic hyper-tuning, since the pianos remain tempered in ordinary fashion. The overall effect is ostensibly designed to parallel the sensation of a deeper, three-dimensional time.

With Canon 3a and 3b, time has come almost to a standstill. Both are marked “in Tai chi tempo”, and Abrahamsen claims their ambiance was prompted by the titular character’s castle in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen, where everything has been frozen. This is the most starkly differentiated of the five pairs, with Canon 3a featuring the detuned winds and strings in gently susurrating fashion, while Canon 3b spotlights the two pianos’ chilly bell-like timbres (with further brushing from the percussionist).

Another retuning Intermezzo precedes Canon 4a and 4b, which take as their launching point another preexisting piece, the eighth of Abrahamsen’s Ten Studies for piano. [Written in 1998, when Abrahamsen began composing again in earnest, the etude’s subtitle is Rivière d’oubli (River of Forgetting).] The original’s unsettled, quietly agitated opening is reimagined here as something much more blizzard-like and stürmisch (stormy), though the canons also bear the designation Deutsches Tanz(German dance)—a homage to Mozart’s famous, festive Schlittenfahrt (Sleigh Ride), K. 605, replete, even, with similar bells. Then, following one last Intermezzo, comes the brief final pair of einfach und kindlich (simple and childlike) canons. Separated by only the briefest of pauses, their now quite-complex microtuning is nevertheless belied by what Abrahamsen calls the music’s “naiveté,” which seems indeed to have at last come well and truly “down to the essence” of things—a sort of Bach-like purity of intention, after all.

Matthew Mendez is a New Haven–based critic and musicologist with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. He is a graduate of Harvard University and is currently a Ph.D. student at Yale. Mr. Mendez was the recipient of a 2016 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding music journalism.

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Meet Jeffrey Milarsky

American conductor Jeffrey Milarsky is the music director of AXIOM and a senior lecturer in music at Columbia University where he is the music director and conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. He received his bachelor and master of music degrees from Juilliard where he was awarded the Peter Mennin Prize for outstanding leadership and achievement in the arts. In recent seasons has worked with ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, MET Chamber Ensemble, Bergen Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New World Symphony, and the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra. In the U.S. and abroad, he has premiered and recorded works by many groundbreaking contemporary composers, in Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall, Davies Symphony Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall, and at IRCAM in Paris, among others. Mr. Milarsky has a long history of premiering, recording, and performing American composers and throughout his career has collaborated with John Adams, Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Elliott Carter, John Corigliano, George Crumb, Mario Davidovsky, Jacob Druckman, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Steven Mackey, Christopher Rouse, Ralph Shapey, Morton Subotnick, Charles Wuorinen, and an entire generation of young and developing composers. He was recently awarded with the Ditson Conductor’s Award for his commitment to the performance of American music.

A much-in-demand timpanist and percussionist, Mr. Milarsky has been the principal timpanist for the Santa Fe Opera since 2005. In addition he has performed and recorded with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Pittsburgh Symphony. He has recorded extensively for Angel, Bridge, Teldec, Telarc, New World, CRI, MusicMasters, EMI, Koch, and London Records.

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About AXIOM

Jeffrey Milarsky, Music Director and ConductorTim Mauthé, Manager

AXIOM is dedicated to performing the masterworks of the 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. Since its debut in 2006, the group has established itself as a leading ensemble in New York City’s contemporary music scene with performances throughout Lincoln Center, in addition to frequent appearances at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre and Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village. AXIOM is led by music director Jeffrey Milarsky and is grounded in Juilliard’s curriculum. Students receive a credit in chamber music for performing in the ensemble, and during any four-year period, AXIOM members will have the opportunity to perform works by John Adams, Harrison Birtwistle, Magnus Lindberg, and Arnold Schoenberg, among other composers. Guest conductors of AXIOM have included Alan Gilbert, Susanna Mälkki, and David Robertson. AXIOM’s current season opened with a concert celebrating the music of composer and former Juilliard faculty member Jacob Druckman, followed by a concert in December featuring the works of Luciano Berio, and concluding tonight with Hans Abrahamsen’s complete Schnee.

Highlights of the 2016–17 season included programs honoring John Adams on his 70th birthday, Steve Reich on his 80th birthday, and one devoted to the music of Kaija Saariaho. In 2015-16 AXIOM performed works by George Benjamin, Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Gerard Grisey, Oliver Knussen, Kaija Saariaho, Giacinto Scelsi, and John Zorn.

ORCHESTRA ADMINISTRATION

Alan Gilbert, Director of Conducting and Orchestral Studies, William Schuman Chair in Musical StudiesAdam Meyer, Associate Dean and Director, Music DivisionJoe Soucy, Assistant Dean for Orchestral Studies

Joanna K. Trebelhorn, Director of Orchestral and Ensemble OperationsMatthew Wolford, Operations ManagerLisa Dempsey Kane, Principal Orchestra LibrarianMichael McCoy, Orchestra LibrarianKate Northfield Lanich, Orchestra Personnel ManagerDeirdre DeStefano, Orchestra Management Apprentice

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