YouTube

VARIATIONS ON THE GHOST OF SOUSA DANCING

SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
at Old First Concerts

Saturday June 7, 2008 at 8 pm

Old First Presbyterian Church
1751 Sacramento Street/Van Ness, San Francisco, CA 94109

PROGRAM

 

Allan Crossman has written for many soloists and ensemble. The North/South Consonance (NYC) recording of Millennium Overture Dance received a GRAMMY nomination in 2003; Music for Human Choir (SATB) shared Top Honors at the Waging Peace through Singing Festival; North/South recently recorded his FLYER (cello and string orchestra, with soloist Nina Flyer); and a recent commission is the piano trio Icarus, for the New Pacific Trio (San Francisco).

One of his many theatre scores, The Log of the Skipper's Wife, was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford and the Kennedy Center, with Crossman's music drawn from Irish/English shanties and dances. His music is the soundtrack for the award-winning animated short, X man, by Christopher Hinton (National Film Board of Canada). His work has been supported by such organizations as Canada Council for the Arts, American Composers Forum, and Meet the Composer (NY). Professor Emeritus, Concordia University (Montreal), he has also taught at Wheaton College, the Pacific Conservatory, and is presently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His doctoral studies were with George Rochberg, George Crumb, and Hugo Weisgall at the University of Pennsylvania.

Allan Crossman

Coastal Ghost   notes

Gary Friedman was born in 1934 and raised in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, Gary Friedman received his higher education at Antioch College, The University of Chicago (B.S. and M.D. degrees), and Harvard University (M.S. degree). His main career has been as a physician-epidemiologist. He worked in the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research for 30 years including 7 years as its Director. Since retiring from Kaiser Permanente in 1999, his current position is Consulting Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Friedman's musical education started with piano at age 5. He also played trumpet in junior high and high school and studied organ and music theory during teen age. Playing and improvising on the piano only occasionally during adulthood, he returned to music seriously at age 54, studying oboe and English horn with Janet Popesco Archibald. He currently plays these instruments in the San Francisco Civic Symphony, the College of Marin Symphony, the Bohemian Club Band and chamber groups. Starting at age 64, he studied composition for four years with Alexis Alrich in the Adult Extension Division of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His musical compositions, mostly chamber works, are described in his music web site www.garyfriedmanmusic.net.

Gary Friedman

Theme and Variations for Erhu and Orchestra   notes

Matt Springer, Erhu

Loren Jones began experimenting with composition as a child. He spent his early years dividing his time between film-making and music, and some of his film work was periodically broadcast on local San Francisco television. Eventually choosing to pursue music instead of film, Loren formed and was part of several bands performing and creating different genres of original music. To this point largely self-taught, in the 1980's Loren returned to serious study to acquire greater depth musical education in order be able to create the kind of music that he had always been the most passionate about. Loren has studied with Tom Constantine, Alexis Alrich and is currently working with David Conte at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he is also a member of the chorus.

His music has been performed by his own chamber group, by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, and by students and teachers from around the Bay Area. He has produced several recordings, worked in radio and film, including creating the sound track for an animated short which won a special Academy Award. His 2006 release, Woodward's Gardens, features two guitars, piano, flute, oboe, harp, and cello. He was the recipient of a 2007 Meet the Composer Grant. His project, Dancing on the Brink of the World, a fourteen movement piece for chamber orchestra and period instruments, on the history of San Francisco, has been an ongoing part of the repertoire of the past three seasons of SFCCO concerts.

Loren Jones

Dancing On the Brink of the World San Francisco - 1600 to The Present  

12. Haight-Ashbury - 1960's
13. The Castro - 1970's

intermission

 

Dr. Mark Alburger (1957-2023, Upper Darby, PA) was an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer with postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He was the Music Director of SF Composers Chamber Orchestra, SF Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions, and The Opus Project; Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music; Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College; and a Musicologist for Grove Online and Grove Dictionary of American Music. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti (Swarthmore College, B.A.); Jules Langert (Dominican University, M.A.); Christopher Yavelow (Claremont University, Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger had composed 399 major works, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue was available from New Music. (markalburgerworks.blogspot.com)

Mark Alburger

Camino Real: Block Four

THE SOUSA

 VARIATIONS   video

Alexis Alrich is presently living in Hong Kong but visits the Bay Area frequently. Her Marimba Concerto, which was presented by the SFCCO, will be played by the Plymouth Symphony in Plymouth, Michigan in 2009 with conductor Nan Washburn. Her piece Island of the Blue Dolphins was performed by the Santa Barbara Symphony on January 19, 2007. She attended an artists' colony in 2007, I-Park in Connecticut, where she wrote Fragile Forests II: Cambodia, next in the series after Fragile Forests I: California Oaks, which was premiered in December 2006 by the San Francisco Composers Orchestra. As one of the winners of a Continental Harmony grant from the American Composers Forum she has written a piece for chorus, orchestra and soloists for the state of Maine. Avenues, her first orchestra piece, was premiered by the Women's Philharmonic and has been played around the country. Her chamber compositions have been performed by members of the San Francisco ballet, opera and symphony orchestras and ensembles including Bay Brass, City Winds, the Ahlert and Schwab guitar and mandolin duo in Germany, the Ariel Ensemble, New Release Alliance and Earplay in San Francisco. Ms. Alrich is the director of the John Adams Young Composers program in Berkeley, California. This is an intensive training program for composers ages 9-18 in honor of and under the aegis of John Adams.

Alexis Alrich

Variation I
Minsu
  ***   

David Graves has been writing a variety of musical works since the 1970s, including jazz, pop, electronic and neoclassical pieces for film, theater, studio recordings and orchestra. He has studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and City College of San Francisco. In 2003 and 2005 David was a resident composer with the Djerassi Resident Artist Program where he was awarded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellowship. He was also a resident composer with the Berkeley Symphony for two consecutive seasons and wrote six pieces that were performed as a part of their Under Construction series. His large-scale ambient works have been installed in a redwood canyon (tree/sigh), The LAB (Deciduous), and the renowned San Francisco AudioBus (Human Street Textures). For many years, he has been the Coordinator for the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and has had pieces performed annually by that ensemble as well as the Irregular Resolutions composer collective. In the late 2000s he released albums with the prog-rock group ScienceNV, recorded a collection of pop vocal tunes, received grants from the American Composers Forum and Meet the Composer, was sound designer for Miss Julie at the Aurora Theater, and developed a collection of short video dreams (Living in the Village of My Dreams). More recently, he was sound designer for Mary Stuart at Shotgun Theater, performed as AmbientBlack at various venues, created soundscapes for the featurette Alien Worlds at the California Academy of Sciences, and installed Fog and Expectations in the backyard garden of Urban Bazaar.

David Graves

Variation II
Sousa Variance
  ***   

Dr. Mark Alburger (1957-2023, Upper Darby, PA) was an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer with postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He was the Music Director of SF Composers Chamber Orchestra, SF Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions, and The Opus Project; Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music; Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College; and a Musicologist for Grove Online and Grove Dictionary of American Music. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti (Swarthmore College, B.A.); Jules Langert (Dominican University, M.A.); Christopher Yavelow (Claremont University, Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger had composed 399 major works, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue was available from New Music. (markalburgerworks.blogspot.com)

Mark Alburger

Variation III
Variations on Americana
  ***   

Dr. Erling Wold is a composer and man-about-town. He recently premiered two large works, his Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi in St Gallen, Switzerland, and his solo opera Mordake for tenor John Duykers as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. He is currently working on a personal autobiographical theater piece detailing his corruption and death with the help of James Bisso, which may never be finished, and just finished a more tractable violin sonata for the Denisova-Kornienko duo in Vienna. He is best known for his operas, including Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate, a chamber opera based on William Burroughs' early autobiographical novel Queer, and his critically acclaimed work A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel.

Erling Wold

Variation IV
On the death of David Blakely
  ***   

The multi-instrumentalist Michael Cooke is a composer of jazz and classical music. This two-time Emmy, ASCAPLUS Award and Louis Armstrong Jazz Award winner plays a variety of instruments: you can hear him on soprano, alto, and tenor saxophones, flute, soprano and bass clarinets, bassoon and percussion. A cum laude graduate with a music degree from the University of North Texas, he had many different areas of study; jazz, ethnomusicology, music history, theory and of course composition. In 1991 Michael began his professional orchestral career performing in many north Texas area symphonies. Michael has played in Europe, Mexico, and all over the United States. Cimarron Music Press began published many of Michael's compositions in 1994. After relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, he has been exploring new paths in improvised and composed music, mixing a variety of styles and techniques that draw upon the creative energy of a multicultural experience, both in and out of America. In 1999, Michael started a jazz label called Black Hat Records (blackhatrecords.com) and is currently on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. The San Francisco Beacon describes Michael's music as "flowing out color and tone with a feeling I haven't heard in quite a while. Michael plays with such dimension and flavor that it sets (his) sound apart from the rest." Uncompromising, fiery, complex, passionate, and cathartic is how the All Music Guide labeled Michael's playing on Searching by Cooke Quartet, Statements by Michael Cooke and The Is by CKW Trio. His latest release, An Indefinite Suspension of The Possible, is an unusual mixture of woodwinds, trombone, cello, koto and percussion, creating a distinct synergy in improvised music that has previously been untapped.

Michael Cooke

Variation V
Stripes and Stars
  ***   notes

Loren Jones began experimenting with composition as a child. He spent his early years dividing his time between film-making and music, and some of his film work was periodically broadcast on local San Francisco television. Eventually choosing to pursue music instead of film, Loren formed and was part of several bands performing and creating different genres of original music. To this point largely self-taught, in the 1980's Loren returned to serious study to acquire greater depth musical education in order be able to create the kind of music that he had always been the most passionate about. Loren has studied with Tom Constantine, Alexis Alrich and is currently working with David Conte at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he is also a member of the chorus.

His music has been performed by his own chamber group, by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, and by students and teachers from around the Bay Area. He has produced several recordings, worked in radio and film, including creating the sound track for an animated short which won a special Academy Award. His 2006 release, Woodward's Gardens, features two guitars, piano, flute, oboe, harp, and cello. He was the recipient of a 2007 Meet the Composer Grant. His project, Dancing on the Brink of the World, a fourteen movement piece for chamber orchestra and period instruments, on the history of San Francisco, has been an ongoing part of the repertoire of the past three seasons of SFCCO concerts.

Loren Jones

Variation VI
Stars and Stripes for Desert
 notes

*** These pieces were funded in part through Meet The Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program. MTC

speaker Click on the links to listen to the music. video Click on the links for video.

PERFORMERS
 

Flute (Piccolo+ Alto Flute **)
Bruce Salvisberg
Harry Bernstein + **

Oboe
Laura Reynolds

Clarinet (Bass Clarinet)
Jonathan Russell

Saxophone
Michael Cooke

Bassoon (ContraBassoon**)
Michael Cooke
Michael Garvey
Lori Garvey **

French Horn
Daniel Wood

Trumpet
Josh Silva



Piano
Davide Verotta
Alex Lu

Synthesizer
Loren Jones

Percussion
Victor Flaviani
Anne Szabla
Loren Jones

Drums
Tour' Duncan

Accoustic Guitar
Loren Jones

Electric Guitar
Kit Ruscoe

Bass Guitar
Tony Saunders


Violin I
Monika Gruber

Violin II
Hande Erdem

Viola
Patrick Kroboth

Cello
Samsun Van Loon
Ariella Hyman

Bass
Andrei Gorbatenko

Harp
Henry Heines

 

Coastal Ghost, for chamber orchestra, was inspired by the story of Glooscap, the celebrated Native legend of the Canadian Maritimes. Among his many forms is the Trickster, outwitting rivals and haunting the coast of Nova Scotia, and they say those famous swirling winds blowing across that shore is the spirit of Glooscap. I was told his story while walking those shores some years ago, and began hearing this piece of music ­ and the wind seemed to be his voice, singing, laughing, calling. At such a time, you of course become haunted - in the best sense of the word.

During a visit to China in 2006, I heard an erhu played and liked its bold sound very much. I decided to write this piece for it, expecting that it would appeal to community orchestras and their audiences. The initial theme and ending are written in the pentatonic (5-tone) scale used in traditional Chinese music. The variations move into a variety of Western harmonies and styles. I was fortunate in having a friend who had read about Matt Springer in Strings magazine and told me about Matt’s interest in the er hu. Matt has been very helpful in educating me about the limitations of the 2-string er hu compared to the violin.

12. Haight Ashbury - 1960’s
What is now the Haight Ashbury was originally a collection of isolated farms and acres of sand dunes. In 1897 the new Haight Street cable car line connected the west end of Golden Gate Park with the Market Street line, and the area became a residential district. It was one of the few neighborhoods spared from the fires that followed the earthquake of 1906. The Haight Ashbury became a haven for hippies during the 1960s, due to the availability of cheap and vacant properties for rent or sale in the district, and was home to a number of important psychedelic rock groups and performers of that period. No one has yet been able to truly capture the emotions, hopes, dreams, power, magic, or even the tragedy of that elusive moment in time, and history holds only a faded, and often inaccurate memory, but it was the beginning of a era for San Francisco and the whole country. The innocence and naivety of the first half of the century was ending, and the rebelliousness and struggles of youth, combined with the arts, Eastern philosophy and psychedelics, created a worldwide renaissance. This was the San Francisco that I grew up in, I lived in the Haight during the late 60’s, and it was an amazing time. This movement is based on local music from the period, as well as memories of being there.

13. The Castro - 1970’s
Castro Street was named for José Castro, governor of Alta California from 1835-1836. It became known as the Castro, named after the landmark theater near the corner of Castro and Market Streets. In the 1950's, what had once a thriving neighborhood, was slowly abandoned as people moved to the suburbs, and the victorians and business became vacant. It came of age as a gay center following the controversial Summer of Love in the neighboring Haight Ashbury district in 1967. The activism of the '60s and '70s forged a community with sizable political and economic power. The assassination in 1978 of openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone, and the tragedy of AIDS, was a turning point in the community's history. The Castro became not just open but celebratory about its thriving gay and lesbian population. Once again, a San Francisco neighborhood was one of the first places in the country where a new lifestyle was accepted and grew. Gay friends, and long time Castro residents, lent and me some popular records from the period. That music, combined with documentaries, my own experiences, and visits to the Castro theater, formed the basis for this movement.

Variation I “Minsu” by Alexis Alrich
In this Sousa Variation the different strains are presented more or less in order and are varied in different ways. It begins with overlapping loops of fragments taken from the original march. The famous trio is first presented in Cambodian style with the melody played by several treble instruments with improvised-style embellishments. The variation ends with a faithful transcription of Sousa's irresistible work.

Variation II “Sousa Variance” by David Graves
This short piece is a darkening of the most recognizable theme in Sousa’s most famous work. The initial series of chords, marked “pensive”, resolves to the solo alto flute’s dark entrance. In a larger ensemble, this might be a little overwhelming; for a chamber orchestra, I’m hoping the balance will deliver an intimate short story of sincerity and desolation. It also takes advantage of the large woodwind contingent available in the current incarnation of the SFCCO.

Variation III “Variations on Americana” by Mark Alburger
maps denatured pitches (often with accidentals removed, or mode change) of John Philip Sousa's four-strain Stars and Stripes Forever over an abbrieviated rhythmic grid and some of the contour of Charles Ives's Variations on America. That the third strain of the dialectic has been transformed into a vague resemblance of Lowell Mason's Mary Had a Little Lamb is purely coincidental, and very welcome. The coda features distorted SASF quotes previously utilized in my setting of Tennesee Williams's Camino Real (Op. 110), for Block Four (Kilroy and the Loan Shark). The moral of the story in this case seems to be that rhythm is a far stronger identity and identifier than pitch.

Sousa Variation IV “On the death of David Blakely” by Erling Wold
DAVID BLAKELY IS DEAD.; Manager of Sousa's Band Stricken with Apoplexy. NOV 8TH, 1896, WEDNESDAY
David Blakely, manager of Sousa's Band, died suddenly yesterday afternoon in the Carnegie Building, Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, from an attack of apoplexy. Mr. Blakely was in the best of health until stricken. At about 4 o'clock his typewriter went out on an errand. When she returned, she found Mr. Blakely lying on his face on the floor of his office.

Variation V “Stripes & Stars: a variation” by Michael Cooke
I have many warm memories about hearing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" during 4th of July outings as a child. It is by far one of the most well known marches in the repertoire. While I have enjoyed listen to it over the years, as a performer, my part was always very boring. Bassoons and saxophone only got the pa-pa part of the um-pa-um-pa accompaniment. So for my variation I first decided I would give the bassoons a more fun part. Then while working with melodies I inverted them and really liked it. The inversion of a given melody is the melody turned upside-down. For instance, if the original melody has a rising major third, the inverted melody has a falling major third. I then recombined various melodies a little to round out my variation. This variation was funded in part through Meet The Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program.

Variation VI “Stars and Stripes for Desert” by Loren Jones
Ali Johna Philip Sousa Khan lived in Afghanistan in the early 1900’s. He had a parallel life to the more famous American Sousa of no relation. His final work, Stars and Stripes for Dessert, was considered to be an evil blasphemy, inspired by infidels, and he was executed after its premiere performance. The only surviving recording of this work was on an old cassette smuggled out of Afghanistan in the 1970’s by a Russian KGB agent, and copied by a friend of Loren Jones, from the Republic of Georgia. Loren transcribed and orchestrated the score from that recording.

Mark Alburger Dr. Mark Alburger was the Music Director, Conductor, and founder of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Mark was an eclectic American composer known for his postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He served as the Music Director of Goat Hall Productions / San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal, an award-winning ASCAP composer of concert music published by New Music, an Instructor in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College, a Music Critic for Commuter Times, an author, musicologist, oboist, pianist, and recording artist.

Dr. Alburger studied oboe with Dorothy Freeman and played in student orchestras that were in association with George Crumb and Richard Wernick. He studied composition and musicology with Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.), Karl Kohn at Pomona College, Jules Langert at Dominican College (M.A.), Tom Flaherty and Roland Jackson at Claremont Graduate School (Ph.D.), and Terry Riley.
       Since 1987, he had lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he initially produced a significant amount of vocal music with assembled texts. His works from this period included the opera "Mice and Men" (1992), the crisis-madrigal collection L.A. Stories (1993), the rap sheet For My Brother For My Brother (1997), and the hieratic Passion According to Saint Matthew (1997).

Since 1997, Dr. Alburger had gridded and troped compositions upon pre-existent compositions ranging from world music and medieval sources to contemporaries such as George Crumb and Philip Glass. To that date, he had written 16 concerti, 7 masses and oratorios, 12 preludes and fugues, 20 operas, 6 song cycles, and 9 symphonies -- a total of 500 opus numbers amounting to more than 800 individual pieces.


John Kendall Bailey John Kendall Bailey is an Associate Conductor with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and is Principal Conductor and Chorus Master of the Trinity Lyric Opera, Music Director and Conductor of Voices of Musica Sacra, and Artistic Director of the San Francisco Song Festival. In 1994, Mr. Bailey founded the Berkeley Lyric Opera and served as its Music Director and Conductor until 2001. Since then he has been a guest conductor with the Oakland East Bay Symphony, Oakland Youth Orchestra, and Oakland Ballet, and music director and conductor for productions with North Bay Opera, Mission City Opera, Goat Hall Productions, Solo Opera, the Crowden School and Dominican University. From 2002-2006 he was the Chorus Master of the Festival Opera of Walnut Creek. Mr. Bailey is also a composer, and his works have been performed and commissioned in the Bay Area and abroad.

Mr. Bailey also maintains a busy performance schedule as a bass-baritone, oboist, and pianist, and has performed with the San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Oakland East Bay, Berkeley, Redding, Napa, Sacramento, and Prometheus symphonies, American Bach Soloists, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Midsummer Mozart and West Marin music festivals, San Francisco Bach Choir, Coro Hispano de San Francisco, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, California Vocal Academy, San Francisco Concerto Orchestra, Masterworks Chorale of San Mateo, Baroque Arts Ensemble, San Francisco Korean Master Chorale, the Master Sinfonia, the Mark Morris and Merce Cunningham dance companies, Goat Hall Productions, Opera Piccola, the Berkeley, Golden Gate, and Oakland Lyric Opera companies, and many other groups. He has recorded for the Harmonia Mundi, Koch International, Pro Musica, Wildboar, Centaur, and Angelus Music labels.

Mr. Bailey has been a pre-performance lecturer for the Oakland East Bay Symphony and the San Francisco Opera, a critic for the San Francisco Classical Voice, a writer of real-time commentary for the Concert Companion, and has taught conducting at the University of California at Davis.


Matt Springer, a research professor at the University of California, San Francisco, is also an avid musical performer (piano/violin/percussion/erhu) and arranger. He has played violin and percussion in the Peninsula Symphony Orchestra since 1999. Matt played erhu (Chinese violin) for many years in the San Jose area's South Bay Chinese Orchestra and in the Golden Gate Ensemble in San Francisco, having studied with the well-known erhuist "Chen Jiebing. He has also performed occasionally on erhu and percussion with San Francisco®s Melody of China, and has appeared as erhu soloist with the San Francisco Civic Symphony. In the 1990s, Matt appeared as piano soloist and as mallet percussion soloist with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, with which he played violin and timpani during graduate school and subsequent research positions until 1999, and he gave several multi-instrumental recitals in the Stanford Music Department during that time. In the past, he has belonged to the Stanford Percussion Ensemble, the Redwood Symphony Orchestra, the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, used to perform frequently with TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, and toured nationally with the Santa Clara Vanguard Drum & Bugle Corps in 1982.