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SAN FRANCISCO COMPOSERS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Presents "Bring 'Em Back Alive!"
Celebrating our Twentieth Anniversary
Saturday, May 28, 2022 at 8 pm

Lakeside Presbyterian Church
201 Eucalyptus Drive, San Francisco, CA

PROGRAM

 

Hussein Al-Nasrawi is an accomplished pianist who graduated from San Francisco State University (B.M., 2018, and M.M., 2020), and was born to Iraqi parents. His passion for music is showcased through improvisation, by playing pieces by various composers, and by composing pieces representing people and places.

Hussein Al-Nasrawi

A Day at the California Academy of Sciences   notes   video

Lisa Scola Prosek is a graduate of Princeton University in Music Composition. Her teachers include Edward Cone, Milton Babbitt, Lukas Foss, and Gaetano Giani Luporini. Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous grants, commissions and awards, including The NY Center for Contemporary Opera "Atelier" Award for The Lariat. Scola Prosek has composed and produced eight operas with librettos in Italian and English. In 2012, Daughter of the Red Tzar, written for acclaimed tenor John Duykers, premiered in San Francisco to capacity audiences, and is currently on the outreach season with Long Beach Opera. Lisa serves as General Manager and Director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, since 2001. Other awards have been from Theatre Bay Area, the LEF Foundation, The Argosy Contemporary Music Fund, Meet the Composer, the Hewlett Foundation, the American Composers Forum, The San Francisco Arts Commission, The Center for Cultural Innovation, The California Arts Council, the NEA and the Zellerbach Foundation.

Lisa Scola Prosek

The Bells of Santo Stefano   notes

Soave Luna   video

Shauna Fallihee, Soprano

Lisa Scola Prosek is a graduate of Princeton University in Music Composition. Her teachers include Edward Cone, Milton Babbitt, Lukas Foss, and Gaetano Giani Luporini. Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous grants, commissions and awards, including The NY Center for Contemporary Opera "Atelier" Award for The Lariat. Scola Prosek has composed and produced eight operas with librettos in Italian and English. In 2012, Daughter of the Red Tzar, written for acclaimed tenor John Duykers, premiered in San Francisco to capacity audiences, and is currently on the outreach season with Long Beach Opera. Lisa serves as General Manager and Director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, since 2001. Other awards have been from Theatre Bay Area, the LEF Foundation, The Argosy Contemporary Music Fund, Meet the Composer, the Hewlett Foundation, the American Composers Forum, The San Francisco Arts Commission, The Center for Cultural Innovation, The California Arts Council, the NEA and the Zellerbach Foundation.

Lisa Scola Prosek, Soprano

Stardust is an anarchist, animist, queer/genderqueer, radical faerie composer living in the somewhat embattled and mythical sanctuary of San Francisco. Since 2014, Stardust's SFCCO offerings have included A la recherche des danses perdues, Home, Railway Sonata, Wiggle, and a theatre triptych of True of Voice Overture, True of Voice Entr'acte, and True of Voice Finale. Stardust also playwrights, most recently creating Lucia, a play about a lesbian anarchist revolutionary organizer of a group called "Mujeres Libres" ("Free Women") during the Spanish Civil War and Social Revolution. Other works include chamber music and symphonic music prepared for encouraging musician friends at events such as the Humboldt and Calcap Chamber Music Workshops and welcoming ensembles such as the Opus Project Orchestra, the Golden Gate Symphony, the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Freedom Band, and of course the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. Stardust plays the oboe and the English horn.

 Stardust

Wiggle   notes   video

John Beeman studied with Peter Fricker and William Bergsma at the University of Washington where he received his Master's degree. His first opera, The Great American Dinner Table was produced on National Public Radio. Orchestral works have been performed by the Fremont-Newark Philharmonic, Santa Rosa Symphony, and the Peninsula Symphony. The composer's second opera, Law Offices, premiered in San Francisco in 1996 and was performed again in 1998 on the steps of the San Mateo County Courthouse. Concerto for Electric Guitar and Orchestra was premiered in January 2001 by Paul Dresher, electric guitar. Mr. Beeman has attended the Ernest Bloch Composers' Symposium, the Bard Composer-Conductor program, the Oxford Summer Institutes, and the Oregon Bach Festival and has received awards through Meet the Composer, the American Music Center and ASCAP. Compositions have been performed by Ensemble Sorelle, the Mission Chamber Orchestra, the Ives Quartet, Fireworks Ensemble, the Oregon Repertory Singers and Schola Cantorum of San Francisco.

John Beeman

Rogue River Canyon   notes

III. Day's End to Canyon Night
IV. Deep Canyon

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

Three George Crumb Tropes, Op. 392,
from The Decameron: Fifth Day
  notes   video

Novel III. Pietro Boccamazza runs away with Agnolella, and encounters a gang of robbers...
Novel VII. Pietro Teodoro, being enamoured of Violante, daughter of Messer Amerigo, his lord, gets her with child, and is sentenced to the gallows...
Novel VIII. Nastagio degli Onesti, loving a damsel of the Traversari family, by lavish expenditure gains not her love...

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

Symphony No. 4 ("Deconstructing Beethoven")   notes

II. Allegretto   video

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

PERFORMERS
 

Piccolo / Flute
Bruce Salvisberg
Martha Stoddard

Oboe / English Horn
Stardust

Clarinet / Bass Clarinet
Michael Kimbell
Tom Berkelman

Bassoon
Michael Cooke
Kat Walsh


Horn
Bob Satterford

Ukulele
Bruce Salvisberg

Piano
Hussein Al-Naswari
Lisa Scola Prosek

Percussion
Hussein Al-Nasrawi
Victor Flaviano
Lisa Scola Prosek


Violin I
Kristen Kline

Violin II
Kat Walsh

Viola
Harry Bernstein
Kat Walsh

Cello
Doug Machiz

Bass
John Beeman

 

 

A Day at the California Academy of Sciences is about the California Academy of Sciences, narrates parts of the academy (The Kimball Natural History Museum, the Rainforest, the Aquarium, and the Planetarium), and was composed for string quartet (Violin I, Violin II, Viola, and Cello) and piano.

Soave Luna is an excerpt of "The Bells Of Santo Stefano", which is part of a longer madrigal collection. The text, by the composer, begins with the image of the bells of Santo Stefano, which ring in the quiet afternoon. The church bell has fallen in love with a beautiful cloud floating towards the western horizon.

Nuvoletta, rosea e chiara Nella quiete pomeridiana Per te suona la campana.

Wiggle is an extensive exploration of the C Major triad with dalliances among rewarmed reverberations of Purcell's The Cold Song, a recurring pastoral horn, a circus calliope, and fanfare-introduced nursery rhyme fantasies, all concocted by a composer in love. Deftly and/or desperately surfing subconsciousness to lucidity, this love performs for the audience of displaced, degendered, and chrono-divergent lovers: awkward circus mechanics, the "wiggle", at once symbol and actuality of a bodily tic -- that which in the other cannot change -- and of radical acceptance, evolving in a way -- that perhaps only music could navigate -- into the freedom of You Can Do Whatever You Want and the simultaneously obsessive ostinato control of "(As Long As You Do Exactly What I Want You to Do)". In the end, love exhausts infatuations seeking authenticity and finding -- moment by moment, for self and other, resolved in the bond -- authentic care.

Two movements from Beeman's 1995 Rogue River Canyon, a five-movement suite for chamber orchestra, will be premiered. The first is Day's End to Canyon Night which is followed by Box Canyon. The movements are very programatic. Moving water is suggested by shimmering percussion, swelling woodwind lines, and surging strings. Open harmonies portray the temperate forest and its inhabitants. Bird calls are heard as fluttering woodwinds and violin trills. Hoots sound in English horn and a lumbering bear are suggested by thumping percussion and strings. The overall effect creates an impression of the rich diversity of nature found in the beautiful canyon.

Cooke writes "Symphony No. 4 ("Deconstructing Beethoven") poses the question, what if Beethoven traveled in time to now and absorbed many of the modern music advancements over the last 200+ years? The second movement is based on Beethoven's Symphony No. 7: II. Allegretto, which is quite a popular one. As a bassoonist, it is definitely my favorite to play and, in my section, the melody assumes the character of an anguished lament. Then it makes use of some techniques that the first movement explores, conflicting rhythms that clash painfully with each other. For me, it just seemed like a natural fit for my symphony. So I planned to deconstruct it by pairing down the melody to just the essentials -- give it an aleatoric feel and continue to explore some ideas I use throughout the whole symphony. There is a rhythm permeating the Allegretto: a single long note followed by two short notes. While this appears from time to time in mine, I mostly switched to a heartbeat rhythm, which is heard in the timpani and bass drum right after the first chord. The five-note rhythm in the first movement is inverted and slowed down. Here it creates a subtle unbalanced rhythmic feel, as 3 against 2. Time is also manipulated, in sections where instruments play mostly the same motive but not at the same time. In some sections, whole-tone or octatonic scales are used, which creates a transformed sense of harmony. In other places, chords have 'extra' tones added, making a more contemporary and richer sound. Beethoven kindly provided me a fugue section, which helps to link this movement with the 4th, and some figures of the 2nd moment reappear in the 3rd."

Alburger writes, "In memoriam George Crumb (October 24, 1929, Charleston, WV - February 6, 2022, Media, PA), who I have known since the 1970's when playing oboe in Delaware County Youth Orchestra, directly adjacent to his assisting as last-chair violist. Three George Crumb Tropes, Op. 392, drawn from The Decameron: Fifth Day, Op. 247 (2015), utilize analogues of Crumb's works. The rather lengthy titles for the Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) Novels conclude as follows:

III. ...the girl takes refuge in a wood, and is guided to a castle. Pietro is taken, but escapes out of the hands of the robbers, and after some adventures arrives at the castle where Agnolella is, marries her, and returns with her to Rome.
VII. ...but while he is being scourged thither, he is recognized by his father, and being set at large, takes Violante to wife.
VIII. ...At the instance of his kinsfolk he hies him[self] to Chiassi, where he sees a [ghost] knight hunt a [phantom] damsel and slay her and cause her to be devoured by [apparitions of] two dogs. He bids his kinsfolk and the lady that he loves to breakfast. During the meal the said damsel is [again] torn in pieces [now] before the eyes of the lady, who, fearing a like fate, takes Nastagio to husband."

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.


Martha Stoddard, Associate Conductor earned her Bachelor of Arts degree at Humboldt State University and her Master of Music degree from San Francisco State University, where she studied flute, conducting and composition. She was named Program Director for the John Adams Young Composers Program at the Crowden Music Center in 2012 and has held the position of Artistic Director of the Oakland Civic Orchestra since 1997.She is Associate Conductor of the San Francisco Composers' Chamber Orchestra and Director of Instrumental Music at Lick-Wilmerding High School. Martha Stoddard Her most recent commissions include today's premiere and her Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano for the 2009 San Francisco Chamber Wind Festival at the San Francisco Conservatory. She has held the position of Artistic Director of the Oakland Civic Orchestra since 1997. Other recent conducting activities include engagements as Conductor for the John Adams Young Composers' Orchestration Workshops at the Crowden School, Musical Director for the operas Belfagor and Trap Door by Lisa Prosek, Guest Conductor for the San Francisco All City High School String Orchestra and the Santa Rosa Youth Symphony Summer Academy Orchestra. She has also served as an adjudicator for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Santa Cruz Youth Symphony Concerto Competitions. Ms. Stoddard is founding member and director of ChamberMix, and is a featured performer on alto flute in John Bilotta's Shadow Tree (Capstone Records CPS-8787) and in John Thow's Cantico (Palatino label #1001) Marika Kuzma, conductor, and as conductor for Janis Mercer's, Voices (Centuar Recordings, CPS 2951).