Berger, Heiss, Lister, Montgomery, Peyton, Weinstein

The NEC Composers' Series brings together many generations of NEC's contribution to new American music. Tonight's concert is NEC's annual Arthur Berger Memorial Concert, and includes works by Arthur Berger, who taught at NEC through the end of the 20th century; current faculty John Heiss, Rodney Lister, Malcolm Peyton, and Michael Weinstein; and alumna Jordan Montgomery '08.

Notes on the works on tonight's concert were written by their composers.

Berger Trio
Trio Cleonice:
Emely Phelps, piano
Ari Isaacman-Beck, violin
Gwendolyn Krosnick, cello

Heiss Serenade world premiere
Fenwick Smith, flute
Franziska Huhn, harp

How does one cope with the loss of one’s beloved life-partner? We were married for 47 years and knew each other for 51. One mourns (profoundly) but one also treasures the overall experience … Arlene was so original, imaginative, energetic and buoyant. Her life-force was animating. Thinking of her (beyond the sadness) brings cheer, optimism and hope … as well as deeper devotion to those who still remain.

These all play into my Serenade. She often told me that she loved my “lyricism,” my “chords,” my “surprises,” and my sense of humor. The piece thus evolves through six phases, Aria–Incantation–Runes–Dances–Pulses and Encomium, while briefly referencing moments we both liked in my works and others'. The first four phases are probably self-evident; Pulses is a little game based on telephone dial-tones of people frequently called, and Encomium is an homage and tribute to Arlene herself. I like to think that this piece would bring some smiles to her.

Lister A Walk after Dark
Songs from the Bat Poet
Trio Cleonice

Montgomery Paper White for string quartet world premiere
Acanthus Quartet:
Rhiannon Banerdt and Gregory Tompkins, violin
Kayleigh Miller, viola
Chris Irvine, cello

Paper White was written after a two-year hiatus from composition. After graduating from New England Conservatory I was forced to move back home to Texas due to the extremely high cost of living in Boston. From there I spent 6 months in Oklahoma as a waitress, finally escaping to work for an IT company in Chicago that subsequently relocated me to Boston for one of their projects. That essentially solved the rent problem, but I found myself emotionally dead (something that sitting in a cubicle all day under bright fluorescent lights, surrounded by windowless walls will do to anyone). I found it exceedingly difficult to begin composing again, but kept forcing myself to write until finally all of those emotions I had been suppressing for two years came flooding out.

When I wrote this piece I pictured a forest of leafless trees divided by white snow. The title, Paper White, works on another level though; my life as a secretary in the corporate world. Despite the obvious emotional despair one can hear in the piece, there is a great deal of hope as well; that by composing it I have awakened those dead emotions and the cold barrenness of the office doesn't have to extinguish the fire of music and art.

Peyton String Quartet No. 2
Mount Auburn Quartet
Charles Dimmick and Katherine Winterstein, violin
Gabriela Diaz '03, '05 M.M., viola
Rafael Popper-Keizer '98 A.D., cello

My String Quartet No. 2 centers around the music presented in the opening Prelude. A long lyric theme introduces the instruments and a relaxed tempo and 6/8 meter proceed with only hints at interruption. The following movements are variations, although not strictly so. New ideas are introduced and abrupt contrasts “test” the viability of the Prelude’s survival. One can, however, hear returns of the Prelude—as in the Intermezzo and elsewhere in their repeated references to the opening motif in various guises. The original music and ambience returns in a Postlude, which flows out of the pairs of soliloquies and the passages that react to the soliloquies. The Postlude is broader and more emphatic than the Prelude, and provides a coda for the work.

This quartet was commissioned and first performed by the Ciompi Quartet of Duke University.

Weinstein Tibia Pia
Jacqueline DeVoe, flute
Yelizaveta Beriyeva '08 M.M., '09 G.D., piano

Tibia Pia (The Faithful Flute) is elegaic in nature and is a musical tribute to BSO flautist James Pappoutsakis and the late composer Donald Martino. The piece was commissioned by the James Pappoutsakis Memorial Fund and premiered as a test piece for the 28th Annual Flute Competition Auditions on February 10, 2008, at NEC. I did not meet Mr. Pappoutsakis in person but certainly heard him play with the BSO any number of times at Tanglewood as a young boy—I do know personally from some of my flute-playing colleagues that he was much beloved by his students. Donald Martino remains a huge inspiration to me—I never officially studied with him and so he didn't teach me how to compose but perhaps just as importantly instead gave me the example of how to be a composer—my own dungeon at home, in a much more modest scale, reminds me of his Newton labyrinth. The opening flute melody of my piece spells James Pappoutsakis—by assigning chromatic pitches to each letter of the alphabet his name equals A-C-C-E-F# & D#-C-D#-D#-D-G#-G-F#-C-Bb- G#-F#. Once I had that nice "tune" I built a row on his last name which I used as the basis for material throughout the first and last sections of the piece (five total sections in an A-B-A-B-A format of alternating fast and slow music). In the opening of the second section I've quoted the flute opening of one of my favorite pieces, Martino's Notturno, although I've given that melody a "tonal" guise—in fact a hint of the note B remains the pitch center throughout the rest of the work. The two slow sections both use the opening row from Notturno, and there is even a suspended moment when I use the notes B & D to say "Bye Don"—D was his favorite note and the ultimate referential pitch of Notturno. With all this emphasis on rows one would suspect something quite chromatic but my esthetic for the last quarter century is built on disguising my overeducation in the theoretical realm and therefore one hears snippets of "referential tonality" throughout the piece.