Winds on Wednesdays: Adams, Poulenc, Takemitsu, & Ravel

John Luther Adams | Strange Birds Passing

The following is excerpted from Adams’ website:
For John Luther Adams, music is a lifelong search for home—an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and remember our place within the larger community of life on earth.
        Living for almost 40 years in northern Alaska, JLA discovered a unique musical world grounded in space, stillness, and elemental forces. In the 1970s and into the ’80s, he worked full time as an environmental activist. But the time came when he felt compelled to dedicate himself entirely to music…….he has become one of the most widely admired composers in the world, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy Award, and many other honors.
……Adams brings the sense of wonder that we feel outdoors into the concert hall………he employs music as a way to reclaim our connections with place, wherever we may be.
……… “If we can imagine a culture and a society in which we each feel more deeply responsible for our own place in the world, then we just may be able to bring that culture and that society into being.”…………

Composers have for centuries attempted to convey bird song in music.  John L. Adams has approached the task differently than Beethoven with his gilded cage birds or Messiaen with his wild ones.  One senses Adams is trying to capture the soul of being a bird – what it is to soar and circle, to move as the breeze dictates. In Strange Birds Passing, his repeated figures, using the same pitches in floating arpeggios working in easy counterpoint, are as a flock of birds whose wings flap in the same way but each in their own space.                          
– David Shimoni and John Luther Adams

Personnel

Flute
Zoe Cagan
Hyo Jin Park
Elizabeth Kleiber

Piccolo
Hui Lam Mak
Clara Lee

Alto Flute
Nnamdi Odita-Honnah
Yeyoung Moon

Bass Flute
Elena Rubin

Francis Poulenc | from Suite française

I. Bansle de Bourgogne
III. Petite marche militaire
V. Bransle de Champagne
VII. Carillon

When Francis Poulenc was commissioned in 1935 to write the incidental music for a new play based on the lives of France’s King Henri IV and his wife, he took the advice of his renowned composition teacher, Nadia Boulanger, and looked to the music composed during the era of the French king for inspiration and influence.  In order to compose a new, “20th century” work yet echo some of the aesthetics of the music from almost four hundred years earlier, Poulenc studied and composed his suite based on the works the 16th century French composer Claude Gervaise, whose name appears in the suite’s subtitle, “d'après Claude Gervaise (16e siècle).”  Upon studying Gervaise’s Livre de Danceries, Poulenc created a piece in the neo-Classical style in which Stravinsky had also worked; Stravinsky composed his neo-Classical piece for the stage, Pulcinella, by looking to the music from centuries prior by Giovanni Pergolesi.  Featuring some of the concerns of ancient music including modal melodies, balanced phrases, and contrasting families of instruments, Poulenc was able to echo the past while adding a modern sound by couching these in contemporary, extended harmonies, “wrong notes,” and asymmetrical phrases.  Poulenc’s suite was originally scored for pairs of oboes, bassoons, and trumpets in addition to three trombones, percussion, and harpsichord before he arranged it for solo piano in the same year.  The seven short movements vary greatly in character with the opening and succeeding odd numbered movements favoring the brisk and lively while the alternating even numbered movements exhibit the serene and melancholy.                                                                     
– Roland Davis

Personnel

Oboe
Helen Skilbred
Coleton Morgan

Bassoon
Julien Rollins
Evan Judson

Trumpet
Sarah Heimberg
Cody York

Trombone
Elias Canales
Luke Sieve

Tuba
James Curto

Harp
Jessica Ding

Percussion
Rohan Zakharia

Tōru Takemitsu | Rain Tree

Rain Tree was first performed in Japan in 1981. Since then it has been among the most performed works written for percussion. The piece was inspired by a line from a novel by Kenzaburo Oe; the line follows, as taken from the score:

"It has been named the "rain tree"; for its abundant foliage continues to let fall raindrops collected from last night's shower until well after the following midday. Its hundreds of thousands of tiny leaves—finger-like—store up moisture while other trees dry up at once. What an ingenious tree, isn't it?"

Rain Tree is written for three percussionists, each playing keyboard instruments as well as an array of crotales.

– Will Hudgins

Licensing Details

Takemitsu RAIN TREE Used by arrangement with European American Music Distributors Company, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music Co. Ltd., Tokyo

Maurice Ravel, arr. Mason Jones | from Le tombeau de Couperin

Prélude
 

Personnel

Flute
Honor Hickman

Oboe
Corinne Foley

Clarinet
Hyeokwoo Kweon

Bassoon
Julien Rollins

French horn
Tess Reagan