Callithumpian Consort: Singleton, Haas, Child, Richardson, Heiss

Alvin Singleton | Be Natural

George Friedrich Haas | tria ex uno (2001) - Sextet after Josquin Desprez

I.
II.
III.
 

Program note

tria ex uno for 6 Instruments refers to a movement by Josquin Desprez (Agnus Dei II. from the Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales). In three steps (arrangement – commenting instrumentation – freely associative new composition), Haas draws parallels between his musical idiom and the compositional techniques of Josquin.

Peter Child | Six Dances of Death (2020) after Holbein the Younger and Henry VIII

commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva, Richard Pittman, director

Bones of all the Men (It is to me a right great joy)
The Ploughman (Consort XIV)
The King (Taunder naken)
The Child  (Whoso that will for grace sue)
The Lady  (Green growth the holly)
The Old Man and Woman (If love now reigned)

Program note

Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death is a series of woodcuts completed in 1525. In 41 tableaux.Death—sometimes playing musical instruments—is a grinning, cavorting prankster escorting the mighty and the humble, the corrupt and the innocent to their graves. His rictus, his macabre joy, mostly convey a withering, satirical humor, but for the innocent child, the overburdened peasant, the good, there is palpable pathos as well.
        Shortly after he made these pieces Holbein became court artist to Henry VIII and one of the greatest portrait artists of all time. Henry, though megalomaniacal and dangerous to his court favorites and his wives, seems to have had an artistic sensibility. He wrote poetry, and he composed musical pieces that are mostly contained in a British Library manuscript commonly known as "Henry VIII’s book."
       Six Dances of Death adapts and reinterprets six of Henry’s compositions in relation Holbein’s woodcuts. The music is affectionately dedicated to Richard Pittman and the Boston Musica Viva, who commissioned the work.                    
– Peter Child

Sid Richardson | We the Way Outward (2021)

World premiere

Commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva, as part of the Write It Now Commissioning Initiative, Richard Pittman, director

Ludic Limp
Sonorant Cerement
Goat Gut Gospel

Program note

We the Way Outward springs from my continued interest in the work of experimentalist poet Nathaniel Mackey, whose poetry and literary criticism engage African American history and culture in a way that emphasizes a cross-cultural approach to art and life. The release of his newest collection of poetry, a three-volume set entitled Double Trio, led me to explore several musical ideas, which have worked themselves into this piece for chamber ensemble.
        Its title derives from the protagonists of Mackey’s intertwined poems Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. They feature a “band of nervous travelers,” who go by many names, and whose peripatetic nature brings them in contact with cultures from around the globe. Norman Finkelstein describes the poet’s penchant for using the nominative, first-person pronoun as his “wandering we.” We, the reader, are participating in the mythos that Mackey unfolds in his poems along with his “philosophic posse”; we’re part of the band searching for gnosis, a point of knowing that comes from without. “We the stubborn consort.” “We the band we were, we the band we’d be.” “We the would-be chorus.” We the Way Outward.
        The first movement, Ludic Limp, fixes on musical connotations of limping, off-kilter rhythms juxtaposed with steady pulse streams. In his essay “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” Mackey establishes a connection between limping and empowerment in relation to the African god Legba, one of the gods retained in the New World African traditions of vodoun, candomblé, and lucumí. Legba is often depicted as an old man who walks with a limp because his legs are of unequal lengths, one being rooted in the spirit world and the other, in our reality. Nonetheless, he dances. Mackey identifies this joining of “limping disability with the gracefulness of dance” in the music of some of his favorite artists, including John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman, among many others. Legba is the god of intersections, doorways, crossroads, thresholds. Mackey relates this interstitial nature to a “forking of the voice,” which he hears in Coltrane’s soloing as he splits his instrument into various registers in dialogue with each other. I’ve applied this idea to the bass clarinet part in Ludic Limp, which constantly jumps between registers in dialogue with itself. While the music in this movement seeks to draw ideas from without, it sometimes resists them. Ultimately all are subsumed and re-contextualized in a playful limping dance.
        The second movement, Sonorant Cerement, engages the funereal element in Mackey’s work. The Song of the Andoumboulou is a cosmic funeral song the poet encountered on an album of field recordings of the Dogon people of Mali and Burkina Faso. The myth recounted therein deals with Andoumboulous, what Mackey calls “a rough draft of a human being, the work-in-progress we continue to be.” These ancestors have not been properly laid to rest with requisite rites. This story has been the springboard for Mackey’s ongoing mythology, which is spun out in his serial poetry. Peter O’Leary identifies it as “a torn cloth, covering a lost, phantomic body (of knowledge, of lore, of flesh—of a people).” I associate the music and ceremony of Sonorant Cerement with the loss we’ve collectively experienced in the COVID-19 pandemic, which initiated this commission.
        The final movement, Goat Gut Gospel, springs from several Mu poems, which evoke a “morning song” as it emerges from the funeral rite of the second movement. “The wail and whine of the goat gut” are envisioned as a cello solo that moves between disjunct musical contexts juxtaposed with one another. Cello and piano come to the fore, following the highlighting of bass clarinet and drums in the first movement, and flute and violin in the second. A prevailing theme of this ensemble is a band made up of distinct characters. It has its roots not only in Mackey’s poems, but also his prose series From a Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.
        In response to Mackey’s call for “centrifugal work” in his manifesto “Destination Out,” We the Way Outward plays with adding musical influences to his contexts. He suggests that we begin from “whatever [it is that the] medium we find ourselves working in will not do.” This music cannot convey to the audience in a one-to-one relationship the composer’s thoughts and associations, for after all music is an abstract language. We can all, however, bring our own meaning to it; and those ideas could be just as meaningful.
– Sid Richardson

John Heiss | Quartet (1971)

Written for the Boston Musica Viva, Richard Pittman, director