Melinda Wagner

Usually File Under ? covers music that has already been released. This month, however, is devoted to an upcoming concert, given twice in March by the New Jersey-based new music group Ionisation. The entire program consists of works written in the past thirty years by active American composers. Yes, I happen to have composed one of the pieces on the program, but the focus of these Ionisation concerts is Melinda Wagner, Pulitzer prize-winning composer and New Jersey resident.

IONISATION NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE IN CONCERT

March 12, United Methodist Church, 245 Broad Street, Red Bank, NJ, 8:00 p.m. (Pre-concert lecture at 7:15 p.m.)
March 13, Montclair Art Museum, 3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair, NJ, 3:00p.m. (Pre-concert lecture at 2:15 p.m.)

PROGRAM

Melinda Wagner - Insomnia
Solo flute

Victoria Bond - Can(n)ons
Clarinet and violin

Melinda Wagner - Romanze with Faux Variations
Violin, cello, and piano

Darren Gage - Tibetan Sketch
Solo marimba with Tibetan cymbals and bowls

Brooke Joyce - Short and Zippy
Flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion

INTERMISSION

Melinda Wagner - Tintinnabulum
Solo Piano

Christian Carey - Trio for Flute, Cello, and Vibraphone

Augusta Read Thomas - Incantation
Solo Violin

Melinda Wagner - Wing and Prayer
Clarinet, Cello, Percussion, and Piano

PROGRAM NOTE ESSAY

Culturally speaking, New Jersey is often given short shrift, particularly when compared with the nearby Big Apple. While New Jerseyans can't hope to compete with the arts organizations in New York City (and nearby Philadelphia, for that matter) in terms of size and glamour, the small organizations that present modern music have long been nurtured here. The Garden State has been and remains a supportive home for several new music ensembles and many composers. Higher education has been a particular haven; in addition to a number of significant smaller music programs at area colleges such as Westminster Choir College, Montclair State University, and William Paterson University, New Jersey boasts two prominent graduate programs in music, at Princeton University and Rutgers University. At these institutions, Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Paul Lansky, Rolv Yttrehus, Nicholas Roussakis, Robert Moevs, Gerald Chenoweth, Noel DaCosta, Peter Westegaard and Claudio Spies have taught and inspired dozens of composers.

It seems especially appropriate, then, that the New Jersey-based new music group Ionisation has decided to highlight composers from the Garden State on their spring concerts in Red Bank and Montclair. Melinda Wagner, Darren Gage (the ensemble's director as well as the composer of Tibetan Sketch), and Christian Carey all reside in New Jersey. Brooke Joyce lived here for a while; he did his doctorate at Princeton. The rest of the composers have more tenuous connections to NJ. Although she lives in Chicago and teaches at Northwestern University, members of Augusta Read Thomas's family live here. Victoria Bond is not a New Jerseyan, but her teacher, Roger Sessions, was.

What's more, the pieces on the program are all of fairly recent vintage. The earliest is the Bond piece, which was written in 1975; Thomas's is from 1995; the Wagner works are from the late nineties and the aughts (one written as recently as July 2004), while the Gage, Carey and Joyce pieces have all been written since the turn of the latest century. While this closeness in geography and chronology is a nice starting point, there is also an ample variety of musical styles and compositional features to be found in these works.

Melinda Wagner, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Music, is featured prominently on the program; Ionisation will perform four of her works. The concert opens with Insomnia, a piece for solo flute. Marked, "Out of sorts, indignant. A little frustrated, and tired", the composition depicts the various stages of sleeplessness: raging outbursts, fitful pacing, mournful despair and finally yawning towards rest.

Victoria Bond's Can(n)ons, dedicated to Ingolf Dahl, is not, despite its title, filled with exact imitative counterpoint of the dux-comes or "Row, row, row your Boat" variety. But contrapuntal it is, consisting of a series of supple duets filled with considerable interplay and subtle cross-references: a witty batch of musical games of "tag".

Wagner's Romanze with Faux Variations, subtitled Piano Trio No. 2, is a dramatically charged piece. While it cannot be called tonal in the traditional functional sense, pitch centricity plays an important role in Wagner's music. In Romanze, repeated Es at its beginning set up a central pitch from which the rest of the work's harmonies unfold. The performers take part in a passionate interplay, rife with the angular gestures of Schoenbergian modernism. This is chamber music with considerable sweep; all of the players are given "monster" parts, requiring both great facility and control. After the effusive passages of the Romanze's middle section, an enigmatic coda, marked Misterioso, restores some semblance of stability. The centric E returns at the work's conclusion, ambiguously set against a piquant mixed-interval chord.

Darren Gage's Tibetan Sketch is, in part, inspired by the composer's recent trip to South Asia. In addition to marimba, the instrumentation includes Tibetan cymbals and bowls. But Sketch is more than just a trope on Eastern music. Elements of American modernism are also present, with a six-note chord circulated throughout the various parts in a disjunct linear fashion that is common in much of Gage's music. A percussionist himself, Gage revels in rhythmic interplay, combining polymetrics with copious use of syncopation.

Brooke Joyce has given a nice summation of the character of his work in its title: Short and Zippy. Expanding upon this brief, breezy moniker, the piece has a considerably brash humor, filled with whistles, sirens, spoken word passages from a Balinese monkey chant -- even a hurdy gurdy! Just as quickly as it begins, Joyce sends his bucolic cartoon soundtrack into a tailspin -- crashing us out of the hall and into intermission.

Tintinnabulum is a short piece for solo piano, written by Melinda Wagner as a birthday fanfare for an eminent composer, and one of her former teachers, George Crumb. As the title suggests, it is filled with bell music, from tinkling chimes to sonorous gongs to pealing cathedral bells. Reading one of Wagner's scores, it is striking how detailed many of the indications are. Very often, performers receive explicit indications of the character needed in particular passages, such as (in Tintinnabulum): "Flamboyant, Bombastic!", "Very Big and Blustery! Show Off!", and "more and more delicate..." Particularly favored chords and sonorities even have hearts placed over them. For Wagner, the score seems to be a personal communication between the composer and performer, and she is not averse to underscoring the expressive requirements of a given piece with descriptive language.

Christian Carey's Trio for Flute, Cello, and Vibraphone deals with an intricate dialogue between the three instrumental protagonists. At its outset, the piece appears to be a colloquy, but by the middle of the work, it is apparent that the vibraphone has claimed a primary, soloistic role. A lengthy and unaccompanied cadenza follows (featuring both bowed and mallet passages), introducing material that will later be developed by the full trio in the work's final section.

Incantation, by Augusta Read Thomas, is one of the earliest pieces remaining in her catalogue; she withdrew most of her early pieces several years ago. It is easy to see why this solo violin work made the cut. Incantation is a poignant elegy, written for Cathryn Tait, a performer who was dying from cancer at the time of the work's composition. Lyrical melodies are offset by vigorous double-stops in dramatic fashion. Despite being written for a solo string instrument, Incantation is remarkably colorful, exploiting a panoply of playing techniques and the instrument's entire compass to make a far richer work than "piece for solo violin" sometimes suggests.

The last piece on the program is Wagner's Wing and Prayer, a quartet for clarinet, cello, percussion, and piano. The piece begins with a cello solo, marked "Like a lullaby, but also reverent, prayer-like". Gradually, the other instruments join, playing ringing sonorities. This slowly building section is topped off by a shimmering and accelerating sixteenth figure in the piano, haloed by a cello harmonic. An agitated vivace breaks us out of musical reverie, with a thickening of texture and upping of the dissonance quotient; the pulse is now propulsively articulated by both the marimba and the piano. Now the clarinet takes the lead with soaring melodies and plummeting arpeggiations, leading us into an aggressive section marked "Brutal". After several climactic altissimo clarinet passages, the tension is gradually diffused, giving way to the oscillating, shimmering sixteenth notes from before. This is followed by an elegiac, lyrical coda, transformative of the introductory material. Once again, Wagner evokes bell-like sonorities in both the piano and percussion, accompanying the plaintive clarinet melodies and cello harmonics with gentle tolling, bringing the piece, and the concert, to a ruminative close.

Tickets for the event are $15; the box office number for ordering them is (732) 345-1400.

More information about the concert can be found at the Two River Theatre web site.

If you have questions or need directions, click on my name below and send an email.

-- Christian Carey