Festival Finale: Gamelan Pacifica Program Notes

1. Collection/Song Title: Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan—Lou Harrison

   • Collection of Songs:

     1. Bull’s Belle
     2. Untitled
     3. Belle’s Bull

   • Performers:

     1. Adrienne Varner
     2. Gamelan Pacifica

   Lou Harrison charted one of the most original paths in twentieth–century music. Combining his classical music experience and training with a deep interest in the music of Asia, he was instrumental in directing our attention toward music as a world phenomenon. His own musical study included Chinese, Korean, and Javanese music, among others. In this piece he combines the grandeur of the classical piano concerto style with the gamelan. The piece was originally written for Belle Bullwinkle (hence the unusual titles of the first and third movements), and she was the performer for the premiere performance and recording in 1987. The piece presents unusual challenges because the tuning of the piano and the gamelan must be reconciled. Normally these two instruments reflect very different approaches to the concept of tuning. Harrison’s composition brilliantly takes into consideration the nature of gamelan music as a kind of heterophonic rather than contrapuntal polyphony. —Jarrad Powell

2. Collection/Song Title: Philemon and Baukis— Lou Harrison

   Performers:

   1. Paris Hurley
   2. Gamelan Pacifica

   Philemon and Baukis was written for the violinist Daniel Kobialka. Lou Harrison’s love of Classical literature is well–known, and the story of Philemon and Baukis is perhaps one of the most poignant, both in terms of its testimony to human fidelity and to the at once vengeful and compassionate nature of the gods. Ovid’s story tells that in the Phrygian hill country there were two trees that were a marvel, for one was an oak and one a linden, yet they grew from a single trunk. The story of how this came about is the story of Philemon and Baukis. For receiving Jupiter and Mercury kindly when the two gods were disguised as poor wayfarers, Philemon and Baukis, a poor but contented old couple, were granted their wish to be priests of the two gods and custodians of their temple. They were also granted the wish that the same hour of death might bring death to both of them. At the end of their lives, the two were transformed into two trees growing from a single trunk. It is easy to hear how this piece, with its two contrasting sections molded into one cohesive movement, is a reflection of this ancient myth. —Jarrad Powell

3. INTERMISSION

4. Collection/Song Title: Haikai—John Cage

   Performers:

   1. Gamelan Pacifica

   John Cage originally composed Haikai for Si Pawit, the gamelan degung of the Evergreen Club in Toronto. The haiku is an unrhymed verse form of Japanese origin having three lines, usual containing five, seven, and five syllables respectively. Each page of Cage’s composition represents a single “haiku” consisting of seventeen events divided into three measures of five, seven, and five events respectively. These events consist of either sound or silence and are accompanied by or separated by instruments playing in “Korean unison,” in which the musicians play almost but not quite together. Cage does not draw on traditional gamelan performance practice for this piece, but rather utilizes his compositional method of chance operations to create a piece in which sound and silence interpenetrate. In conventional music, sound and silence have a sort of figure and ground relationship. In Cage’s work of this type, the two lose this hierarchical relationship and interpenetrate, resonating equally with perceptual energy. The result is a kind of unmediated presence. The use of unusual instrumental techniques, such as turning the pot–gongs upside down, is actually well within the range of modern explorations of performance practice that have been underway in Java for some years. Many contemporary composers in Java are well aware of Cage’s work and count him among their influences. —Jarrad Powell

5. Collection/Song Title: Scenes from Cavafy— Lou Harrison

   • Collection of Songs:

     1. Gending Cavafy
     2. Gending Ptolemy
     3. Gending Bill / Lancaran Jody

   • Performers:

     1. John Duykers
     2. Gamelan Pacifica

   The three movements of Lou Harrison’s Scenes from Cavafy are based on four poems selected from the work of the great Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. In addition to the gamelan music, Harrison wrote parts for harp, Chinese psaltery, and Chinese bowed psaltery. It seems clear that Harrison had in mind using a range of available panerusan (elaborating) instruments as is normal with Javanese gamelan. The harp and Chinese instruments are stand–ins for the gender, siter, and rebab normally found in a Central Javanese gamelan. For this performance we will use the Javanese instruments.

   Scenes from Cavafy was originally composed for the baritone David Rohrbaugh with Gamelan Si Betty at San Jose State University. This was really the first major work that Harrison wrote for the instruments that he and Bill Colvig built. The piece is dedicated to Betty Freeman and Franco Assetto. (Freeman was certainly the most important individual patron of contemporary classical music in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century.) It is interesting to note that shortly following the premiere of the work at San Jose State University in May of 1980, the piece received its Pacific Northwest premiere with Gamelan Pacifica in November of 1980, right here in PONCHO Concert Hall, during a festival celebrating the music of Lou Harrison. The singer for that performance was John Duykers, one of Harrison’s favorite singers and one who has made notable recordings of Harrison’s work, including the opera Rapunzel. It is a special pleasure that he is able to return to perform this piece tonight, almost thirty years after that initial premiere. —Jarrad Powell