World premieres abound at this year’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music

Heart of Darkness

Opening night of the Cabrillo Festival—Friday, Aug. 1—brings the world premiere of the recently revised version of Santa Cruz-born composer Eric Lindsay’s “Darkness Made Visible,” which juxtaposes two very different types of music: one more conservative and Romantic Era-influenced, and one more bombastic and angular. By the end of the piece, these two highly dissimilar styles of music have merged—a feat that Lindsay accomplishes by uniting previously introduced themes by way of a common pulse and various harmonic signposts.

Lindsay’s motive for creating “Darkness” was very much in keeping with the Cabrillo Festival’s mission of making avant-garde music more accessible. As the composer explains, the piece was born of his desire to bridge what he perceived as a gap between contemporary and traditional sensibilities. “I wanted to do something that kind of took the extremes of this, and in the process of merging them together, kind of closed that journey for some listeners without much experience with new music,” he offers. “So as we hear themes that come back and gradually transform, it gives the listener a chance to re-familiarize themselves with aspects of the old and the new types of music, and then at the end, it’s supposed to be a journey that everyone takes together, regardless of what level of listening expertise they already have coming to the concert.”

Lindsay says he composed the “more scaled-back” original version of “Darkness” in 2003 while staying at a French chateau completely bereft of musical instruments. “It was a lot of me doing my best with my ear training to really get a grip on what this piece was going to sound like with absolutely zero points of musical reference,” he recalls. “So it was kind of fun to take these little sketches and then transform it from my mind with a pen and paper, and then see with what strength did I have allegiance to the actual sound of the piece when I actually played it when I got to a piano.”  

As the premiere of the reworked “Darkness” approaches, Lindsay once again finds himself in the dark as to what the finished product will sound like. “Especially because my mind is already kind of locked around the idea of what the first version sounded like, because I’ve heard that recording so many times, it’s going to be a little bit of a surprise to me to go and check out that first piece and go, ‘Whoa! What’s this piece?’” he notes. The composer adds that because he’s not involved in conducting or shaping the piece, the outcome of the Aug. 1 premiere of his work is beyond his control—a prospect that he finds a little nerve-wracking. “But I’m more than happy to have Marin conduct, because that, in itself, is a pretty fantastic experience,” he states. “It’s in really great hands.”

Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark

Sharing the opening night spot with Lindsay is Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Christopher Rouse, whose festival-commissioned “Concerto for Orchestra” is dedicated to festival Music Director/Conductor Marin Alsop in honor of the festival’s Executive Director Ellen Primack and Development Director Tom Fredericks. “Marin has been such a great supporter of mine for so many years, and this is the first piece I’ve actually had the opportunity to write for her and one of her organizations,” Rouse states. “It seemed pretty much a no-brainer to, in some modest way, express my feelings of gratitude and affection for her and the wonderful musical relationship we’ve had over the years.”

“Concerto” is divided into five relatively short sections—three of them fast and two slow—followed by two larger sections that expand upon the material presented in those earlier segments. One compelling aspect of the piece is that it gives every instrumentalist in the orchestra at least once moment in the spotlight. According to Rouse, some of these solo sections will truly be putting the musicians to the test. “Some of the tempos are very fast; those fingers are going to need to fly!” he says. “The trumpet players are going to have to really keep blasting away for a long period of time, so stamina, I think, will be a challenge for some of the players. It’s real virtuoso stuff—that’s what a concerto for orchestra is meant to be, instead of the usual concerto, like a piano concerto or a violin concerto, where you have one soloist up front who’s doing the virtuoso part. Here the virtuosi are the members of the orchestra.”

“Concerto” was as challenging to compose as it will be to perform. Rouse says he slaved over every measure for a total of approximately 17 months. “Certainly there were points in the piece where I thought, ‘Well, now what?’ It’s like I’m in a completely darkened cave and I just hit a wall,” he chuckles. “I’m trying to figure out, ‘How do I keep moving?’ I’ve got to find the path again somehow.”

Having successfully groped his way back to the light of day, Rouse now faces the somewhat stressful prospect of handing his brainchild over to the orchestra and hoping for the best. This being “Concerto’s” world premiere, Rouse himself will hear the piece for the first time just a few days before the public does. “Usually people think, ‘Oh, you must have tryouts and workshops,’” he notes. “No, you don’t. The first rehearsal is usually three days before the first performance, and that’s the first time anybody has heard any of it.” The composer adds that he usually skips first rehearsals. “Because the players are reading the music for the first time, it usually doesn’t sound very good,” he explains, “and it’s always a danger that composers will hear this and think that it’s really what the piece sounds like, and leave in utter despair, [thinking] that they’ve lost any ability that they ever had.”

Finally, Rouse daunted by the thought of negative critiques? Not really. “I do write music that I hope will engage the listener, so I hope people will like it, but I can’t speak in any way other than my own way,” he says. “I’m not setting out saying, ‘Oh, yes, they’ll love it if I do this,’ and ‘They’ll love it if I do that.’ I just write music that I would like to hear.”

Window of Opportunity

Like Christopher Rouse’s latest opus, 19-year-old composer Matthew Cmiel’s “Sneak in a Window” is a tribute to the irrepressible Marin Alsop. The piece, which has its world premiere on Saturday, Aug. 9, takes its name from a piece of advice from Alsop herself: “Pursue that which you are passionate about and, pure and simply, never give up! If the front door is locked to you, go around the side and sneak in a window!”   

Cmiel, who founded the all-teenage Bay Area new music ensemble Formerly Known As Classical in 2005, calls Alsop’s words “a philosophy for me of how to live my musical life. [It’s] just the idea of being willing to do your own thing or to get into anything any way you can.”

The Cabrillo Festival, as it turns out, has played a crucial role in Cmiel’s musical career. The composer recalls attending his first festival at age 10 in 1999: “It was really that year at Cabrillo where I realized, ‘Oh, my God! There are people who actually [compose music] for a living, and they’re writing cool stuff. I think they did Christopher Rouse’s flute concerto, and that just blew my mind entirely. I was unbelievably excited about it.”

Cmiel describes his homage to Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival as “a short fanfare, eight minutes long—groove-oriented, dance-like, with a frenetic energy, particularly toward the end of the piece.” A single rhythmic theme—triplet, eighth note, eighth note, quarter note—repeats throughout “Window’s” four sections, which get progressively slower and more agonizing, until finally the rhythmic figure, in Cmiel’s words, “bursts off the top,” going up to the fastest speeds physically possible.

Like many of his fellow composers at this year’s festival, Cmiel admits that he finds the process of world-premiering his newest piece a little unnerving. “I’m a performer as well [as a composer],” he states, “and if I’m playing something for people, I have no nerves whatsoever, but the second I have very little control over a situation—I’m sitting there in the audience with everyone else; I’m staring at the orchestra—I become unbelievably nervous. My nails start digging into my hands.”

Cmiel isn’t particularly apprehensive about the kind of feedback he might get after unveiling his new work, however. “I’m 19—I’m still growing as a composer,” he reasons. “[Even] right now I could write a better piece [than “Sneak in a Window”], given the same amount of time and the same circumstances. So I try to take people’s concerns and critiques into consideration, and take it to heart without taking it personally.”

First Harvest

The Sunday, Aug. 10 conclusion of this year’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music kicks off with the world premiere of an innovative work by the Taiwan-born Chiayu, whose “Feng Nian Ji” (Harvest Festival) was directly inspired by its composer’s attendance of the Cabrillo Festival Composers Workshop in 2006.

Chiayu

“Feng Nian Ji” is based on the harvest music of a Taiwanese aboriginal tribe known as the Ami. Chiayu spent a couple of months collecting materials, listening to tapes of Ami singing and developing ideas before she began composing the piece, which features various motivic and antiphonal aspects of Ami chanting adapted for orchestral instruments. “The challenge is to imitate the singing style itself,” Chiayu notes. “However, I think using orchestral instruments gives me more of a variety of timbre to choose from, so I actually like it very much.”

Chiayu shows nothing but enthusiasm to be presenting this new work for the first time. “I’m truly excited about this premiere, because the whole process of producing music is only complete when the music is actually performed.

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