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Victoria Jordanova’s new album is driven by two impulses. Both are highly creative: the first comes from the very fiber of her being as an artist who both composes and performs; the second from her taste as a curator of new music, a taste formed by that very creative activity.
In the first case, Jordanova defies categories. She is a virtuoso harpist, but she has never been content to take the standard route associated with her instrument. A variety of types of harps are used, referencing different traditions of performance. Technologies of many different stripes come into play from piece to piece. In short, the harp is not the end for Jordanova, only a means to a far larger field of play.
And of course she is a composer. And not only is her creative voice on display in the two works of her own in this collection, it is also clearly there in the presentation of the other works. For the Cox pieces, the composer and harpist have collaborated by arranging music originally written for piano. The Cage is in fact a “multiplication” of a work usually known as the sparest sort of setting. And the Rochberg is subtly shaped by its encounter with technology, to bring out new shadings of color and depth.
As for the second, her “curating” of this program, she shows great sensitivity to the mix of the music. One work is by a peer she admires, two by now historic twentieth century American masters, two by herself. And the works of course show great range. Cox’s two pieces are lyrical and rigorous at once, suggesting an intersection between modernist formalism and minimalist process. The Cage is a languid gem from his early period. The Rochberg is one of the monuments of the contemporary harp literature, a mix of the modern and the romantic, a feast of expressive moments, like facets of a diamond viewed as it rotates. And Jordanova’s own music completely reimagines the instrument, taking it into realms of rich texture and layering previously unheard.
The title of this disc, from the Cage, is more than just a convenient label. The whole concept of the program is that of landscape. This very concept comes with a double meaning. All of the works on this disc suggest relations to nature, outdoor space, the realm of the earth. But also, each work itself is an environment, a space where music can unfold, not encumbered by the usual demands of “straight-line” narrative development. This is music that we enter into, that we can inhabit as listeners. We are not driven to follow a single line, either internally or at the demand of the composer. Rather we are allowed a space for contemplation, and the discovery of beauty.
Cindy Cox's two pieces are written for electric celtic harp (which provides an especially clear and bright sound, completely in keeping with the music). The first, The blackbird whistling/Or just after (2006), features rippling arpeggios whose harmonic content is derived from the overtone series. The result is fresh and natural, yet also one senses a strong structure behind the surface. Hierosgamaos IV (2005) is a much more meditative work. A repeated E tolls in the middle register, against which one hears wisps of melody, and small sparkling outbursts.
John Cage's In A Landscape (1948) is best known as an extremely simple and lyric single melody, played on piano or harp. Jordanova has taken this source and elaborated it by multitracking it upon itself three times, using pedal harp with contact microphone. The resultant heterophonic canon now suggests something quite different from the original. Instead of a single object--the tune--in a vast resonant landscape, we have instead the object—through its multiplication—becoming the landscape itself. One sees the tune in echoes of itself, receding into the distance, towards the horizon.
George Rochberg's Ukiyo-E (Pictures from the Floating World) (1976), is a sort of kaleidoscope or mobile, a series of gorgeous moments which alternate and cycle from one to the next, creating a dreamy space for contemplation and sensuous delight. Not only Asian, but Mahleresque and impressionistic tropes meander through the sound's frame. Jordanova has arranged the settings of her processing so as to bring out a far greater variety of colors than one usually hears in the piece. And the gentle swoosh of the amplification's gating even seems to create a blossom that opens and closes on each musical moment.
Jordanova’s own music shows her deep understanding of her own instrument, through her ability to use unusual performance techniques for specific sonic goals. Thus in the 2005 Secret Life of Bees, scored for 6 electro acoustic harps and premiered at The 9th World Harp Congress in Ireland, performs it herself via multi-tracking. The first movement, “Swarm”, is an essay in the classic “murmuring” technique of bisbigliando. The result is delicate and unnerving at the same, just the like natural model which is its inspiration. The second, “Beehive”, creates a drone background for gentle scraping sounds and harmonics, using an electric toothbrush! The effect is like something completely electronic, though of course the source is her touch on her instrument. And the final movement, “Go to Work”, is a concise essay in slyly mechanical ostinatos of many different kind of harmonics.
For her 2005 Three Meditations (for two amplified acoustic pedal harps), Jordanova creates her own “floating world”. This work comes in part from her experience of making a realization of Cage’s Postcard from Heaven, featured on the first ArpaViva release. Pentatonic pitch sets give the framework for a space in which sounds blossom, recede, and evaporate, constantly replaced by new events that float to the surface like bubbles in a pond.
A last personal note: I am writing these notes while living in Tokyo for three months. Jordanova’s music has accompanied me over the city on my iPod, creating a soundtrack for one of the most stimulating and chaotic of postmodern urban environments. And the contrast of my current landscape with her series of imaginary ones has created a special space for me, one that opens up contemplation even in seeming chaos.
Robert Carl, May 2007
Cindy Cox
Radical, traditional, original, archetypal—neither modernist nor neo-tonal, Cindy Cox derives her “post-tonal” musical language from acoustics, innovations in technology, harmonic resonance, and poetic allusion. Naturally unfolding through linked strands of association, timbral fluctuation, and cyclic temporal processes, her compositions synthesize old and new musical designs.
As Robert Carl notes in Fanfare, “Cox writes music that demonstrates an extremely refined and imaginative sense of instrumental color and texture...This is well-wrought, imaginative, and not easily classifiable music.” Her work, always engaged with novel approaches to sound and instrumental color, combines with formality “to yield great depth of meaning and a playful appeal” (NewMusicBox, American Music Center).
She has received awards and commissions from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP, Meet the Composer, and the Gemeinschaft der Kunstlerinnen und Kunstfreunde International Competition for Women Composers. She has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival, the MacDowell Colony, and the Civitella Ranieri and William Walton Foundations in Italy.
Recent performances include [Four Studies of Light and Dark] for piano and percussion at the Festival di Musica Contemporanea at the American Academy in Rome, Hysteria, for trombone and four-channel tape at the Kosmos Frauenraum in Vienna (filmed for Austrian National Television), Münster Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, and the REDCAT/Cal Arts Theater in Los Angeles, The blackbird whistling/Or just after, for solo piano at Merkin Hall, Into the Wild, by the Paul Dresher Ensemble at the Library of Congress, Cathedral Spires by the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Primary Colors on the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella series, Columba aspexit, by the Kronos Quartet at Hertz Hall in Berkeley, and Axis Mundi by the Earplay Ensemble at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
Earning her doctorate in 1992, Cox studied composition with Harvey Sollberger, Donald Erb, Eugene O’Brien, and John Eaton at Indiana University; Cindy Cox is presently a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
www.cacox.com
John Cage (1912-1992)
Much has been written about this legendary American composer,a pioneer of chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments, and electronic music. Though he remains a controversial figure, he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era. In addition to his composing, Cage was also a philosopher and writer.
John Cage received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for having extended the boundaries of music through his work with percussion orchestra and his invention of the prepared piano. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988. In 1982 the French Legion d'Honneur made Cage a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He received the Notable Achievement award from Brandeis University in 1983. He received the degree Doctorate of All the Arts Honoris Causa from the California Institute of the Arts in 1986. Cage was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University for the 1988-89 academic year. He is a laureate of the 1989 Kyoto Prize given by the Inamori Foundation.
While his interest in chance procedures and found sound continued throughout the sixties, Cage began to focus his attention on the technologies of recording and amplification. One of his better known pieces was Cartridge Music (1960), during which he amplified small sounds in live performance. Taking the notions of chance composition even further, he often consulted the "I Ching," or Book of Changes, to decide how he would cut up a tape of a recording and put it back together.
Cage was interested in Eastern philosophies, especially in Zen, from which he gained a treasuring of non-intention. Working to remove creative choice from composition, he used coin tosses to determine events (Music of Changes for piano, 1951), wrote for 12 radios (Imaginary Landscape no.4, also 1951) and introduced other indeterminate techniques.
His other works show his growing interest in the theatre of musical performance (Water Music, 1952, for pianist with a variety of non-standard equipment) and in electronics (Imaginary Landscape no.5 for randomly mixed recordings, 1952), culminating in various large-scale staged events .
Cage also appeared widely in Europe and the USA as a lecturer and performer, having an enormous influence on musicians and artists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage
Gorge Rochberg (1918-2005)
When George Rochberg was presented the Gold Medal of Achievement of the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in 1985, the citation read in part: "We celebrate George Rochberg for his craft, poetry, and determination to melt the ice in contemporary music Rochberg is a towering figure in American music. For over thirty years he has been a vibrant teacher and leading American composer — questioning, eloquent and deeply serious His work reunites us with our musical heritage and provides a spiritual impetus to continue."
This recognition climaxed a long career during which Rochberg produced a large body of orchestral and chamber music, as well as works (including his opera The Confidence Man) which emerged first from his involvement with atonal and serial music during the late ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s, and then from a gradual reassessment of, and ultimately a turn to, tonal music in the middle-late ’60s, ’70s, and on into the ’80s. It was this turn to a whole-hearted embrace of traditionally-oriented tonal possibilities which not only warmed up the musical climate but also opened the way to greater freedom and latitude in the way composers could express themselves. Rochberg may have been speaking for others as well as himself when he declared serialism "finished, hollow, meaningless"
The storm center of this change of heart and mind came with the first performance and subsequent recording of his Third String Quartet — a work whose appeal, according to Donal Henahan of the New York Times, lay in its "unfailing formal rigor and old-fashioned musicality. Mr. Rochberg’s quartet is — how did we use to put it? — beautiful."
Beginning with the first performances of his Night Music in 1953 by the New York Philharmonic with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting, other works have subsequently achieved major attention, notably the Symphony No. 2 with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra (1959 and 1961); the Violin Concerto, which Isaac Stern performed in America, England and France during the middle ’70s; the Oboe Concerto, commissioned for Joseph Robinson and performed by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic (1984); Symphony No. 5 premiered by Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony (1986); Symphony No. 6, with Lorin Maazel conducting the first performances with the Pittsburgh Symphony (1987); Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, commissioned for Anthony Gigliotti, principal clarinet, by Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and premiered in 1996.
Rochberg began his studies in composition at the Mannes School of Music, and, after serving as an infantry lieutenant in World War II, resumed them again at the Curtis Institute of Music. He taught at the Curtis Institute from 1948 to 1954; and in 1960 he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as a chairman of the Department of Music until 1968. He retired from teaching in 1983 as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the Humanities.
www.presser.com/rochberg
Victoria Jordanova
Victoria Jordanova is a composer and harpist who melds experimental techniques and electronics with classical training. “She has a tightly controlled focus to her work, a singularity of vision” Roddy Schrock wrote in the NewMusicBox Magazine.
Wishing to establish her own “sonic world” Jordanova in 1993 began to explore and use electronics as an intrinsic part of her composition process.
CRI's recording of her Requiem with other original harp solos released in the eXchange series in 1994 (CD 673) was named one of the top ten classical recordings of the year by Tim Page in New York Newsday. In 1997 her Dance to Sleep album was published on CRI Emergency Music series (CD 755) featuring her new works for traditional harp with different electronic module applied to each piece. Jordanova’s 2004 Outer Circles are a “sound sculpture” for sampled vocal acoustic and environmental sounds published by Innova Recordings (CD 614). Her first multidisciplinary work Panopticon (2003 ArpaViva DVD 001, distributed by The Cinema Guild of New York) was funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission and was performed by Jordanova and California EAR Unit, actor Jeff Atik and included video by Relja Penezic.
Jordanova is a founder of ArpaViva label dedicated to presenting new aesthetic tendencies in electro-acoustic music, interpretation, audio recording and sound processing. First ArpaViva CD released in January 2007 was premier recording of John Cage’s Postcard From Heaven for 1-20 harps.
Jordanova’s music for chamber ensembles was performed by the California EAR Unit, Zeitgeist, Bang on a Can All Stars, CurvdAir, Creative Voices, and others.
She holds BA, from Michigan State University and MA from New York University. She held the Langley Fellowship, and French Government fellowship as a resident of the Cité Internacionale des Arts in Paris. Jordanova is the former faculty of conservatory Mokranjac in Belgrade, New York University, and the Greenwich House Music School in New York.
www.victoriajordanova.com
Dedicated to my harp teachers:
Josip Pikelj, Lauralee Campbell, Lily Laskine, Jacqueline Borot, Marie Claire Trachier, Vera Dulova and Ruth Ingelfield.
Victoria Jordanova, June 2007
Produced by Victoria Jordanova
Executive producer: Relja Penezic
Digital editing and mixing: Victoria Jordanova
Mastered at Dan Dugan Sound Design, San Francisco.
Mastering Engineer: Dan Dugan
Cover image and design: Relja Penezic
Victoria Jordanova Photos: ©2007 ArpaViva Foundation Inc.
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