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Saturday, November 5, 8:00 pm Littlefield Concert Hall
MILLS PERFORMING GROUP: HOCKET!
Hocket is a rhythmic technique involving rapid alternation of notes between different instruments in an ensemble. Hocketing is characteristic of diverse musics of the world, including medieval European vocal music, Pygmy (Mbuti) and Bushmen (San) music from Africa, the minimalist music of contemporary composers like Steve Reich and Louis Andriessen, and the traditional gamelan music of Indonesia. This concert begins with yet another Southeast Asian source: the indigenous music of the Philippines.
Palbuniyan Kulintang Ensemble
Traditional Gong Music and Dance from Mindanao Island, Philippines
Danongan Kalenduyan, director.
Gathering Together (1983)
for piano eight hands
by Pauline Oliveros
Performed by pianists Lona Kozik, Chris Brown, Andrew Jamieson and Belle Bulwinkle
“Gathering Together was composed in March 1983 especially for The Kitchen benefit in New York City, to help raise funds for The Kitchen's new grand piano. It was composed for one piano, eight hands, to activate the full sonority of a grand piano.
As a child, I used to watch fascinated as my mother, grandmother and grandfather sat all three together on the piano bench to play six-hand versions of classics such as Verdi's Il Trovatore. That family activity is commemorated in Gathering Together." – Pauline Oliveros
INTERMISSION
HOCKET for Henry Cowell (1982)
For Bass Drums
By James Tenney
HOCKET is the second of the Three Pieces for Drum Quartet, which also includes WAKE for Charles Ives for Tenor Drums and CRYSTAL CANON for Edgard Varése for Snare Drums. Tenney’s brief program note states that the piece “explores certain parallels between pitch-intervals and time-intervals first suggested by Cowell. In addition, various devices – including the medieval hocket” – are used to create an illusion of spatial movement”.
All three pieces are derived from works originally composed for Stephan Von Huene’s mechanical drum. The mechanical construction and means of reading its “program” , encoded on large plastic disks, encouraged pieces with canonical and cumulative structures. The drum was installed for many years at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
The piece is in three main sections, each being canonical, and in some way a hocket. The first section consists of rolls which gradually “move” around the room by means of a hocketing crescendo/decrescendo roll in adjacent drums. This canon increases both in volume and in tempo, eventually interrupted by a single stroke of drum I, which leads through dovetailing with the roll-hocket diminuendo to a kind of disjointed fragmentation, or incomplete anticipation of a full rhythmic canon. That canon begins the second section, and is composed of successively shorter durations, with each drum entering three bars after the last one. Drum IV’s canon is incomplete, breaking down into a short study of hockets and accents between all four drums. The third section features a return through the fragmented canon to the rolls of the beginning, creating an inversion of the first section. (Analysis adapted from Polansky, The Early Works of James Tenney).
GANGSA for Ramón Santos (2010)
For four flat gongs and live computer processing
By Chris Brown
This piece was written for a festival at the University of the Philippines (UP) in February 2010 that centered on a revival of José Maceda's massive work for 20 radio stations titled Ugnayan (1973). One meaning of the title of that work in Tagalog is “interlinking”, which described the way 20 layers of recorded music played with traditional Filipino instruments interlocked as an audience equipped with transistor radios tuned in on 20 different radio stations. But it also referred to the interlinking of the past with the present, of traditional cultures with modernist ones. My piece is dedicated to Dr. Ramón Santos, a composer, conductor and associate of Maceda, who now directs the UP Center for Ethnomusicology.
Gangsa is the name of bronze flat-gongs which are traditionally played in interlocking fashion by ensembles from the Cordillera mountains of Luzon, Philippines. The piece is #8 in a series of Inventions that explore polyrhythmic interaction of performers with electronics. Its instrumental score is a polymetric pattern music in which each gangsa plays in a cycle of different numbers of beats, specifically 8,7,6, and 4. The patterns they play begin with a single open stroke on each downbeat and change by gradually filling out the second half of each cycle with short, muted strokes. The phasing of cycles results in much longer composite cycles that define the form, like a mandala built on circles of different but numerically related diameters. The tempo begins very slow, accelerating gradually to a tempo that stays constant for the long middle section of the piece, then decreasing speed again while the patterns contract in a completely symmetrical manner. The electronic part uses the same rhythms in playing sounds that are all transformations of each gong sampled live in the performance, with nothing prerecorded. But the patterns are shifted in time to hocket with the next strokes of each gong. In the sections with changing tempi, the recorded and live rhythms are inevitably out of sync, creating a rhythmic dissonance that contrasts to the tight synchrony in the middle fast section. The goal is to create an interdependency and balance of the acoustic and electronic components, merging ancient and contemporary technologies to create a continuously fluctuating soundfield from the rich metal timbres of the gangsa.
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