Interview with Stacey Rose

Composer and pianist Stacey Rose sits down to answer some questions about her upcoming performance with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra: ‘Raisons d’Etre-A new work for solo piano’.

Q: What is the inspiration for the piece?
SR: As many creations, this work was inspired by nature, literature, and, of course people.  Certain phrases in Thoreau, certain patterns and wildlife on the water, certain life experiences–all co-exist in this piece.

Q: Describe the process that you go through as a composer when creating a work.
SR:I knew that sometime in my life I must compose a work that I could perform with orchestra. Beginning with short phrases and motifs, I continued to expand ideas that organically connected to one another. I sketched the piece for solo piano with a second piano accompaniment, and then eventually “colored in” the accompaniment with each instrument.   Once the general outline was developed, it was easy to hear which instrument best served which line. It’s like casting an actor–you just know the quality of sound that a given note requires.

Q:Describe the process that audience will observe at the event.
SR: This is such a unique and exciting opportunity for an audience because they will have a truly raw and personal view into the birth of a piece.  It’s a coming together of professionals who have prepared their respective parts as best as possible before the important and revealing union that takes place in rehearsal.  As a soloist, I’m always surprised (not always pleasantly!) at how I feel my part is secure and “ready to go,” until I come side by side with orchestra.  My equanimity is unexpectedly shaken. The rehearsal process is quite fascinating to witness.  The audience will be a part of this process, seeing and hearing how an ensemble most effectively works together to rehearse, right then and there molding the work into “performance ready” shape.  It’s enormously gratifying to observe how something that initially seems like a puzzle of separate parts fuses together to become a unified whole.

Q: What are you looking forward to in working with Masestro Boughton and the NHSO?
SR: It is a tremendous privilege and sense of confidence to know that my new work will be in the hands of such a master as Maestro Boughton.  It will be thrilling to share a first performance experience of my composition with a conductor who possesses such sensitivity to detail but also a keen understanding of and demand for clear musical architecture.  I feel assured that he will help me to project the piece in exactly the way I have conceived it, while also adding his personal insights.  He draws the best from this group of talented players.  I so look forward to collaborating with him, having a wonderful time in joining our perspectives to achieve a product that gives life to my musical ideas.

Win 2 Tickets - Or 20% off for Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

The New Haven Symphony is proud to be part of the GoogleHaven100.

As sponsor of GoogleHaven gift #9 of 100, we are giving away two tickets to our May 13 performance of Beethoven’s epic Symphony #9, Ode To Joy. This 2-ticket gift to our best seats in historic Woolsey Hall is yours if you’re the 12th person to email us.  Everyone else who emails from today to May 13 will get a 20% discount and no handling fees.

To qualify, please:
email us at boxoffice@newhavensymphony.org.
use subject line GoogleHaven100
tell us your name and why you want to see Beethoven’s Ode To Joy.

Orchestra has ‘new level of precision and excitement’

(Editorial published in the New Haven Register on Sunday, May 2, 2010)

The Register has been paying attention the the New Haven Symphony lately, and it should.

The April concert was spectacular, including Jin Hi Kim’s wild drumming as she played her own piece and the overwhelming Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, which brought an emotional audience to its feet.

It has taken a couple of years for word to get around that William Boughton is drawing out of the symphony a level of precision and excitement that we’ve never heard before, but now people are hearing this news, and the audience is growing.

I usually hear symphonies on the radio and at each concert I’m amazed again at the brilliance of a live orchestra as the sound of horns soars over Woolsey Hall from one direction, flutes from another.

The symphony will play Beethoven’s Ninth on May 13 with the Hartford Chorale. This promises to be an even more exciting evening, if possible.

Alice Mattison
New Haven

10 Questions with Composer-in-Residence and guest artist Jin Hi Kim

Q: When did you know that you wanted to make a career in performance?

A: I thought I was not going to be komungo soloist when I came to the USA, but I met Henry Keiser (guitarist) in San Francisco and we started improvising together, then I was introduced to many other leading musicians and invited to festivals throughout the world as a komungo soloist. So I became a professional performer. Over three decades I have been the soloist for my own composition with  orchestras and chamber ensembles.

Q: Did you have a particular teacher or mentor that influenced your career / performance choices? If so, how?

A: As many American composers were influenced by Cage, so was I by getting to know about his musical philosophy. I interviewed him for Korean music magazine, and  In 1989 I was invited to a gathering of composers in a residency with John Cage called “Composer to Composer” in Telluride, Colorado, which was directed by Charles Amirkhanian. I was deeply inspired by Cage, because he was a rare model for crossing Asian philosophy with America?s liberal spirit. His works are full of message and surprise. I recalled the Asian ritual aesthetic of irregularity through his works of happening. I am very familiar with silence in music through my Korean court music, but his silence dealt with physical sound around the silence. This fascinated me, because he was the first composer who challenged my old traditional belief of silence in music.

Q: Describe what it’s like to be a composer/performer as opposed to simply a composer or simply a musician. What are the inherent challenges?

A: I have double pleasure being a composer and performer. I want to introduce many Korean instruments to the west, but I can’t find a great Korean musicians in the USA, so I compose new pieces using my primary instrument komungo, and my new invention electric komungo, tall and colorful barrel drums and janggo drum. It is real pleasure to create new music, and perform my own music with other musicians. I like the collaborative process of learning new piece together, and I can improvise my part further during the performance, which is very luxury situation.

Q: If you could play any other instrument other than your own, what would it be and why?

A: I play various drums as I mentioned before. In Korea all musicians play janggo drum because the music is based on highly stylized rhythmic cycles on janggo drum. They do not have a conductor in traditional orchestra, instead musicians listen to the janggo rhythmic cycles. So every body including singer and dancer plays the drum. Once learning the various rhythmic cycles, it is easy to play another drums like dancer’s barrel drums that I will play in my Monk Dance with NHSO on April 22 at Woolsey Hall.

Q: If you could play (or sing) any piece (regardless of instrument) what would it be and why?

A: Improvisation. I love to make new sound every time as every day is different in our life.

Q: What do you feel is your greatest musical accomplishment?

A: My work is all about collaboration between Korean and non-Koreans. My intension of cross-cultural music creativity is for aesthetic balance and aesthetic equality between Korean and Western (dominated musical power) as well as collaboration with world music masters. I have devoted to learning and understanding other cultures besides my Korean music.  I have had the privilege and opportunity to collaborate with many leading improvisers around the world in various traditional and contemporary settings.  These experiences have made my life richer and helped my musical creativity to expand in scope. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for me to be creative in my life and respect and embrace unique individual voices with respect to cultural and ethnic backgrounds.  I believe these cross-cultural efforts may contribute to a deep and healthy exchange of many different attitudes in music making.

Q: What is the non-musical accomplishment you are most proud of?

A: I was grown up under Confucianism attitude in Korea: Male is better, the Older is better.  I was rare Korean woman who has become very strong with individual belief. I know that young generation of female in Korea are impressed and influenced by me.

Q: How does “Monk Dance” speak to the performer and the audience?

A: I composed Monk Dance for Western orchestra and Barrel Drums. The orchestra captures the feeling of slow monk’s dance, and I develop a vivid energy on drums. So the whole performance balances yin and yang, slow and fast, gracious and vigorous. The drum solo is derived from the Buddhist monk’s drumming on a big barrel drum for enlightenment. My way of playing drums is dance like. (not dancer’s dance, but musician’s dance). The rhythmic patterns, inner energy and body movements are all integrated on the drums and drum sticks.

Q: What should the audience be listening for in terms of technical and thematic areas during the piece?

A: Imagine a female monk is dancing when the orchestra plays slowly and graciously, and enjoy the vigorous energy from the drums. Be ready for new sound from the orchestra. It is good to be shocked once in your life.

Q: What do you find most challenging about “Monk Dance”?

A: The orchestra members have to put some Korean spices on notes. In string sections there are many graphic symbols for performing techniques, which is I call “Living Tones”. This is different attitude of making music.- each note has own life, tone gestures and energy.  I think the musicians may find the Living Tones strange first, but it will be only for the first time. I am sure that they will get to use to that and they may like them as they try Korean food first time.

Don’t miss our Family Concert this Sunday!

The NHSO presents Big Blue Marble this Sunday April 11 at 2:00pm for our last Family Concert of the season. The Instrument Discovery Zone begins at 1:30pm. The symphony performed the concert for student groups from grades 2-8 on Tuesday April 6 at Woolsey Hall to thunderous applause! Big Blue Marble is themed on the sea and its inhabitants and includes some of the most unusual guest artists you will ever hear on a concert stage – a recording of humpback whales!

Here are some of the enthusiastic responses from Tuesday’s concert:

“The concert was wonderful.  Our kids were enthralled and so appreciative.  I loved that … the theme of water was expressed in so many different ways. Thank you and thank you to the symphony!” – Susan Wiles, Country School, Madison

“Thank you for the lovely concert yesterday!!  My students truly enjoyed the performance and the presentation. Students and parents alike had great things to say about the performance!” – Jane Postovoit, Baldwin School, Guilford

“I liked the whales!” – Fourth Grade Student, Barnard Elementary, New Haven

Tickets are $5 for children, $15 for adults and $10 for seniors. To purchase tickets please Click Here https://www.choicesecure01.net/mainapp/eventschedule.aspx?Clientid=NewHavenSymphony. TICKETS CAN ALSO BE PURCHASED AT THE DOOR BEGINNING AT 1PM ON SUNDAY.

Woolsey Hall renovations?!

For nearly 117 years the NHSO has performed mostly in Yale University’s historic Woolsey Hall. Known for its grandeaur, elegance, and yes, those famed wooden seats,Yale Daily News reporter Nora Caplan-Bricker explores the University’s long-term plans to renovate our famed concert hall:

Woolsey on ‘wish-list’
Administrators say renovation needed but unlikely

One of Yale’s most iconic spaces may be in need of a face-lift, but it’s unlikely to get one any time soon.

The spacious Commons eatery and the 2,700-seat Woolsey Hall auditorium often house large-scale gatherings, from formal meals like the Freshman Holiday Dinner and traditional events like Convocation. University President Richard Levin said these spaces have fallen behind much of Yale’s newly renovated campus. But other projects have consistently taken precedence and, especially in light of the recession, will continue to do so.

“They’re vast spaces, and they’re going to be quite expensive to renovate,” Levin said. “While they are certainly deserving of a renovation, they’re serviceable, and they still have an aura of elegance and grandeur and importance in our community.”

While the economic downturn has forced the delay of $2 billion in building projects, Levin said Commons and Woolsey were not among them. New residential colleges, the School of Management building, an updated biology facility and the renovation of the Sterling Chemistry Laboratory would all have broken ground if not for the crash, but Woolsey and Commons remained “on the wish list, but not the to-do list,” Levin said.

They have been there for years. Although administrators looked into tentative renovation plans and budgets nearly a decade ago, Provost Peter Salovey said administrators have never found refurbishing Woolsey and Commons as pressing as other projects, such as building Loria Hall, Rosenkrantz Hall and a host of new buildings on Science Hill and renovating the 12 residential colleges, the Rudolph Center and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Still, a quick walk through the Woolsey rotunda reveals cracked floors and discolored walls.

University Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer said administrators dreamed of receiving a gift to fund the renovations upon Yale’s tercentennial in 2001, the 100th anniversary of the building’s construction. She added she still hopes the University will find a donor for these spaces in the next decade, but with the development office focusing on the two new residential colleges and the SOM building, they are far from the top of the list.

Levin said the cost to renovate Commons was estimated at over $50 million nearly a decade ago, and Woolsey was expected to cost more than $100 million. Those numbers would be higher today, he added.

Each space presents its own engineering challenges. In Commons, the question is how best to install air conditioning to make the dining hall more pleasant in the early fall and late spring. But given the room’s size, and a lack of convenient places to conceal air condition ducts, this won’t be an easy task, Levin said.

In Woolsey, Levin said the echoing acoustics —which have led members of the Yale Concert Band to affectionately call the space a “toilet bowl” — need an update. The auditorium was built for organ music, which requires a great deal of reverberation, which is why the seats are wooden and don’t have cloth padding that would absorb sound. But the hall’s excessive resonance can sometimes swallow up orchestral music or the spoken word, Levin said.

Levin said he hopes to someday install mechanical elements into Woolsey’s ceiling, making it possible to change the acoustics to fit the occasion at hand.

Published for Yale Daily News March 25, 2010

5 Fun Facts: Schoenberg Edition

1.  Irving Thalberg once sent an emissary to persuade Arnold Schoenberg to produce a score for The Good Earth. The man, finding Schoenberg indifferent at best, launched into an animated discussion of the potential for music to complement the film. “Think of it,” he enthused. “There’s a terrific storm going on, the wheat field is swaying in the wind, and suddenly the earth begins to tremble. In the midst of the earthquake, Oo-Lan gives birth to a baby.” “With so much going on,” Schoenberg drily replied, “what do you need music for?”

Schoenberg never did score a Hollywood film. “I will write the music,” he once offered, “and then you will make motion pictures to correspond to it.” Unsurprisingly, the producers declined.

2.  Following his arrival in the United States, Arnold Schoenberg was forced to teach music courses at all levels to make ends meet. He once found himself instructing a class of kindergarten music teachers. “You are teachers?” he asked, bewildered. “You mean there are people who know less than you do about music?”

3.  George Gershwin often sought advice and lessons from other composers (Ravel and Stravinsky among them). While playing tennis with Arnold Schoenberg one day, Gershwin asked him for some lessons as well. Schoenberg declined: “I would only make you a bad Schoenberg,” he explained, “and you’re such a good Gershwin already!”

4.  “My music is not modern,” Schoenberg once remarked. “It is only badly played.”

5.  Reluctant Modernist

In 1917, the forty-three-year-old Arnold Schoenberg was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Though he was careful to conceal his civilian identity, he was often asked by fellow soldiers: “Aren’t you that controversial modernist composer?” Eventually he was forced to come clean: “I must admit that I am,” he declared, “but it’s like this: somebody had to be, and nobody else wanted to, so I took it upon myself.”

“I am a conservative,” Schoenberg declared on another occasion, “who was forced to become a revolutionary.”

Revolution

The upcoming concert, Revolution, on March 25th at Woolsey Hall and March 26th at the Quick Center on the campus of Fairfield University, features Beethoven’s masterful Symphony No. 3, “Eroica” and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). While every classical music aficionado, and many classical music novices know the Eroica, Schoenberg’s work remains unexplored terrain for many. Schoenberg’s upending of traditional harmony with his pioneering of the twelve-tone system of composition has meant that many listeners have rejected Schoenberg outright. This is a shame because Transfigured Night owes far more to Wagner and Brahms than to Schoenberg’s later works. While there are hints of the atonality that he would eventually embrace fully, Schoenberg is romantic, lush and lyrical in this work. Based on the poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel, Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night is in five parts that mirror the five stanzas of the poem. Each part of musical work evokes the same emotional ground as its corresponding stanza.

So why is Eroica paired with Transfigured Night under the moniker Revolution? We know that Schoenberg was a revolutionary figure in 20th Century music. He fundamentally changed, for better or worse, the musical landscape; not just classical music but all western music. Beethoven, too, closed the book on the Classical era and ushered in the Romantic era, fundamentally changing the symphonic form in the process. But again, why these two particular works, especially in light of the fact that Schoenberg’s truly revolutionary work was to come much later with the spiky, and perhaps harsh, strains of atonalism?

The Eroica is revolutionary on several levels. It was penned in homage to the revolutionary Napoleon (when the revolutionary Napoleon became the Emperor Napoleon Beethoven stripped the dedication to his once democratic hero.) More than that, though, is the nature of the work itself.  As Maestro Boughton has pointed out, the Eroica introduced the notion that symphonic music could be the vehicle to express specific ideas and emotions. Thus, 100 years later (and only separated by an intermission on the NHSO program!) Schoenberg took Beethoven’s revolutionary romantic ideal to heart in Transfigured Night, though the emotions and ideas expressed are quite different.  Following is an English translation of the poem and when you come to the concert hall on March 25th or March 26th you can decide how well Schoenberg described the poem in musical terms and how true to Beethoven’s revolutionary ideals he was.

Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht) by Richard Dehmel
Translated by Stanley Appelbaum
Reprinted from the website oldpoetry.com

Two people walk through a bare, cold grove;
The moon races along with them, they look into it.
The moon races over tall oaks,
No cloud obscures the light from the sky,
Into which the black points of the boughs reach.
A woman’s voice speaks:

I’m carrying a child, and not yours,
I walk in sin beside you.
I have committed a great offense against myself.
I no longer believed I could be happy
And yet I had a strong yearning
For something to fill my life, for the joys of
Motherhood
And for duty; so I committed an effrontery,
So, shuddering, I allowed my sex
To be embraced by a strange man,
And, on top of that, I blessed myself for it.
Now life has taken its revenge:
Now I have met you, oh, you.

She walks with a clumsy gait,
She looks up; the moon is racing along.
Her dark gaze is drowned in light.
A man’s voice speaks:

May the child you conceived
Be no burden to your soul;
Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming!
There’s a glow around everything;
You are floating with me on a cold ocean,
But a special warmth flickers
From you into me, from me into you.
It will transfigure the strange man’s child.
You will bear the child for me, as if it were mine;
You have brought the glow into me,
You have made me like a child myself.

He grasps her around her ample hips.
Their breath kisses in the breeze.
Two people walk through the lofty, bright night.

My Irish Valentine

A wonderfully romantic musical time was had by all last weekend at the New Haven Symphony Pops My Irish Valentine at East Haven High School, Hamden Middle School and Shelton Intermediate School. Soloist Michael Zegarski wowed the crowd with romantic standards such as Delovely and Some Enchanted Evening while conductor Jerry Steichen led the orchestra in beautiful favorites including the Suite from Titanic and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy.

Here’s what one of our patrons had to say: “My Irish Valentine concert was GREAT!  As are all of Gerald Steichen’s concerts. The orchestra is great.  Gerald Steichen is my very favorite conductor.  Please be sure he is coming back in the fall. There was no mention of the next season fall 2010-2011 but please let those in power know that we want Jerry back. We have been coming to the NHSO for many many years and have learned so much from Gerald Steichen.  We love him dearly.  He is the best conductor!”

Once again we would like to thank all of our patrons for coming out and our sponsors, Whitney Center, Tweed New Haven Regional Airport, Town Fair Tire, R.D. Scinto, Newtown Savings Bank and Saint Raphael Healthcare System for making our performances possible.

Fiddle Faddle Follow-up

Hard to believe Fiddle Faddle was already 10 days ago. Thank you to all the parents, greandparents, and children who came out to this fantastic show! If you missed it, watch this fantastic video created by photographer Monika Szymanska!

Click here: Fiddle Faddle

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