Speeding toward her Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance, Madeline plays her fourth recital with scintillating works by Lūcija Garūta, Alexander Scriabin, Kate Soper, Peter Ablinger, and Kaley Lane Eaton. These selections defy description and simply must be heard! Program notes are found below.
This recital is presented in partial fulfillment of the Doctoral of Musical Arts Degree.
You can catch the full performance on Wednesday, Feb 9 at DMA recital 4 - YouTube.
Four Preludes - Lūcija Garūta (1902-1977)
I. Grave
II. Andante medatitivo, Tempo rubato
III. Lento, rubato
IV. Apassionato, esulato (sempre rubato)
Sonata no. 1 - Aleksandr Scriabin (1872-1915)
I. Allegro con fuoco
II. Adagio
III. Presto
IV. Funèbre
~ INTERMISSION ~
So Dawn Chromatically Descends to Day (2018) - Kate Soper (b. 1981)
From Piano and Voices (1998) - Peter Ablinger (b. 1959)
Billie Holiday
Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (Mother Theresa)
Bonnie Barnett
FREE (2019) - Kaley Lane Eaton
A few Programme Notes:
So Dawn Chromatically Descends to Day – Kate Soper
Here is a central source of musical emotion. We internalize the motion of pitches and chords in reaction to contextual forces in musical space. We attribute agency and causation to musical motions that violate intuitive physics and inevitability to motions that yield to musical inertia and force. The character of the musical motions, which is shaped also by their temporal realization, mirrors equivalent motions in the “real” physical world. We map specific musical motions onto specific emotional qualities, again in reflection of real-world equivalences.
[M]usic and language share the same evolutionary roots. [They] diverged in their most characteristic features: pitch organization in music, and word and sentence meaning in language. Poetry straddles this evolutionary divergence by projecting, through the addition of ordinary speech of metrical and timbral patterning, its common heritage with music.
Incidentally, text setting is a rich source of evidence for the interface between music and poetry.
- Fred Lerdahl, from Two Ways in Which Music Relates to the World
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost
Voices and Piano
I like to think about Voices and Piano as my song-cycle, though nobody is singing in it: the voices are all spoken statements from speeches, interviews or readings. And the piano is not really accompanying the voices: the relation of the two is more a competition or comparison. Speech and music is compared. We can also say: reality and perception. Reality/speech is continuous, perception/music is a grid which tries to approach the first. Actually the piano part is the temporal and spectral scan of the respective voice, something like a coarse gridded photograph. Actually the piano part is the analysis of the voice.
Music analyses reality.
- Peter Ablinger
FREE is about free will, or, the “right to future tense” which is increasingly under attack as our economic forces converge to mine our private lives for data (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). FREE is also about my personal experience with this phenomenon, which in many ways mirrors my life as a young classical singer and pianist, where my private life and emotional experience was always “put to work” in service of music of the canon. Sometimes I could express myself through Beethoven, but mostly all I wanted to do was hold the pedal down and play the black keys, my head inside the piano, bathing myself in a wash of pentatonic sound. When reading Zuboff’s masterful book about the loss of private expression in our impending surveillance economy, I built a pitch-following theremin to act on the piano that can only read and spit out one pitch at a time; as the piano is playing an entire ocean of sound, the theremin generates frantic attempts to replicate it, to no avail, resulting in a strange human-computer counterpoint. This, to me, expresses the experience we are all wading through currently: losing our private experiences, our private sadness, joy, hope, love, and expression, to technology and capitalism.
- Kaley Lane Eaton