NWS concludes its exploration of the world of percussion with this special performance featuring tabla master Zakir Hussain performing the world premiere of his own work. NWS alumnus Alex Orfaly’s Danzón Luna will also receive its world premiere. This performance is part of NWS’s season-long festival Percussion Perspectives.

 

Zakir Hussain’s performance is sponsored in part by a gift from The Tandon Family Foundation.

 

NWS thanks its 2020-21 donors.

 

Program

Lou Harrison

Fifth Simfony (1939)
Approximate duration: 16 minutes

The modern history of the percussion ensemble centers on the confluence of three maverick composers from the West Coast. The elder statesman was Henry Cowell, who wrote pioneering works for percussion while he was incarcerated in California’s San Quentin State Prison. His two chief disciples were John Cage and Lou Harrison, who mounted groundbreaking percussion concerts in Seattle, where Cage worked as a rehearsal pianist for dance classes, and San Francisco, where Harrison lived.

In one of his first works for percussion ensemble, completed as a 21-year-old in 1939, Harrison chose the somewhat subversive title Fifth Simfony. The fact that he labeled it his “fifth” even though he had completed no prior symphony (or “simfony”) must be seen as Harrison thumbing his nose at Beethoven’s most iconic composition. Harrison and company were consciously turning away from the hierarchical system of musical interplay that Beethoven epitomized, leaning instead into an Asian sensibility that was less attached to forcing sounds into fixed relationships, or even recognizable pitches. In that sense, Harrison’s “simfony”—using a bastardized spelling of his own invention—was honoring the idea of a symphony in its most literal and basic sense, as derived from Greek words that mean “sounding together.”

Harrison’s three movements have a crisp and recognizable architecture, following the old fast-slow-fast pattern of the Italian sinfonia (overture) that predated the mature symphony. There is no doubt that the four percussionists are sounding together in meaningful ways, even in the complete absence of identifiable pitches, and this proof-of-concept helped to establish the percussion ensemble as a viable and permanent addition to the concert music landscape.

Alex Orfaly

Danzón Luna (2021; world premiere of NWS commission)
Approximate duration: 8 minutes

Alex Orfaly, a Bay Area based percussionist and composer, has an active performance career, having played with numerous Bay Area orchestras in recent years including the San Francisco Symphony. An alumnus of the New World Symphony (NWS), he served as Timpani Fellow from 2002 to 2006. He has performed with orchestras worldwide, including the Tuscon Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Palau de Les Arts in Spain, and currently serves as Principal Timpanist for the Sun Valley Symphony in Idaho, where he has played since 2007. As a composer, Mr. Orfaly has a growing body of pieces to his credit, many featuring percussion. His Concerto for Brass and Percussion was premiered by NWS in 2004 and in 2012 NWS also commissioned his Divertissement No. 2, a kind of miniature concerto for timpani (playing an impressive 15 kettledrums) accompanied by brass and wind ensemble, along with a wide array of percussion instruments. Mr. Orfaly’s most ambitious piece to date might be his dramatic 2017 work Breaking Light for Five Percussionists and Orchestra, written for the Sun Valley Symphony, which involves many dozens of percussion instruments ranging from Chinese gongs to Taiko drums to an empty propane tank.

Mr. Orfaly composed Danzón Luna for the New World Symphony specifically to feature its current Timpani Fellow, Matthew Kibort, occupying Mr. Orfaly’s old position with the Symphony. In discussions about the commission, NWS Artistic Director Michael Tilson Thomas suggested a piece with a Latin flavor to it, and Mr. Orfaly explains,

When he said “Latin” two things popped into my head: a Latin percussion section of Guiro, Maracas, Claves and Bongos and, the open string tuning of a guitar, which lead me to want to include a harp in the piece. After that I wanted to create a Latin-inspired ensemble so the piano, vibes and bass all seemed to fit very naturally.

The title of the piece has a double meaning. In literal translation, the title suggests a Moon Dance. But Mr. Orfaly also has composed the piece as a tribute to his beloved black standard poodle named Luna, who passed away last year. The animated spirit of the music evokes Luna’s fun-loving nature, which Mr. Orfaly also captured in an earlier work, his 2011 The Mean Man’s March, based on the human and canine social complexities of the dog park.

A sustained and mysterious introduction ending with a rising chain of perfect fourths leads to the first rhythmic groove of Danzón Luna, beginning with a kind of modified clave rhythm given by the piano. Mr. Orfaly has the pianist mute the strings inside the piano for greater percussive effect. The Latin percussion instruments are layered on top of this ostinato, joined by a quick moving pentatonic pattern in the timpani. The timpani eventually picks up the syncopated rhythm of the piano introducing a jagged rising melody that is irresistibly catchy and will form the basis for the rest of the piece. After a metrically dynamic duet passage with the bongos and timpani, the texture begins to gradually build until a sudden drop exposing an unusual harp trill that sets the tone for a contrasting groove. Mr. Orfaly establishes yet another groove when the meter shifts from 4/4 to 3/4 in the most texturally dense section of the piece. Another sudden drop has the bongos and other Latin instruments lead the timpani towards its brief cadenza, based on the earlier metrically shifting passage. The final portion of the piece, marked “Jubilant,” brings back all of the main material of the piece in a culminating splash.

Danzón Luna’s composer profile and program note provided by Alex Orflay.

Steve Reich

Drumming, Part I for Four Percussion (1970-71)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes

While supporting himself as a taxi driver in San Francisco in the 1960s, Steve Reich experimented with compositional techniques based on tape loops and repetitive cycles, helping to give rise to a transformative new style that has been dubbed “minimalism.” After a landmark series of tape pieces, he created one of his first significant works for acoustic instruments, Piano Phase, in which two pianists play repeating patterns that gradually fall out of sync with each other.

Following a life-changing visit to Ghana, Reich’s experiments with phasing culminated in Drumming from 1970-71, a work of unprecedented scope that foreshadowed his large ensemble masterpieces from later in the decade, including Music for 18 Musicians. In Part I, a single measure of rhythmic material provides all the raw material needed to elaborate a continuous structure for four pairs of tuned bongos that can stretch to 20 minutes. As the players slip into different rhythmic alignments, the tonal differences between the high and low bongos create the perception of a shape-shifting melody that disintegrates and re-emerges time and again.

Zakir Hussain

Chalan No. 1 in D (2021; world premiere of NWS commission)
Approximate duration: 14 minutes

Chalan is a term in Indian music used to describe the improvised development of the characteristics of both a raag and a rhythm cycle. It also points to the salient feature (or face) of a raag known as pakkad. Every raag has a few landmark phrases with which the audience is familiar and, when arranged in the right order with improvisations spaced in between, the artist is able to draw the face of a raag. This process in a nutshell is known as chalan.

In the Indian rhythm repertoire, a tabla player sparsely uses some familiar patterns to draw a grid of a chosen rhythm cycle with a point identified from where the artist would slide right back into the grid. This said improvisation could be of one round of the rhythm cycle or as many as the performer chooses at the time, thus laying down a course to traverse through spontaneously. The length of the improvisation is similar to that of a jazz soloist taking one round around the course (changes) or as many as appropriate at that time. In this process, there is similarity between Indian music and Jazz.

Chalan No. 1 in D is laid out in the rhythm cycle (taal) of 16 beats; the name of this rhythm cycle is teentaal.  In a solo rhythm performance in the Indian system, there is usually either sarangi (bowed) or harmonium used as instrumental accompaniment, known as nagma or lehra. The instrumental musician plays a composed melody of the same length as the rhythm cycle (taal) metronomically (like a bass line), keeping time for the tabla player and the audience. This is being performed here by the mallets; they also at points melodically amplify the patterns, thus signaling the arrival of the downbeat (the sum, first beat of the cycle).

The rest of the ensemble, after establishing the cycle with theka (the signature rhythm melody of 16) and reciting it for the benefit of the audience, uses various components of tabla repertoire like peshkar, to lay down the grid, and kaida (pre-composed theme) on which to improvise. They follow this up with gat and paran (fixed compositions).  The tradition is to first recite these compositions to highlight their poetic beauty and grammar and then perform them, as the ensemble does here. Tihai (a phrase repeated three or nine times with or without space in between each repetition) is a frequently occurring feature used to arrive at the first beat of the cycle (the sum).  The ensemble, after establishing the theka and peshkar theme then introduces various tihai’s before moving on to a kaida.

                – Zakir Hussain

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.