Program Notes, April 17, 2025
Sarah Gibson (1986-2024)
Sarah Gibson was a Los Angeles-based composer and pianist whose works drew on her breadth of experience as a collaborative performer with a deep interest in the creative process across various artistic mediums. She received honors and recognitions such as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s Sound Investment composer, American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Readings, Copland House Residency, Victor Herbert ASCAP award, and a Chamber Music America Grant. She received commissions from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center, Arco Collaborative, Aspen Summer Music Festival & School, and Seattle Symphony, among others.
Gibson’s music has been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Jennifer Koh, Departure Duo, HOCKET, and at various venues across the United States and in Europe. As a pianist, Sarah performed with many of these ensembles as well as with wild Up, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and the Atlanta Symphony where she debuted under the direction of Donald Runnicles in 2005.
Sarah was co-founder of the new music piano duo, HOCKET, which has been lauded as “brilliant” by the LA Times’ Mark Swed, and was a core artist for the inimitable Los Angeles Series, Piano Spheres. HOCKET has held residences at Avaloch Farm Music Institute and received grants from the Earle Brown Music Foundation and the Presser Foundation. HOCKET has performed at such festivals as the MATA Festival, the L.A. Philharmonic’s Noon to Midnight, Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, and the Other Minds Festival.
Sarah received degrees in Piano and Composition from Indiana University and the University of Southern California. Alongside Artistic Director Andrew Norman, she was the Lead-Teaching Artist for the esteemed Nancy and Barry Sanders Los Angeles Philharmonic Composer Fellowship Program. Sarah was Assistant Teaching Professor in Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the College of Creative Studies and Music Department where she was the director of the Ensemble for Contemporary Music.
Soak Stain (2023)
An innovative technique created by American abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, “soak stain” involves diluting acrylic paint until it is fluid enough to pour onto a raw canvas from a coffee can. In Frankenthaler’s paintings, this technique allows one to see colors competing and blending with its contiguous rival. I love this approach and the way it provides both structured blocks of color in Frankenthaler’s works and leaves amoeba-like and uneven edges as various colors meet. In my piece, I try to play with this idea by evoking clear formal structures defined by liquid melodies and melting textures.
– Sarah Gibson
Gregory Beyer (b. 1973)
Fulbright Scholar, composer, educator, and percussionist Gregory Beyer is a contemporary music specialist whose singular artistic voice tastefully blends classical, jazz, and world music sensibilities.
He is Artistic Director of Arcomusical, an organization dedicated to the Afro-Brazilian berimbau that has been featured on PBS’s “Now Hear This” and NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. In the United States, Arcomusical has released three albums, MeiaMeia (2016, Innova Recordings), Spinning the Wheel (2019, National Sawdust Tracks), and Emigre and Exile (2022, New Focus Recordings). Additionally, Beyer produced Arcomusical’s Belo Horizonte-based sister ensemble Arcomusical Brasil, its debut album, Semente (2021, Selo Grão Discos). An active researcher and collaborator, Beyer’s most recent article, “Arching Over the Atlantic: Exploring Links between Angolan and Brazilian musical Bows” was published in Ethnomusicology, the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Earning second place at the 2002 Geneva International Solo Percussion Competition, Beyer has given solo performances throughout the United States as well as Canada England, Germany, Switzerland, China, Brazil. He recently gave the world premiere of Four Elements, a multi-movement solo marimba work by Cambodian-American composer, Chinary Ung.
Professor Beyer is the Director of Percussion Studies at Northern Illinois University, and is a member of the University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Composition’s Grossman Ensemble. From 2001-2014, Beyer performed with flutist Erin Lesser as Due East, a duo that released three albums of music written for the ensemble. From 2011-2018, Beyer was a core member of Chicago’s premiere new music group, Ensemble Dal Niente.
Greg is proud to play Sabian Cymbals, Innovative Percussion Sticks and Mallets, Evans Drumheads, and Pearl/Adams keyboards and drums.
(Amen)ding Thirteen: a sign of abundance (2024)
This piece was commissioned by and composed for the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition’s resident thirteen-member sinfonia, the Grossman Ensemble. The number thirteen focused my attention and opened a path toward developing a unifying force to animate the composition. I began to compile a list of thirteen possible inspirations:
Thirteen musicians… thirteen harmonies… thirteenth chords… palindromic 13/8 meter (3+2+3+2+3)… thirteen rhythmic variations… a thirteen-minute piece with five formal sections of 3+2+3+2+3 minutes… tempi in multiples of thirteen…the sacred rhythms of Babalú-Ayé, the Afro-Cuban orisha of sickness and of healing, whose numerological symbol is thirteen…
After researching thirteen’s artificially maligned status in the western world, it became clear that the acculturation process instills in groups of people a web of values and beliefs that also include irrational fears and superstitions. In the United States and elsewhere in the west, one particularly widespread example is known as “triskaidekaphobia:” the fear of the number thirteen. For many, the slightest mention of Friday the 13th can trigger the foreshadowing of bad luck. Sadly, this fear manifests itself in our lived reality. According to statistics kept by the Otis Elevator Company, for example, for every high rise building in the United States with a named thirteenth floor, there are six more that jump from the twelfth to the fourteenth.
Some suggest this may be attributable to Judas Iscariot, the infamous thirteenth guest at the Last Supper of Christ. Some suggest that thirteen is simply an uncomfortable, unfamiliar number as it takes us one step beyond the seeming perfection of twelve, with its 12 months, 12 hours, and all of its structural symmetry that shows up in music and in our lives as a comforting and regulating presence.
Yet in other cultures thirteen carries no such negative charge, and in some cases it even represents the auspicious and perfectly natural. For example, Native American tribes referred to the North American continent as the “Great Turtle Island” and used the thirteen “scutes” (visibly embossed divisions) on the back of a turtle’s shell as a physical symbol to follow the thirteen roughly 28-day cycles of their lunar calendar (13 x 28 = 364), something both deeply connected to living close to the earth (i.e. following its seasons of planting and of harvest, etc.) as well as something deeply feminine.
Perhaps most poignantly, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery. Yet, this ostensibly excellent development in our nation’s history contained a damning loophole. Thanks to recent scholarship by Isabel Wilkerson, Ava DuVernay, and so many others, we know full well that life in a post-Thirteenth America has been rife with over a century full of imprisonment, lynchings, and still other forms of backlash against our African-American brothers and sisters. All too often, irrational fear begets deadly violence.
Thanks to the generosity of Northern Illinois University, I wrote (Amen)ding Thirteen during a magical sabbatical leave during the fall of 2023 that allowed my wife and I to live together daily for an extended period. One day as I was sharing these initial thoughts about twelve’s “perfection” and thirteen’s fraught significance, my wife commented, “Thirteen is one more than perfection. Like a baker’s dozen, it is a sign of abundance.”
Her beautiful ray of sunshine stayed with me like a meditation while writing this music…indeed, love conquers fear.
I recently came across Picasso’s charming July 7th, 1961 painting, “Ronde de la jeunesse.” Thirteen young dancers circle and sway around a blue dove – a secular symbol for peace with connections to early Christianity. The colors of the 13 dancers – 3 black, 3 red, 3 yellow, and 4 white – immediately brought to mind the powerful lyrics of Stevie Wonder’s 1976 anthem, “Black Man.” Below the central image is another series of 13 red and black dots scattered around a shape that could easily be interpreted as the number 3. The centrally located dove and its Holy Trinity symbolism conveys a story of three-in-one and one-in-three.
As Picasso’s youthful and childlike dance implies, and in Wonderian and Wilkersonian fashion, (Amen)ding Thirteen is a musical prayer offering. And it is an invitation to dance in thirteen like its never been danced. After all, losing oneself in movement and in a good sweat may just break the feverish nonsense of unfounded fear that holds us back from our best selves and may allow us to pierce darkness into the light of an abundant future for everyone.
– Gregory Beyer
Thomas Adès (b. 1971)
Thomas Adès was born in London in 1971. Renowned as both composer and performer, he works regularly with the world’s leading orchestras, opera companies and festivals.
His compositions include three operas : the most recent of which The Exterminating Angel premiered at the 2016 Salzburg Festival and subsequently has been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the Royal Opera House, London all conducted by the composer; The Tempest (Royal Opera House and Metropolitan Opera); and Powder Her Face. His orchestral works include Asyla (CBSO, 1997), Tevot (Berlin Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall, 2007), Polaris (New World Symphony, Miami 2011), Violin Concerto Concentric Paths (Berliner Festspiele and the BBC Proms, 2005), In Seven Days (Piano concerto with moving image – LA Philharmonic and RFH London 2008), Totentanz for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and orchestra (BBC Proms, 2013), and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (Boston Symphony Orchestra, 2019). His compositions also include numerous celebrated chamber and solo works.
Thomas Adès has been an Artistic Partner of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 2016 and will conduct the orchestra in Boston and at Tanglewood, perform chamber music with the orchestra players, and lead the summer Festival of Contemporary Music. He coaches Piano and Chamber Music annually at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove.
As a conductor, Thomas appears regularly with the Los Angeles, San Francisco and London Philharmonic orchestras, the Boston, London, BBC and City of Birmingham, Symphony orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouworkest, Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Czech Philharmonic. In opera, in addition to The Exterminating Angel, he has conducted The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Opera House and the Zürich Opera, The Tempest at the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera, and Gerald Barry’s latest opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in Los Angeles (world premiere) and in London (European premiere). In the 2019-20 season Thomas has a residency with the Royal Concertgebouworkest and also conducts the London and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestras and makes his debut with Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the USA, he returns to the Los Angeles and Boston Symphony Orchestras. Thomas also returns to the Royal Opera House twice this season, to conduct Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and the premiere of his new ballet The Dante Project.
His piano engagements include solo recitals at Carnegie Hall (Stern Auditorium), New York and the Wigmore Hall in London, and concerto appearances with the New York Philharmonic. This season will see the release of his album of solo piano music by Janacek and he will also join Simon Keenlyside in a recital of Schubert’s Winterreise at the Vienna State Opera.
His many awards include the Grawemeyer Award for Asyla (1999); Royal Philharmonic Society large-scale composition awards for Asyla, The Tempest and Tevot; and Ernst von Siemens Composers’ prize for Arcadiana; British Composer Award for The Four Quarters. His CD recording of The Tempest from the Royal Opera House (EMI) won the Contemporary category of the 2010 Gramophone Awards; his DVD of the production from the Metropolitan Opera was awarded the Diapason d’Or de l’année (2013), Best Opera recording (2014 Grammy Awards) and Music DVD Recording of the Year (2014 ECHO Klassik Awards); and The Exterminating Angel won the World Premiere of the Year at the International Opera Awards (2017). In 2015 he was awarded the prestigious Léonie Sonning Music Prize and in Spring 2020 he will receive the Toru Takemitsu composition award at Tokyo Opera City where he will conduct a concert of his own music.
Living Toys (1993)
Living Toys was commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain for the London Sinfonietta and premiered on February 11, 1994 at Barbican Hall, with Oliver Knussen conducting. The composer has provided the following epigraph and note:
“When the men asked him what he wanted to be, the child did not name any of their own occupations, as they had hoped he would, but replied: ‘I am going to be a hero, and dance with angels and bulls, and fight with bulls and soldiers, and die a hero in outer space, and be buried a hero.’ Seeing him standing there, the men felt small, understanding that they were not heroes, and that their lives were less substantial than the dreams which surrounded the child like toys.” (Anon., from the Spanish)
“The child/hero’s dream-adventures form the five ‘figurative’ sections, offset by three more volatile, dynamic paragraphs: painting versus film, perhaps.
“First, Angels, a long horn solo haloed with gongs and little trumpets. Then with a change in tempo and the first bass note (a ‘B’), into the ring charges an Aurochs (the extinct European bison). He is whipped and goaded by the brutal, elegant matador-kid until his bellows of defeat (horn again) metamorphose into the first appearance of the ‘hero’s theme.’ This rolling, square tune makes three appearances, immediately preceding each of the three unnumbered sections (BALETT, etc.). In these there is a reordering of shared material (hence anagrammatical titles): three-voice descending chords, each voice restricted to a single interval. Recurring in BATTLE and dominating TABLET, this material evolved in BALETT from a fragment of the bullfight out of which it flies: descending in E-D-C (horn, inversion of the start of the hero’s theme), combined with the angelic horn solo (trombone, this time).
“The BALETT cadences abruptly on a menacing octave ‘B’ where the little hero has a bad dream — a grotesque army, led by a pair of virtuosi (one is a maniacal drummer, the other has a nightmarish talking bugle), advances on him to the point when — it being forbidden to dream one’s own death — he switches dreams. He is in a film, in deepest space, dismantling a great computer, whose vast intelligence dwindles to a wilting Vicwardian music-hall waltz (contrabassoon and double bass). It is the gentlest of executions, and the little astronaut whistles his tune like the sweet fifing of a tiny recorder.
“There follows an unstoppable, suffocating BATTLE, in which the monstrous militiamen reappear and (E-minor climax) finish their fell work. Our hero dreams himself a full military funeral, with muffled drums and tear-blurred mass humming of his tune; a TABLET is erected, and there is a three-gun salute, or three cheers, or three rockets, or three big puffs of dust as the story book is slammed shut and he drifts off to join his first adversaries.”