jeremy beck

never final, never gone

innova 696

www.innova.mu

Shadows & Light for string quartet

Nevsky String Quartet

Tatiana Razoumova and Svetlana Grinfeld, violins;

Vladimir Bistritsky, viola; Dmitry Khrytchev, violoncello

Four Piano Pieces

Heather Coltman, piano

Prelude

Dance

Meditation

Toccata

Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano

Tatiana Razoumova, violin; Maria Kolaiko, piano

I Rapture

II Reminiscence

Never Final, Never Gone for SATB chorus and piano

University of Northern Iowa Concert Chorale

Bruce Chamberlain, conductor

Diane Beane, piano

Sonata for flute and piano

Cynthia Ellis, flute; Roberta Garten, piano

I Maestoso

II Allegro giocoso

III Andante con moto; Grazioso

Kopeyia for percussion ensemble

University of Northern Iowa Percussion Ensemble

Randy Hogancamp, director

In the fall of 1993, I was teaching courses in American Music at Herzen University in St. Petersburg, Russia; I began the composition of Shadows & Light that October. The sacred music of the Russian Orthodox Church had originally inspired me to write a choral piece, but the lack of a suitable text for this music led me to recast it as the beginning of my string quartet’s second movement. Once this decision had been made, the rest of the music seemed to almost write itself and I completed this work in February of 1994 after I had returned home to Cedar Falls, Iowa. While there are no direct quotations of any Russian melodies or harmonies, this piece (for me) is infused with the spirit of the people, places and events - both contemporary and historic - that I encountered there. It is therefore only fitting that the Nevsky String Quartet should present the premier recording of the work.

Formally, the first movement is in the character of a scherzo and is based on gradually developing motives organized in groups of four (notes, rhythmic units). The longer, second movement begins with what had been the choral music. The climax of this music is followed by a transition which suggests improvisation - this then leads to a presto. The forward motion of the presto music is interspersed with recollections of one of the first movement’s melodic ideas; later, it is also interrupted by sharp juxtapositions of a disjunct recapitulation of the “improvised” transition music (like flickering shadows and light through the branches of a tree on a sunny day). Near the end of this movement, there is a return of the opening choral material, but this time it is presented as a series of overlapping, truly-improvised motives in each of the four instruments. The viola’s entrance in this closing section reintroduces the main melodic idea from the presto and so provides a link between the different musics of this movement. Rather than leading to a rousing return of the presto, the music which emerges from this improvisation is drawn from the choral music, the spiritual center and impetus of the entire piece.

Shadows & Light is my third string quartet. It was premiered 17 April 1994 by the Faber Quartet (Fred Halgedahl and Julie Hinson, violins; Kathleen Sihler, viola; Jonathan Chenoweth, violoncello) on a concert jointly produced by the Beethoven Club and the Iowa Composers Forum at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The first three of the Four Piano Pieces were composed in 1995, in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The suite begins with a Prelude, which is a lyrical and pastoral work - it is dedicated to pianist Heather Coltman, who first recorded this set in 1998 (for a CD release on heng hau records of Boston, which is now out-of-print). The second piece, Dance, is rhythmically active, with surprising changes of meter. The music is propelled by the syncopation that results from these sudden shifts of the pulse. Dance is then followed by Meditation, a pensive movement, with slowly-moving harmonies.

The last piece of the set, Toccata, was actually composed first, in 1988 in New York City. This Toccata was composed as an encore piece for the pianist Deborah Jamini. It is in a “traditional” toccata style, with running sixteenth notes marked vivace, albeit in my own tonal idiom.

never final, never gone for SATB chorus and piano was composed for Bruce Chamberlain and the University of Northern Iowa Concert Chorale. Both the text and the music were written while I was teaching in St. Petersburg, Russia in the fall of 1993. During that time I was living in a dormitory of Herzen University, located just a few blocks off the main thoroughfare of Nevsky Prospect, near the great Kazansky Cathedral. There is a small park across from that cathedral where I often used to sit and watch people on cool autumn mornings. I wrote the following in that park:

in the beautiful dream, a man wakes up.

nervous in the garden, he remains on his back

feeling warm earth while gazing at the sky

(disappearing stars).

now feeding him, she

(not seen before this)

whispers the cooler air of the morning night, also fading.

the man hopes, by lying still, to keep the disappearing

constant and mesmerizing; the fading,

a luxurious delicacy:

never final, never gone.

listen – now she (how she) laughs.

I lived in New York City from 1978-88, and during that time (which included my undergraduate years at the Mannes College of Music), I composed a number of short sonatas for solo instrument and piano. This was done partly as a way to explore some of the various sonorities and capabilities of each particular instrument. Certain of these works (including the Sonata for flute and piano) remain personal favorites of mine. My musical language then, as now, is in a rhythmically-based, tonal dialect. The style of the Sonata is American lyrical, while the form is generally free and rhapsodic in nature (the exception to this is the second movement, where the return of the opening section unfolds as a complete retrograde). This work was composed in 1981, and is in three short movements. The first is a free, fantasy-like movement which begins with the solo flute presenting the main melodic and motivic material. The second movement, Allegro giocoso, is in an A-B-A’ form and begins with the two instruments in opposition; the piano plays short, percussive figures while the flute’s music is more mellifluous. In the middle section, the piano becomes seduced by the flute’s music and joins with it before rejecting it and returning to its more independent stance. The last movement revisits certain aspects of the first movement from a slightly altered perspective. Included within this perspective is music which may be considered an interpolated slow movement (marked grazioso). This movement then ends with a brief passacaglia in the piano while the flute plays above it in a free, improvisatory-like manner.

The Sonata for flute and piano won a Special Recognition Award in the 1983 National Federation of Music Clubs Young Composers Contest. The professional world premiere was given on 11 January 1987 by Alexa Still (flute) and Frank Corliss (piano) at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, where it was favorably reviewed in the New York Times. Recorded for the first time in 2001 by Cynthia Ellis (flute) and Roberta Garten (piano), this second edition of the work is dedicated to them.

kopeyia (pronounced ‘ko-pay-YEE-ya’) was commissioned

by Randy Hoepker, director of the Southeast Polk High School Percussion Ensemble in Des Moines, Iowa. Composed in October – December of 1995 the work is based, in part, on field recordings of traditional Ewé drumming which I made in the summer of 1995 while working in Ghana on a grant from the Kopeyia Ghana School Fund. This work (named after the village in which I was teaching and studying) is not merely a transcription of those recordings. Rather, one piece (Ga-hú) provided certain rhythmic and structural relationships which I then recast and developed. Most of these traditional ideas are to be found in the unpitched instruments which provide the underlying “carpet” for the entire work (cowbell, shaker, conga, two snare drums, suspended cymbal and bass drum). The harmonic language found in the pitched instruments (two marimbas, vibraphone, timpani and chimes) is wholly my own and bears no relationship to West African melodic material. One should note that there are critics who have reservations about this type of borrowing from other musical cultures, some of them even going so far as to declare such borrowing “musical colonialism.” It seems to me that this type of borrowing and influence has been going on for centuries; think of Mozart and the influence of Italian opera on his stage works or Debussy’s noted interest in the Javanese gamelan. I would only caution listeners that Kopeyia is not an example of West African drumming. I encourage anyone interested in “the real thing” to go out and find a recording of it or, even better, take a course and learn how to play some of it; I am sure they would find that music to be as fascinating and as exciting as I found it to be during the summer of 1995.

© 2008 by Jeremy Beck

Kopeyia is scored for 11 players; the music is available on a rental basis from The Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music, The Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103-1116, tel (215) 686-5313.

“jeremy beck is exhibit a in classical music’s defense against the charge of being out of touch.” ‑The best new recordings from North America, Gramophone (June 2006)

A dramatic and lyrical composer of works for varying orchestral, chamber and vocal forces, Jeremy Beck’s first two innova CDs were included by Gramophone in its June 2006 Reviews: The best new recordings from North America. pause and feel and hark (innova 650), released in May 2006, features some of his other chamber music, including Black Water for soprano and piano. A monodrama based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, reviewers have found Black Water “enthralling…stunning in its intensity” while Oates herself has written of her “admiration for [this] beautiful and haunting composition.”

In 2004, Wave - a Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra CD devoted to Beck’s music - was released as innova 612. Reviews of this CD describe his Sinfonietta for string orchestra as “harmonically inventive, thoroughly engaging…sinewy and gorgeous” and Death of a Little Girl with Doves for soprano and orchestra as displaying “imperious melodic confidence [and] fluent emotional command.” At its world premiere, this operatic soliloquy based on the life of sculptor Camille Claudel was appraised as flowing “seamlessly through the use of a dazzling variety of instrumental and vocal color…a fresh, exciting piece by a major talent.”

Beck’s opera The Biddle Boys and Mrs. Soffel was named by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as one of the Top Ten Cultural Events in Pittsburgh for the year 2001, while the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review hailed the work at its premiere as “superb…more successful compositionally…than many new works seen at major opera houses.” Another of his operas, The Highway, was presented by New York City Opera as a part of that company’s Showcasing American Composers series in May of 2000; at the premiere of this opera at Yale, the New Haven Register declared that Beck’s “handling of dramatic relationships and superimposed time was masterful.”

Beck has earned awards, grants and honors from the American Composers Orchestra, California Arts Council, the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Composers Forum, Kentucky Foundation for Women, Millay Colony for the Arts, Meet the Composer, Wellesley Composers Conference, Kentucky Arts Council, Iowa Arts Council and the American Music Center.

In addition to private studies with Samuel Adler and Jack Beeson, he holds degrees in composition from the Yale School of Music, Duke University and the Mannes College of Music, where his principal teachers included Lukas Foss, Jacob Druckman, Stephen Jaffe and David Loeb.

Born in 1960 in Painesville, Ohio, Beck was also raised in Kansas City, Hinsdale, Massachusetts and Quincy, Illinois. He currently resides with his wife and son in Louisville, Kentucky, where he is a practicing attorney.

Nevsky string quartet (Tatiana Razoumova and Svetlana Grinfeld, violins; Vladimir Bistritsky, viola; Dmitry Khrytchev, violoncello) was originally founded in 1995 by students of the St. Petersburg Conservatory (Russia). The Quartet has won numerous awards and prizes in Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Sweden including the International Dmitri Shostakovich String Quartet Competition (1996 and 1999) and First Prize in the Swedish International String Quartet Competition (1999).

In 2002, the Quartet was featured in a recital of Russian and American classics as a part of Boston University’s Fifth Annual Russian Festival.

Heather Coltman (piano) made her debut in her native country of Zambia at the age of five, and emigrated to the United States in 1966. Since that time she has performed extensively as a solo and collaborative musician throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa. Her principal teachers include Lita Guerra, Claude Frank, David Bar-Illan and Nadia Boulanger, and she holds degrees from the University of Texas (D.M.A.), the Mannes College of Music (M.M.) and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati (B.M.). Among the many competitions in which Dr. Coltman has received top awards are the Johannes Hodges International Piano Competition and the Geza Anda International Piano Competition.

Additionally, she won the Outstanding Accompanist Award in both the Corpus Christi Young Artists Competition and the Emanuel Feurmann International Cello Competition. Dr. Coltman is Chair of the Department of Music at Florida Atlantic University where she is a Professor of Music and the Director of Keyboard Studies. Her artistic association with Jeremy Beck began in the early 1980’s when they were both students at the Mannes College of Music in New York. She has premiered many of Beck’s works; her recording of his Sonata No. 3 (1997) with cellist Emilio Colón was released in 2006 on Beck’s first CD of chamber music, pause and feel and hark (innova-650).

In addition, Dr. Coltman may be heard performing Beck’s Nocturnes (1999-2000) on her solo debut CD entitled Dream Chasers (Wisdom Recordings, 2005).

Bruce Chamberlain (conductor) is the Director of Choral Activities at the University of Arizona. Equally at home in the orchestral and choral repertoire, Dr. Chamberlain has appeared as a guest conductor with the symphony orchestras of St. Petersburg (Russia), San Antonio (Texas), and Jackson (Tennessee), the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic (Czech Republic) and the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, among others. Collegiate choral groups under Dr. Chamberlain’s direction have been featured at national and divisional conventions of the American Choral Directors Association and have made numerous European tours to perform with leading international orchestras, including the English Chamber Orchestra and the Buda Pest Chamber Orchestra. A magna cum laude graduate of the Indiana University School of Music with B.M.E., M.M. and D.Mus. degrees, Dr. Chamberlain studied conducting with Julius Herford, Margaret Hillis and John Nelson.

Cynthia Ellis (flute) is a member of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, playing solo piccolo since 1979. Her performance credits also include the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Opera Pacific, Pasadena Chamber Orchestra and the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz, California.

She has also served as the principal flutist for touring ballet companies on their Orange County (California) stops including the Royal Ballet of London, American Ballet Theatre, Stuttgart Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet. In January of 1995, she was appointed Principal Flutist with the Opera Pacific Orchestra.

She has recorded with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, the Pacific Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and has also performed on several major motion picture soundtracks. Chamber music credits include performances on the Pacific Symphony Orchestra Chamber Music Concerts, the Corona del Mar Baroque Festival and the Sonora Baroque Festival.

In March of 2000, her chamber trio Les Amis Musicalles won first place in the National Flute Association Chamber Music Competition. Ms. Ellis received her B.M. and M.M. degrees with Honors from California State University-Fullerton, where she currently holds a lectureship position teaching flute and coaching chamber music.

Roberta Garten (piano) received B.M. and M.M. degrees in piano performance from the University of Southern California. Her performances have earned awards from both the Musical Merit Foundation and Music Teachers Association of California as a member of their Young Artists Guild.

She has performed at the Kennedy Center and the Falla Conservatory in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as in Japan, Korea, and Spain. She was featured as accompanist for Gene Pokorny, Principal Tuba for the Chicago Symphony on his 1990 CD Tuba Tracks. Ms. Garten is the staff accompanist at the Colburn School in Los Angeles and is frequently heard in recitals throughout Southern California.

Randy Hogancamp (director, UNI Percussion Ensemble) has been the faculty percussionist at the University of Northern Iowa since 1972. Along with his teaching, Mr. Hogancamp performs regularly as timpanist and principal percussionist in Iowa with the Dubuque Symphony, the Waterloo/Cedar Falls Symphony, the Des Moines Symphony and the Cedar Rapids Symphony while each summer finds him performing with the New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra.

Mr. Hogancamp holds a B.M.E. from the University of Northern Iowa and an M.M. in percussion performance from Northwestern University. In addition to directing the UNI Percussion Ensemble, Mr. Hogancamp also directs the UNI West African Drum Ensemble, having completed a program of study in Ewé drumming at the Dagbe Cultural Institute and Arts Center in Kopeyia, Ghana.

credits & acknowledgements

Shadows & Light for string quartet was recorded in April of 2003 at the St. Petersburg Palace of Youth Arts (St. Petersburg, Russia). Producer: Vladimir Bistritsky. Engineer, editor and mastering: Leonid Ribkin.

Four Piano Pieces was recorded 17 May 2003 at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, Florida). This recording was partially supported by a travel grant from the School of Music at the University of Louisville (Kentucky). Producer: Jeremy Beck. Engineer: Scott Wynne. Editor and mastering: Jonathan Marcus.

Sonata No. 2 for violin and piano was recorded in 2003 at the St. Petersburg Palace of Youth Arts

(St. Petersburg, Russia). Producer: Vladimir Bistritsky. Engineer, editor and mastering: Leonid Ribkin.

Never Final, Never Gone for SATB chorus and piano was recorded in 1994 at the University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls, Iowa). Producer: Jeremy Beck. Engineer, editor and mastering: Thomas Barry. This recording was previously released in 1995 on a National Association of Composers, U.S.A. CD entitled

“An American Sampler - New Music from NACUSA” on the ERM label (ERM-6662).

Sonata for flute and piano was recorded 29 November 2001 in Anaheim, California. Producer: Jeremy Beck. Engineer: Shantih Haast. Editor and mastering: Jonathan Marcus.

Kopeyia for percussion ensemble was recorded 20 September 1997 at the University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls, Iowa). Producer: Jeremy Beck. Engineer, editor and mastering: Thomas Barry. Assistant engineer: Jeff Schafer. This recording was previously released in 1998 on a CD entitled “Places Not Remote - Music from the Setting Century, Vol. 3” on the Living Artist Recordings label (LAR-Vol. 3).

CD Mastering: Jonathan Marcus for Orpharion Recordings (Long Beach, California).

CD Design: Route 8 - A Design Firm

innova Director: Philip Blackburn

Operations Manager: Chris Campbell

All compositions are published by Ashmere Music (BMI). Scores and parts may be purchased directly from the composer. Please visit the composer’s website at www.BeckMusic.org for further information.

Innova is supported by an endowment from the McKnight Foundation.