Reich ’s teenage love of jazz - in particular, Kenny Clark’s artists with the Modern Jazz Quartet - led him to take up percussion and form his own band. Reich once referred to Ligeti as “the European composer who has best understood both American and non-Western music.” On the surface, it must have seemed far removed from the concerns of Boulez and his fellow avant-gardists in Western Europe - with the exception of György Ligeti. Yet the Ensemble intercontemporain, founded by Boulez himself, would later commission Reich and won his admiration for its precision perfection in interpreting his music.Ĭompleted in 1971 after a year of work, Drumming is one of the acknowledged early masterpieces of Minimalism and a pivotal work in Reich’s development. Dismissive of Minimalism in general, he never programmed any Reich. Yet he had a blind spot for major contemporary American composers. His inaugural season as music director followed in 1967, and Boulez would return over the span of nearly four decades as music director at Ojai more often than any other artist.
By an ironic coincidence, Boulez paid his first visit to Ojai that same year. It was during the 1966 Summer Festival (programmed by Ingolf Dahl) that Steve Reich’s music made its Ojai debut: Michael Tilson Thomas played his Two Fugues for Piano.
Triste Silencio Program á tico is a piece of music in black and white.” “The second movement examines the dramatic contrast between light and shadow, while the third movement explores the destabilized characters and their inner mind with their complex psychological states. “The first movement focuses on the dark mood of the film as well as the visual style with its unusual angles and distorted sets,” writes Negrón. Triste Silencio Program á tico draws on some of the themes she wrote for this score. “At that time, I played violin and Celtic harp in a band called Sinestesia and one of our earliest gigs was to compose and perform a live score to go along with this film.”
CELTIC RHYTHMIC PATTERNS DRUMS SERIES
Caligari involves “an insane hypnotist uses a somnambulist to commit a series of crimes,” the composer explains. Directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, Dr. Caligari as well as by the aesthetic of German Expressionist cinema. Triste Silencio Programático (2002) is one of Negrón’s first compositions and was inspired by the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. One of her current projects, for National Sawdust, is Chimera, a work-in-progress she describes as “a lip sync opera for drag queen performers and chamber ensemble exploring the ideas of fantasy and illusion as well as the intricacies and complexities of identity.” W ritten to celebrate the 30 th anniversary of the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Lío de 4 is a brief and playful piece that focuses on the potential of rhythmic elegance and vitality.Ī generation younger and a native of Puerto Rico, Brooklyn-based Angélica Negrón is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who has received accolades for her idiosyncratic use of toys, electronics, and robotic instruments. Her opera Camelia La Tejana : Only the Truth was presented by Long Beach Opera in 2013. Based in her native Mexico City, where she grew up in a family devoted to the traditions of Mexican folk music, Gabriela Ortiz explores intersections between the realms of avant-garde, jazz, and folk. The music of Steve Reich completes this summer of creative juxtapositions - and fills in a missing link between the realms of European and American musical innovation.īut first, we turn to a pair of pieces by two other contemporary composers to start off this Concert for Ojai. We’ve encountered a mixture of leading European and American composers, reflected on Pierre Boulez and his ties to the natural setting of Ojai, and sampled from the legacy of figures from the post-Boulez generation like Olga Neuwirth, Unsuk Chin, and Pintscher himself. The 2020 Ojai Music Festival programs designed by Matthias Pintscher have alluded to numerous threads and connections, bridges and transitions - all resulting in the enticingly varied menu of today’s scene.
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