Grass - Ceremony I & III - Paul Chihara / Neville Marriner

Paul Chihara - Grass/ Ceremony I & II

Paul Chihara

Grass (Concerto for Double Bass & Orchestra

Buell Nedlinger, Double Bass

Ceremony I

London Symphony Orchestra

Neville Marriner, Conductor

Lead Soloists

Roger Lord - Oboe

Maurice Meulien & Douglas Powrie - Celli

Robin McGee - Double Bass

Michael Frye - Percussionist

Ceremony III

London Symphony Orchestra

Neville Marriner, Conductor

Solo Flutist: Peter Lloyd

The amplified Hichi-Riki performed by Mr. Suenobu Togi

The Hichi-Riki is a traditional Japanese double-reed instrument used in Gagaku (Court Music)

The Contemporary Composer in the USA 

Turnabout QTV-S 34572

Quadraphonic / Stereo Compatible

1974

From the back cover: Buell Neidlinger is principal bass with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and teaches at the California institute of the Arts. He has been a member of the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, the Houston Symphony under Sir John Barbirolli, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf. He has also served on the faculties of the New England Conservatory of Music, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York under Lukas Foss. Mr. Neidlinger has given numerous solo recitals, notably at Carnegie Hall in New York and Jordan Hall in Boston, and has been soloist at the Ojai, Aspen, and Tanglewood Festivals. In 1968, he was a featured soloist at the Stravinsky Festival at Lincoln Center, New York. In Houston, he was director of the Contemporary Music Society. Mr. Neidlinger is perhaps best known for his performances with jazz artists Cecil Taylor and Gil Evans, and Frank Zappa. His performances on recordings of classical, rock, and jazz music are numerous. More recently, he has produced rock and roll records.

Grass was composed at the request of the noted bass virtuoso Bertram Turetzky, and first performed by him at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music on April 14, 1972. Originally conceived as a concerto for bass and orchestra, it eventually evolved into a symphonic meditation on nature (and death), in which the soloist is the principal actor. Grass takes both its inspira- tion and its title from a poem "The Mower's Song" by the sixteenth century English poet Andrew Marvell:

My mind was once the true survey 

Of all these meadows fresh and gay; 

And in the greenness of the grass 

Did see his hopes as in a glass; 

When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

Though often sunny in its imagery, pastoral poetry is gen- erally sad and elegiac, both in tone and subject matter. So, too, I hoped my composition would suggest deeper responses than its surface sound images. The Marvell poem, recited through the five trombones, is incorporated into the generall orchestral pulse and fabric without focusing attention exclusively on its linguistic properties. Other bits and fragments of personal nostalgia, both literary and musical, find their way into the score – most notably, two sentimental old songs of mine, "Pammy's Tune" and "Whisper Julie." Grass is, I think, a very sad composition, a sort of orchestral requiem, and it dwells largely within a private world of personal associations and images. It is in five movements, played without pause.

As a concerto, it makes heavy demands on the soloist, both technically and compositionally. In the final two movements, for example, he performs against a variety of orchestral textures-some delicate and others raucous, and in a number of different musical styles, from classical to jazz to funky rock. He is asked to integrate these disparate stylistic elements. with his own musical personality, moving naturally from strictly – notated to freely– improvised passages and cadenzas. Mr. Neidlinger, who performs the solo part brilliantly in this recording and who is equipped with the most dazzling technical facility, as well as the broadest musical awareness, meets all demands with gratifying ease and sensitivity.

The Ceremony series of compositions belongs to its own sound world, quite distinct from that of Grass. The word "ceremony" implies for me a stylized ritual corresponding to some deeper, often spiritual transformation. I view these compositions as a kind of musical "rite of passage;" they deal with levels of transformation, and as such may be considered studies in continuous development or variation. They are concert meditations on simple musical objects, such as the unison, the rhythmic ostinato, the triad, etc. Textures are not so much composed as generated, the lines being "woven" by simple but incessant operations on the given materials in incantatory fashion. The principal harmonic interval is the unison (not the octave) – all other combinations being con- sidered dissonant or passing.

Ceremony I was written (and first performed) during the Marlboro Festival of 1971. Ceremony I (not represented on this recording) was composed the following year for the New York flutist Paul Dunkel and members of Speculum Musicae. Ceremony III was completed at Tanglewood in August, 1973, among the beautiful trees of the Berkshire Mountains. It was first performed in November of that year by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (who commissioned the work) under Neyille Marriner. 

Paul Chihara

Paul Chihara was born in Seattle in 1938. His principal teach- ers of composition were Robert Palmer at Cornell University, Nadia Boulanger, and Gunther Schuller. He has received numerous awards and commissions, most recently from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Fromm Foundation for the Houston Symphony, and the San Francisco Ballet. His Forest Music for Orchestra, which is the concluding work in his Tree Music series, has been performed with much success by Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in America and on their 1972 tour of Japan. It was also performed by London's New Philharmonia Orchestra at the Edinburgh Festival of 1973. Mr. Chihara is a music adviser to the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, a free-lance composer, and part-time teacher at UCLA. His compositions are published by C. F. Peters.

Neville Marriner is music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as of London's Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. A former violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra and conducting student of Pierre Monteux's, Mr. Marriner ranks among the most honored and sought after of internationally active conductors. His recordings have won him many awards, including the Netherlands' Edison Prize, Vienna's Mozart Gemeinde Prize, Paris' Grand Prix du Disque, and "recording of the year" from High Fidelity, Stereo Review, and The Gramophone. Ceremony III is dedicated to him and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.