Cover drawing by Mahot de la Querantonmals.
Additional Notes by J. Tucker Batsford
Serenus 12028
Charles Whittenburg - Games Of Five: For Woodwind Quintet
The University of Connecticut Wind Quintet - Paul Dunkel, flute; Milton Hamilton, oboe; Michael Sussman, clarinet; Edward O'Conner, French horn; William Scribner, bassoon
Leonard Balada - Geometrias No. 1
Francis Chagrin Ensemble
Conducted by Harold Farbeman
Arthur Custer - Sextet for Woodwinds and Piano
Interlochen Arts Quintet: Gary Sigurdson, flute; Robert Morgan, obo; Fred Ormand, clarinet; Norman Schweikert, horn; Lewis Lipnick, bassoon; Donald Moore, piano
Richard Moryl - Modules
Nancy Turetzky, piccolo; Bertram Turetzky, string bass; Howard Williams, trombone; Tele Lesbines, percussion
From the back cover: ABOUT THE COMPOSERS (in order of their appearance):
CHARLES WHITTENBERG was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1927. He is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Connecticut. His many citations and awards include two successive Guggenheim Fellowships (1963-64 and 1964-65), The Rome Prize of the American Academy (1965- 66), a teaching grant in new music performance techniques from the American Council of Learned Societies (1962), the Residency in Music Com- position of the Center of Liberal Studies, Washington, D. C. (1965) and two concurrent research endowments from the University of Connecticut Research Foundation (1969). Prior to his present academic appointment Mr. Whittenberg was affiliated with the Electronic Music Center of Columbia and Princeton Universities, the Summer Institute of Bennington College, Vermont, and Editor of the Bulletin of the American Composers Alliance. He is a frequent contributor to the Yale Journal of Music and "Perspectives of New Music." (Princeton University Press)
Mr. Whittenberg has written for all the musical media, his works ranging from the pure instrumental solo, voice and piano, voice with varied instru- ments, through the brass and woodwind quintets and chamber orchestras to the symphony orchestra itself. These compositions have been performed throughout the United States and with increased frequency in the concert halls and over the broadcasting networks of most of the countries of Europe, eastern and western. The American Brass Quintet has played his "Concerto for Brass Quintet" (1968) and his "Triptych for Brass Quintet" in cities as far apart as Munich and Hong Kong, Sidney and Zagreb.
"Although I realize that your implications are positive, I dislike the appellation, "avant garde," Whittenberg said at one point to an interviewer for the Connecticut Music Educators Association. "I do not reject the past. What is of no value in the past has now rejected itself. But I respect all true tradition, especially the Central European tradition in which an order is present that Igor Stravinsky once called 'Apollonian.""
LEONARDO BALADA was born in Barcelona, Spain, on September 22, 1933, and has been a resident of the United States since 1955. A graduate of both the Juilliard School of Music and the Conservatorio del Liceo of Barcelona, he has studied composition with Aaron Copland, Alexander Tansman, Vincent Persichetti and Bernard Wagenaar. He also studied conducting with Igor Markevitch and Siegfried Landau. Until recently head of the United Nations School (NYC) Music Department he is at present (1971) Associate Professor of Music at the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburg.
His works have been commissioned or performed by many outstanding artists, including Victoria de los Angeles, Montserrat Caballe, Teresa Ber- ganza, Ruggiero Ricci, Salvador Dali, Gaspar Cassado, Narciso Yepes. His orchestral works have been performed by the New Orleans, Pittsburg, Louisville, Aspen Festival, Rochester, Cincinnati, Spanish R.T.V. Symphony Orchestras as well as the Orquesta Filarmonic de Madrid.
Balada is extremely active and versatile as a composer, his works encompassing a wide range of repertoire, extending even to a concerto for bandoneon, a kind of large scale concertina, and orchestra. To the date of this recording his greatest successes have been in the larger forms: "Guernica" (after Picasso's painting); "Sinfonia en Negro" (to Martin Luther King); "Maria Sabina," an imposing work for female reader, actors, large chorus and orchestra. Since its premiere at Carnegie Hall in April, 1970, when the work ran to an hour and a half, Balada has made a short- ened 'suite' version that runs to less than thirty minutes. In addition, his large works include a concerto for guitar and orchestra, the aforemen- tioned concerto for bandoneon and orchestra, a piano concerto, a "Musica Tranquila" for strings, and most recently "Cumbres" for concert band.
ARTHUR CUSTER'S credits both as man and composer are almost too voluminous to enumerate in this brief space. Born in Connecticut in 1923, he has earned degrees from the University of Hartford (Engineering), the University of Connecticut (B.A.), University of Redlands (M.Mus.) and the University of Iowa (Ph.D.). He has studied composition with Paul Pisk, Philip Bezanson and Nadia Boulanger. He has written a considerable body of musicological comment and criticism for the various learned musical journals. He has been Supervisor of Music for the United States Air Force in Spain, serving while there as consultant to the U.S. Information Agency in Madrid, lecturing in both Spanish and English. For a number of years he was director of the St. Louis Center in the Arts, a position similar to the one he holds now with the Rhode Island State Council On The Arts.
It is proper to regard the year 1957 as the beginning of Arthur Custer's career as composer since he has destroyed all his works written prior to that year. While many of the first "professional" pieces were on a small scale, intended primarily for teaching, he also wrote some quite advanced pieces for chamber groups (brass, woodwinds, small orchestra) and even one "Concert Piece" for full orchestra. In the next five years his work assumed greater authority, a more adventurous quality, as he ventured in- to the area of new sounds and effects to be derived from the classical instruments and their players:instrumentalists sing, play percussion instruments, add other effects to performance. In these pieces there is a pur- poseful and inescapable incongruity. There is parody, irony and humor.
As to Arthur Custer's latest and current interests, these include the tape machine in all its uses, especially in its use as a kind of third dimension for the otherwise linear music; jazz as a genre which may be synthesized with his customary dissonant serious production; and a kind of functional serious music which is adapted to the uses of film, television and living theater which tends to unify all components into a total artistic product. Some of Custer's newer works will find their way into Serenus' "The Mu- sic of Arthur Custer - Vol. II. "Vol. I bears the number SRS 12024.
RICHARD MORYL is a native of Newark, New Jersey. He studied compo- sition with Frederick Breydert, Iain Hamilton, Boris Blacher and Arthur Berger. While his earlier compositions were influenced by Hindemith, he feels really that everything he has seen, heard or performed has had some influence on him; he feels his music is really his own.
Moryl's list of awards includes a Fulbright Scholarship, the Tanglewood and Bennington fellowships, and many grants and commissions. He has also been associated with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and is currently teaching composition at Smith College.
ABOUT THE MUSIC
GAMES OF FIVE: For Wind Quintet, Op. 44, was written for the University of Connecticut Wind Quintet between June and September, 1968. The use of the word 'games' does not refer to any athleticism on the part of the players but rather to the 'play' of rhythms, instrumental groupings and tonal competitions. The work is intended to be a succession of witty, sportive but musically rational orders of non-representational events.
It is not necessary for the enjoyment of this work to have the slightest knowledge of the "Twelve-Tone System." Nothing "deep" Hes hidden in the music's core that repeated hearings will not reveal to be the result of intention, conscious or unconscious. It is the discovery of the composer's "games" that add to the initial pleasure of hearing.
GEOMETRIAS (Geometries) is written for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Trumpet and Percussion (preferably 2). The title reflects more an atti- tude than a musical translation of geometric elements. There are, how- ever, two aspects of the work which might be considered "geometric. One could be identified as "the point" or "points," the staccati and pointillistic strokes without harmony, the material of Section "A." The other might be called "the line" or "lines," homophony, essentially harmo- nic, formed by clusters, as in Section "B." The introduction, appearing several times, is the "biological" union of A and B. Also important to the concept of the work are the rows (scales), constructed in such a way as to avoid a tonal center. The placement of the instruments, too, farther apart than customary, adds a three-dimensional element to the piece. Balada has tried to create his own idiom, different from the now conventional tech- niques of post-serialism, action music or aleatorism. "Geometrias" was commissioned by the National Music Festival of Barcelona and was first performed there in October, 1966.
SEXTET FOR WOODWINDS AND PIANO was written in 1961 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Arthur Custer's Doctorate in composition at the University of Iowa. It is a pivotal piece in that it establishes a basic gesture and point of view for a number of subsequent works. The first movement is labelled "Sinfonia," the second a "Cantilena" and the third a "Finale," not unexpected in a last movement. These titles might seem to promise a work of sombre conventionality but the fact is that it is gay, debonair, even ebullient. Written for woodwind quintet (Fl., Ob., Cl., Hn., Bsn.) and Piano, it was first performed in Madrid on May 3, 1961, by the Quinteto de Viento de Madrid, with Gerardo Gombau, pianist.
MODULES, for Piccolo, String Bass, Trombone and Percussion, was writ- ten in May of 1969. The notation used is proportional, and is independent of strict pulse or meter. Although some sections are written in a quasi-twelve-tone style, the organization of the work is based on Time-Space principle, a theory that time rather than tonality or anti-tonality is the main basis of music. The music unfolds as a series of events and articulations of varying densities, and is a highly expert study in instrumental sonorities. Each individual part is a piece of virtuoso writing, and the whole is an exciting extension of instrumental custom, an original and ef- fective investigation into the accoustical affinities of the various instru- mental combinations utilized.
Side one
Charles Whittenberg
Games Of Five for Wind Quintet - The University of Connecticut Wind Quintet
Leonardo Balada
Geometrias #1 - Francis Chagrin Ensemble
Side two
Arthur Custer
Sextext for Woodwinds and Piano
Richard Moryl
Modules
