A sort of Brazilian Frank Zappa is how composer and virtuoso guitar player Athur Kampela has been described.
One of three living composers being featured in a concert in Grahamstown on Thursday 7 August, he is also a virtuoso guitar player and his technically impressive Phalanges, for harp solo is going to put Jacqueline Kerrod to the test.
A sort of Brazilian Frank Zappa is how composer and virtuoso guitar player Athur Kampela has been described.
One of three living composers being featured in a concert in Grahamstown on Thursday 7 August, he is also a virtuoso guitar player and his technically impressive Phalanges, for harp solo is going to put Jacqueline Kerrod to the test.
Kerrod is the third member of Trio Volant (Jill King, viola and Liesl Stoltz, flute). The name Volant (having the power of flight) is a clue to where they’re taking their audiences in a tour that includes the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University on Wednesday 6 August, and closing with the prestigious Cape Town Concert Series on 23 August.
Anchoring their Grahamstown programme will be the Telemann Trio in F Major – and that’s as traditional as it gets with this adventurous ensemble.
American composer Robert Paterson’s Embracing the Wind, he says, is “like an Olympic athlete running against the wind”. Japanese composer Tôru Takemitsu’s And Then I Knew ’Twas Wind embodies his “sound as life” concept. Debussy admitted while he was writing Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, “I am writing down all the music that passes through my head like a madman.”
There’s nothing conventional about this programme, hosted here by the Grahamstown Music Society.
Nor the three musicians.
Johannesburg-born Kerrod has performed with the Kanye West, Santo Gold and Antony and the Johnsons. She’s the harpist for the show The Fantasticks! In New York. She’s a member of the American Modern Ensemble, and an advocate for new music.
Chamber music devotee King is also a certified Jivamukti Yoga teacher in the US.
Flautist Stolz is a part-time lecturer in flute and Mellon Post-doctoral fellow at University of Cape Town. She studied flute with Eva Tamassy at the University of Stellenbosch. In 1993, when she was 16, she won a scholarship to attend an orchestra course in the US where she was selected principal flute of the International Youth Wind Orchestra.
Extensive overseas studies followed with the likes of Shigenori Kudo (Japanese-French flutist) at the Ecole Normale de Musique: Alfred Cortotin Paris, France, the Paris Conservatoire’s Pierre-Yves Artaud, Chantal Debushy (chamber music) and Peter-Lukas Graf at theAccademia Internazionale Superiore di Musica: Lorenso Perosi in Italy .
In South Africa she won all major competitions for woodwind instruments and was the overall winner of the ATKV-FORTE competition. She won various first and other prizes in international competitions.
Stoltz has appeared as soloist with the Cape Town, Eastern Cape and Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestras, the Free State Symphony, UCT String Ensemble, Camerata Tinta Barocca and Odeion Simfonia. She was part of the 2011 production Vuurvoël (with Mario Nell and Magdalene Minnaar) which was nominated for a Kanna award at the 2011 Klein Karoo Art Festival. She teaches privately and at the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town.
The concert at the St Andrew’s College Drill Hall is at 7.30 pm on Thursday 7 August.
Tickets are available at the door – schoolgoers and Grahamstown Music Society members attend for free.
The programme
Arnold Bax – Elegiac
Hendrik Hofmeyr – Il Poeta e l’Usignolo
Robert Paterson – Embracing the Wind
Athur Kampela – Phalanges (for harp solo)
Georg Philipp Telemann – Trio in F Major TWV 42:F3
Tôru Takemitsu – And Then I Knew ’Twas Wind
Claude Debussy – Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp
Programme notes
Elegiac Trio (1916) by Arnold Bax (1883-1953)
Bax was an English composer and poet. His compositions blended elements of romanticism and impressionism and were often inspired by the Irish tradition as well as the country’s political problems. His poetry, written under the pseudonym of Dermot O’Byrne, reflects his affinity with the work of the Irish poet WB Yeats. The Elegiac Trio was written shortly after Debussy had completed his Sonata for flute, viola and harp (1915) and Bax’s Trio clearly resembles the Debussy work. It was the first of three memorial works that Bax wrote as a response to the Easter Rebellion of 1916. The uprising, organised by Irish republicans who desired an end to British rule and the establishment of an independent Irish state, influenced the composer profoundly for not only did it lead to the death of some of his closest friends, it also ended his dreamlike and romantic impression of Ireland.
The Trio is divided into two sections. In the first the viola and the flute sing against arpeggiated, expressive accompaniment by the harp. It includes several statements given to the viola or flute and viola. Of particular note is a pianissimo episode launched by trilling flute and viola as background to the harpist’s left hand playing harmonics in unison, with the theme played in the right hand. In the slower closing section, the viola and right hand of the harp sing an elegy accompanied by flute patterning and roulades and harp arpeggios. The balance of melancholy and joy in the work recalls Yeats’s refrain in his poem on the uprising, Easter 1916: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”
Il Poeta e l’Usignolo (2004, arr. 2014) by Hendrik Hofmeyr (b.1957)
South African composer Hendrik Hofmeyr first came to the notice of the public when his opera The Fall of the House of Usher won the South African Opera Competition and the Nederburg Opera Prize, and was subsequently performed at the State Theatre in Pretoria in 1988. In the same year Hofmeyr, who was furthering his studies in Italy during ten years of self-imposed exile, was awarded first prize in an international competition with music for a short film by Wim Wenders.
In 1997 he won the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Competition of Belgium (with Raptus for violin and orchestra) and the first edition of the Dimitris Mitropoulos Competition in Athens (with Byzantium for high voice and orchestra). His Incantesimo for flute was chosen to represent South Africa at the Congress of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Croatia in 2005. In 2008 he received a Kanna Award from the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in acknowledgement of his contribution to South African music. Hofmeyr obtained his doctorate in music in 1999 and is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Cape Town.
Il poeta e l’usignolo (The poet and the nightingale) is a paraphrase of Due sonetti di Petrarca for high voice, recorder, cello and harpsichord, commissioned for the Recorder Society of South Africa by the SAMRO Endowment for the National Arts. In the sonnets Petrarch bemoans the loss of his beloved Laura, contrasting the joys of spring to his own sad state, with the mournful song of the nightingale reminding him of his great loss. This arrangement for flute, viola and harp was made at the request of Trio Volant.
Embracing the Wind (2000) by Robert Paterson (b. 1970)
American composer, percussionist and conductor Robert Paterson was born in Buffalo, New York. He initially studied composition at the Eastman School of Music. Afterwards he obtained a Master’s Degree in Composition from Indiana University and a DMA in Composition from Cornell University. His compositions are influenced by nature, rock and roll, jazz, world music as well as by the compositions of other classical composers.
The inspiration for Embracing the Wind originated from the image of an Olympic athlete running against the wind. As the writing of the work progressed, the focus eventually shifted to more abstract thoughts, such as the concept of creating music that sounds flexible and has wind-like, ebb-and-flow qualities. Paterson achieves this by creating musical zephyrs from repeated motives and smooth phrases that utilise gradual dynamic swells and subtle tempo fluctuations.
This work is more minimalist than most of his other compositions in that cells are repeated over and over again as textural background. It is also Romantic as it has a narrative structural quality and the form is intentionally less severe.
Phalanges, for harp solo (1995) by Athur Kampela (b.1960)
Brazilian composer Kampela is internationally recognised as composer and virtuoso guitar player. He won the 1995 International Guitar Composition Competition in Caraca and the 1998 Lamarque-Pons Guitar Composition Competition in Uruguay. In Brazil he studied with the German composer Hans-Joachim Koellreutter (1986-8) and afterwards with Ursula Mamlok at the Manhattan School of Music (1992).
He holds a doctorate in music composition from the University of Columbia. Kampela broke new ground in various ways: first, in his native country as a sort of “Brazilian Frank Zappa” he fused popular and vernacular styles with contemporary textural techniques; second, he developed new extended techniques for acoustic instruments.
The title Phalanges refers to the bones of the fingers and the subcutaneous motor skills and movements that underlie the act of playing the strings. Three main ideas are interspersed in this piece: an ergonomic or motoric one, referring to the way in which the hands accommodate the technical demands of the instrument; a rhythmic one, referring to the interaction of complex rhythms and the use of the composer’s system of micro-metric modulation, a mathematical way to link very complex rhythms; and finally, the use of extended techniques and a series of devices (paper between strings, tuning fork, constant pedal glissandi, half-pedal “buzz” sound, etc.) that divide the harp into three sonic regions.
The theatrical aspect of Phalanges conveys its deep meaning: navigating between the technical demands made on the fingers and the almost magical output of the music itself.
Trio in F Major TWV 42:F3 by Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)
Vivace – Mesto – Allegro
The trio sonata was a popular form of chamber music in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It was mostly written for two solo melodic instruments and basso continuo, hence the name trio sonata. However, because the basso continuo is usually made up of at least two instruments (usually cello/bass viol and harpsichord), performances of trio sonatas typically involve four musicians.
The German Baroque composer Telemann composed a large number of pieces for two instruments and basso continuo. The melodic instruments are often two violins, but there are exceptions such as in this trio sonata for Flauto dolce, viola da gamba and basso contininuo. The composer sometimes deviated from the sonata form as it had originally been modelled by Corelli. He loved the combination of instruments from different families. As his trio sonatas were mostly written for the amateur market, he paid much attention to writing good melodies that were pleasant to the ear.
This trio sonata in F major is a good example of contrapuntal writing. In the first movement in F major the flute starts with a lively melody, which is taken over by the viola, and the rest of the movement presents a dialogue between these two instruments, accompanied by the harp.
The second movement in D minor opens with a mournful, slow moving melody on the flute, once again joined by the viola and harp. This same melody is repeated, this time introduced by the viola and followed by harp and flute. The flute opens the final movement with a joyous melody taken over first by the viola and then joined by the harp.
And Then I Knew ’Twas Wind (1992) by Tôru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
Japanese composer Tôru Takemitsu first came to prominence in Japan following the formation of the anti-academic, Mixed-Media Experimental Workshop in 1951 and, internationally, with Stravinsky’s enthusiasm for his Requiem for strings (1957), an endorsement that led to numerous commissions. Mainly self-taught, his work was influenced by composers such as Debussy, Messiaen, Webern and Cage. He combined aspects of Eastern and Western music, and his music often involves improvisation and the use of unconventional graphical forms of notation as well as referencing the sounds of nature and incorporating silence.
Takemitsu created a unique philosophical world-view and style for which he used the phrase “sound as life”. He wrote about 130 concert works and more than 100 film scores.
And then I knew ’twas wind is an example of Takemitsu’s life-long interest in French music. Although calm and meditative, it also features complex harmonies. The composer borrows the orchestration from Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp. As in much of the music of Debussy, Takemitsu uses modal melodies and subtle changes in tone colour.
The work explores an aesthetic involving the “motionless” dream-like movement of water, and similarities are drawn between the effects of wind in nature and the unconscious mind. The title is borrowed from a similarly-themed poem by Emily Dickinson. The composition features a continuous stream of interconnected episodes, with a smooth, rhythmically-varying flow that incorporates both sound and silence. Gradually, a gentle, seven-note pattern emerges.
Eastern-influenced elements include the glissando (sliding) effect produced by the harp pedal being applied to an already-sounding note, and the harp sometimes plays chords that can only be heard once the same notes have faded away in the flute and viola parts.
Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp (1915) by Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Pastorale: Lento, dolce rubato
Interlude: Tempo di minuetto
Finale:Allegro moderato ma risoluto
In 1914 French composer Debussy was living in a small cottage overlooking the English Channel and experiencing severe depression at the devastation caused by World War I. The war reduced him – and several other artists – to almost complete silence, until the summer of 1915, when, in his own words, he managed to “rediscover music”. He planned to compose a cycle of six sonatas for various combinations of instruments, but as a result of his poor health he managed to complete only a cello sonata, this trio sonata for flute, viola, and harp, and a violin sonata.
This sonata was the first major composition written for these three instruments. The composer described the trio sonata as written “in the ancient, flexible mould with none of the grandiloquence of modern sonatas”. His intention was to promote French national music through a synthesis of the refined 18th-century stylistic gestures of Rameau and Couperin and his own highly nuanced style of musical impressionism.
The Sonata evokes inner worlds, sometimes through the masks of the commedia dell’arte (form of theatre characterized by masked “types”), sometimes through evoking a feeling of the dances of ancient times. The contrasting instrumental sonorities – plucked harp, bowed string instrument and woodwind – throw its various motifs, many resembling ornamental arabesques, into clear relief. The writing is fluid and improvisational.
The opening movement offers six melodic ideas that often appear to be fragmentary motives rather than fully developed themes. The interlude pays homage to the 18th century masters who inspired the sonata. The freely structured and rapid Finale projects a subdued mood. The work concludes with a section that recalls the opening themes of the first movement. As he completed the work, he wrote to a friend, “I am writing down all the music that passes through my head like a madman”.
After hearing this austere, ethereal work performed the following year, he stated, “It is the music of a Debussy I no longer know. It is frightfully mournful, and I don’t know whether one should laugh or cry – perhaps both?”
