2020 Opening Night

Cabrillo Festival kicks off with an Opening Night event reflecting on the Festival’s roots. Interviews with conductor, pianist, and former Cabrillo Festival Music Director Dennis Russell Davies and with composer, bassoonist Robert Hughes, reveal composer Lou Harrison’s personal and musical influence at the Cabrillo Festival. The event includes composer David T. Little introducing a recording of The Conjured Life, his Festival-commissioned work commemorating Lou Harrison’s centenary; and Harrison’s own celebrated Symphony No 3, commissioned by the Festival in 1982. Both works feature the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra; conducted in 1991 by Dennis Russell Davies, and by Cristi Macelaru in 2017.

PROGRAM NOTES

David T. Little: The Conjured Life (2017) | Festival Commission 

World Premiere  August 5, 2017
Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, Santa Cruz, CA
Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru 

I. Invocation
II. A Nest of Shadows
III. Aubade (for Lou Harrison) 

Commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival in honor of Lou Harrison’s centenary with support from Diane and Donald Cooley.

When Lou Harrison died in Indiana, I was living in Michigan. We were both far from our homes on the coasts; his west, mine east. Though we had never met, his death marked the first time I had mourned the passing of someone as an elder within the community of composers. That we had been so close geographically when he died—a mere four-hour drive—felt like a missed chance, a feeling that quickly intensified into regret. This feeling resurfaced when, not long after, I first heard his Threnody for Carlos Chavez. So moving and full of humanity, that piece changed me, and remains among the works most dear to me.

Harrison’s influence found its way into my own compositions, but to my surprise the process was gradual. By the time I heard his Threnody, I had moved beyond the feverish copying of styles I had experienced as a very young composer. I just listened, over many years, and tried to understand the music from the inside out. In a way, through this process, Lou Harrison taught me how to listen.

In writing The Conjured Life, I took a similar approach: I listened. Though the third movement certainly owes a debt to Harrison’s music for gamelan, I generally tried not to emulate his work. I dug into my own experiences with his music and tried to express the very personal nature of his influence on me. When mining this influence, however, it was not just Harrison that emerged, but other composers, poets, and thinkers as well: unexpected influences that not only inform my work, but also form the foundation of my creative life.

The title The Conjured Life is borrowed (with permission) from art curator Lynne Warren. She had originally used it for her exhibit on the lineage of surrealism created for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Though it seems unlikely that anyone would call Lou Harrison a surrealist, the title nonetheless seemed fitting. Harrison courageously followed his own path in an era of cultural homogeneity and conformity. He made a life for himself; seemingly conjured as if from nothing. Composers do something similar when we write music, mining and channeling our deepest thoughts, desires, and influences, to make something hopefully new, and hopefully great; seemingly conjured as if from nothing.

But nothing comes from nothing. And while The Conjured Life is on the one hand a tribute—offered to Lou Harrison on the occasion of his centenary—it could also be viewed as an essay about the deep and personal nature of influence itself. However one views it, it is for Lou. I hope he would have liked it, and am grateful to the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for offering me the opportunity to thank him at last.
—David T. Little

Lou Harrison: Third Symphony (1982, rev. 1983, 1989) | Festival Commission 

World Premiere Recording 
Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies 
Musicmasters Recording 1991 
Produced and engineered by Gregory K. Squires. 
Recorded at University California Santa Cruz concert hall. 

The world premiere recording was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and contributors to the Cabrillo Music Festival. 

Allegro Moderato 
A Reel in Honor of Henry Cowell 
A Waltz for Evelyn Hinrichson 
An Estampie for Susan Summerfield 
Largo Ostinato 
Allegro 

Streamed with permissions from Editions Peters. 

PROGRAM NOTE 

Lou Harrison  (1917-2003) needs no introduction to long-time Festival audiences. A Founding Member of the Cabrillo Festival—he participated in the original 1961 Sticky Wicket concerts in Aptos that were the genesis of the Festival—for many years he presided over Festival concerts like a jovial patron saint. His works, including numerous West Coast and world premieres, were performed at every Festival for more than thirty years. 

The Third Symphony was commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival for its twentieth anniversary in 1982 and was first performed at the final concert on August 29 of that year. During the fall, Harrison revised the second and fourth movements of the symphony, and the American Composers Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies performed this version in New York in November 1982. After further revisions, it was performed again the following summer at the opening concert of the 1983 Cabrillo Festival. In 1989, Harrison made additional revisions, primarily to simplify the fourth movement; this version was performed at the final Festival concert on July 29, 1990 and recorded the next day by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in the concert hall of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Harrison continued to revise the work before virtually every performance, including one he was planning to attend at University of Ohio, Columbus; though he died en route on February 2, 2003. It was performed yet again as part of the Festival’s 50th anniversary season in 2012, under the direction of Marin Alsop. 

For those curious to know the identities of the people named in the second movement:  

Henry Cowell, a major twentieth-century American composer in his own right, did a great deal to encourage and support the composition and performance of new music. He was also a teacher and close friend of Harrison. 

 Harrison met Evelyn Hinrichsen while studying composition at Mills College in the 1930s. The school’s music librarian, she was described by Harrison as “that rarity, a genuinely helpful person.” She later married Walter Hinrichsen, editor of the C.F. Peters music-publishing firm and was responsible for the donation of many original manuscripts to the Mills College library. The Waltz was written for her birthday.  

Susan Summerfield, an accomplished organist, was the music department chairman at Mills in 1982. The Estampie was first written as an organ piece for her. Parts of it proved to be unplayable, so it was adapted for orchestral use in the Third Symphony. 

Harrison’s own notes from the premiere performance are the best commentary on the Symphony: My Third Symphony grew as did the other two, over a long period of time. Sections have undergone multiple revisions at various dates, and, finally, special and intense revisions in relation to other movements once the entire work came together.  

I am, philosophically, a complete pessimist, but also a fairly bubbly glandular optimist. Out of this conflict, I keep up the pretense that civilization will endure, and thus behave as though there were plenty of time for works to mature. The poet Horace never let go a line without at least ten years’ consideration–the idea is appealing. Gilbert Highet once wrote that he believed it the duty of a poet to write memorable lines, and this, of course, is what takes the time. I like to think that it is the duty of a composer to write memorable melodies, and this too takes time–but what a joyous kind of time!

As in my Symphony on G, this work includes a “scherzo” area, again conceived as a little suite–here, three dances: a reel, a waltz, and a medieval estampie, the whole constituting movement two. The first and last movements are mostly canonic in manner and take the shape of the old concerto grosso form of Baroque usage. The Largo was the slowest to mature, and out of its final growth the entire symphony developed.

I am grateful to the many friends who made this piece possible, and hope that each may find at least some part of it that gives pleasure.

—Lou Harrison