The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry ofthe 

East Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

For the convenience of concertgoers, 

the Garden Cafe remains open for light refreshments

until 6:00 pm on Sundays.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

www.nga.gov

Concerts are made possible in part through the generosity of donors 

to the National Gallery ofArt through The Circle. Reserved seating is

available in recognition oftheir support. Please contact the development

office at (202) 842-6450 or circle@nga.gov for more information.

cover: John Cage, Changes and Disappearances No. 32,1982,

National Gallery ofArt, Washington, Gift of Kathan Brown

The Seventy-first Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

National Gallery ofArt New Music Ensemble

Lina Bahn, violin; Bill Kalinkos, clarinet

Lisa Celia, flute; Ross Karre, percussion

Alexis Descharmes, cello; Jenny Lin, piano

Jaime Oliver, computer musician

with guest performers

Stephen Drury, Steven Schick, and Margaret Leng Tan

Presented in conjunction with

The John Cage Centennial Festival Washington, DC

www.johncage2012.com

September 5 and 9, 2012

Admissionfree
2,900th Concert

Wednesday, September 5, 2012 | 12:10 pm

East Building Auditorium

Program

(Performed without intermission)

John Cage (September 5,1912-August 12,1992) 

Living Room Music (1940)

Arnold Schonberg (1874-1951)

Seeks Kleine Klavierstiicke, op. 19 (1911)

Nos. 1 and 2

Cage

6 stories from Indeterminacy (1959)

Nos. 1 and 2

David Felder (b. 1953)

Green Flash (2012)

Schonberg

Seeks Kleine Klavierstiicke

Nos. 3 and 4

Cage

6 stories from Indeterminacy (1959)

Nos. 3 and 4

Christian Wolff (b. 1934)

Second Serenade (2012)

Schonberg

Seeks Kleine Klavierstiicke

Nos. 5 and 6

Cage

6 stories from Indeterminacy (1959)

Nos. 5 and 6

Cage

The Perilous Night (1944)

Cage

Solos for Flute, Clarinet, and Violin from

Concertfor Piano and Orchestra (1957-1958)
2,901st Concert

Sunday, September 9, 2012 | 6:30 pm

East Building Atrium

Program

John Cage (September 5,1912-August 12,1992)

Imaginary Landscape no. 4 (1951)

Cartridge Music (i960)

Music for “Works ofCalder”(1949-1950)

INTERMISSION

The audience is asked to refrainfrom applause until the completion

ofthe second halfofthe concert.

Robert Ashley (b. 1930)

Resonant Combinations (2011)

Roger Reynolds (b. 1934)

opporTuniry (2012)

George Lewis (b. 1952)

Merce and Baby (2012)

Steve Antosca (b. 1955)

evocation (2012)

Henry Cowell (1897-1965)

Tides ofManaunaun (1917)

John Cage

Ryoanji (1983-1992)

Both concerts have been made possible in part by support from

Randy Hostetler Living Room Music Fund.
The Musicians

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE

The National Gallery ofArt New Music Ensemble presented its inaugural

concert in 2010 in the Atrium ofthe East Building. Since then, the ensemble’s performances —featuring strategic placement ofmusicians throughout

the Gallery and utilizing computer-controlled transformations and spatialization ofsound—have elicited praise from the press. The group’s 2011

tribute to the Gallery’s seventieth anniversary, staged in the West Building

Rotunda, was hailed by the Washington Post as “a spectacular, wonderfully 

provocative” concert, which transformed the Rotunda into “an immense

temple ofsound, presenting a program oftheatrical new works that married

humans with computers, and ancient myths with contemporary aesthetics.”

The nga New Music Ensemble looks forward to presenting music of

American composer Jeffrey Mumford in February 2013, in the first concert 

of his tenure as composer-in-residence at the Gallery. On June 2, 2013, the 

ensemble will be joined by the Washington-area harp and saxophone duo

Pictures on Silence in a program of chamber and video works, including the 

premiere of Steve Antosca’s my end is my beginning, commissioned by

Chamber Music America for the event.

STEVE ANTOSCA

Named artistic director ofthe nga New Music Ensemble at its inception in

2010, Steve Antosca is a codirector ofthe John Cage Centennial Festival

Washington, DC. Through the realization ofscores that juxtapose elements

of nondeterminacy with traditional notation, he crafts a sonically rich 

performance environment. Formerly the artistic director and a composermember ofthe verge Ensemble, he has received commissions for new 

works from the American Composers Forum, the Argosy Foundation

Contemporary Music Fund, the Bourges International Competitions, Chamber Music America, the Fromm Fund at Harvard University, the Johansen

International Competition, the Kennedy Center, the Maryland State Arts

Council, Meet the Composer, the McKim Foundation at the Library of

Congress, and the National Education Association. Recipient in 2011 ofthe

6

National Academy of Music’s International Music Prize for Excellence in

Composition, Antosca has a master’s degree in computer music composition from the Peabody Conservatory ofJohns Hopkins University. He lives

and teaches in the Washington, dc area.

LINA BAHN

Described as “brilliant” and “lyrical” by the Washington Post, violinist Lina

Bahn is a highly acclaimed champion of new music and a versatile performer

in many styles. Appointed to the faculty at the University ofColorado in

Boulder in 2008, she has taught master classes in Beijing, Hong Kong, and

Sydney as well as at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She was a

member ofthe award-winning Corigliano Quartet and has appeared in multiple tours with the Takacs String Quartet. A frequent guest soloist with the 

Chicago Chamber Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she has

appeared at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam,

the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg, Queen Elizabeth Hall in London,

and Strathmore Hall in Bethesda, Maryland. Currently the executive director 

and violinist ofthe verge ensemble, she teaches at the Sierra Summer

Academy of Music in California and the Institute ofthe Palazzo Rucellai in

Florence, Italy. A graduate of Indiana University, the University of Michigan,

and the Juilliard School ofmusic, Bahn studied with Dorothy DeLay, Paul

Kantor, and Miriam Fried.

LISA CELLA

Much in demand as a performer of contemporary music, flutist Lisa Celia is

artistic director ofsoundoN: A Festival of Modern Music; cofounder ofthe 

ensemble noise; and a faculty member ofthe Soundscape Composition and

Performance Exchange in Maccagno, Italy. An associate professor of music

at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, she is a founding member of

its faculty contemporary music ensemble, Ruckus. Following undergraduate

studies at Syracuse University, she completed a master ofmusic degree at

the Peabody Conservatory and a doctor ofmusical arts degree in contemporary flute performance at the University of California, San Diego. Her

teachers include John Oberbrunner, Robert Willoughby, and John Fonville.

7
ALEXIS DESCHARMES

Chosen in 2008 by Diapason magazine as one of the ten best cellists of his 

generation, Alexis Descharmes studied at the Paris Conservatoire and won

the Valentino Bucchi (1997) and Avant-Scenes (1999) competitions. A

member ofthe Orchestra ofthe Paris National Opera since 2006, he has

worked with France’s Ensemble Alternance, Ensemble Court-circuit, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (ircam). Dedicatee ofsome fifty contemporary works for

solo cello and ensembles that include the cello, Descharmes has recorded 

music by Liszt and Kaija Saariaho as well as anthologies ofmusic by

Schubert and Klaus Huber with pianist Sebastien Vichard.

BILL KALINKOS

Originally from Queens, New York, clarinetist Bill Kalinkos enjoys a diverse

musical career as a member ofAlarm Will Sound, Deviant Septet, Ensemble 

Signal, iris Orchestra, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

as well as the nga New Music Ensemble. He has been a guest performer

with CityMusic Cleveland, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Eco Ensemble, the 

East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, the New World Symphony Orchestra, 

the Philadelphia Orchestra, Spoleto Festival usa, and the Wordless Music

Orchestra. A resident ofCalifornia since 2011, Kalinkos teaches at the 

University of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley and is principal clarinetist ofthe Oakland East Bay Symphony.

ROSS KARRE

A percussionist and temporal artist based in New York City, Ross Karre

specializes in media selected from classical percussion, electronics, theater,

moving image, visual art, and lighting design. After completing his doctorate in music at the University of California, San Diego, where his teacher

was Steven Schick, Karre worked closely with composers Pierre Boulez,

Harrison Birtwistle, and Helmut Lachenmann. Karre is a percussionist for

the International Contemporary Ensemble (ice) and performs regularly with 

the nga New Music Ensemble, red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion,

and numerous other new music ensembles. His projection design and video

art has been presented in concert at the National Gallery as well as New

York’s Miller Theater and Park Avenue Armory, and by bbc Scotland in

several concert halls in Glasgow.

JENNY LIN

Admired for her adventurous programming and charismatic stage presence, 

Jenny Lin has drawn high praise for her performances at Avery Fisher Hall,

Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center, as well as at the Ars Musica, bam’s

Next Wave, Mostly Mozart, and Spoleto festivals. She has been a guest soloist

with the American Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Sinfonica Nationale

della rai, and Siidwestdeutscher Rundfunk Orchester. Her extensive discography includes recordings on the bis Records, Hanssler Classic, Koch/Ei,

and Steinway & Sons labels, featuring music by Mompou, Montsalvatge,

and Shostakovich, among others. Born in Taiwan and raised in Austria, Lin

holds a degree in German literature from the Johns Hopkins University and

makes her home in New York.

JAIME OLIVER

Returning to the National Gallery for the third time to perform with the 

nga New Music Ensemble, Peruvian-born Jaime E. Oliver is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in composition at Columbia University in New York. In 2011

he obtained his doctorate in computer music from the University ofCalifornia,

San Diego, where he studied with Miller Puckette. Specializing in designing

computerized instruments that listen, understand, remember, and respond, 

Oliver has been featured at many international festivals and conferences, 

collaborating with composers, improvisers, and artists in creating installations and composing and performing music. Winner ofthe file Prix Lux,

the Giga-Hertz-Preis, and the Guthman Competition ofthe Georgia Tech

Center for Music Technology, Oliver has also been awarded a Fulbright 

scholarship and research residencies at the Center for Art and Media in

Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/

Musique in Paris.

9
STEPHEN DRURY

Named “Musician ofthe Year” by the Boston Globe in 1989, pianist and

conductor Stephen Drury has received critical acclaim for his performances

ofmusic written in the last hundred years. Recipient of awards and prizes 

from the Carnegie Hall/Rockefeller Foundation Competitions in American

Music and the National Endowment for the Arts, Drury has worked closely

with many ofthe leading composers of our time, including John Cage, and

has commissioned new works for solo piano from Cage as well as John Luther

Adams, Terry Riley, Chinary Ung, and John Zorn. A graduate of Harvard 

College, he created and directs the Summer Institute for Contemporary 

Performance Practice at the New England Conservatory, where he teaches.

STEVEN SCHICK

A distinguished professor ofmusic at the University ofCalifornia, San Diego,

percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and

raised in a farming family. For thirty-five years he has championed contemporary music by commissioning and premiering more than one hundredfifty new works. The founding percussionist ofthe renowned Bang on a Can

All-Stars, he has also served as artistic director ofthe Centre International de

Percussion de Geneve and is the founder and artistic director ofthe percussion group redfish bluefish, with which he performed at the National Gallery

in 2010. Most recently, he was appointed artist-in-residence ofthe International Contemporary Ensemble (ice), the first musician to receive this 

honor. In addition to his roles as music director ofthe La Jolla Symphony

and Chorus and artistic director ofthe San Francisco Contemporary Music

Players, Schick maintains a lively schedule of guest-conducting the bbc

Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the

Utah Symphony Nova Series. Author of a book, The Percussionist's Art: Same

Bed, Different Dreams, Schick has numerous recordings of contemporary

percussion music to his credit, including a three-CD set ofthe complete 

percussion music of Iannis Xenakis.

10

MARGARET IENG TAN

Pianist Margaret Leng Tan’s eleven-year collaboration with John Cage—from 

1981 until his death—established her as one of his preeminent interpreters.

A featured performer in a tribute to Cage’s memory at the forty-fifth Venice

Biennale, she performed his music in the pbs American Masters films on

Cage and Jasper Johns. Tan’s Cage recordings are critically regarded as

definitive performances, and she was selected by Cage’s publisher, C. F.

Peters, to edit Volume 4 of his complete piano music. In 2006 Tan gave the 

premiere performance ofCage’s newly discovered Chess Pieces, which she 

also prepared for publication. In addition to her participation in this festival,

during the Cage centenary season Tan will honor her mentor in celebrations 

in Eastern and Western Europe and Central America. Margaret Leng Tan

maintains a website at www.margaretlengtan.com.

u
The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin 

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,900th Concert 

September 5, 2012

Wednesday, 12:10pm

East Building Auditorium

Program Notes

alWays seeking 

the lOveliest thing in

the tRuest action:

“not idle talK, but the highest oftruths”

As much as John Cage was about a pure, wild poetics, John Cage was about getting things done:

the diversity and the sheer quantity ofhis endeavor over more than fifty years of creative life are

astonishing. The pattern ofinvention through activity obtained throughout his life: each new

conception, each new piece was the end result of a myriad small breakthroughs along the way.

By no means were these breakthroughs simple in either their pragmatics or their philosophy. 

Moving from traditional music and the fringes ofthe 1930s ultramodern current Cage immersed

himselffirst in Indian, then Far Eastern aesthetics and philosophy. By end ofthe 1950s his 

method had become holistic; his life and his art an ever-expanding whole. Part ofthe spirit of

these concerts, embodied in the several newly commissioned tribute works, is to demonstrate

that one ofhis most important functions as a human being in the twentieth century, in America

and in the world, was as a spur for others’ efforts to make something, to create, to work.

Living Room Music (1940) for percussion/speech quartet is one ofCage’s earliest distinctive

works, already blurring the boundary between music and “event” and in its very content

expanding the concert work beyond the stage. Although sharing its rhythmic preoccupations

(clear pulse and meter) with the Constructions, its media of objets trouve are at once residue of

Dada and precursors ofthe found objects and situations ofmuch later work. The second
movement sets a text of Gertrude Stein, her “The World Is Round.” The optional, melodic third 

movement suggests a spontaneous recourse to unselfconscious song. Magazines and other 

prosaic object types are called for in the score.

This afternoon’s concert on John Cage’s 100th birthday is partly structured around pairs of

recorded readings from his extraordinary Indeterminacy: New Aspects ofForm in Instrumental

and Electronic Music (from which comes the quote in the above mesostic) and Arnold 

Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19. Cage, as is well known, was briefly a student in

Schoenberg’s harmony class at UCLA and figures anecdotally in Cage’s Indeterminacy stories.

Cage conceived Indeterminacy in 1958, first as a lecture at Darmstadt and Brussels, then as a

recording for Folkways. The textual source material is a set of ninety stories on a variety of

subjects, some rooted in Zen Buddhism, others in Cage’s own life. On any one occasion, any 

selection from these stories may be read. In the original 1959 recording, the stories were

accompanied by longtime Cage collaborator, composer, and pianist David Tudor playing

selections from Cage’s Concertfor Piano and Orchestra and a recording ofthe aleatoric 

electronic piece Fontana Mix, “composing” the sequence of events. The stories themselves were 

to be performed in exactly one minute; therefore the longer ones required Cage to read the text 

much more quickly, to sometimes comic effect. Many ofthe stories in the piece were published 

in Cage’s first book, Silence, and later in A Yearfrom Monday, and Indeterminacy set the stage

for many later text-based pieces. The Folkways recording no doubt helped establish for a wider

audience this well-known iconoclast’s sense ofhumor and humanity.

The aphoristic—or again, koan-like—quality ofthese stories has a distinct analogy in

Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 19. A free atonal work, five ofits movements were apparently

written in a single day, February 19, 1911, the final being written on June 17, during the period

ofthe very different activities of orchestrating the ultra-Romantic Gurrelieder and compiling the 

pedagogically strict Harmonielehre. These pieces are tiny, with a total timing ofless than seven 

minutes, a tendency toward brevity and “moment” form that Webern would adopt

wholeheartedly. Schoenberg had taken up painting, suddenly, in 1907; he associated with 

Expressionist artists, especially Richard Gerstl, whose intense style Schoenberg in some ways

emulated. Schoenberg’s paintings, primarily self-portraits, are form and color defining moments 

ofmood, suggesting a precedent for both Opus 19 and the Five Piecesfor Orchestra, op. 16.
There are also literary overtones; certainly Schoenberg was able to arrive at certain motivic

expressions ofmood through as direct as possible illustration or reflection oftext (as in The Book

ofthe Hanging Gardens and Erwartung, as well as Pierrot.) The six movements are 1. Leicht,

zart (tenderly); 2. Langsam (slow); 3. Selir langsam (very slow); 4. Rasch, aber leicht (quick, but 

lightly); 5. Etwas rasch (somewhat quick); 6. Sehr langsam (very slow).

David Felder was invited by Morton Feldman to join the faculty at the State University ofNew

York-Buffalo in the early 1980s, and in 1985 Felder became Artistic Director ofthe eminent 

June in Buffalo festival, founded by Feldman in 1975. In 1996 he formed June in Buffalo’s

professional orchestra, the Slee Sinfonietta. He has consistently pursued innovation in the use of

technology and multimedia in his music, which is characterized by a unique sensibility to timbre. 

Felder writes, “In my work Green Flash, it is my intention to pay homage to Cage’s preparation

ofthe piano, one ofhis many signature innovations, and to some personal memories ofmy own 

numerous interactions with Cage over the years, beginning in the early 1980s. In one ofthese 

interactions, we were speaking about a particularly beautiful SoCal sunset over the Pacific Coast 

Highway. Cage remarked that the sunset was Tike the vibraphone—beautiful, but we know that 

it isn’t good for us.’ The short composition is an 8-channel electronic piece (here mixed down to

4.1 channels) made entirely from modified acoustic piano samples and lines. The piano itselfis

detuned, resynthesized, and each individual ‘note’ is further altered by attending to each partial

as an independent entity.”

The Perilous Night is a relatively extended (ca. twelve-minute) solo prepared piano work in six 

sections. Cage had invented the well-prepared piano (as it were) in 1940 when space

considerations precluded the use ofhis wonted percussion ensemble for a Syvilla Fort dance 

performance in New York City. Henry Cowell’s experiments with pianos were a significant 

precursor to the development. Cage wrote The Perilous Night in winter 1943-44 while living in

New York City; the title was suggested by a series ofIrish myths collected by Joseph Campbell. 

Although each movement has a distinctive sound, the sound, texture, and rhythmic flow ofthe

piece suggest gamelan. Comparatively lush in its sonic variety, the piece nonetheless has a dry,

steady-state quality throughout much ofits length that belies its title and the difficult and
unsteady circumstances ofthe composer’s life at the time ofits composition, when the 

dissolution ofhis marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff precipitated a kind ofspiritual crisis.

Cage’s Concertfor Piano and Orchestra (1957-1958) is a chance work that combines 

procedural ideas from as early as the Sonatas and Interludes and The Seasons with chance 

operations and indeterminate details and form developed over the course ofthe 1950s. On the 

largest level, the form and content ofthe piece are indeterminate in that any complement, from 

solo to tutti, ofthe aggregate ofthirteen individual players, plus piano and conductor, might play

in a given performance. (Cage later added a solo for voice.) Within a performance, there is no

coordination among solos; the (optional) conductor’s role—the conductor’s score is a list of

timings—is as a kind ofliving stopwatch, indicating time frames to the players.

Within each player’s part, other indeterminacies are present. The location ofplayable

elements on a page is determined by the I-Ching. The elements for each instrument, which Cage

developed based on the idiomatic (and certainly not limited to traditional) possibilities ofthe 

instrument learned from performers, frequently can’t be predicted exactly in their details of

pitch, articulation, and dynamics. Notes are in three sizes: large, medium, small; these

differences suggest either loud, medium, or soft dynamics, or duration ofthe event. Strings apply

ad libitum scordatura tunings; performers are also asked to sing unspecified notes and sounds,

among other options. The piano part alone is a catalog ofpotential techniques, a wellspring Cage 

would return to in later music. James Pritchett notes eighty-four different notational and

compositional methods in its sixty-three-page part. There is an enormous amount of detail in

each part as it is written, which detail is extended infinitely by the imaginations ofthe 

performers. (Alexis Descharmes performs the Solofor Cello from this piece at La Maison

Franchise in his concert this evening.) In practice, the form ofthe piece is wildly mobile, like 

Earle Brown’s experiments inspired by Calder. The present performance features flute, clarinet, 

violin, percussion, and piano.

Christian Wolffbegan his association with John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton

Feldman as a teenager in New York City in the early 1950s. His development as a composer

paralleled many ofCage’s experiments, particularly with regard to performer choice, into the

1960s. Along with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, he has nurtured a utopian,
communal approach to making music and has an ongoing concern for progressive political

ideals, represented in his work with varying degrees of explicitness. He has performed

extensively as an improviser and worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Wolff

studied Classics at Harvard and taught Classics there, and for nearly twenty years at Dartmouth

College, where he also taught comparative literature and music.

About John Cage, Wolffwrites, “[H]e was instrumental in having me be the composer

that I am, not by having his music be an ‘influence’ (he really disliked the notion ofinfluence), 

but, first (and quite briefly) as a teacher, then as lifelong friend, he, as Morton Feldman once put 

it, ‘gave permission,’ or, whatever I cooked up, he thought it fine, and supported it

enthusiastically.” Wolffs tribute work for this festival is his Second Serenade for flute, clarinet 

and violin, completed in July 2012. The composer relates, “Those three instruments reminded me 

of a very old piece (1950) for that combination, called Serenade. It used just 3 pitches

(untransposed). The new piece uses a lot more and—unlike the early one which is, along with the

extremely limited pitch material, structurally tight (using a version ofthe Cageian rhythmic

structure scheme)—it (the new piece), like most ofmy music oflast three decades, is,

structurally, a continually changing mix of different kinds ofstuff—like a patchwork quilt with 

irregular patches. Another way to put it, it is continuously discontinuous.”

Program notes by Robert Kirzinger, editor, Program Book ofthe Tanglewood Festival of

Contemporary Music