LA

75TH SEASON

OF CONCERTS

MAY 7, 2017 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Lento elejiaoo [J*~ ca. 7oJ (yticoMnyP 'forbtJJiry^

(pdlf-Suriy)— 'plajrzti'Vel/

rripeoetCy

£ fo l’---b

(is. strrtpre)

O

N

(S-Vn.)

catf?ox.\

'pp (yarn stick)

SLr^ yM%

ppftjpj

SB'

£------ / g__

(sempre & i
PROGRAM

4:00 • East Building Auditorium

The Three Cs: Cage, Cowell, Crumb

Pioneers of the Avant-Garde Piano

Margaret Leng Tan, piano

John Cage (1912-1992)

The Perilous Night (1944)

for prepared piano

Henry Cowell (1897-1965)

The Tides of Manaunaun (1917)

Aeolian Harp (1923)

The Banshee (1925)

Advertisement (1914/1959)

Intermission

George Crumb (b. 1929)

Metamorphoses, Book I* (2015 - 2017)

Black Prince (1927) — Paul Klee

The Goldfish (1925) — Paul Klee

Wheatfield with Crows (1890) —Vincent van Gogh

The Fiddler (1912-1913) — Marc Chagall

Nocturne: Blue and Gold— Southampton Water (1871) —James McNeill Whistler

Perilous Night (1990) — Jasper Johns

Clowns at Night (1937) — Marc Chagall

Contes Barbares (1902) — Paul Gauguin

The Persistence of Memory (1931) — Salvador Dali

The Blue Rider (1903) — Wassily Kandinsky

For amplified piano, toy piano, auxiliary percussion

‘World premiere and written for Margaret Leng Tan

2 • National Gallery of Art

The Musicians

Singaporean pianist Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force in the

American avant-garde. Tan, whose work embraces theater, choreography, and performance,

has been called "the diva of avant-garde pianism" by the New Yorker. She is renowned as

a preeminent John Cage interpreter (her mentor of eleven years) and for her performances

of American and Asian music that transcend the piano's conventional boundaries. As one

of George Crumb's favorite performers, her DVD recording of his Makrokosmos I and II has 

come to be regarded as a performance manual for pianists.

The first woman to graduate with a doctorate from Juilliard, Margaret Leng Tan has

since been hailed as "the queen of the toy piano” (New York Times) and "the toy piano’s

Rubenstein" (The Independent, London). In her groundbreaking 1997 CD, The Art of the Toy

Piano (Philips/ Universal), she elevated a humble toy to the status of a real instrument.

Critics acknowledge her as the world's first toy piano virtuoso, who has inspired composers

to create a distinctive repertoire for a new instrument. Her subsequent toy album, SHE

HERSELF ALONE: The Art of the Toy Piano 2, was released as a Mode Records CD/DVD. Evans

Chan's 2004 documentary, Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan,

was nominated for "Best Music Documentary" at the American Film Institute/ Discovery

Channel's SilverDocs (now a Mode DVD).

In 2011, Tan was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts by the State University

of New York. She was inducted into the Singapore Women's Hall of Fame in 2014. The 2015

Singapore International Festival of Arts commissioned Curios — a solo music-theater work

by Phyllis Chen — for Tan, who was also awarded the 2015 Cultural Medallion, Singapore's

highest artistic accolade.

75th Season • 3
The Composers

John Cage — composer, philosopher, author, artist, and mycologist—is one of the twentieth

century's most influential figures. He was not only a leader in the postwar, avant-garde

movement and the most important innovator in experimental music, but also an influencer

of cultural norms.

In the 1930s, he studied composition with Adolph Weiss and Arnold Schonberg.

Cage became involved with modern dance in Los Angeles and Seattle, where he met his

future artistic and life partner, Merce Cunningham. In his compositions, rhythm and timbre

became increasingly important, and in 1940 he invented the prepared piano. In 1951, he

was introduced to the l-Ching or Book of Changes. This led him to chance operations and

indeterminacy, which became his lifelong approach to composing music, writing, and

making art. The year 1952 saw the launch of his silent piece, 4'33". He also wrote a number

of the earliest electro-acoustic compositions. Through his collaborations with Cunningham

and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, he established the concept of interdisciplinary collaboration. Cage's fame started to grow from the 1960s onward. In the 1980s, he

started focusing on opera, resulting in his five Europeras. In his final years, he composed his

series of number-titled pieces —sparse, time-structured, elegiac statements.

Henry Cowell’s father introduced him to the Irish music that would remain a touchstone for the composer, while the Irish poet John Varian fueled his interest in Irish folk

culture and mythology. While growing up in San Francisco, Cowell experienced Chinese

opera, leading to a lifelong interest in world music. It was in Cowell's classes at the New 

School in the 1930s that John Cage first heard Indonesian gamelan music.

Although lacking a formal musical education, the teenaged Cowell wrote many 

piano pieces. He began to explore the idea of tone clusters and also experimented with

polyrhythm and polytonality. In 1914, on the strength of his compositions, he entered the

University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with Charles Seeger and also became 

interested in mysticism and theosophy. In New York, he met the radical composer-pianist,

Leo Ornstein, who encouraged Cowell's pianistic experimentations. He soon caused an

international furor with his remarkable new string piano and tone cluster techniques.

Cowell was central to the group known as "ultra-modernist" composers: Carl

Ruggles, Leo Ornstein, John Becker, Colin McPhee, Ruth Crawford, and Edgard Varese. In

1927, Cowell started the periodical, New Music, publishing significant new scores including

those of Copland and Ives. Cowell's influential book, New Musical Resources, appeared in

1930, and in 1934 he created the record label, New Music Recordings. Among his many 

students were George Gershwin and Lou Harrison, who described Cowell as "the mentor

of mentors."

George Crumb received his bachelor's degree in 1950 from Mason College of Music

in his home city of Charleston, West Virginia. In 1959, he completed his doctorate under

Ross Lee Finney at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. From 1965 to 1999, Crumb taught

at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (1956),

the Pulitzer Prize (1968), a Grammy Award (2001), and the Gold Medal for Music from the

American Academy of Arts and Letters (2015).

4 * National Gallery of Art

While teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1962, Crumb wrote his Five

Pieces for Piano, the first work in his characteristic style. In the 1960s and 1970s, he gained 

recognition with his vocal compositions based on the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca —

Ancient Voices of Children (1970), the Madrigals (1965-1969), and Night of the Four Moons

(1969). Crumb's important instrumental compositions include Echoes of Time and the River

(1967), Black Angels (1970), Vox Balaenae (1971), Makrokosmos (1972-1973), and Star-Child

(1977)). His seven-volume American Songbook (2001-2010) constitutes the longest song

cycle in Western classical music history.

Crumb's stylistic language has its roots in Mahler, Debussy, and Bartok. His iconic, 

indisputably recognizable voice draws inspiration from sources ranging from Western art

music to hymns and folk tunes. The distilled timbral universe and sense of suspended time

in a Crumb score invite comparison with certain Asian musical traditions, which Crumb

attributes to "certain vibes being in the air at the time." Many of his compositions integrate

theatrical, mystical, and symbolic elements that are reflected in the unorthodox notation

of his exquisite, calligraphic scores.

75th Season • 5
Program Notes

The three Cs —John Cage, Henry Cowell, and George Crumb —laid the foundation for the

extended language of the piano, conjuring forth tantalizing new sound possibilities from

the piano's interior. While their pioneering, now "classic avant-garde" accomplishments

constitute the bedrock of forays by future experimentalists, the alternative pianistic worlds

of Cage, Cowell, and Crumb remain sui generis, each an inimitably distinct, unmistakable

sonic realm.

I have chosen to represent John Cage's prepared piano with The Perilous Night, a work

that had profound implications for Cage on his path toward Zen. Four decades later this

work became the inspiration for Jasper Johns's series of Perilous Night artworks, all of which

contain a page from John Cage's score.

The prepared piano is John Cage's now classic invention from the 1940s: mutes of 

various materials are inserted between the grand piano's strings completely transforming

its sound characteristics. Prepared with bolts, screws, pieces of felt, rubber and bamboo,

The Perilous Night fulfills Cage's intention of creating "a percussion orchestra under the

control of a single player." Written towards the end of his marriage to Zenia Cage, it is one

of Cage's most personal, expressive statements, a study in inquietude concerning "the

loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy." Cage said that his

title, The Perilous Night, came from Joseph Campbell's recounting of an Irish myth concerning a perilous bed that rested on a floor of polished jasper.

Cage's teacher, Henry Cowell, is recognized for his two pianistic innovations— the

tone cluster and the string piano, Cowell's term for playing directly on the piano strings.

Aeolian Harp and The Banshee are string piano pieces, while The Tides of Manaunaun and

Advertisement employ all manner of clusters — aggregates of consecutive notes played by

palms, forearms, and fists. Advertisement is a sonic depiction of the blinking neon lights of 

New York's Times Square, while Irish mythology lies at the root of Banshee and Tides.

Metamorphoses, Book I

In July 2015,1 was visiting George Crumb in Media, near Philadelphia, when he casually

dropped his bombshell: "Margaret, I think I'm about ready to write a new piano cycle that I

am calling Metamorphoses, and the first volume will be for you." Crumb then proceeded to

pull out several art books containing the various paintings he had chosen to interpret in

Metamorphoses. He also showed me his preliminary notated sketches for Paul Klee's Black

Prince, the opening piece in the cycle.

You could have bowled me over with a feather! It has been forty years since the

Makrokosmos series, Crumb's groundbreaking, pianistic achievement of the 1970s. Since

then he has written several piano compositions, but nothing on the scale of Makrokosmos.

This was a historic occasion indeed.

6 • National Gallery of Art

And so began the step-by-step creation of a composition that would unfold over the

next eighteen months. George would call to say that he had finished a piece. I would learn

it and travel to Media to play it for him on his Steinway M, whereupon he would hand me

the next completed movement. These were memorable, intoxicating work sessions: I loved

seeing the excitement that hearing his music for the first time elicited in George. I was

impressed by his extreme open-mindedness, especially when I had suggestions for practical alternatives that would render the piece playable on a full-scale concert grand, and even

the occasional aesthetic reservation on my part that he would then address and render

more convincing.

I was extremely gratified that he was tailoring the work to my own particular idiosyncrasies: the inclusion of the toy piano, using my voice in unusual ways — most strikingly,

learning to caw from the many crows in Crumb's backyard, apropos of Van Gogh's Wheatfield

with Crows. He also enlisted a battery of small percussion objects to satisfy my secret desire

to be taken for a real percussionist beyond a mere toy embodiment of one.

A highlight of my role as composer's muse was introducing Crumb to Jasper Johns's

1990 Perilous Night, one of four works with that title made by the artist in response to John

Cage's The Perilous Night music from 1944. Crumb's spontaneous response to the Perilous

Night artwork was immediate and visceral. His ensuing Perilous Night composition could 

not be more different from Cage's. Crumb was not familiar with the original Cage piece,

and it was only after Crumb had completed his Perilous Night that I played him Cage's work.

George Crumb is planning a second volume of Metamorphoses, this time for the

pianist Marcantonio Barone. I can't wait to see what surprises are in store. Program notes

by Margaret Leng Tan

George Crumb on Metamorphoses, Book I

The great Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky invented the idea of transforming visual

art into sound in his Pictures at an Exhibition. My Metamorphoses, Book I is therefore a direct

descendent of Mussorgsky's hauntingly beautiful piano composition (later orchestrated by

Maurice Ravel and several others). I sometimes wonder if this sort of artistic reincarnation

would even be possible without the application of a kind of musical "black magic" (perhaps

this "demonic" element is already implied in the term "metamorphoses").

The opening piece of my composition illustrates the painting Black Prince (Paul Klee,

1927), over which I have inscribed: "Boldly, with smoldering intensity." I was thinking of

Africa as the probable place of origin of the entire human race; my thoughts drifted to that

modern "black prince,” Nelson Mandela, who won the admiration of the entire world for his

humanity and courage despite unimaginable hardship.

Goldfish (Paul Klee, 1925); Vivace, quasi presto; "playfully, whimsically." My piece

attempts to replicate the bizarre swimming acrobatics of this remarkable creature and owes

much to Debussy's Poissons d'or from his Images). I also quote tiny thematic cells from two

of my earlier compositions.

75th Season • 7
Wheatfield with Crows (Vincent Van Gogh, 1890); Lento elegiaco; "uncanny, forbidding." This painting is one of the very last works of Van Gogh and seems to me to be

suffused with a sense of death.

The Fiddler (Marc Chagall, 1912 - 2013); Poco animato; "joyous, exuberant (in a JewishRussian folk style).” As depicted in the painting, this work might be more accurately titled

Fiddler on the Roof, since it portrays that familiar figure of Jewish-Russian village life who

musically commemorates all the important events of the villagers' lives — births, weddings, 

funerals, and so forth. I have locked in the tuning of the violin (G-D-A-E) by means of the 

piano's sostenuto pedal so that these pitches resonate throughout the entire piece.

Nocturne: Blue and Gold —Southampton Water was painted by the American artist

James McNeill Whistler, 1871. My musical setting attempts to replicate the eerie insubstantiality of this impressionistic painting. I have inscribed: Lento sospeso; "ethereal, dreamlike."

Perilous Night (Jasper Johns, 1990); Molto vivace; "fearfully, with dark energy.” This 

painting was inspired by a piano piece of the same title by John Cage (the composition of 

which was prompted by an emotional upheaval in Cage's life). So with the advent of my 

own Perilous Night, we see an example of a "double reincarnation”— music into painting,

and then again into music.

Clowns at Night (Marc Chagall, 1937) is one of my favorite of all paintings. I have

provided my own subtitles: "A ballet grotesque for circus folk and poltergeist (in a lazy

blues tempo, languid, seductive, ghostly).'' The blues melody is played on a toy piano and

the poltergeist is represented by two wood blocks with different pitches.

Contes Barbares (Paul Gauguin, 1902); Drammaticamente. This provocative painting

suggested to me a theater piece for three characters: a storyteller (the strange male figure

with deformed features and clawed feet), a reciter of ancient lore (the girl in an idol-like

position), and a dancer (the girl to her right). I gave the music a four-fold structure: "The

storyteller invokes a vision...," "Tahitian death chant: spirit of the dead watching (Manao

Tupapau),” "The storyteller invokes a vision...," and "Tahitian dance: myth of the moon

(Hina) and the earth (Fatou)."

The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Dali, 1931); Lentamente; "shadowy, dreamlike."

I cite three of my own "persistent memories" as revealed by three musical quotations: 0

A quote from Mozart's Clarinet Concerto (my father, an accomplished clarinetist, would

often practice at home and Mozart was his favorite composer); 2) A quote from Beethoven's Piano Sonata, op. 110 (this was the first of Beethoven's late works I learned as a

teenage piano student); and 3) "Amazing Grace"—a favorite hymn tune in the heart of

Appalachia (my Appalachia).

The Blue Rider (Wassily Kandinsky, 1903). Molto agitato; "with a relentless

driving rhythm throughout.” A commentator wondered if Kandinsky had in mind

Goethe's poem, The Erl-King, in which Death is pursuing a young child. (An indistinct

childlike contour is discernible in the rider's arms.) I embraced this interpretation and

my musical setting portrays a father galloping on horseback with his son in a frantic,

futile attempt to outrun Death.

8 • National Gallery of Art

Like all of my piano works since Five Pieces for Piano (1962) and through Makrokosmos

I and II and other works, Metamorphoses is concerned with new modes of expression for the

instrument. Included are a special range of timbral techniques such as pizzicato, muted

effects, production of harmonics (especially harmonics of the 5th partial), but also various 

glissando techniques, bending of pitch, special pedal effects, and so forth). Occasionally

objects are applied to the piano strings, such as a glass tumbler, a percussionist's wire

brush, a metallic jewelry chain, a yarn mallet. I sometimes also require certain vocal sounds 

(speaking, whispering, shouting, singing, humming). In addition to the amplified piano, the

pianist is also required to play toy piano, woodblocks, a metal wind chime, pod rattle, and

wire coil drum.

I have always been most fortunate to have had outstanding pianists who were willing

to tackle the formidable technical and musical innovations in my scores. And among the

very finest of these is Margaret Leng Tan, for whom I wrote Metamorphoses, Book I. Margaret's technical prowess and superb artistic sensitivity is a combination that must warm the

heart of any composer!

75th Season • 9
Credits

Black Prince: bpk Bildagentur/Kunstsamlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, 

Germany/Art Resource, NY

The Goldfish: bpk Bildagentur/Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg,

Germany/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY

Wheatfield with Crows: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,

The Netherlands/Art Resource, NY

The Fiddler: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Art Resource, NY

Nocturne: Blue and Gold: Tate Gallery, London, UK/Art Resource, NY

Perilous Night: ©Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/Private

collection/Jamie Stukenberg/The Menil Collection

Clowns at Night: Musee d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, France/Art Resource, NY

Contes Barbares: Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany/Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

The Persistence of Memory: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA/Art Resource, NY

The Blue Rider: Foundation E. G. Buehrle/ Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

lO • National Gallery of Art

Upcoming Events of the SeventyFifth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F, Lammot

Belin Concerts

Laura Falzon, flute, and Rupert Boyd, guitar

Toward the Sea

Presented as part of the

European Month of Culture

May 10,12:10

West Building, East Garden Court

Winners of the 2016 Joseph and Goldie

Feder Memorial String Competition

Presented in cooperation with

Washington Performing Arts

May 13,12:00

West Building, East Garden Court

Winners of the 2016 Misbin Family

Memorial Chamber Music Competition

Presented in cooperation with Washington

Performing Arts

May 13, 2:00

West Building, East Garden Court

Boreal Trio

Music by Max Bruch, Jean Francaix,

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and

Uriel Vanchestein

May 14, 3:30

West Building, East Garden Court

Tomas Kaco, piano 

Music by Bach, Chopin, and Paganini

Presented as part of the

European Month of Culture

May 17,12:10

West Building, East Garden Court

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art

and all of its programs is free of charge,

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording equipment

during the performance is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic

devices are turned off.

Concerts are made possible in part

through the generosity of donors to the

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition

of their support. Please contact the

development office at (202) 842-6450 or

circle@nga.gov for more information.

www.nga.gov

www.instagram.com/ngadc

www.twitter.com/ngadc

www.facebook.com/nationalgalleryofart

The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2077 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Cover Score excerpt from Wheatfield with

Crows (detail) by George Crumb, courtesy of

C. F. Peters Corporation, NY

Back cover West Building, Constitution

Avenue entrance, viewed from Sixth Street NW,

1941, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Gallery Archives