For the convenience of concertgoers 

the Garden Cafe remains open until 6:oo pm.

The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phone

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry of

the East Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

Mailing address

200ob South Club Drive

Landover, md 20785

wirw.ngfl.gov

cover: Paul Stevenson Oles, 1971, National Gallery ofArt Archives

The Sixty-fifth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,605th Concert

Alan Feinberg, pianist

Presented in honor of

JasperJohns: An Allegoiy ofPainting, 1955-1965

Second concert ofthe Sixty-second American Music Festival

February 25, 2007

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

East Building Auditorium

Admissionfree
Program

John Cage (1912-1992)

Bacchanale (1938)

Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997)

Three Two-part Studies (1940)

Morton Feldman (1926-1987)

Palais de Mari (1986)

INTERMISSION

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

The Celestial Railroad (1910-1913, adapted 1925)

The Alcotts (1915)

Milton Babbitt (b. 1916)

Playingfor Time (1977)

Robert Helps (1928-2001)

Musicfor Left Hand: Three Studies (1975)

Etude 1: For Ian Underwood 

Etude 2: For Tison Street

Etude 3: For Rudolph Kolisch

Helps

Three Song Transcriptions (1998)

Schilflied (Felix Mendelssohn)

Chanson pour Jeanne (Emmanuel Chabrier)

Testament (Henri Duparc)

The Exhibition and the Festival

JasperJohns: An Allegory ofPainting, 1955-1965, on view at the National

Gallery through April 29, includes some ofJohns’ (b. 1930) most important

paintings, drawings, and prints, among them Target with Plaster Casts (1955)

and Diver (1962). Johns’ early work was devoted to examining and reinventing the premises of painting during an era when painting practice was

riddled with conceptual upheaval and doubt. Much ofthe music chosen for

the Sixty-second American Music Festival was also the result of conceptual 

upheaval, as composers in the same period reexamined their own practices.

From 1955 to 1965, contacts between painters and composers were

particularly fruitful in New York City. When the works of unorthodox

composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Ralph Shapey, and Stefan

Wolpe were performed, artists faithfully attended. The era also saw the birth 

of performance art, in which dance, drama, music, painting, poetry, and 

sculpture might be brought together in one event. In his Lecture on Something (1959), John Cage said, “When starting to be abstract, artists referred to

musical practices to show that what they were doing was valid; so nowadays,

musicians, to explain what they are doing, say, ‘See, the painters and sculptors have been doing it for quite some time.’” Johns enjoyed a long and close

association with the world of ballet in particular, and in 1973 he designed the 

set and costumes for Un Jour ou Deux, working with Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

By 1955, the National Gallery’s American Music Festival, an annual festival ofmusic by American composers, was in its eleventh year. In the decade

that followed, avant-garde composers such as Elliott Carter, David Diamond, 

Leon Kirchner, Walter Piston, Ralph Shapey, Virgil Thomson, and Stefan

Wolpe were among the dozens of composers whose works were performed

at the Gallery’s festivals.

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The Musician

Alan Feinberg has forged a remarkable career based on musical exploration. 

His intelligence, integrity, and affinity for an unusually wide-ranging repertoire

place him among those few artists who are able to build a bridge between the

past and the present. He has more than three hundred premieres to his credit,

for works by such composers as John Adams, Milton Babbitt, John Harbison,

Charles Ives, Steve Reich, and Charles Wuorinen. Feinberg has toured several

times with The Cleveland Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnanyi, playing 

Brahms’ Piano Concerto no. 2 and the premiere of Shulamit Ran’s Concert Piece.

Often on the cutting edge, Feinberg was featured on the opening night

ofthe San Francisco Symphony’s American Mavericks Festival and at 

the New York Philharmonic’s Horizons Festival, the tenth anniversary

concert ofthe American Composers Orchestra, the New York 92nd Street

Y’s Berio Sequenza Marathon, and in act 1 ofthe first performance ofJohn

Adams’ opera Nixon in China, for the Guggenheim Museum’s Works in

Progress Series.

Feinberg also enjoys an outstanding reputation abroad. He has appeared

at the music festivals ofBath, Bergamo, Berlin, Brescia, Budapest, Cambridge,

Edinburgh, Geneva, and Huddersfield, and he was the first pianist invited by

the Union of Soviet Composers to represent American contemporary music

with performances in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow. Among

his many recordings are four solo CDs for Decca that survey American music.

Alan Feinberg appears at the National Gallery by arrangement with Seldy

Cramer Artists of Lafayette, California.

4

Program Notes

One ofthe leading figures ofthe postwar avant-garde, John Cage influenced

writers, artists, choreographers, and other composers through his music,

essays, lectures, and numerous interviews. It can safely be said that he had a

greater impact on music in the twentieth century than any other American

composer. The 1950s were a period ofintense creativity for Cage, in which he

experimented with notation in order to broaden the possibilities. In 1952 he

created the work that has become his most famous and controversial, 4'33”,

which consists ofthree movements, each completely silent. During the late 

1950s he began his collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, forming a relationship that continued through and beyond 1973, the

year in which Un Jour ou Deux was produced with set and costume designs

by Jasper Johns.

Born in 1912 in Texarkana, Arkansas, Conlon Nancarrow was active in

his early years as a trumpeter, playing jazz and other types of popular music.

He attended the University ofCincinnati College-Conservatory of Music

from 1929 to 1932 and later studied composition and counterpoint in Boston with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Nicolas Slonimsky. Of his studies, Nancarrow reported, “The only formal studies I did that were important

were the studies I had in strict counterpoint with Roger Sessions. That was 

the only formal training 1 ever had. And they were rigid! I’d do this strict

counterpoint exercise, and then I’d take a piece ofmy music and say to him,

‘What do you think ofthis?’ ‘Very interesting’ [Sessions would say]. ‘Where’s

your counterpoint exercise?”’ Nancarrow composed frequently for the player

piano, partly because he was convinced that other musicians could deal with

only moderately difficult rhythms. He went so far as to say, “As long as I’ve

been writing music I’ve been dreaming of getting rid ofthe performers.”

Morton Feldman was bom and raised in New York City. In 1949 he met

Cage, and the two developed an artistic association that proved crucial to music

in America in the 1950s and beyond. Cage encouraged Feldman to trust his

instincts, which helped Feldman create his totally intuitive compositions.

Instead ofusing a formalized system for composing, Feldman worked from

5
moment to moment, from one sound to the next. Feldman’s friends in 1950s

New York included composers Earle Brown and Christian Wolff and painters

Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark Rothko. The painters in particular influenced Feldman to

search for his own sound world, one that was more immediate and more

physical than any he had explored before. From this he developed a graph

notation form ofmusic that relies heavily on player improvisation.

One of Feldman’s last compositions, Palais de Mari was written for 

pianist Bunita Marcus, who asked Feldman to condense the material and

techniques from his long pieces into a shorter work. The title was taken from

a photograph ofthe ruins of an ancient palace in East Asia that Feldman

observed at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Palais de Mari is a concise version

ofhis late mature style, consisting of quiet, sparse, and asymmetrical repetitions ofshort phrases. Timbral changes shift subtly; articulated by silences,

they lend a sense ofbeauty and mystery to the work.

Although Charles Ives was much older than any ofthe other composers

represented in the American Music Festival (he died in 1954 at age eighty), 

he noted and appreciated the work ofseveral ofthem and encouraged his

fellow New Englander Elliott Carter through letters and personal contact.

Virgil Thomson spoke for most twentieth-century American composers

when he referred to Ives as “the father ofus all, whether we knew it or not.”

An adherent oftranscendentalism who drew inspiration from Ralph Waldo

Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Ives believed music to be suffused

with a unique spiritual quality. His music is distinctly American, frequently

quoting patriotic songs, hymns, and marches.

Milton Babbitt provided the best description of his approach to composition when he said, “I believe in cerebral music, and I never choose a note

unless I know why I want it there.” As a student in New York in the late 

1930s and early 1940s, Babbitt immersed himselfin the intellectual milieu

ofthe city, developing a lifelong engagement with analytical philosophy

and reading widely such journals as Symposium and Politics. Babbitt studied

privately with Sessions and eventually enrolled for graduate work with him

6

at Princeton University. Babbitt’s music has at times evoked heated controversy. Some of his more severe critics call his music inaccessible and

irrelevant, but his adherents find that he has undertaken a systematic and

comprehensive exploration ofthe twelve-tone compositional universe.

Pianist and composer Robert Helps, like so many ofhis colleagues

whose works are included in this festival, was a pupil of Sessions’. Helps

was not only an effective proponent ofhis own works, but also devoted

much effort to performing and recording works of other composers, including Babbitt, George Perle, Mel Powell, Arnold Schoenberg, and Sessions.

Inspired by Helps’ example, Alan Feinberg has recorded much of Helps’

music, and the resulting CDs have so far garnered three Grammy awards.

Program notes by Sorab Modi

Next Week at the National Gallery of Art 

Contemporary Music Forum

Music by John Cage

Presented in honor of

Jasper Johns: An Allegory ofPainting, 1955-1965,

as part ofthe Sixty-second American Music Festival

March 4, 2007

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court