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 of

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

For the convenience of concertgoers the Garden Cafe

remains open until 6:00 pm for light refreshments.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW

Washington, DC

Mailing address

2000B South Club Drive

Landover, MD 20785

www.nga.gov

The Sixty-eighth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery of Art

2,775th Concert

Oni Buchanan, pianist

Presented in honor ofWomen’s History Month

March 10, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building Lecture Hall

Admission free
Program

Missy Mazzoli

Orizzonte (2004)

Cindy Cox (b. 1961)

From Hierosgamos: Studies in Harmony and Resonance (2003)

3. Sonorous

4. Meditative, still

5. Playful, but driven

Adina Izarra (b. 1959)

Conclave (2003)

Joan Tower (b. 1938)

Throbbing Still (2000)

Mei-Fang Lin (b. 1973)

Interaction (2001)

Annie Gosfield (b. i960)

The Wanton Brutality ofa Tender Touch (2006)
The Musician

Pianist Oni Buchanan focuses her virtuosity and inventiveness on concert

programming that is often interdisciplinary in nature, directly engaging the

intimate connections between music and the visual arts, poetry, or dance. She

has performed solo recitals throughout the United States at such venues as

the Silberman Series at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania; the Lane Series

in Burlington, Vermont; the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts in Chicago;

and the Bechstein Piano Center in New York City. Buchanan has also performed internationally, including recitals in Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao

Paulo, Brazil; and Guelph, Canada. Her numerous appearances with chamber

ensembles include performances at Harvard University, the New England

Conservatory of Music, and the New School ofMusic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has been a guest concerto soloist with the Waynesboro (West

Virginia) Community Orchestra, conducted by Eric Stassen.

Buchanan received a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of

Virginia and a master’s degree in piano performance from the New England

Conservatory of Music. She continued her music studies at the University

of Iowa School of Music. She also studied at the Aspen Music Festival in the

studios ofJoseph Kalichstein and Gabriel Chodos, and has been an active

participant and performer in the New England Conservatory Summer

Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice.

In addition to her music degrees, Buchanan holds a bachelor of arts

degree in English from the University of Virginia and an master offine arts

degree in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Buchanan’s second

poetry book, Spring, selected as a winner ofthe 2007 National Poetry Series, 

was also a poetry honors winner in the 2009 Massachusetts Book Awards.

Buchanan’s poems are featured in several anthologies including The Best

American Poetry 2004 and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets ofthe New

Century.

Oni Buchanan currently maintains a private piano studio in Boston.

Her discography includes three solo piano CDs on the independent Velvet

Ear Records label. She maintains a Web site at www.onibuchanan.com.

4

Program notes

Missy Mazzoli was recently deemed “one ofthe more consistently inventive,

surprising composers now working in New York” by the New York Times. Her

music has been performed internationally by the Kronos Quartet, eighth

blackbird, the Minnesota Orchestra, the South Carolina Philharmonic, NOW

Ensemble, and many others. Upcoming projects include a performance by

the American Composers Orchestra, and performances ofher chamber opera, 

Songfrom the Uproar, at Bard College and as part of New York City Opera’s

VOX series. Mazzoli is the recipient ofthree ASCAP Young Composer Awards,

a Fulbright grant, and grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Barlow

Endowment. She is the executive director ofthe MATA Festival in New York City.

Orizzonte, for piano and electronics, consists of gently overlapping sine

waves that set the stage for a meditative and introspective piano melody.

It was composed for Hills Not Skyscrapers, a band that Missy Mazzoli 

founded in The Netherlands in 2004. It was first performed on a piano

that had been left out in the rain for a year, in a dilapidated squat hidden

in the heart ofAmsterdam.

A professor at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, Cindy Cox has been

described as radical, traditional, original, archetypal—neither modernist

nor neotonal. She derives her “post-tonal” musical language from acoustics, 

innovations in technology, harmonic resonance, and poetic allusion. She has

received awards and commissions from the American Academy ofArts and

Letters, the American Society ofComposers and Publishers (ASCAP), the

Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, and the National Endowment for

the Arts. Recent performances ofher works in Washington, DC, include the 

Paul Dresher Ensemble’s rendition of Into the Wild at the Library ofCongress

and a National Symphony Orchestra presentation of Cathedral Spires at the

Kennedy Center. Cox’s music is recorded on the Capstone, New World, Albany,

Cantilena, Arpa Viva, Mark, and Valve-Hearts labels.

5
The title of Hierosgamos: Studies in Harmony and Resonance refers to the

hierosgamos, an ancient principle that reveals the ultimate wholeness concealed 

among pairs of apparent opposites. Literally “sacred marriage,” this mysterious

union involves a simultaneous moment of creation and dissolution between

the self and the other, a co-terminus spiritualization ofmatter and a materialization ofspirit. The three selected etudes in this performance are drawn from

a larger work ofseven—a cycle that attempts to show how opposing characteristics and materials ultimately derive from a single source. The middle etude

(Meditative, still) is the center post, and the overtone series from the middle

note ofthe piano—E4—and its inverse provide the pitches. The opening

etude ofthe set (Sonorous) is formed by a slowly moving series ofchorale-like

chords based on A-flat. Its middle section uses a variation on the chorale with 

rapidly descending scales. The third etude (Playful, but driven) is composed

of a forceful, motoric ascending line ofscales topped with a repeating B-flat.

Adina Izarra, born in Caracas in 1959, obtained a Ph.D. from York

University in England in 1989. She returned to Venezuela, where she has

taught at the Simon Bolivar University. She currently directs the university’s

post-graduate program in music and the Digital Music Laboratory. Izarra

has written extensively for flute and guitar, and is currently concentrating

on electronic music and video art. In her electroacoustic work, she has a

predilection for the sounds of nature, especially birds, together with street

calls, particularly those of Spanish origin still present in Caracas streets.

She is active in the International Society for Contemporary Music and

the Venezuelan electro-acoustic music scene. She is also part of RedAsla

(Latin-American sound art composers) and is the only woman member of

the Collegium of Latin American composers. Her music has been recorded

by BIS Grammophon and Elektron (Sweden), Equinoccio (Venezuela), 

Leonardo (Massachusetts), and RedAsla (Mexico), as well as independent

record companies.

6

About Conclave, Adina Izarra writes: “‘Conclave’ is a pun: ‘con—clave’

“(‘with clave,’) the rhythmic pattern which is the basic structuring rhythm of

salsa, and of course this rhythmic pattern is often played by the percussion

instrument claves and ‘conclave’ (a closed organization).” Although the

correct spelling in Spanish has the accent, it destroys the pun. The work is

based on the clave used as rhythmic modulation. Also the fifths progression,

typical ofthe genre, is used. Both deliberately appear out of context.”

Joan Tower’s music is noted for a number of defining qualities—driving

rhythms and colorful orchestrations influenced by the sounds and sensations of a childhood spent in South America—and accessibility for listeners

and players alike, resulting from her own experience as a performing

pianist. She has written a number ofworks paying homage to composers

such as Beethoven (Concertofor Piano), Stravinsky (Petroushskates), and

Copland (Fanfarefor the Uncommon Woman). The top-selling recording of

her orchestral work, Made in America, won three 2008 Grammy® awards,

including best classical contemporary composition.

Throbbing Still, the fourth and final movement ofTower’s No Longer

Very Clear, was inspired by John Ashbery’s (b. 1927) poem “No Longer

Very Clear:”

It is true that I can no longer remember very well

the time when we first began to know each other.

However, I do remember very well

the first time we met. You walked in sunlight,

holding a daisy. You said, “Children make unreliable witnesses.”

Now, so long after that time,

I keep the spirit ofit throbbing still.

Tower applies “[keeping] the spirit ofit throbbing still” to the ten years

she spent as a child in Bolivia, and says that the Incan rhythms of her youth

“throb still” in her musical compositions. “Still” functions in two opposing

meanings, indicating both stasis (the gridlock ofthe repeating chords)

as well as the continued inclusion ofthese rhythms from the past in the

present day.

7
Mei-Fang Lin is currently on the faculty ofthe School of Music at Texas

Technical University. She received a Ph.D. from the University ofCalifornia 

at Berkeley and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where she taught as visiting assistant professor of composition

and theory. Supported by the Frank Huntington Beebe Foundation in Boston 

and a George Ladd Paris Prize from the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, Lin

also spent three years in France studying composition with Philippe Leroux

and participated in the one-year computer music course “cursus de composition” at the Inshtut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique

in Paris. Lin has received major awards from competitions and festivals in

France, Italy, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as the American Music Center, the

Look & Listen Festival, the National Association ofComposers, the SCI/ASCAP

Student Commission Competition, and the 21st Century Piano Commission.

In Interaction, Mei-Fang Lin aims to unite the piano and recorded

electronic sounds without resorting to the use of actual piano sample

sounds in the recording. She achieves this mostly by means of establishing

a close connection between the musical textures, the rhythmic gestures, and

the timbre in the piano and the recording. These two seemingly opposing

media are meant to give the impression that they not only complement each

other, but they actually give birth to each other. Interaction was commissioned by the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign.

Described by The New Yorker as “A major figure ofthe downtown scene

with pieces that use nonmusical sounds in a strikingly expressive manner,”

Annie Gosfield lives and works in New York City, where she divides her

time between composing and performing. She has received commissions

from the Bang on a Can AllStars, Felix Fan, cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, the

Miami String Quartet, Lisa Moore, and Blair McMillen, among many others.

Godfield’s music is featured on three portrait CDs on the Tzadik label as well

as on Cantaloupe, CRI, Innova, Mode, and Sony Classical. She has received

many grants and awards, including the Foundation for Contemporary Art’s

prestigious “Grants to Artists” award. Gosfield held the Darius Milhaud

chair at Mills College, and has taught at Princeton University and CalArts. 

Several of her essays on music have been published in the New York Times’

series “The Score.”

Of The Wanton Brutality ofa Tender Touch, Annie Gosfield writes: “The tide

was inspired by a recent televised brawl: one baseball player wrapped his arm

around another player’s waist, and drew him in close in order to deliver a

wicked roundhouse punch. In one graceful series ofmovements, what looked 

like a fleeting moment oftenderness became an unbridled expression offury.

I was intrigued by the idea of creating a piece that borders on brutal, yet can be

delivered with flawless precision and accuracy.”

Program notes and composer biographies provided by Oni Buchanan

9
Next Week at the National Gallery of Art

Ewa Poblocka, pianist

Music by Chopin

Presented in cooperation with the Embassy of Poland

honor ofthe 200th anniversary ofthe birth of Frederic Chop

March 14, 2010

Sunday evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

amarcord

Sixteenth and seventeenth-century German music

March 17, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building, West Garden Court