Eleanor Hovda

for double-mounted cymbals, bass bows, and friction mallets

I. Centerflow/Trail I

II. Centerflow/Trail II

III. Lemniscates with Breath

IV. Ecce

V. Montemarte

The Cymbalmusic Series developed out of ensemble music that I've been making since 1972. The various pieces are made for a cymbal soloist who elicits sounds from the metal using bass bows and superball friction mallets. The cymbal player also uses voice sounds, such as whistles, hums, and vowel/consonant "breath" sound shapes as extension and counterpoint to the metal sounds. The player always works collaboratively with the space in which the pieces are performed, and in several of the pieces there are collaborations with dancers and audiences.

Click here to see the score.

Click here to listen to a recording of Centerflow/Trail II by the Prism Players on the Eleanor Hovda Collection CD (Spotify).

Lois V Vierk

for orchestra

This piece was inspired by the twisted sandstone canyon in the southern California high desert in Angeles National Park called "Devil's Punchbowl". At this exquisite site you are always aware of both extreme beauty and also danger. Descending into the canyon the trail is rugged, rocky, and treacherous, and the head is scorching. But rising up from the deep gorge are steep, magnificent mountains with their cold streams and sweet smelling pine trees. The vistas are grand. Far in the distance, soft shapes and hues of the landscape melt into one another. 

Devil's Punchbowl unfolds slowly. Musical materials are constantly developed, pushing the work forward from a relatively simple beginning to its dynamic and colorful climax. The piece opens with languorous brass slides downward. String phrases answer the brass, and woodwinds add color and wisps of melody. Gradually the strings begin their long ascending glissando, sweeping the woodwinds up to their highest register, ending the first section.

Immediately strings and low woodwinds enter with agitated multi-color, ever-changing trills and tremolos. Various instruments combine to form sinewy melodic shapes which creep slowly upward. Percussion becomes more pronounced. Brass adds rhythm and harmony. Each phrase builds on the one before as, little by little, the music becomes faster, louder, and rhythmically emphatic. Trombones and celli playing fortissimo glissandi in the lowest register propel the piece to its full orchestral climax. After the high energy of the climax the music returns briefly to the lyrical mood of the opening, ending gently. 

Devil's Punchbowl was commissioned by the Bang On A Can Festival and the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. The commissioning of this work was made possible by a grant fro the Meet The Composer/Reader's Digest Commissioning Program, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. 

The recording of Devil's Punchbowl is of the premiere, given by Victoria Bond conducting the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra on March 21, 1994. They performed the piece beautifully. 

Below are two versions of the score. First is the final version, incorporating several sets of edits to the orchestration made after the premiere and over subsequent years, and which is dated 2009. The major changes to orchestration, emphasizing an expanded role for trombones, etc., are marked above the staves of the score. 

The second is the original score as used by Victoria Bond in 1994 (with numerous indications marked for my first set of edits).

Click here to view the revised score.

Click here to view the original score.

Lois V Vierk

 for Gagaku ensemble

Over the 12 years I actively studied Gagaku I discovered many things about sound. It wasn't, to my thinking, "Japanese sound" in particular -- but sound. I learned how nuances of sound, such as articulations, dynamic shapes, and pitch bends are not just ornaments but all can serve to move a musical phrase forward. I learned how a number of the same instruments sounding together can make a "wall" of sound that can be at once powerful as well as graceful, with a transparency of texture that allows the subtleties of each instrument to come through. And I experienced music unfolding slowly over a long period of time, unhurried, with elegance.

Many of my early compositions, like more than a few Gagaku pieces, have slow beginnings and gradually gather speed and momentum. Although much of my current work uses other approaches to form, I have returned to this idea in Silversword. It seemed the most natural way to let the musical materials develop. But I have not tried to write Gagaku here. The way that I blend instruments and seek new colors from the blendings is not traditional to Gagaku. And the work's high energy climax built on increasingly dense textures, more and more volume, and repetition of ever-shortening phrases, has more to do with my own sensibilities as a Western composer than with anything in Gagaku.

This piece is named after the Hawaiian silversword plant. On the island of Maui you can ascend 10,000 feet to reach the peak of mount Haleakala. From that precipice you look down into a vast crater ("big enough to hold Manhattan") at an ancient desert strewn with volcanic cinder cones. Volcanic ash has been windswept over the centuries into spectacular stripes and swatches of color -- bright white, brilliant orange, shining black. If you then descend 3,000 feet into the bowl of the crater, you will see magnificent plants scattered like jewels on the ashscape. These are silverswords. Their leaves are like silvery quills that grow out of the arid soil in spherical crowns to catch water from the evening fog. Their bloom spikes rise up to five feet with hundreds of tiny white flowers forming rosettes.

Silversword is dedicated very respectfully to my Gagaku teacher in Tokyo, Mr. Sukeyasu Shiba, and to Reigakusha, the Gagaku ensemble that he founded.

Special thanks especially to Mari Ono and Naoyuki Miura and their organization, Music From Japan (New York City).

Special thanks also to Bob Cummins, David Behrman, Yuji Takahashi, Akemi Naito, Donel Young, Bruce Ide and Karen Pearlman.

Silversword was premiered on July 28, 1996 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center Festival 1996, New York City.

Audio is an informal recording made in a rehearsal space in Tokyo in June 1996.  There were changes to the score made after this rehearsal and before the premiere in July 1996, most notably to the biwa parts.

Recording by Reigakusha - gagaku ensemble in Tokyo, Artistic Director Sukeyasu Shiba.

Click here to view the score.