The Center for 21st Century Music looks forward to an electrifying concert by the Slee Sinfonietta on Tuesday, April 16 at 7:30pm in Slee Hall under the baton of Prof. Jaman Dunn-Danger. Featuring the works of Lukas Foss, Su Lian Tan, Chou Wen-chung, and William Kraft, this performance takes as its point of departure the pan-American theme from the Sinfonietta's October 17 concert, now turning our attention to musical interactions between America and Asia.
German composer and conductor Lukas Foss established what became an intimate connection to Buffalo’s music culture after his arrival in 1963 to direct the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the University at Buffalo and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Foss’s compositional style shifted from Western neoclassicism to experimental in the mid-twentieth century.
Lukas Foss
An elegy for distinguished Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu, For Toru cycles through moods of tender sorrow and longing, punctuated by flickers of joy. Foss evokes grief and signals Takemitsu’s musical lineage through the flute’s melody, which features bent pitches and contrasting soft, fluttered, and sharp articulations. Though the work is overarchingly tonal, Foss provides few moments of resolution, alluding to Takemitsu’s enduring influence.
William Kraft was an American percussionist and composer whose works reflects a variety of genres, including serialism and experimental jazz. The recipient of several awards and grants—a fellowship from the Guggenheim and Ford Foundations and several awards from the Kennedy Center among them—Kraft dedicated his career to absorbing new techniques and creating new music performing ensembles.
Encounters V, “In the Morning of the Winter Sea” channels the form and mood of Carl A. Faber’s homonymous poem. To capture the cautious optimism of a soul recovered, Kraft uses starkly contrasting dynamics, juxtaposing articulations for both cello and percussion, and drastic temporal shifts. The piece exhibits his connection to a variety of musical traditions through instrumentation, including an array of four tam tams from Asia. Kraft's influences bespeak the common interests of West Coast composers and performers who borrowed from Asian traditions, including major figures with whom he collaborated, such as Lou Harrison and John Cage.
William Kraft Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Chou Wen-chung left an indelible mark on Western and Asian music of the twentieth century. He was born in Yantai, China, in 1923 and relocated to the United States in 1946, around which time he began composing his earliest noted works. The first of his major composition projects, Landscapes, was premiered in 1949 by the San Francisco Symphony. Critics and scholars attested to the unparalleled nature of the work, claiming that it did not abide by either Asian or Western standards.
Chou’s style retained its idiosyncratic lexicon, though he increasingly drew from Asian soundscapes throughout his career. Ode to Eternal Pine (2009) is no exception. Using a variable mode principle he had developed himself, the piece undergoes several transformations, moving fluidly between chromatic and pentatonic tonal formations.
Su Lian Tan’s work is similarly biographical. A former student of Milton Babbitt, she combines a German post-modern aesthetic with her childhood soundscape, rooted in China and Malaysia. Tan’s opera, Lotus Lives, was staged earlier this season at the University at Buffalo Center for the Arts. She is the Fletcher Professor of the Arts at Middlebury College and Visiting Slee Professor at the University at Buffalo for the 2023-24 academic year.
Flutist Carol Wincenc personally commissioned Autumn Lute Song and its various recordings; the version we will hear on April 16 includes an obbligato part for the erhu). A flutist herself, Tan was able to capture the instrument’s timbral flexibility and expressivity within the piece. The work centers the pentatonic scale, a tonal system often used to sonically evoke East Asian localities/traditions.
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