MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: Hukvaldy

  • 11. Moravská Hudba

    Brno, 1991 —

    I first visited Czechoslovakia in 1991 to perform at the Brno International Music Festival. How this opportunity came about is a story in itself. My colleague Tom Sovik at the University of North Texas joined a group promoting the City of Dallas as a sister city with Brno, the second largest Czech city and capital of the Moravian province, where he had done his doctoral musicology research. At his suggestion, I wrote a short piece as a gift to Brno. Its mayor turned over the gift score to the secretariat of Brno’s International Music Festival, a distinguished Moravian composer Arnošt Parsch. He invited me to come to the festival and conduct my music. The result was an October 1991 performance in Brno’s New Town Hall of two of my works, ANTIPHONS (1989) and CANZONA, for combined woodwind and brass quintets, which I conducted.

    rehearsing with Czech ensemble

    Parsch invited me back in 1992 for the 27th Brno International Festival’s Experimental Music Exposition V. I presented my LIGHTFORMS 2: StarSpectra multimedia computer music and played trombone in an experimental multimedia piece by my friend, Rodney Waschka. I had performed the same program early that fall at the Festival Internacional Alfonso Reyes in Monterrey, Mexico.

    PTACí

    While in Brno for the 1991 festival, I met choreographer Hana Smičkova, who invited me to compose a work for her Mimi Fortunae Dance Theater, which rehearsed in the ancient Spilberk Castle. I began studying the great 20th-century Moravian composer Leoš Janáček’s music as background for the ballet’s composition.

    PTACí (“Birds”) was premiered in Brno in 1993 by the Moravian Chamber Orchestra, which I conducted. The ballet, choreographed by Smičkova, was performed by Mimi Fortunae in historic Mahunovo Divadlo, the first building in Europe to be equipped by Thomas Edison with electric lights.

    During these years, Parsch and I became composer friends. Our visits to each other always included long walks in nature and deep discussions of music, art, and culture. In 1991 I had visited the northern Moravian mountain village of Hukvaldy, the summer home of Janáček. He loved nature walks and studied bird songs.

    Hukvaldy Sketches was first a concert suite of PTACI, my set of modern musical impressions of old Moravia, in the ancient heart of Eastern Europe. Scored for a chamber quartet, it was premiered February 6, 2018, at Texas State University Performing Arts Center, by Ian Davidson (oboe), Vanguel Tangarov (clarinet), Ames Asbell (viola), and Kari Klier (marimba).

    The final transformation of this work was a re-scoring of Hukvaldy Sketches for the original PTACI orchestration. Its five scenes:

    Hrad – morning climb to the castle ruins

    Ptáci – watching Leoš’s birds

    Vody – forest streams and shadows

    Bystroušky – mouflons and other mountain wildlife

    Podzim – autumn sunset

    PTACí / Hukvaldy Sketches

    Clark 1993/2016 (TC-69/80)

    Morava

    In my intense study of Janácek, I reveled in the expressive depth of his uniquely modern Moravian music. His powerful String Quartet No. 2 and his collection of gentle piano music, Po zarostlém chodníčku, affected me deeply.

    In one of my Brno performances, Parsch’s Czech colleagues commented on my music’s affinity to modern Moravian musical style. I was informally dubbed an honorary Moravian Composer, a distinction I proudly took as a high honor of their acceptance. Since then, I have written many pieces with Czech imagery:

    Two of these are vocal music that include some Czech lyrics. The treble choir piece A NEW LIDICE begins with “We build a new village, while a just world watches. Stavíme novou vesnici. Spravedlivý svêt bude sledovat.” Children (including my daughter Alison) sang a short phrase in Czech in MORAVIAN MOUNTAIN SONGS, written for the Woodrow Wilson Elementary School Choir in Denton, Texas.

    Sinfonietta

    with Parsch at the spring outside Brno

    Leos Janácek composed his great concert work, Sinfonietta, in 1926 for the Sokol Gymnastic Festival in Prague. Janáček said it was intended to express “contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, courage and determination to fight for victory.” It is what I call musical sketches of his home city, Brno, the largest city in the Moravian east of what was then Czechoslovakia.

    I visited Brno several times starting in 1991 to perform my music at its International Music Festival.

    LISTEN ›

    Janácek Sinfonietta

    UNT Symphony Orch. on YouTube

    The festival traditionally ends with a performance of Sinfonietta by the Brno Philharmonic in Janácek Divadlo (theatre). In 1993 my ballet, PTACI, was premiered at historic Mahunovo Divadlo, across a plaza from Janácek Divadlo.

    Though I could have continued my “Sketches” series with a “Brno Sketches,” instead a 2024 work is a set of more abstract variations partly based on and quoting themes from Sinfonietta (in the tradition of Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Haydn).

    • Variation 1 “Canon” engages that ancient musical technique, evoking Brno’s medieval history.
    • Variation 2 “Overtones” explores two harmonic series, C and Bb, painted over each other in layers of color, with hints of fanfare emerging through the clouds.
    • Variation 3 “Constellations” is a kaleidoscopic succession of large sonorities built on stone-sturdy Perfect Fifth intervals brightened by jazz-like added tones.
    • Variation 4 “Fanfare” is an ostinato pattern-music fantasia on Sinfonietta‘s grand fanfare themes.

    Brno Variations

    Clark 2024 (TC-138)

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  • 1. Forest Paths

    Howell, 1967 —

    In 1967 I was already earnestly composing for piano, trombone (my own instrument), even for orchestra. Living beside the Shiawassee River’s glacial-moraine beginnings in rural Livingston County Michigan, my best pastime was hiking along the creek’s forested banks. I was already going to Ann Arbor for trombone lessons and Youth Symphony rehearsals.

    In fall 1967, after my 18th birthday, I moved to Ann Arbor and enrolled at the University of Michigan. Though not yet a music major, I began playing bass trombone in the university orchestras. For 8 years, Ann Arbor with beautiful Huron River running through it was my forested Michigan home.

    The year before I was born, John Cage wrote a gentle, beautiful piece for piano, one simple enough that my 1967 piano skill could have handled. It also expressed my own urge to amble along freely improvised paths of musical exploration.

    John Cage – Dream (1948)– Damian Alejandro, piano

    At age 17, I never dreamed that I would meet John 24 years later (in Denton Texas of all places), a gentle soul who loved mushrooms. And I had yet to discover this piece or any John Cage music. But I was also writing simple and (I thought) beautiful piano music.

    Two pieces for piano that expressed my attitude of wonder while wandering in the woods were updated fifty years later with my 2023 editing skills. “Mystic Breeze” and “Light” were my 12th and 18th completed TC compositions. “Riverbank” is from a 1967 sketch of an “interlude” for trombone and piano.

    They make a nice set of three, revealing that before formal study my compositional explorations were already discovering more exotic harmonies and rhapsodic forms resembling Debussy’s Impressionism and even the post-tonal possibilities of 12-tone rows.

    ARBOR SKETCHES

    Clark 1967 (TC-12/18)

    • 1. Breeze
    • 2. Riverbank
    • 3. Light

    Brno

    Twenty-four years later in 1991, I was invited to perform at the 26th Brno International Music Festival. It would lead me on a path of musical and cultural exploration that has filled my life since with beauty. (I had also married a beautiful Czech-American woman in 1976.)

    Brno is the capital of the Moravian province of what was then Czechoslovakia. Brno was the home city of the great 20th-century Moravian composer, Leoš Janáček. After visiting his home and school in Brno and his summer home in Hukvaldy, I began to study his music.

    Two things captured my interest. Like Bartok, he embraced and collected the folk music of his homeland. He also exalted in nature, walking around the wooded hills of Hukvaldy’s castle ruins, and collected his own transcriptions of bird calls.

    While there on the first visit, I was commissioned to compose a ballet for the local dance theatre company. Inspired by Janáček’s birds, I began to write my own music for what would become the ballet, PTACí (“Birds”).

    Lesní cesty

    In a music store in Brno, I also discovered his marvelous 1911 set of piano pieces, the title of which translates “On the Overgrown Path.” On a return trip, I was able to visit the Moravian Music Archives in Brno to examine his original hand-written manuscript of the pieces.

    Excerpted from Series I:

    • No. 5, They Chattered Like Swallows
    • No. 6, Words Fail!
    • No. 7, Good Night!
    • No. 8, Unutterable Anguish
    • No. 9, In Tears
    • No. 10, The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!

    Po zarostlém chodníčku – – – Josef Páleníček, piano

  • Paths of Light

    a composer’s journal –

    retrospectively logging places, events, ideas, and sounds of a life of composing.

    Each chapter remembers a time and place in my career, and explores a particular compositional design approach derived from my study of 20th-century masterworks. Audio clips offer listening to all pieces cited, both the masterworks and my later compositions inspired by them. Take some time to listen as well as read! – TC

    LINK TO CHAPTER

    CONTENTS

    LINK TO CHAPTER

    Read it all:

    a composer’s journal