Robert Cogan Memorial Concert

Robert Cogan | Study in Deep Calm, No. XIV from "Algebra and Mornings" for piano (1981-)

World Premiere

Program note

Algebra and Mornings, began in 1981 as a collection of “piano pieces for the young” originally commissioned by and composed for the Groton Center of Arts and its then Director, Harry Chalmiers.  The cycle is dedicated to Bob Cogan’s and Pozzi Escot’s daughter, Kali.  Over ensuing decades, Bob continued to add to the cycle including the final two pieces, nos. XIII and XIV, composed in the 2010s.  His foreword to the collection begins with the following:

From someone who has loved Beethoven’s Bagatelles and Schumann’s Album for the Young, not to mention J. S. Bach’s Notebooks and Inventions, these pieces attempt to repay a debt, to shed some of their same morning light.  The title draws images from the poem “Matthew 25:30” by Jorge Luis Borges: “…horses and mornings/algebra and fire,” which also contains the line “falls in music, gentlest of all time’s shapes.”

“For the young” on the title page is, of course, a pretension, a hope, and a metaphor. 

Bob directs in the performance notes for Algebra and Mornings—as he does in many of his other compositions—that the performer is “to shape piece[s] by choosing the beginnings and endings, as well as the number of events, total duration, and inner dynamic and articulative details…. By sharing the creative role more openly than in some other music, the performer has one more way of imagining and possessing the pieces.”
        “Study in Deep Calm”, No. XIVfrom Algebra and Mornings, receiving its world premiere this evening, was Bob’s final composition for solo piano.                 
– Jon Sakata

REMARKS | Andrea Kalyn, President, New England Conservatory

Robert Cogan | Aflame in Flight, a folio for solo violin (1999-)

Program note

Aflame in Flight is the last of a large sequence of folios composed in homage to, and based on texts of William Carlos Williams.  Each folio explores montage techniques in which a large, ever-growing group of segments are to be combined in many different ways.  In Aflame in Flight the violinist uses four specific fragments to create a framework for the piece, but chooses from thirty-seven other fragments to develop the body of the work, resulting in a new composition with every performance. 
        Begun in Paris during the Balkan violence at the end of the twentieth century, the work is dedicated “to the memory of all those past and present everywhere who have been driven from their homes—aflame in flight in the worst sense.”  Stillness, silence, flurries of motion, ecstatic passages, and lyrical laments give voice to this dedication.  Michael Appleman, the Paris based violinist for whom the piece was composed, gave the premiere in 1999.                     
– Eden MacAdam-Somer

…a crow zigzags…
…smaller birds…
dive from above stabbing for his eyes

…a flight of empurpled wings!
…kindled / to sudden ardor!

…churring…a flashing
of wings and a churring song

…A burst of wings…

…aflame (only) in flight!

Love is a stone endlessly in flight…
The stone lives, the flesh dies
– we know nothing of death.

The gulls, vortices of despair, circle and give
voice to their wild responses…

…small birds
Moved by desire, passionately…
The colors of their plumage…indecipherable
…the white, the yellow, the black…

Anywhere is everywhere…

Oh life, bizarre fowl, what color are your wings?
Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, white, brown,
orange, black, grey?

                Your great wings
Flap as you disappear in the distance…

…life…is only a bird
That has…a cry
That reaches to every rock’s center…

The flames towering / Ah!

flames with… a belly of their
own that destroys…
A drunkenness
of flames… All fire, afire!
                Whirling flames, leaping
Carried by the wind…
Beautiful thing! Aflame
                Intertwined with fire

the waterfall of the
flames, reversed, shooting
upward
               the person
becomes the flame –
               a shriek of fire with
the upwind…
                float
upon the flames as upon a sweet breeze
               riding the air…
Beautiful thing
the flame’s lover –
The pitiful dead
cry back to us from the fire, cold in
the fire, crying out…

From William Carlos Williams, Spring and All and Paterson. 
New York: New Directions, 1923 and 1958.

Pozzi Escot | Interra I for two pianos (1968-)

Program note

Pozzi Escot’s Interra I (1968-) was composed while she was in residence at the Radcliffe Institute.  The work received its world premiere at Jordan Hall by pianist Robert Jones, February 10, 1970, in its original version as thirteen solo piano preludes with a visual graphic performance of Schoenberg’s Opus 19 No. 6 (film and spotlights) and tape music—an ‘in memoriam.’  This version included a roulette to select any one order of the thirteen pieces and was to have a duration of 13’45”.
        When Pozzi gave us the score to Interra I in the 2000s, the graphic projection film and tape music were removed, and the thirteen preludes were consolidated by her into a three-movement design, with a new duration designation of 6’.  As we did with Pozzi’s Interra II (another solo piano + pre-recorded tape composition from 1980), we received her permission to make a new arrangement of Interra I for two pianos: to augment the already challenging piano writing to encompass not only the ‘live’ solo piano part, but to also ‘make live’ the array of pre-recorded layers matching the original dense conglomeration of dynamic simultaneity and accumulation.
        Our arrangement process continues with this evening’s new transformation: a further temporal compression of the three movements, in which Pozzi’s signature sonic geometries undergo new forms of fragmentation and super(im)position, cascade and collision.                                                            
– Jung Mi Lee, Jon Sakata

REMARKS | Kali Pozzi-Escot Cogan

Robert Cogan | Celanporträt/Celan Portrait for voice and piano, bilingual version in five movements (2004)

A. Rabenüberschwärmte Weizenwoge
B. Die Pole
C. (Sleep not)
D. ...Ich
E. Pour the wasteland into your eye-sacks

Program note and text

Celanporträt / Celan Portrait evokes the Romanian-Jewish writer Paul Celan (1920–1970), widely regarded as the greatest of Europe’s post World War II poets.  He arrived at adulthood during the Holocaust, knowing of his parents’ deportation and death.  He faced the inescapable post-Holocaust dilemma: how to live and create in the face of this event impossible to ignore or to encompass.  He ultimately lived, married, taught, and died by suicide in Paris.  American poet-laureate Robert Pinsky has cited the “greatness of his invention,” and J. M. Cameron places him “within the tradition of Hölderlin and Rilke, his achievement not less than theirs.” 
       The Portrait intermixes six of Celan’s texts (in John Felstiner’s English translation and in the original German) in five movements.  It is dedicated to the memory of my paternal grandparents, who also disappeared in the Holocaust in Kishinev, Romania/Moldova (1941–1945).                                                                      
– Robert Cogan

A.

Rabenüberschwärmte Weizenwoge.
Welchen Himmels Blau?  Des untern?  Obern?
                Pour the wasteland / die Ödnis / into your eye-sacks,
                The call to sacrifice,
Schlaf nicht / sleep not / Sei auf der Hut.
Die Pappeln / polars / mit singendem Schritt
Ziehn mit dem Kriegsvolk mit… / the salt-flood.
                Come with me to Breath
                and beyond / hinaus.

B.

Die Pole
sind in uns,
unübersteigbar / surmountable /
im Wachen,
wir schlafen
                Die Zahlen / numbers / im Bund / league
                mit der Bilder Verhängnis
                und Gegen-
                verhängnis.
Wir schlafen hinüber, vors Tor
des Erbarmens,
ich verliere dich an dich, das
ist mein Schneetrost,
sag, dass Jerusalem ist,
sags, als wäre ich diese
dein Weiss,
als wärst du
meins / mine /
als könnten wir ohne uns wir sein
                Der drübergestülpte
                Schädel, an dessen
                schlafloser Schläfe / sleepless /
Later arrow, that sped out from the soul.
Stronger whirring.  Nearer growing.  Two worlds touching.

C.

(Sleep not.)  The ditch runs with your blood.
Green skeletons are dancing,
One tears the cloud away:
wind-beaten, battered, icy.
your dream bleeds from the lances.
The world’s a laboring beast,
                Raben…schwärmte
                …Himmels…
Später Pfeil…Seele
                …Beide Welten.
creeps stark under the night sky.
God is howling.

D.

…Ich
fürchte mich und frier.

With all my thoughts I went
Right out of the world; there you were,
you my gentle one, my open one, and –
you took us in.

Who
says it all died out for us
when our eye dimmed?
It all awoke, all started up.

Huge, a sun came drifting, bright!
against it stood soul to soul, clear,
they forced a silence
ihre Bahn vor.

Leicht
tat sich dein Schloss auf, still
steigt ein Hauch in den Äther,
und was sich wölkte, wars nicht
wars nicht Gestalt und von uns her
wars nicht
so gut wie ein Name?

E.

Pour the wasteland into your eye-sacks,
the…sacrifice,
                an ill-
                usury hammer
                sings the cosmic tempo
…the salt-flood,
come with me to Breath
and beyond.
                …the cosmic tempo
                of praise / besingt.   

“Pour the Wasteland,” “Below a Painting,” “Nocturne,” “The Poles,” “The Numbers,” and “With All My Thoughts”from Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner.  New York: Norton, 2001.

REMARKS | Harry Chalmiers

Robert Cogan | Contexts/Memories, Version C for two pianos (2000)

Program note

Bob wrote that:

Contexts/Memories had its beginnings in a set of piano pieces “for the young,” Algebra and Mornings, begun in 1981 and added to occasionally since then.  Contexts/Memories is a reediting, in the cinematic sense, of those pieces: exactly the same music appears, but crosscut (remembered) differently, no longer for the young.  Several different versions, different montages, exist.  Version C, for one or two pianos, was created for and is dedicated to Jung Mi Lee and Jon Sakata.  The title Algebra and Mornings draws its images from the phrases “...horses and mornings/...algebra and fire...” in the poem “Matthew 25:30” by Jorge Luis Borges, which also inspired Contexts/Memories: “memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy.”

To this we add an excerpt—by the French philosopher Deleuze on Spinoza (two philosophers whom Bob expressed deep interest in)—which we feel fittingly describes this piece:

But now it is a question of knowing whether relations (and which ones?) can compound directly to form a new, more “extensive” relation, or whether capacities can compound directly to constitute a more “intense” capacity or power.  It is no longer a matter of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities.  How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum?  How can a being take another being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and world?  Now we are concerned, not with a relation of point to counterpoint, nor with the selection of a world, but with a symphony of Nature, the composition of a world that is increasingly wide and intense.  In what order and in what manner will the powers, speeds, and slownesses be composed?                                                                                                          
– Jung Mi Lee, Jon Sakata

Four Rilke Sonnets, for solo soprano voice (2020)

Sonnet 1:1  There rose a tree
Sonnet 1:3  A god can do it
Sonnet 1:5  Erect no tombstone
Sonnet 1:2  And almost a girl it was and came forth

Program note and text

 “…song is existence.”  As a composer, Bob had a special love for the sound of the human voice.  About one third of his compositional output involves a singer or singers.  He also had a keen interest in language and poetry.  Texts from Borges, Williams, Celan, Bronk and many others figure prominently in his music.  In fall 2019, Bob came across Burton Pike’s English translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.  Struck by the intense musicality of these texts, he selected four of the fifty-five poems and composed what turned out to be his last work. 
        Four Rilke Sonnets is written for solo soprano and dedicated to the memory of Roger Sessions, Bob’s most influential teacher, and to Elizabeth Keusch, one of Bob’s most devoted performers.  An informal premiere of the opening sonnet took place in Cambridge on Bob’s ninetieth birthday, February 2020.  The complete cycle is performed for the first time tonight.
         Bob was especially fascinated by the versatility of Rilke’s language, its ability to “turn on a dime.”  This quality is reflected and amplified in the musical setting through sweeping melodic gestures, flexible rhythms, contrasting articulations, and constantly fluctuating colors of sound.                                                    
– Matthias Truniger

Sonnet 1:1

There rose a tree.  O pure over-rising!
O Orpheus is singing!  O high tree in the ear!
And all fell silent.  Yet even in the silence
new beginning, intimation and transformation came forth.

Animals in silence pressed out of the clear
released forest of hollow and nest;
and then it happened that it was not from cunning,
and not from fear that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from hearing.  Growl, screech, roar
seemed small in their hearts.  And where just before
there had been hardly a hut to receive this,

a shelter of darkest longing
with an entrance whose posts were trembling, —
there you created for them temples in their hearing.

Sonnet 1:3

A god can do it.  But tell me, how
is a man to follow him through the slender lyre?
Man’s thought is hesitation.  At the crossroads of two
pathways of the heart stands no temple to Apollo.

Song, as you teach it, is not desire,
not striving for a goal at last achieved;
song is existence.  For the god something simple.
But when are we?  And when does he bend

To our being the earth and the stars?
It’s not, youth, that you love, even though
The voice then tears your mouth open—learn

to forget that you sang out.  That fades away.
To truly sing is a different breath.
A breath about nothing.  A breeze in the god.  A wind.

Sonnet 1:5

Erect no tombstone.  Just let the rose
bloom every year in his honor.
For it is Orpheus.  His metamorphosis
in this thing and in that.  We should not strain

for other names.  Once for all times
it is Orpheus when there’s singing.  He comes and goes.
Is it not already much, if sometimes he outlives
for a few days the petals of the rose?

O how he had to disappear for you to grasp it!
And even if he himself was also anxious he would vanish.
In that his word surpasses being here

is he already there where you cannot follow it.
The lyre’s fence does not force his hands.
And he obeys by stepping over.

Sonnet 1:2

And almost a girl it was and came forth
out of this united joy of song and lyre
and shone forth clear through her spring veil
and made itself a bed within my ear.

And slept in me.  And everything was her sleep.
The trees that I had ever admired, these
feelable distances, the felt meadow
and that amazement that concerned myself.

She slept the world.  Singing god, how have
you perfected her, so that she did not first desire
to be awake?  Look, she came into being and slept.

Where is her death?  O will you yet find
this motif, before your song consumes itself? —
Where is she sinking out of me? … A girl almost …

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, Book 1, Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5, translated by Burton Pike.  From Burton Pike, Where the Paths Do Not Go.  World Poetry Books, 2018.

Artist biographies

Pozzi Escot attended Reed College and graduated from Juilliard School and the Hamburg Musikhochschule, where she studied with Philipp Jarnach.  When the New York Philharmonic premiered her Symphony V, “Sands,” she was named one of the five outstanding women composers of the twentieth century, alongside Lili Boulanger and Ruth Crawford. 
        Reviewers around the world have said: “Symphony V is an arresting composition, a most formidable mathematical construction where the resulting sound expresses either a delicate and poetic or a powerful excitement” (Andrew Porter, The New Yorker); “Sands is a fascinating study in textural contrast and interplay” (Joseph McLellan, Washington Post); “Escot’s Interra II pulses with the beauty and excitement of mathematics (Tom Purdom, The Philadelphia Welcomat); “Lamentus is powerfully and masterfully designed (Süddeutsche Zeitung); “With Christos, Escot exploited brilliantly unfamiliar timbres” (Theodore Strongin, The New York Times); “Neyrac Lux is a formidable vision of mathematical abstraction and of that sense of universality which such abstraction engenders” (The Netherlands Interface).  

Described by the Boston Globe as “virtuosic, riveting, and radiant”, and by the New York Times as “provocative, powerful and poignant,” Elizabeth Keusch is recognized as a vocal artist of great versatility, winning international acclaim for her interpretations of works spanning the late Renaissance era through the 21st Century. 
        On the concert stage, she has been a soprano soloist with numerous orchestras including the National Symphony Orchestras of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, as well as the Boston, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, Dallas, Minneapolis, Houston, and Denver Symphony Orchestras among others.
        She has performed title roles with the Paris Opera, Teatro Colón, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Neue Oper Wien, Opera ad Hoy (Madrid), Encompass New Opera (NYC), Arizona Opera, Opera Boston, and Tanglewood Opera Theatre.
        Festival collaborations include performances at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, Wiener Festwochen, Hörgänge (Vienna), Festival d’Automne (Paris), Berliner Festwochen, Festival Ultraschall (Berlin), Transit (Belgium) and Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  The soprano has collaborated extensively with Helmuth Rilling, singing oratorios and masses of Bach, Handel, Brahms, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Britten for the International Bach-Akademie Stuttgart and the Oregon Bach Festival.
        A champion of chamber music, Ms. Keusch has performed with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, Brentano String Quartet, Pacifica String Quartet, Seattle Chamber Players, Klangforum Wien, and Kammerensemble Neue Music Berlin, Collage, Boston Musica Viva and the Chameleon Ensemble.
        Ms. Keusch has a Bachelor of Music degree from University of North Texas, a Master of Music degree and an Artist Diploma from NEC.  While a student at NEC she began her collaboration with Robert Cogan, performing his open folio for solo voice, Utterances.  In the ensuing years Ms. Keusch has had the great pleasure to also perform Cogan’s works Eight Songs of William Bronk, A-Ka-Ho, two early songs set to poetry of Ezra Pound, and Celan Portrait.

Composer/performer/improviser Eden MacAdam-Somer ’13 DMA is one of today’s most exciting and versatile artists.  Hailed by the New York Times as reflecting “astonishing virtuosity and raw expression,” her music transcends genre through soaring violin, vocals, and percussive dance, weaving in and out of the many cultures that have formed her experience.  She has been a featured soloist with symphony and chamber orchestras, jazz and swing bands, and Romanian, Jewish Music, and American folk ensembles. She has been a guest artist at such institutions as the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and the Dundalk Institute of Technology, a featured performer at the Eastbourne, Texas, and Beijing International Music Festivals, and she has toured across the contiguous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, India, Iceland, Europe, the UK, and Afghanistan.
       Eden has written numerous works for solo artist on voice, violin, and body percussion, such as Rumi Songs, a partially composed, partially improvised song cycle.  Her works are performed internationally, and she has received commissions by such groups as the New Gallery Concert Series, Cuatro Puntos Resident Artists, the Providence Mandolin Orchestra, and the AURA Ensemble.  Her 2015 live solo album, My First Love Story, was listed as one of the top ten jazz albums of the year in the Boston Globe.
        Eden is currently a full-time faculty member at NEC, where she teaches courses, ensembles, studio lessons, in addition to serving as Co-Chair of the Department of Contemporary Improvisation.  A dynamic and passionate teacher, Eden works with each student to attain the skills they need to become creative and successful artists, strengthening unique personal style with a good foundation in aural skills and technical facility.  Outside of the classroom, Eden maintains an active, eclectic international performance and recording career as a soloist and with such bands as Notorious Folk and the Klezmer Conservatory Band.

Concert pianists and transdisciplinary artists, Jung Mi Lee ’92 MM, ’93 GD and Jon Sakata ‘92/’93 Double MM, ’03 DMA, are active in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia and have been featured in cultural capitols of Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Norway, People’s Republic of China, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland.  A sampling of venues and institutions that they have performed and creatively worked at offers a glimpse into the diverse are(n)as that they are engaged with: Radialsystem V in Berlin, Färgfabriken Kunsthalle in Stockholm, the Exhibition Pavilion of the National Museum of Architecture in Oslo, Bagsværd Kirke in Copenhagen, Myyrmäki Kirkko in Vantaa, Gyllensbergsalen - Sandels Cultural Centre in Helsinki, Estonian History Museum in Tallinn, 2015 Illuminus nighttime festival in Boston; Beijing Central, China National, Shanghai, Wuhan and Xi’an Conservatories; Boston, Harvard, Montreal, New Mexico, Porto Alegre, Tallinn, Tsinghua, Tufts Universities; Carnegie Mellon Center for Arts in Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The New School (NYC), Wentworth Institute of Technology, Williams College Multicultural Center; Goethe-Institut-Boston, Japanese-American Cultural Center-Los Angeles, Conference in Interdisciplinary Musicology 2005 (Montreal), International Conference on Music and the Environment (Tallinn), 4th International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music (AAWM).
        Exhibition and installation design collaborators include architect John Stephen Ellis AIA, transdisciplinary artist Nobuho Nagasawa, architect and artist Rob Trumbour AIA, painter Deborah Barlow, poet Todd Hearon, artist and curator Lauren O’Neal, architect Rolf Backmann, poet Willie Perdomo, architect and artist Bruce MacNelly.
        Jung Mi and Jon live in Exeter, New Hampshire and have taught at Phillips Exeter Academy since the mid-1990s. Their dedication to the solo and collaborative works of Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot, with whom they toured extensively nationally and internationally to perform and record, spans the past three decades.