an idyll for the misbegotten

Face coverings required.

Observe social distancing (six feet or more).

Seating is general admission, first-come, first-served. Please only sit next to people you are quarantining with. Benches are reserved for parties of 2-3.

Russell House will be open during this event. You may find restrooms there as well as food and drink to purchase.

Happy Rain on a Spring Night (2004) by Chen Yi (click name for biographical information)

for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano

Commissioned in 2002 by Music From Copland House, my mixed ensemble piece Happy Rain on a Spring Night is written for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. It was premiered in 2004 in New York. The musical inspiration came from an ancient Chinese poem with the same title, written by Du Fu (712-770) in the Tang Dynasty:

Happy rain comes in time, when spring is in its prime.

With night breeze it must fall, and quietly moisten all.

Clouds darken wild roads, light brightens a little boat.

Saturated at dawn, with flowers blooming the town.

[English translation by Chen Yi from the original Chinese]

This poem can be understood symbolically: just as welcome rain nurtures and swells budding seeds into blossoms, society is constantly pushing forward to a new future. As the poem unfolds line by line, the music of this piece reflects each line's meaning, both in scene and in expression, in a similar progressive process. Although the tempo is set at ♩ = 60-70 throughout, and the piece is to be played vividly while never slowing down, the tension builds from a quiet background in the beginning, to a sustained climax towards the end. The musical image in measures 1-41 represents the first half of the poem. Here, the woodwind instruments respond to the muted fast moving notes while metallic string sounds and high piano gestures decorate the texture.

In measures 42-87, the music represents the third line of the poem, where it's so dark that a little light in the boat is shimmering on the lake. In this section, the breathy key slaps on the flute create a mysterious atmosphere as it has a dialog with the other instruments. While being echoed by the string harmonics, the cello's glissandi recites the poem in the tone of Mandarin.

Measures 88-161 are a toccata. It starts with the piano and builds to a big shape to reach the climax in measure 116. This keeps the scene vivid as the piece moves to the coda (m. 162 to the end), which stands on the energetic peak at the end of the piece.

This piece is constructed with two large parts according to the principle of the Golden Section: m. 1-115, and m. 116-192+4 (since the second section is faster). The primary Golden Section occurs at the beginning of the loud and energetic climax of the piece. The smaller divisions within each section are also based upon Golden Section proportions, and textures, too, change according to this proportional arrangement.

— C. Y.

Rain Tree (1981) by Tōru Takemitsu (click name for biographical information)

"It is called the 'Rain Tree' because it seems to make it rain. Whenever it rains at night, throughout the following morning the tree makes drops fall from all its richly growing leaves. While the other trees quickly dry out after the rain, the Rain Tree, because its leaves, no bigger than fingertips grow so closely together, can store up raindrops in its leaves. Truly an ingenious tree!"

Quoted from "Atama no ii Ame no Ki"

(The Ingenious Rain Tree) by Kenzaburo Oé

—Tōru Takemitsu

Strange Birds Passing (1983) by John Luther Adams (click name for biographical information)

[excerpts borrowed from John Luther Adams' book Silences So Deep: Music, Solitude, Alaska (2020)]

"Early each morning and again around sunset, I would walk [in rural Georgia, outside of Atlanta], among oaks and poplars, sycamores and flowering dogwoods. At the edge of the woods and out in the fields were choruses of birds. But most often I would walk farther into the trees, following silvery, limpid phrases that floated through the cool air. Now and then I would catch a glimpse of the singer, always deeper in the forest. This music filled me with longing, an aching hunger to feel at home in the world. In time I learned that this was the wood-thrush--the favorite singer of my hero Thoreau. I listened to this music for weeks before trying to write down something of what I was hearing and feeling.

In time, with the aid of a field guide and binoculars, I learned which birds sang which songs. I began to recognize the distinctive voices of the cardinal, Carolina wren, eastern towhee tufted titmouse, redwing blackbird, and eastern meadowlark. Following my studies at CalArts, my teachers now were the birds. With the self-consciousness of the young artist, I assiduously avoided the music of Oliver Messiaen and other composers who had incorporated birdsong into their music. I chose not to use field recordings to help with my notations. I began to carry a music notebook on my walks. I wanted to take dictation directly from the birds themselves--as Annie Dillard writes: 'learning the strange syllables one by one." (pages 16-17)

"I remember one magical afternoon in May 1979 [in Alaska], sitting in the birch-and-aspen forest outside our cabin, listening to the singing of a hermit thrush. I knew this song from my travels in the cloud forest of Southeast Alaska, eight hundred miles to the south. But here in these younger, leaner woods, the phrases were longer and more florid, and the tones were brighter--like the light flickering through the newly opened leaves. This singer was clearly related to the wood thrush--the bird that had started it all for me in Georgia. Now, here in my new home, this music seemed to touch me even more deeply. And in the years since then, I've often said that the music I want to hear when I finally depart this world is the song of the hermit thrush. For me, this is the music of heaven." (pages 33-34)

An Idyll for the Misbegotten (Images III) (1986) by George Crumb (click name for biographical information)

(to be heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August)

for Horn (originally Flute) and 3 Percussionists

"I feel that 'misbegotten' well describes the fateful and melancholy predicament of the species 'homo sapiens' at the present moment in time. Mankind has become ever more 'illegitimate' in the natural world of the plants and animals. The ancient sense of brotherhood with all life-forms (so poignantly expressed in the poetry of St. Francis of Assisi) has gradually and relentlessly eroded and consequently we find ourselves monarchs of a dying world. We share the fervent hope that humankind will embrace anew nature's 'moral imperative'. My little 'Idyll' was inspired by these thoughts. Flute and drum are, to me (perhaps by association with ancient ethnic musics), those instruments which most powerfully evoke the voice of nature. I have suggested that ideally (if impractically) my 'Idyll' should be heard 'from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August'. 'An Idyll for the Misbegotten' evokes the haunting theme of Claude Debussy's 'Syrinx' (for solo flute, 1912). There is also a short quotation from the eighth century Chinese poet Ssu-K'ung Shu: 'The moon goes down. There are shivering birds and withering grasses.' // When Mr Robert Patterson (one of my former composition students and a virtuoso horn player) mentioned to me that he had been considering the feasibility of a French horn adaptation for the solo flute part of my 'Idyll for the Misbegotten' I was initially somewhat skeptical. My music, like so much contemporary music, implies such specificity in regard to timbre and idiomatic expression that the idea of transcription would seem unthinkable. And yet, after Mr Patterson had played through the horn part for me, I had to admire the sensitivity and ingenuity with which he had solved the various problems of transliteration. The horn, with its enormous evocative power, creates an effect at the same time more intense and primitive than the flute is capable of. The horn coloration does indeed invoke a 'mystical sense of nature'. Although the horn part in 'Idyll' demands a considerable degree of virtuosity, I feel this new version to be eminently practical and effective. I fully endorse this alternate form for the work and would be especially pleased if it might help to fill out the rather limited repertory of contemporary solo music for the horn."

—George Crumb

Eternal Song (2018) by David Kirkland Garner (click name for biographical information)

This piece is the final movement of a collaborative piece titled A Forest Unfolding (see below for more). The text is by Author Richard Powers extracted from his novel The Overstory:

Networked together underground by

countless thousand miles of living threads,

her trees feed and heal each other, keep

their young and sick alive, pool their

resources and metabolites. . . .

Her trees are far more social than anyone

suspects. There are no individuals. There

aren’t even separate species. Everything in

the forest is the forest. Trees fight no more

than do the leaves on a single tree.

Nature isn’t red in tooth and claw. If trees

share their storehouses, then every drop of

red must float on a sea of green.

A Forest Unfolding is a collaborative work inspired by recent scientific research into the rich communication and subterranean connectivity between trees. Four writers—the environmentalists Bill McKibben and Joan Maloof, along with the novelists Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson—selected prose passages and poems on the relations among people and trees. They presented these selections to four composers—Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner, Stephen Jaffe, and David Kirkland Garner—who set these words into a linked sequence of recitatives and arias. The resulting whole traces a narrative arc from human estrangement from nature to a glimpse of the endless cooperation that knits a forest together.

The composers themselves communicated and cooperated with one another throughout the process, sharing thoughts on the relations between the texts, exchanging material and musical ideas, and shaping the structure of the larger piece. Together, they settled on a shared musical intertext, the final section of the last song in Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, to lend connective tissue to the whole. In this way, a collective process of many makers yielded a work in the cantata tradition about the need for human reintegration with the rest of the deeply collaborative living world.

A Forest Unfolding was conceived by Richard Powers, Laura Gilbert, and Jonathan Bagg. It was commissioned by Electric Earth Concerts for premieres on August 12, 2018 in Peterborough, New Hampshire and August 18th at the Portland Chamber Music Festival in Maine.

—Richard Powers

Jennifer Parker-Harley, flute

Scott Herring, percussion

Rachel Calloway, mezzo soprano

Laurie Baynard, Dana Crytser, Jennifer Davis, Annie Eaton, Roya Farzaneh, Ziqing Guan, Chris Kowalewski, and Blair Mothersbaugh, flutes

Joseph Eller and Carmen Borregales, clarinets

Michael Harley, bassoon

Ari Streisfeld, violin

Claire Bryant, cello

Joe Jones, Daniel Myers, Andrew Patzig, and Bailey Seabury, percussion

Phillip Bush, piano

David A. Gordon, conductor

Special Thanks to:

Jeff Francis, Sound and Video Engineer, Livestream director

Scott Herring and the UofSC Percussion Studio

Kim McMahon, Director, Russell House University Union

Michael Gibson, School of Music Facilities Manager

Eric Duncan and the Black Rooster Restaurant

Southern Exposure Donors

We would like to thank the following individuals for their generous support of our 2020-2021 season. Donors receive special benefits including a reserved seat at the series concerts. To make a gift or to learn more about our different giving levels, please contact Caroline Earp at EARPC@mailbox.sc.edu. Gifts listed are from July 1, 2020 – February 18, 2021. Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy. If your name is missing or incorrectly listed, please contact the Caroline Earp.

Sustainer ($1,000-$4,999)

Ted and Debbi Fetner

Patron ($500-$999)

Anonymous

Ms. Alice K. Adams

Cormac and Laura Cannon

Tayloe and Christine Harding

John and Susan Steedman

Joseph Rackers and Marina Lomazov

Contributor ($250-$499)

Christina and Emory Clark

Dick and Winifred Goodwin

Nancy Lane

Sandra Aidar-McDermott and Gerald McDermott

David and Ellen Potter

John Fitz Rogers

Chandra Shekhar

Ryan J. Williams

Partner ($100-$249)

Anonymous, in honor of the UofSC Theory

Faculty

The Austermiller Family

Reginald F. Bain and Erin Keefe Bain

Drucilla Barker

Dr. Anne Louise Bezuidenhout

Barbara C. Bowers

Kate and John Boyd

Phillip Bush and Lynn Kompass

Dan Cook

David and Erika Cutler

Gail and David Dawson

John Mark and Robin Dean

Eric Duncan

Dr. Caroline M. Eastman

Mandy Fang and Yi Sun

George Fetner

Martha C. Freibert

David and Bronwen Garner

Stephen and Christine Hait

Katty and Charles Hite

Michael Harley and Jennifer Parker-Harley

John Harley

Sharon Jacenko

Kunio Hara and Daniel Jenkins

Mary Bull and Craig Kridel

Elizabeth Knoth

Ken May

Morgan and Mary MacLachlan

Baljinder S. Sekhon

Southern Exposure also thanks the following patrons for their support of individual concerts this season:

Rachel Calloway and Ari Streisfeld

Peter M. Chametzky

Susan Felleman

John M. Grego

Laura K. Kissel

Darlene Moak

For more information about Southern Exposure contact Michael Harley (mharley@mozart.sc.edu). To donate directly, visit our website (www.sc.edu/music/southern-exposure). Please follow Southern Exposure on Facebook!

Staff: J. Michael Harley, Artistic Director; David Garner, Assistant Director; David Gordon, Graduate Assistant; Jeff Francis, Sound Engineer/Lighting Designer; Sara Winsted, Visual Art Coordinator.

20th Anniversary Season (2021-2022):

September 17, 2021: Night Music featuring composer Augusta Read Thomas and UofSC faculty performers (location and time TBD)

November 7, 2021: At War With Ourselves featuring the Kronos Quartet, Nikky Finney, Michael Abels, and a South Carolina All-Star Choir (3:00pm at the Koger Center for the Arts, with a residency at UofSC from November 4-7)

January 28, 2022: Messiaen Reimagined featuring Founders, the 2019 Savvy Competition Winners (7:30pm in the Recital Hall, with a Spark Residency January 24-28)

February 18, 2022: The Westerlies - Feb. 18, (7:30pm in the Recital Hall)

Spring 2022: COVID-impact a virtual concert featuring UofSC faculty performing world premieres by Nicky Sohn, Marcus Norris, and David Kirkland Garner (release date TBD)

March 24, 2022: Bang on a Can All-Stars a Gala 20th Anniversary Concert and Fundraising Event, Tickets Required (7:30pm in the Johnson Recital Hall, Darla Moore School of Business)