American Portraits

Wild Trails and American music have crossed paths since the group's first concert, which took place over twenty-four years ago. We were then in the midst of the Gulf War, throughout Europe there was a hostile attitude toward anything bearing the U.S. label; an ill-concealed racism against the U.S. was in the air, and even in the cultural field there was no exception. Moreover, in the Italy of those years, and especially in the improperly called "cultured" milieu, contemporary American music was not considered much: with the exception of institutional and approved figures from the official European avant-garde such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Elliott Carter, and Milton Babbitt, who were somehow performed, most of our own art directors regarded Americans as basically ignorant good-timers from from a country still too young to possess the depth that came from having millennia of History behind it like Europe: only the world of jazz, considered the only authentic form of expression invented by Americans, was respected (albeit with a certain supercilious arrogance).

Little or no one considered the novelty arising from the phenomenon of minimalism, which indeed was strongly opposed and virtually never offered in concert (the cultural shock caused by the performance of Philip Glass and Bob Wilson's Einstein on the Beach at the 1976 Venice Biennale was quickly belittled by critics) not to mention the composers of the next generation, the so-called postmoderns, who were considered little more than a joke.

We were decidedly against the stupidity of this attitude, so we decided to name our first Festival "The American Friends," since we just couldn't to think that authors like Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, David Lang and Michael Gordon could be equated to with figures like Ronald Reagan and George Bush just because they were born in the United States. For composers of our generation, America was a breath of fresh air in the often moldy and festering environment of the European avant-gardes, from too many years entrenched in reactionary positions that recycled the glories of Darmstadt and still spoke a language over thirty years old.

Groups like Bang on to Can had completely turned the stylistic perspective on its head, combining the compositional rigor of composers like Luciano Berio and Louis Andriessen with the influence of rock and jazz, bringing fresh blood and new energy to the world of from concert music. We were also enthusiastic about the composers of the previous generation, and scores by Reich, Adams, Glass, Riley and Rzewski crowded our programs quite often. With the same interest we got to know and hang out with younger composers who later came on the American scene, from Julia Wolfe to Anna Clyne, from Michael Torke to Michael Daugherty. With many of them we have formed friendships that last from decades, and we have commissioned several works written specifically for our ensemble. Throughout the years of our journey, the dialogue with American musicians has been fruitful and continuous, and the widespread offering of these musics has meant that gradually many of the distrusts that surrounded these scores and composers have disappeared. With pleasure we now see several other Italian groups proposing the same composers that years ago we were the only ones performing.

In these three concerts to Spoleto we offer a broad panorama of composers with very different stylistic tendencies. Some come from minimalism, while others (like Sean Shepherd and Andrew Norman) have nothing to to do with that experience.America has many musical faces, and we like to explore different ones. Although we have also attended to long historical composers such as Cage and Feldman, on this occasion we have chosen to perform lesser-known composers, reserving only the first evening for the historical names of minimalism and focusing our attention on great composers who are still incredibly neglected in our country.

Composers such as Missy Mazzoli, Christopher Cerrone, Timo Andres and Armando Bayolo are regularly present in the playbills of the most prestigious U.S. institutions, but totally ignored in Italy. What is surprising and intriguing is the extraordinary variety of styles and modes of expression present in overseas music. Immune from the craze for "compositional schools" that still plagues Europe, these musicians possess a freedom of expression often unknown here. Dozens of different languages can be found in their music, often bizarrely mixed together, far from from any sterile attitude of purism or academia. Energy, unusual instrumental colors, use of forms derived from popular music, theatricality and extroversion often used explicitly, ability to communicate directly with the audience (without, however, yielding to pandering or condescending positions) are just some of the characteristics found in all these musicians.

In the first concert we will re-propose historical pages by Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich performing them with the original instruments of those years: organs and electric keyboards now gone into disuse, fortunately found and restored thanks to Giovanni Mancuso, composer and collector of musical instruments. The so primitive and raw sounds of these keyboards at the time were truly shocking and, with the arrival of later versio- ns of these instruments, have softened considerably. Classics such as Glass's Music in Fifths and Reich's Four Organs thus regained all the subversive charge that had made early listeners of the scores cry out in scandal thanks to "electric" colors and atmospheres antithetical to to those typical of classical writing.

to Wild Trails also likes to explore different sides of these composers: Meredith Monk, for example, is universally famous for her production of vocal music, while we offer listening to fascinating and rarely performed piano pages. Terry Riley is known for his music dedicated to the world of electronic keyboards, and we, as well as to those, explore a score for string quartet, an acoustic ensemble par excellence.

Over the course of these appointments, we move from the stylistic playfulness of Michael Daugherty, who pays homage to Nancy Sinatra and her 1966 recording hit These Boots are made for walkin', to Michael Torke, who arranges the harmonies of his piece by drawing inspiration from the telephone book and blending classicism and pop music together, to the figural complexity of Sean Shepherd author of works of extreme technical difficulty to the timbral enchantment of Christopher Cerrone (who also uses flowerpots as an instrument to percussion) and to the manic reiterations of the finale of Armando Bayolo's Gestos Inutiles, which progressively push the performers' instrumental virtuosity to the extreme limit. The delicacy of Christopher Rouse's short page for solo flute is contrasted by the menacing industrial/rock sounds of David Lang. The charm of American landscapes on the road accompanies John Adams' work for violin and piano, where jazz echoes are grafted onto classical forms and hints of minimalism. Many more are the colors of this American rainbow, and we certainly do not want to take away the surprise of discovering them while listening.

The common thread that runs through these scores so different from each other is that of a declared optimism about the world of composition: there is no feeling of crisis, the classical language is by no means considered (as sometimes happens from us) something old or destined only to a narrow and refined elite of acquaintances. Classical music naturally coexists with pop, rock and music from from all over the world, it is not a language excluded from everyday life; on the contrary, it absorbs its influences and re-proposes them in an autonomous way, proposing an always different and engaging point of view. This belief in the future continues to be the lifeblood that drives many of these composers to to write operas, symphonies, concertos for solo instruments, using the forms of the past as containers into which to pour new ideas. Our journey within America continues, and there are already several composers of the very latest to generation to whom we are turning our attention, in an ongoing cultural exchange between different countries that transcends natural differences and instead seeks points of commonality, and is a source of continuous and free stimulation in a world that is often as closed in on itself as that of contemporary music.

Charles Boccadoro