Clarinet World Premieres

World Premiere Performance of Todd Goodman's Concerto for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra performed by Calvin Falwell and the Beaver Valley Philharmonic in Midland, Pennsylvania conducted by Bruce Lauffer

In the third and final concert of its 2007-08 season, the Beaver Valley Philharmonic Orchestra premiered a new work by composer-in-residence Todd Goodman. Hence the concert’s theme: “Premiere and Finale.”. Also on the program was the Mozart Requiem.

The Concerto for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra was commissioned by Maestro Bruce Lauffer and the Beaver Valley Philharmonic to conclude the 2008-09 season. The work, in two movements, takes the orchestra and soloist through a passionate journey of the relationship between a child and a parent. Goodman said the first movement, Promenade Comique, translated as “funny walk,” is an argument between the orchestra, acting as the parent, and a jocular bass clarinet soloist, representing the child.

The second movement, A Berceuse et Rêve, which means “a lullaby and dream,” reverses the roles of the two characters and tells the story of a parent, this time represented by the bass clarinet, who is trying to put the child (the orchestra) to sleep. Performance with Calvin Falwell was well covered with skill and virtuosity.

Calvin Falwell performs on a regular basis with the Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra, Johnstown Symphony and McKeesport Symphony. Previous positions include the Paducah Symphony Orchestra (KY) and The American Wind Symphony. He has performed with the Louisville Orchestra, Lexington Philharmonic and the Wheeling Symphony. He is also a substitute musician with the Bronx Symphony Orchestra.

His passion for contemporary classical music has resulted in solo appearances with the University of Louisville Wind Ensemble, Duquesne University Wind Symphony and the Duquesne Contemporary Ensemble. With a strong interest in contemporary classical music, calvin has had numerous pieces written for him by some of America's most promising young composers such as Todd Goodman, Joseph Hallman and Suzanne Polak. In the May 2008 he will be giving the premiere of two Concertos for Bass Clarinet by composers Todd Goodman and Joseph Hallman.

Calvin is currently Adjunct Professor of Music at Holy Family University and Lancaster Bible College. Former teaching positions include, Clarinet Instructor at the Creative and Performing Arts High School, Centers for the Musically Talented and Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, PA.

Mr. Falwell holds a Bachelor of Music in Clarinet Performance from the University of Louisville and a Masters of Music in Clarinet Performance from Duquesne University. His principal teachers include, Ron Samuels, Richard Page, Tim Zavadil and Paul Demers.

                TODD GOODMAN has been described as "one of America's promising young composers." His work has been played by principle members of the Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, Singapore and Seattle Symphonies. Mr. Goodman receives commissions from a wide variety of players and ensembles across the United States. With many performances in the United States his works have also been performed in Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Goodman currently serves as the resident composer for the McKeesport Symphony Orchestra writing his Concerto for Piccolo and Orchestra [2007] and the Beaver Valley Philharmonic who is set to premiere his Concerto for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra [2008] in April of 2008. Prior to these appointments, Mr. Goodman served as the Altoona Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence from 2002-2005 during which time he was commissioned eight works; including his Symphony No.1 “Fields of Crimson” [2003], Fanfare for a New Era [2003] Some Assembly Required [2004] and Sketches of Home [2005]. He feels that the audience connection and participation in his music is vital to its success. He wants people to leave a concert feeling that they experienced a work rather than just observing.

             Todd Goodman was born in Bedford, Pennsylvania in 1977. He received his Bachelor of Music degree in composition at the University of Colorado at Boulder and his Masters of Music degree in composition at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Currently working on a Ph.D. in theory and composition at Kent State University, he has also studied at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, France, with the European American Musical Alliance and at the Aspen Music Festival in Aspen, Colorado. His principal composition teachers have been David Stock, George Tsontakis, Richard Toensing and Louis Jorge Gonzalez.

             In September 2006, Mr. Goodman was appointed as resident composer for the newly built Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center in Midland, Pennsylvania. He also serves on the facuty of the Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School where he teaches musicianship and composition to some of Pennsylvania's finest young musicians.

            Mr. Goodman has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work with the Altoona Symphony Orchestra as well as grants from the University of Colorado Entrepreneurship Center for his work, Symphony No. 1 “Fields of Crimson”. Mr. Goodman has also won such notable prizes as the international project piccolo rebirth 2007 prize for his work Echos: prelude and dance [2007] for piccolo and piano, the prestigious Gold Farbe award from the University of Colorado film department for his scores to two short films Hypnotic Reverie and Light Autumn by writer/director Ryan McVeigh. As well as the 1998 and 1999 Anderson Award for composition and the Milan Desi Derri prize for his Concerto for Alto Saxophone [2005].

          The world premiere of his Symphony No. 1 “Fields of Crimson” was released on CD through Wrong Note Media in July 2003, marking the 140^th anniversary of the subject of this work, the battle of Gettysburg. This work has been very well received throughout the United States and Europe. In late-2007 the Duquesne Wind Ensemble will release a recording of Mr. Goodman's River of Sorrows along with other works by David Stock and Indiana University composer Don Freund.

         Mr. Goodman's current commissions include Concerto for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra commissioned by Bruce Lauffer and the Beaver Valley Philharmonic which will be premiered on April 17, 2008 and Mass for a Time of War for the Beaver Valley Philharmonic for the orchestras 2009-2010 season and Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra for Pittsburgh Symphony principal oboist, Cynthia Koledo De Almeida and the Beaver Valley Philharmonic.

Clarinetist Michael Norsworthy Performs World Premiere of Ezra Sims' Concert Piece II at Special Boston Modern Orchestra Project Concert at New England Conservatory

This special concert of contemporary premieres is a proactive move which will have a long lasting affect on the presentation of New Music. Many soloists of this medium as listed on the program, attest to the quality being performed of many of the leading composers of this time. Of interest to Clarinetists, the below premiere performed by luminary Michael Norsworthy, tells all about virtuosity, along with his Clarinet co-part Amy Advocat, who performed the below work with intense credibility.

The world premiere on this program by Ezra Sims (born January 16—last week marked his eightieth birthday), the most prominent composer of music using a 72-part equal division of the octave in the Just Intonation system.* Sims has been writing microtonal music for nearly 50 years, beginning with quarter-tone works and eventually moving to the current system, which he is largely responsible for developing and refining. His notational convention (an extension of the sharps-flats idea) based on the common five-line staff is probably the most universally employed of any such method. Sims’s approach involves pitched-centered modes, usually of eighteen or twenty-four pitches (within the octave—that is, eighteen or twenty-four “pitch classes,” to use the technical jargon), for any given moment in his music, allowing for a more accurate tuning of just intervals. This is incompletely analogous to the use of a key or mode, usually seven pitches drawn from the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. (Joe Maneri, by contrast, uses the 72-pitch octave in a manner analogous to Schoenberg’s egalitarian equal-tempered twelve-tone scale, without pitch-centered hierarchies based on the acoustic series.)

Born in Alabama, Ezra Sims studied with Quincy Porter at Yale and, like William Bolcom, with Darius Milhaud at Mills, where he also worked with Leon Kirchner. He was a Berkshire Music Center Fellow in 1960. He began writing microtonal music in about 1960, at first working with equal-tempered quarter-tone scales. His quarter-tone work culminated in his Third Quartet before he moved into the subtler 72-pitch octave. Its subtlety, in fact, was too much for most performers and led Sims to the electronic music studio, where he produced most of his pieces of the 1960s, often working with dance groups. (He taught briefly at New England Conservatory at this time and also worked as a programmer for the Harvard Library.) His return to acoustic instruments and the current phase of his composition began in the early 1970s and corresponds in part to his acquaintance with the musicians of Boston Musica Viva and of the New England Dinosaur Theater, of which he was music director from 1969 to 1978. The Dinosaur Annex ensemble was formed in 1975, becoming the most important advocate of Sims’s music over the past three decades. The first work of Sims’s new phase was a quintet for flute, clarinet, and strings called String Quartet No. 2 (1962) (its misleading title a reaction to an error in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary), written for Boston Musica Viva. Among many commissioned works are several for Boston Musica Viva and several for Dinosaur Annex, his Elegie nach Rilke for soprano and ensemble, commissioned by the Goethe Institut Boston, and his String Quartet No. 4, a Koussevitzky Foundation commission premiered by the Huyghens Quartet in Amsterdam.

Concert Piece II is in three movements, fast-slow-fast, totaling about twelve minutes. The rhythmically free-floating, fluid melodic line with a restless accompaniment is characteristic of Sims’s style, and can be found as early as his Third Quartet. The two clarinets deliver their lines in loose imitation. In the first movement the first plays the whole upward-tending first phrase solo, to be answered by the second clarinet with nearly the same phrase but in a new harmonic field, namely 5/12ths of a tone higher. (The same melody, in a new context, reappears in the third movement.) The phrases shorten, with the canonic intervals changing, throughout the movement, with the oboe picking up on the clarinets’ opening gesture. The last few measures give us a clear cadence.

The canonic linear motion in the second movement, shared initially between the two clarinets, gradually spreads to the orchestral instruments—horns, bassoons, strings, flute, etc. Two flutes in a new tempo lead the music back around to a recapitulation of the beginning of the piece that builds to the final cadence.