Fanfare for Two Trumpets was commissioned and written in 2015 on the occasion of the installation of William Robins as President of Victoria University of the University of Toronto.

Blast Off (for two trumpets) was commissioned and written in 2015 on the occasion of the installation of William Robins as President of Victoria University of the University of Toronto.

Brand New Music looks at the 1972 Stylistics’ song You Make Me Feel Brand New from three separate angles. For each movement, I cut the song into one-bar sections and re-ordered them randomly, creating skeletons which I fleshed out in three styles. The original song was played at school dances when I was young and very shy. I still associate it with unfulfilled yearning and melancholy, although there is a good deal of playfulness mixed into these versions. The work is dedicated to my partners in the Collide collaboration, media artist Jason Baerg and scientist/artist Erin Fortier, as well as to Continuum Contemporary Music, with whom I share a happy collaboration of many years.

Europa was a Phoenician princess who was seduced and borne off to Crete by Zeus. There she bore him three sons, who became the founding fathers of Europe. It’s telling that European civilization, which has been a mixed blessing for the rest of the world, was founded upon what could be seen as a kidnapping and rape. This piece explores the conflicted feelings of Europa—whose enslavement to Zeus brings her exhilaration, violation, and humiliation—and those of her former lover Hiram, who has searched all his life for her, and for whom their reunion brings ecstasy, frustration, and death.

Europa was commissioned by the Toronto Masque Theatre (Larry Beckwith, Artistic Director), with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. My thanks go to the funders, for funding; to Larry, for asking; to all the cast and production team, for being excellent collaborators; and to Steven Heighton, for providing such eloquent and heartfelt words.

The song cycle has a vital place in Western music, but there are surprisingly few contemporary Canadian examples of the form. Moths (2013) continues my collaboration with author André Alexis, with whom I have talked of writing song cycles since we began to work together. He conjured up a cycle of six songs tracing the journey of a sleeper through night and dreams, from darkness to light, from the visceral to the ethereal.

Moths was commissioned by Canadian Art Song Project (Lawrence Wiliford and Steven Philcox, co-artistic directors) with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

To say “as if”. To unfold a universe, one parallel to our own, just as alive, or more so. Two little words mapping some unmapped place. A longing for something that could be, or could have been, wishful or wistful or whimsical. As If, a piece dreamed up, an invisible journey, seeking its own level, at times flowing like water, then doubling back, remembering itself, echoing.

As If was commissioned by Aventa Ensemble (Bill Linwood, conductor) with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts.

Fresh Face was commissioned by Soundstreams Canada on the occasion of their 30^th anniversary. It is dedicated to R. Murray Schafer, who suggested the musical theme (S-C-H-A-F-E-R) on which the words and music are built.

Open Road marks my fifth collaboration with the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). I respond keenly to Whitman’s very personal vision, a fusion of the spiritual and the physical, and his strongly rhythmic language, echoing the cadences of the King James Bible. In Open Road, Whitman creates his own Adam, before the fall: life-embracing, open-hearted, on an epic journey, rejoicing in the earthly paradise he finds around him.

Whitman’s long lines and purple passages are a challenge to set and to sing. The soloists deliver the more personal, incantatory lines, with the choir responding, shading, interfering, echoing. The essential relationships in the poem—those between man and woman, between the individual and the collective, and between our dual masculine and feminine natures—are embodied by the male and female soloists, in combination with the ensemble. These forces, with their rich compositional possibilities, connect back to the oratorio tradition, one beloved in English Canada since Whitman’s days.

Open Road was commissioned by Soundstreams Canada (Lawrence Cherney, Artistic Director).

Song of the Open Road  by Walt Whitman, edited by James Rolfe

AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune–I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!
You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!
You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs!
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!

The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best light,
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me;
I think whoever I see must be happy.

From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me;
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to me, I would do the same to you.

Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;
Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.
Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear, it would not amaze me;
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d, it would not astonish me.

Allons! after the GREAT COMPANIONS! and to belong to them!
Committers of crimes, committers of many beautiful virtues,
Enjoyers of calms of seas, and storms of seas,
Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,
Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,
Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,
Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of children, bearers of children,
Journeyers with their bearded and well-grain’d manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass’d, content,
Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

Allons! the road is before us!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Mon enfant! I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself, before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Program Note: Two Hopeful Songs (2010) music by James Rolfe; words by Dennis Lee

Two Hopeful Songs (2010) were commissioned by Toronto’s Viva Youth Singers (Carol Ratzlaff, Artistic Director), and written to poems by Dennis Lee.

Song lyrics

The Moon (from Garbage Delight, 1977)

I see the moon

And the moon sees me

And nobody sees

As secretly

Unless there’s a kid

In Kalamazoo,

Or Mexico,

Or Timbuktu,

Who looks in the sky

At the end of the day,
And she thinks of me

In a friendly way —

‘Cause we both lie still

And we watch the moon;

And we haven’t met yet,

But we might do, soon.

Dopey (from Yesno, 2007)

Squeaks from the sisyphus chorus.

Hums from the crunch.

Dopey & grumpy & doc, just

truckin’ along —

here come chorale;

mind to the

grindstone, ear to the plough.

Hi-

hoein along with a song:

What home but here? Whose grubby hands but ours?

Lullaby was commissioned and premiered in 2011 by Lady Cove Women’s Choir of St. John’s, Newfoundland (Kellie Walsh, Artistic Director), with the kind assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts.

If I had to choose desert island words, The Song of Solomon would make the list: it is evergreen, sexy, and tasty to sing. Garden takes the form of a brief dialogue between the genders. Men and women weave in and out, saucy and vivid, first wooing each other, then singing together. Garden was commissioned by Tafelmusik Choir (Ivars Taurins, artistic director) in celebration of its 30th anniversary in 2012. I dedicate this new work to a wonderful choir whose singing I have known and loved for many years.

Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vine flourish,
if the blossoms have opened and the pomegranate bud forth. There will I give you my love.

Program Note: Hope (2011) Music by James Rolfe, words by Emily Dickinson.

Hope was commissioned by North Toronto Collegiate Institute (Carol Ratzlaff, Head of Music Department) on the occasion of their 100^th anniversary.

Poems (by Emily Dickinson)

1

Hope is a strange invention

A Patent of the heart

In unremitting action

Yet never wearing out

Of whose electric Adjunct

Not anything is known

Though its unique Momentum

Inebriate our own.

2

Musicians wrestle everywhere

All day, among the crowded air

I hear the silver strife.

And, waking long before the morn,

Such transport breaks up the town

I think it that “New Life”!

It is not bird, it has no nest,

Nor “Band” in brass and scarlet drest,

Nor Tamborin, nor Man;

It is not Hymn from pulpit read,

The “Morning Stars” the Treble led

On Time’s first Afternoon!

Some say, it is “the Spheres” at play!

Some say, that bright Majority

Of vanished Dames and Men!

Some think it service in the place

Where we, with late celestial face,

Please God, shall Ascertain!

3

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

As an Anglo-Canadian composer writing a tango, I’m skating on thin ice. How can my stolid northern soul find its way into the very particular poetry, singing, rhythm, and soul of this dance? This tango is an imaginary journey, as I clutch my own peculiar musical baggage, and Federico García Lorca guides me. His incandescent ghazal lends both spark and structure, leading me through the dance.

always, always: garden of my agony,
your body always elusive,
the blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already my tomb, empty of light.

Program Note: Joyce Songs (2009) by James Rolfe

words by James Joyce; for soprano, mezzo, tenor, baritone, and piano; duration ca. 15 minutes. The songs may be performed individually or in any combination, in any suitable order. Joyce Songs were commissioned by The Aldeburgh Connection (Stephen Ralls, Artistic Director) with the assistance of The Ontario Arts Council.

Song Texts

A Flower Given to My Daughter

Frail the white rose and frail are

Her hands that gave

Whose soul is sere and paler

Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair– yet frailest

A wonder wild

In gentle eyes thou veilest,

My blueveined child.

I

Strings in the earth and air

Make music sweet;

Strings by the river where

The willows meet.

There’s music along the river

For Love wanders there,

Pale flowers on his mantle,

Dark leaves on his hair.

All softly playing,

With head to the music bent,

And fingers straying

Upon an instrument.

XI

Bid adieu, adieu, adieu,

Bid adieu to girlish days,

Happy Love is come to woo

Thee and woo thy girlish ways — –

The zone that doth become thee fair,

The snood upon thy yellow hair,

When thou hast heard his name upon

The bugles of the cherubim

Begin thou softly to unzone

Thy girlish bosom unto him

And softly to undo the snood

That is the sign of maidenhood.

XVI

O cool is the valley now

And there, love, will we go

For many a choir is singing now

Where Love did sometime go.

And hear you not the thrushes calling,

Calling us away?

O cool and pleasant is the valley

And there, love, will we stay.

XX

In the dark pine-wood

I would we lay,

In deep cool shadow

At noon of day.

How sweet to lie there,

Sweet to kiss,

Where the great pine-forest

Enaisled is!

Thy kiss descending

Sweeter were

With a soft tumult

Of thy hair.

O unto the pine-wood

At noon of day

Come with me now,

Sweet love, away.

XXVIII

Gentle lady, do not sing

Sad songs about the end of love;

Lay aside sadness and sing

How love that passes is enough.

Sing about the long deep sleep

Of lovers that are dead, and how

In the grave all love shall sleep:

Love is aweary now.

XXXV

All day I hear the noise of waters

Making moan,

Sad as the sea-bird is when, going

Forth alone,

He hears the winds cry to the water’s

Monotone.

The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing

Where I go.

I hear the noise of many waters

Far below.

All day, all night, I hear them flowing

To and fro.

XXXVI

I hear an army charging upon the land,

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:

Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,

Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:

I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.

They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,

Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:

They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.

My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?

My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

Writing for unpitched percussion means getting by without pitch, harmony, and melody—which only leaves the good stuff: rhythm, colour, and unbounded energy. I began with two tiny ideas, one from “Why This Kolaveri Di”, a viral Bollywood music and dance video from 2012, the other from Queen’s immortal “We Will Rock You”. They dance together, with a little help from the Balinese Gamelan piece “Liar Samas”. I was fortunate to collaborate on this piece with the choreographer Jacob Niedzwiecki, whose input helped to shape it, as did that of TorQ Percussion Quartet, who commissioned it. Why You was written with the assistance of a Toronto Arts Council Grant to Music Creators.

Librettist: Paul Bentley
Commissioner: Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company (Co-artistic Directors John Hess and Daírine Ní Mheadhra)
Premiere: 25 February – 1 March 2009, Enwave Theatre, Toronto, Ontario
Performers: 5 voices (soprano, mezzo, fado singer (contralto), baritone, bass baritone), 5 players (clarinet/bass clarinet, guitar, piano, violin, bass/bass guitar)
Duration: 85 minutes (11 scenes, one optional intermission)

Synopsis

Pedro Carmona, a young surgeon and son of a prominent Portuguese general, has escaped military service in Angola in 1968 by fleeing to Toronto with his upper-class wife Constanza. In order to survive, he has taken two jobs while he retrains to qualify as a doctor.

The opera begins as Constanza—sick of poverty, loneliness, and winter—explodes in frustration. She humiliates Pedro by threatening to get a job herself. Pedro storms out, and ends up at a Fado club, where he meets the Fadista Inês. He becomes a regular at the club, and love grows between him and Inês. In Lisbon, Pedro’s anxious parents haven’t heard from him for months. A telegram from the dictator Salazar informs them of Pedro’s desertion, ordering him to be captured and shot.

Pedro can resist Inês no longer: he goes to her apartment, and they consummate their love. Constanza, who has taken a job as a cleaner, discovers Pedro’s photograph in Inês’s dressing room, and confronts him. Inês arrives and tells them that she is carrying Pedro’s child. Constanza is crushed and begs for Pedro to come back, but he refuses, moving in with Inês instead. Summoned by Constanza, Pedro’s parents confront him, accuse him of harming the family’s name, and order him to return to his wife; again he refuses. Alone with his son, General Carmona tries some gentler persuasion, but to no avail. His wife decides that the only honourable solution is for the General to kill Inês; when he hesitates, she takes his gun, goes to the nightclub, and shoots Inês.

Constanza is appalled by the murder. The General hears from Pedro, who discovered Inês’s body while on duty at the morgue, and asks to meet his parents and wife at the cathedral, in order to repent his sins before them and before God. He does so, but then he takes the General’s gun and forces the others to drink Inês’s blood, a vessel of which he has saved from the morgue. He unveils her dead body, and forces the others to sing her praises. He shoots himself, whereupon Inês sings a final farewell.

Press excerpts

Rolfe’s writing for his five-player ensemble is transparent enough that I could distinguish virtually all of the sung English at Sunday’s opening performance. Rolfe also gives the listener plenty to hold onto throughout the piece, through repetitions of material that familiarize the ear with the music and give extra dimension to the drama. Rolfe cleverly uses fuguing to illustrate the desire of each of these singers that Pedro quit fooling around. The whole score was put together at that level of skill and economy. 

– Robert Everett-Green, Toronto Globe and Mail, 24 February 2009

The Story of Inês de Castro

In 14^th-century Portugal, the heir to the throne, Prince Pedro, is married to Constanza. He falls in love with one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting, Inês de Castro, who is from Galicia, in Spain. She becomes his mistress, and they have three children. The court is scandalized; but above all, the king fears Inês will increase Spanish influence on the Portuguese throne. He orders Inês to be killed—according to legend, in front of her children, while Pedro is away hunting. Pedro is beside himself with grief and rage, and wages war against his father. After a number of years, his father passes on, and Pedro becomes king. His first act is to arrest Inês’s killers, torture them, and bite their hearts (just as they had bitten his own heart). He then has Inês taken from her grave, dressed in royal robes, and—seating her on the queen’s throne—he orders his courtiers to kiss her bony hand. He has an elaborate tomb built for them at Alcobaça, which remains there to this day, inscribed “Death will never part us / Until the end of the world”.

The true story of Inês de Castro is a national epic in Portugal, and the anniversary of the death of the writer who immortalized it, Camões (who died June 10, 1580), is now Portugal’s national holiday.

A note on the opera Inês

The Queen of Puddings first heard Fado in 2001, at a Mariza concert in Toronto. When they approached me about writing an opera involving Fado, I began a fascinating journey into that music, of which I knew almost nothing, in spite of the large Portuguese presence in Toronto. My ears were opened: Fado is very operatic, with its dramatic, heart-grabbing singers and stories. And I was delighted to get acquainted with Inês de Castro, a beautiful and passionate story ready-made for opera, as well as the Portuguese language, which is practically music itself, rolling like the waves of the ocean. These influences flowed into my own music to make an opera which is married to both countries, just as the Portuguese in Canada have created a new world from the roots of an ancient one.

One of opera’s great pleasures is working with great people. Early on, Joe Blackmore, Ricardo Sternberg, and Manuela Marujo (all of The University of Toronto) were very helpful in illuminating Portuguese history, literature, and culture. My librettist Paul Bentley threw himself into the fray with gusto, and bore with me patiently through many drafts and changes while I grappled with the music. The director Jennifer Tarver provided crucial insights in the later stages. And the co-directors of The Queen of Puddings, John Hess and Daírine Ní Mheadhra, offered steadfast faith and encouragement from beginning to end. To all of you, my heartfelt thanks!

Commissioner: Toronto Masque Theatre (Artistic Director Larry Beckwith) with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts
Premiere: 25 – 28 April 2007, Young Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, Ontario
Performers: 5 voices (3 sopranos, mezzo, baritone), 7 early instruments A415 (recorder, oboe, lute/theorbo, harpsichord/organ, violin, viola, cello). May also be performed on early or modern instruments at A440.
Duration: 35 minutes (6 scenes)

Program note

Both Purcell’s and Virgil’s versions of Dido and Aeneas feature an Aeneas who is a man of action. He is what he does, in contrast to Dido, who is what she feels. Aeneas and Dido tries to imagine Aeneas’s interior life. What drives Aeneas to choose an uncertain quest for a new homeland over Dido’s offer of love and country? His heart has been turned to ashes by witnessing the violence visited upon his Troy. Dido’s heart still aches from her husband’s death, yet she plucks up the courage to confess her love to Aeneas, making his rejection unbearably painful. Immersed as they are in their own suffering, they cannot grasp each other’s.

Press excerpts

And then there’s the score. Rolfe’s music is so easy to enjoy, it’s like the musical version of being articulate. It’s not at all spare or simplistic. In fact it often seems to skate towards dissonance and discord, but in a way that compels rather than challenges. There’s a visceral intelligence that pulls you along. And you’ll wonder how such insanely modern sounds are being pulled out of period instruments.

Aeneas and Dido is an impressive follow-up to Rolfe’s justly praised mini-opera Swoon, a class-comedy set in Rosedale that debuted at the Canadian Opera Company a few months ago. Another work, raW, recently won the Jules Leger Prize for New Chamber Music. Someone has to commission this guy to do a full-length work.

– Gord McLaughlin, Toronto Eye Weekly, 27 April 2007

Librettist: Anna Chatterton
Commissioner: Canadian Opera Company (Richard Bradshaw, Artistic Director) with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts
Premiere: 6 – 9 December 2006, Imperial Oil Opera Theatre, Toronto, Ontario
Performers: 4 voices (2 sopranos, tenor, baritone), 13 players (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass)
Duration: 45 minutes

Librettist: Camyar Chai
Commissioner: Tapestry New Opera (Artistic Director Wayne Strongman) and the Manhattan School of Music Opera School (Gordon Ostrovsky, director), with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts
Premiere: 6 April 2005, Manhattan School of Music, New York, NY
Other productions: Tapestry: school tour, New York, April 2005; school tour, Toronto, spring 2006; Rideau Hall, Ottawa, April 2006; school tour, Sault Ste. Marie and region, spring 2006. Pacific Opera Victoria: school tour, Victoria and Vancouver Island, 2007.
Performers: 5 voices (2 sopranos, mezzo, tenor, baritone) with an optional part for children’s chorus, and 3 instruments (percussion, electric bass, and keyboard)
Duration: 33 minutes (5 scenes)

Synopsis

At lunchtime, Miriam, the new kid at school, is taken in hand by friendly Keisha. They meet Elijah, a loner who eats sushi for lunch. He clutches his kite, which he dreams will fly one day, and carry him away from school. Keisha scoffs, but Miriam believes him. The school bully, Big Billy Brett, with his sidekick Nikki, mocks Elijah. He abuses Elijah’s kite and steals his lunch. When Billy finds out what sushi is, he is revolted, and delivers an enormous burp. Miriam isn’t impressed and lets Billy know it. They trade insults and Miriam easily trumps him. When an enraged Billy attacks her, she fells him with a neat martial arts move. Billy retreats, issuing threats, and Miriam is suddenly a school hero.

Now Miriam is hanging out with Nikki. They sing about how cool girls love to go shopping. But when Miriam speaks to Keisha and Elijah, Nikki scolds her. Elijah accuses Miriam of selling out her friends, which provokes Miriam to wreck Elijah’s kite. Now Miriam is shunned by all the kids for going too far. But Keisha is able to reassemble the kite, making it better than ever. Elijah approaches Miriam to make peace with her; when he sees his new kite, he is in awe. Suddenly, Big Billy enters, bent on revenge, but he stops short when he sees the new kite. They all work together to launch Elijah and his kite, including Billy, whose enormous burp provides the necessary lift-off power. They celebrate together as the lunch bell rings.

Librettist: André Alexis
Commissioner: Toronto Masque Theatre (Artistic Director Larry Beckwith) with the assistance of The Laidlaw Foundation and the Ontario Arts Council
Premiere: 13 – 14 May 2004, Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto, Ontario
Other productions: May 2011, Enwave Theatre, Toronto, Ontario
Performers: 8 voices (3 sopranos, alto, 2 tenors, baritone, bass) and 9 early instruments A415 (2 recorders, 2 violins, 2 viola da gambas, harpsichord/chamber organ, theorbo/baroque guitar, cello). May also be performed on early or modern instruments at A440.
Duration: 35 minutes

Synopsis

Seeking his wife Eurydice in the underworld, Orpheus implores Hades to let him bring her back to life. Hades gives in reluctantly, on condition that Orpheus not look back at Eurydice while she is being led back to earth. The reunited couple begin their journey back. Hades praises the peacefulness of the underworld over the turbulence of life on earth, but is upbraided by his wife Proserpine, who sympathizes with the living.

The couple sing a love duet while they journey toward light, past the tortured souls of the underworld. They meet a shepherd and his flock who perished when the shepherd, dreaming of his girlfriend, walked off a cliff, followed by his sheep. The shepherd recognizes and praises Orpheus, then tells him his story, which his sheep mock bitterly. As the couple take their leave of the shepherd, the opera ends with a hopeful chorus.

Press excerpts

[Orpheus and Eurydice] is one of the most beautiful new operas to be written recently, delivering inventive instrumentations and rhythms for recitatives while bowing to gorgeous tonal echoes of centuries past in arias and choruses. Rolfe’s final chorus and the duet between Eurydice and Orpheus deserve to be heard again and again.

– John Terauds, The Toronto Star, 14 May 2004

Program Note

Librettist: George Elliott Clarke

Commissioner: Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company (Co-artistic Directors John Hess and Daírine Ní Mheadhra)
Premiere: June 18 – 22, 1998, The Music Gallery, Toronto, Ontario
Performers: 6 voices (2 sopr., mezzo, 2 bari., bass), 7 players (2 vln., vla., vlc., bass, pno., perc.)
Duration: 100 minutes (2 acts)
Other productions: Queen of Puddings: June 1999, DuMaurier Dance Theatre, Toronto, Ontario; August 1999, Alderney Landing Theatre, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; February 2001, Winspear Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta

Synopsis 

Beatrice Chancy is a historical drama based upon the true story of the Cenci family of Rome, circa 1600. The story is set on a plantation in Nova Scotia during the last days of slavery, circa 1800, with the heroine Beatrice as the half-caste daughter of her master, Francis Chancy. When her father responds to her romance with the slave Lead by beating him and then raping her, Beatrice takes justice into her own hands and murders him. For this, she is hanged, along with her lover Lead and her stepmother Lustra. It is a tale of love, but also of violence, slavery, incest, and revenge. Opera and classic tragedy are fused with the brutal reality of slavery in Nova Scotia, a little-known chapter of Canadian history.

Press excerpts

Make no mistake: Beatrice Chancy is the triumphant event of the operatic season. James Rolfe’s music drama to a text by George Elliott Clarke, now revised and presented in a wholly inspired new production by the tiny Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company, is chamber-sized only in scale. Its imagination and depth of feeling are vast, even overwhelming. With Beatrice Chancy, I felt I was face to face with the future of opera — and its breath was hot.

Rolfe has understood, as few other composers of new opera have, that opera is emotion and melody is character. Clarke, the Nova Scotia-born, black Canadian poet, has provided him with a remarkably charged libretto; it’s loosely based on Shelley’s verse tragedy The Cenci, but its narrative of incestuous desire, rape and revenge has been shifted to the Annapolis Valley in 1801, when slavery was still legal in the British colony.

Beatrice is the daughter of a white landowner and a black slave. She is a cherished, even pampered child until, returning home after a convent education in Halifax, she openly declares her love for a fellow slave. Her father Francis Chancy’s buried lust cracks open both their lives. Clarke makes his bold transformation resound with the impulse toward freedom — from unmediated power, from patriarchal oppression, from colonial enslavement.

The music of Beatrice Chancy is astonishing. Sophisticated in its eclecticism, it hints at, or often quotes, black spirituals, ring shouts, freedom songs, blues, gospel, hymns, insistent percussion,  as well as Nova Scotia fiddling. But this range of source material has been subtly shaped, and is deployed utterly for expressive effects. Each of the six characters has a distinct, complex musical profile. The music takes us intimately inside them, and thus when the big emotional moments come — and there are many — the impact is gigantic.

Measha Bruggergosman’s Beatrice proved unforgettable, her rich passionate soprano on fire, her emotional investment in this woman total. She carried the big burden of this music, but every singer made an impact: Nigel Smith, tender and then raging as Beatrice’s lover-slave; Gregory Dahl, terrifying and yet eerily recognizable as Francis Chancy; Lori Klassen, finding the ambiguity and pathos in Chancy’s wife Lustra; Marcus Nance, movingly self-doubting as the religious slave Moses; and Lisa Lindo as the child slave Deal.

In the finale, as the singers and musicians stood together on stage chanting the hymn O Freedom, a black woman just to my left in the audience fervently added her voice to the singing. She was right: An experience of the magnitude of Beatrice Chancy brought, for all of us, our hearts into our throats. 

– Urjo Kareda, The Toronto Globe and Mail, 22 June 1999

Monumental.  Mesmerizing.  Breathtaking.  These words are barely adequate in describing James Rolfe’s and George Elliott Clarke’s brilliant new opera Beatrice Chancy . . . a seamless, masterful combination of music and drama.

– Ron Foley MacDonald, Halifax Daily News, 14 August 1999

Finally. After sitting through a season’s worth of half-baked new operas, I can sit back, clap and sing the praises of George Elliott Clarke’s and James Rolfe’s brilliant, compelling Beatrice Chancy … James Rolfe’s music is gorgeous and smart—an informed hybrid of baroque, gospel, and East Coast idioms that never sounds cluttered or academic.

– R. M. Vaughan, Toronto Eye magazine, 24 June 1999

Rolfe’s score follows the ideals of earliest opera by giving precedence to the text. His deft intertwining of musical styles—Maritime fiddling, baroque counterpoint, spirituals  even a Broadway love duet—in itself becomes a moving statement of the racial co-existence that remains but a dream at the play’s devastating close.

– Tamara Bernstein, The national Post, 15 June 1999

The Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company has astonished and thrilled the Toronto opera-going public with a production of a new chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy. The economically charged libretto is set with impressive musical sophistication by James Rolfe in a manner which constantly supports and reinforces the text. I can’t recall attending such a gripping premiere in many years of opera-going.

– Peter Dyson, Opera Magazine (UK), November 1999

Background

The Making of Beatrice Chancy:  Notes on a Collaboration

I first read the poems of George Elliott Clarke in 1990, while searching for material suitable for song lyrics. His words seemed to leap off the page, as if possessed: alive, argumentative, by turns violent and blissful, never at rest.  So I wrote to him blindly, sending a cassette of my music, proposing that we collaborate on an opera; his reply was “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Then what? Neither of us knew anything about writing an opera. We cast about for ideas, settling after a few false starts on the story of the Cenci family. It goes like this: in Rome, ca. 1600, Francesco Cenci, the Pope’s treasurer, is rich, powerful, and very bitter. Not wishing his children to inherit his wealth, he has two sons murdered, and rapes two daughters to reduce their dowries. The first daughter escapes and marries; he imprisons the second, Beatrice, to prevent her from doing the same. She hires assassins who kill her father, but the job is bungled. Confessions are extracted under brutal torture; Beatrice, her stepmother Lustra, and another brother are executed on orders of the Pope (who then inherits their fortune, the Cenci family now being defunct).

Murder, incest, torture, execution–we had found our opera. But George then transposed the action to early 19th-century Nova Scotia, giving the classic tragedy new dimensions of racism, slavery, and liberation. Over the next five years, he wrote draft after draft of the story, drafts which I would then edit to suit my musical and dramatic instincts. These edited versions evolved into the libretto of Beatrice Chancy, while the longer drafts grew into a dramatic poem of the same name, recently published by Polestar Press.

During this time, we had two sojourns at The Banff Centre’s Composer-Librettist Workshop, where Music Director John Hess kept an interested eye on our progress. He later founded The Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company in Toronto, with Dáirine Ní Mheadhra; they workshopped the First Act in June 1996, and the first draft of the entire piece in December 1997. These workshops were crucial to the opera’s birth; we could immediately hear what worked, and what didn’t. Most important, it was encouraging to hear at last the fruit of our years of imaginative labour. The Queen of Puddings were also encouraged, and premiered the opera in June 1998 at The Music Gallery in Toronto.

Some thoughts on the music of Beatrice Chancy

In composing this opera, I have tried to use the simplest possible means of expression, to let the characters tell their own stories, and to let George’s eloquent words be heard. Simple, direct vocal lines also keep the singers closer to the viscerality of their art. Body and soul are intimately bound together in opera:  the singers bathe the audience with their sweat and blood, their voices and their souls. Perhaps that’s why people either love or loathe opera, without much middle ground.

My favourite dramatists (I think of Shakespeare and Mozart) give life to complex and utterly alive characters, with all the contradictions, joys, pain, and conflicts that we humans live through. They know that the answers are never revealed to us, that the decisions we struggle to make are as likely to be bad ones as good. What seemed right to Canadians in 1801–slavery, the superiority of Europeans over Africans and native peoples, of men over women–now seems arrogant and oppressive. But 200 years from now, how will we be judged? One of the “mottoes” George chose for the opera seems more true now than in 1991, when it was penned by Hardial Bains:

“The old enslavement was to nature, and the new one is of one individual to another, beginning with chattel slavery and proceeding to the modern kind, where enslavement has assumed the most grotesque form–not only wage-slavery, but also bondage to the financial institutions which, in the present period, hold the entire world in their grasp.”

Music in Nova Scotia, ca. 1801

Playing music and singing were everyday parts of nineteenth-century Nova Scotian life. Hymns were sung in church; at home, there were folk songs, work songs, and lullabies. Young people attended singing schools to sing the religious “pop” music of their day, and also to mingle with the opposite sex.  Dances on Saturday nights were eagerly awaited; the music was usually made by a solo fiddler, often one of African descent. There was a diversity of musical cultures in Nova Scotia that is hard for us to imagine:  English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French, Acadian, American, German, Miqmaq, and African-Canadian musics existed side by side, often freely mixing with each other.

What did these musics actually sound like? Little is known: of the European music, some fiddle tunes and religious songbooks survive, but accounts of the early music of African-Canadians are scant. I studied field recordings and accounts of African-American music from isolated parts of the deep South–coastal islands, rural areas, and prisons–which may be the best clues we have. Here I encountered the ring shout, one of the most “purely” African forms of self-expression to flourish in the North American diaspora. (Many others, particularly drumming, language, and religion, were feared and suppressed by slaveholders.) The participants form a circle, moving counterclockwise, clapping their hands and stomping their feet, creating a driving, polyrhythmic groove, which accelerates gradually.  A leader sings out short phrases, often improvised, and the others reply with a fixed response (e.g. “Hallelujah!”). Ring shouts often tell Biblical stories about freedom, or about overcoming a powerful oppressor (e.g. “Daniel in the Lion’s Den”).

The spiritual, one of the best-known forms of African-American music, was also popular in Canada. The spirituals familiar to us today became refined and standardized during U. S. Reconstruction and the early days of recorded sound, but there are compelling older styles–very slow, with irregular phrases and much rougher harmonies–which can be heard in such forms as the field holler, early blues, and the “moans” and Dr. Watts hymns still sung in some African-American churches. Spirituals and ring shouts are both used in the opera, sometimes as direct quotations, sometimes as original “reconstructions”.

Program Note: Songs and Rounds (2001) by James Rolfe. For orchestra, with a recorder part for beginners. Duration ca. 4’30”.

Songs and Rounds was commissioned by the Canadian Music Centre, Ontario Region, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra through the Millennium Fund of the Canada Council for the Arts. The first movement features two rounds, while the second arranges two Québecois folk songs. The recorder part is intended for an ensemble of beginner players with a range of an octave, from D to D’.

Program note

Blind sets seven poems from Dennis Lee’s Un (2003).  This collection of short, terse poems presents a relentlessly dark and apocalyptic vision of our world, while still finding flickers of humanity and hope.  Armageddon is coupled with redemption, despair with exhiliration, pollution with purity.  Boiled-down texts burst with unorthodox phrases and neologisms.  Lee situates his words in the present, yet they also apply to the terrible war years in which the poet grew up (he was born August 31, 1939, on the very eve of World War 2).  They reflect the physical and emotional extremes of the time, something which is hard to imagine at our comfortable distance.  It’s in this way that I see this work commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Holland from Nazi occupation, an event in which Canadian troops played a decisive role.  The ever-present word “blind” evokes both the unthinking madness of war and the physical damage to its victims.  It also suggests the phrase “God blind me”, which was supposed to have gained currency among World War I troops sickened by the sight of mass slaughter.  It’s intriguing to realize that the apocalypse always seems to be with us, past, present and future.  Is this reason for despair, or is it in fact reassuring?

Blind was commissioned with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts by Soundstreams (Lawrence Cherney, Artistic Director) for the Netherlands Chamber Choir.

Texts to Blind 

1 inlingo

In scraggy lingo lost,

high mean-

times petering, thickets of

lex & scrawn:

split for abysmal, hopalong

underword, head for no exit,

grapshrapnel yore spelunking.

fractal untongue.

2 if

If it walks like apocalypse.  If it

squawks like armageddon.

If it stalks the earth like anaphylactic parturition.

If the halo jams like septicemic laurels, if

species recuse recuse if mutti clearcut, if

earth remembers how & then for good forgets;

if it glows like neural plagues if it grins, if it

walks like apocalypse—

3 blind

Blind

light, blind

night, blind blinkers.

Blind of the lakelorn / of

lumpen /the scree.

In terminal ought and deny, indelible isprints.

Palping the scandalscript. Sniffing the

petrified fiat.

4 beloved

In silicon gridlock, in

quagmeat extremis – basta, on wings of success,

Still we snog through

sputum waste to

caramelize the Beloved,

riffle thru alley slop for a gob of awe

5 hope  

Hope, you illicit

imperative:  what

sump what gunge what

glimmer of sotto renewal?

What short shot

shimmer of green reprise?

6 noth

And are creatures of

nothing.

I noth you noth we

long have we nothed we

shall noth, staunch in true

nothing we

noth in extremis, noth until

habitat heartstead green galore & species

relinquish the terrene ghosthold;

crumble to alphadud; stutter to rumours of ing.

Program note: Four Anthems for Four Seasons. Music by James Rolfe, to texts from The Bible. Durations: Spring 3’30”; Summer 1’30”; Fall 2’15”; Winter 2’45.

Four Anthems for Four Seasons was commissioned by the Elora Festival, Noel Edison, artistic director, with the assistance of The Laidlaw Foundation. It was premiered on 3 August 2003, at St. Mary’s Church, Elora, Ontario.

Texts

SUMMER:  Proverbs 6:6-11

6 Go to the ant, you sluggard!

Consider her ways and be wise,

7 Which, having no captain,

Overseer or ruler,

8 Stores her provisions in the summer,

And gathers her food at harvest.

9 How long will you slumber, O sluggard?

When will you rise from your sleep?

10 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber,

A little folding of the hands to sleep–

11 So shall poverty come on you like a bandit,

And your need like an armed man.

FALL:  Deut 24:19-22

When you reap your harvest in your field, and forget a sheaf, you shall not go back

to fetch it; it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.

20 When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.

21 When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean it afterward; it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.

22 And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I command you to do this thing.

SPRING:  Song of Solomon, 2:10-13

10    My beloved spoke, and said to me:

“Rise up, my love, my fair one,

And come away.

11    Behold, the winter is past,

The rain is over and gone.

12    Flowers appear on earth;

The time of singing has come,

And the voice of the dove

Is heard in our land.

13    The fig tree puts forth her green figs,

And the vines with the tender grapes

Give forth their fragrance.

Rise up, my love, my fair one,

And come away!

WINTER:  Job 38:22, 29, 30

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?

Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of the heaven, who hath

gendered it?

The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.

And Psalm 147:16,17

16 He giveth snow like wool:  he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.

17 He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold?

There is perhaps no part of the Bible which is more pessimistic and less “religious” than Ecclesiastes, a chapter whose very inclusion in the Bible was hotly debated. Yet its pessimism rings true, and its lyrical strains about the endless rounds of existence can be as comforting as they are bitter. The assertion that “there is nothing new under the sun” is also comfortingly ironic for a 21st-century composer who was schooled as a proper 20th- century avant-gardist.

Program Note: The Mayor’s Fanfare (2009) by James Rolfe.  Duration 90 seconds.

The Mayor’s Fanfare, for four trumpets, was commissioned in 2009 by the Toronto Arts Foundation on the occasion of the Mayor’s Arts Luncheon celebrating the 2009 Toronto Arts Awards. It is dedicated to Mayor David Miller and to Toronto Arts Council Director Claire Hopkinson.

The reaction to the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US brought back memories of growing up during the Cold War. I remember the omnipresent atmosphere of fear and anxiety, faced with a faceless enemy who could strike at any second. I remember my father, constantly aggravated by my mother’s constant worrying: “Worry, worry, worry, all you ever do is worry!” Perhaps he was just as anxious, but unwilling to voice it. I remember the music of the time: high modernists like Xenakis, furiously tearing out all traces of the past; and those who embraced the past, like The Beach Boys, wistfully and longingly. I remember growing up in Ottawa, which (like most cities at the time) was obsessed with obliterating its past—in this case, according to the dictates of French urban planner Jacques Gréber (himself a disciple of Le Corbusier, as was Xenakis). As an anxious mind flits restlessly from one thought to the next, making its own unexpected connections, all these thoughts and musics circulate through Worry, which was written from one moment to the next, without thought as to its future. It’s also a kind of nostalgic homage to the modernism I was born into, innocent of its bitter origins. Worry was commissioned by Continuum (Jennifer Waring, Artistic Director) and Numus (Jeremy Bell, Artistic Director) for Mark Fewer, violin, with the assistance of The Laidlaw Foundation.

Drop (1998) is haunted by ghosts of violin sonatas past, ghosts whose desires are sometimes indulged, but more often frustrated. Drop was commissioned with the assistance of The Ontario Arts Council by the Sabat-Clarke Duo, who premiered it in Toronto in January 1999.

Bouquet is a kind of potpourri, a weaving together of instrumental melodies which are wholly derived from poetic texts–texts used as elements in my recent wedding. This is a practice sometimes disparaged as eclectic, as “mere assemblage”, perhaps because it unites disparate styles of music, both the holy and the unholy. Yet it has enjoyed great favour among composers for centuries, with such diverse results as medieval isorhythmic motets, much opera and film music, and sampled music.

Tunnel was begun without knowing where it would end up. In the real world, this would be a bad way to run a tunneling project, but since the new music community has been overlooked by the Triumph of Capitalism, we can still afford to grope around blindly in the dark, and sniff the dirt and rubble along the way.

Scroll contains echoes of Baroque forms: a division into slow-fast-slow-fast sections, with the slow sections referring to triadic, tonal harmony, and the fast ones using dance-like rhythms. But the harmonies are often highly chromatic and atonal, while the rhythms are more Stravinskian and Afro- Cuban than Baroque.

The contents of Tombeau are primarily extracted from six or seven previous works of mine. The form is thus autobiographical, as if reflecting on a photo album from my last four years. The piece begins patiently and methodically, but gradually becomes annoyed with itself, striving by turn to forget, contradict, and destroy what it set out to do. But don’t believe everything you read.

The contents of Dissolution are primarily extracted from six or seven previous works of mine. It is autobiographical, as if reflecting on a photo album from my last four years. The piece begins patiently and methodically, but gradually becomes annoyed with itself, striving by turn to forget, contradict, and destroy what it set out to do.

Before After begins with a quick, cheerful, leaping motif in rhythmic unison. Then things begin to happen, and the motif ends up crushed and inert. More things happen after that. Before After was commissioned in 1992 by The Fifth Species Woodwind Quintet, with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts.

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Bird is a collaboration between composers John Oswald and James Rolfe, based on Leonard Cohen’s song Bird on a Wire. The words and music of the original are reworked freely with extended phrases, ornaments, modulations, and interpolations.

Dust was written for a concert with the theme of Vienna, a city which conjures up both the Great Germanic tradition (as exemplified by Vienna-based composers such as Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) and a light, frivolous style (as in the waltzes of the Strauss family).

The songs of Illuminations reflect the extremes which so violently animate the poetry of Rimbaud. With beautiful and exquisitely constructed language, Rimbaud navigates poles of despair and exhilaration, love and misanthropy, purity and filth. In this world, romanticism and modernity are placed in a crucible where they react violently to one another, as if in an alchemical experiment, an image which constantly recurs in Rimbaud.

Since his death in 1892, Walt Whitman has become an unwitting collaborator for a steady stream of composers, myself included; four of these texts I have previously set, in 1990.  Despite its high romantic tone, Whitman’s verse remains palatable to our ears: the beauty of his language, his loving attention to its rhythm and sound, and his direct, unpretentious tone make him one of the most approachable of poets.  These songs are mostly from the earlier books of Leaves of Grass, verses which explore facets of desire, be they quiet, turbulent, or defiant.  In my earlier settings, I explored the texts more for sound than for meaning, but this time I have approached them more traditionally, as art songs, trying to hold up a musical mirror to their essences.

Six Songs were commissioned by Soundstreams (Lawrence Cherney, Artistic Director) through The Ontario Arts Council.

Six poems by Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

I heard you solemn sweet pipes of the organ

I heard you solemn sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday I pass’d the church,

Winds of Autumn, as I walk’d the woods at dusk I heard your long stretch’d sighs up above so mournful,

I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;

Heart of my love! You too I heard murmuring low through one of the wrists around my head,

Heard the pulse of you when all was still singing little bells last night under my ear.

Not heaving from my ribb’d breast only

Not heaving from my ribb’d breast only,

Not in sighs at night in rage dissatisfied with myself,

Not in those long-drawn, ill-supprest sighs,

Not in many an oath and promise broken,

Not in my wilful and savage soul’s volition,

Not in the subtle nourishment of the air,

Not in this beating and pounding at my temples and wrists,

Not in the curious systole and diastole within me which will one day cease,

Not in many a hungry wish told to the skies only,

Not in cries, laughter, defiances, thrown from me when alone far in the wilds,

Not in husky pantings through clench’d teeth,

Not in sounded and resounded words, chattering words, echoes, dead words,

Not in the murmurs of my dreams while I sleep,

Nor the other murmurs of these incredible dreams of every day,

Nor in the limbs and senses of my body that take you and dismiss you continually—not there,

Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!

Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.

O you whom I often and silently come

O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you,

As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,

Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

Trickle drops

Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!

O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,

Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,

From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d,

From my face, from my forehead and lips,

From my breast, from within where I was conceal’d, press forth red drops, confession drops,

Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops,

Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,

Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,

Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,

Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops.

One hour to madness and joy

One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!

O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!

O savage and tender achings!

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me in defiance of the world!

O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!

O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of a determin’d woman.

O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!

To have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!

To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!

To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!

To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!

To rise thither with my inebriate soul!

To be lost if it must be so!

To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!

With one brief hour of madness and joy.

A clear midnight

This is thy hour O soul, a free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death, and the stars.

These poems are contradictory in nature. Whitman speaks of intimate and personal feelings by magnifying them with grand turns of phrase, and metaphors embracing the eternal and the universal. The music, rather than mimicking the poet, seeks to distill the original emotions, and to let the words speak for themselves. The voice is reduced to a very restricted range, time is stretched to near-stillness, the accompaniment is full of silences. Complex random-number procedures were used to ensure that pitches and durations remained consistent and distinct; this gives the piano part a very traditional role, that of setting and maintaining the poems’ moods.

The Connection features a text which is rhythmically recited by the performer, consisting of a two-page letter in twenty segments, entitled “The Connection,” by the Russian surrealist writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). This text also generates the music, with its metric patterns being translated to rhythms, and vowel sounds to pitches. In keeping with the shaggy-dog trajectory of the letter, however, these translations are arbitrary and non- linear, and so the music, rather than acting as an accompaniment or a mirror image, becomes an independent entity, a kind of obligato to the text, unfolding with its own loopy logic.

All the Rage was written in 1997 as a kind of plundering of Beethoven’s Rondo Capriccio, Opus 129 (Die Wuth Über den Verlorenen Groschen, or Rage Over A Lost Penny) It’s a piece which I looked up after two infuriating weeks of vainly trying to get my phone line connected. I wondered what would happen if I replaced Beethoven’s material with my own, but left the rest intact–his form, dynamics, tessituras, note densities, etc. So I replaced the first two bars with material that was itself somewhat used (dominant seventh harmonies and syncopations, so beloved by Beethoven, plus figures from Afro- Cuban music and from Jimi Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic). From the third bar, no more new material was necessary: in the spirit of the original, the opening motives are repeated, developed, transformed, and generally harassed until the piece ends.

Program Note: Thin Air (1994) by James Rolfe. For piano. Duration ca. 90 seconds.

Thin Air was written at the request of pianist Barbara Pritchard. It is based on the theme of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

This work has three sources: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (from whence come the two loud opening chords), the Dutch composer Guus Jansen’s One Bar for harpsichord (whence the extended cross- rhythms), and the dub song Dread River by the reggae group Burning Spear (whence the wobbly groove and predominance of very short notes). These three musics, so distant from each other, brought to mind medieval isorhythmic motets, with their three distinct texts and melodies–but for the accordion, “motel” seemed more apt than “motet”.

The family tree of Cello Motel (1993) shows its descent from Accordion Motel (1992), whose forebears include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Guus Jansen’s One Bar for harpsichord, and the dub tune Dread River by the reggae group Burning Spear. The miscegenation of these secular and sacred ancestors brings to mind the medieval isorhythmic motet, albeit with “motel” seeming more apt than “motet”.

Discontinuous Probability Fields 1 – 4 were written in 1993. My intention was to shun expression, narrative or rhetoric, instead presenting and dissecting a sound world in a static, non-directional way.

This is one of a series of piano works featuring a predominant use of random procedures (“probability”) in its composition. Parameters (“fields”)–pitch, dynamics, and duration–are chosen arbitrarily and manipulated within very narrow, suddenly-changing (“discontinuous”) bands of possibilities. As a result, the listener is confronted with the nature of the sounds themselves, rather than by the musical structures and relationships which usually swallow them. The material of this piece was taken from the descending notes (C-B-A-G-F) found in the bass line to “America” by Paul Simon, and shared by many other sentimental tunes. The notes were transposed to nine keys, given separate durations, and superimposed to produce 159 slightly different nine-note chords. These were filtered randomly (most notes were deleted), and dynamics and durations were added (again randomly). The closing section comes from the same chords, but filtered differently, and with new dynamics and durations.

The family tree of Viola Motel (1993) shows its descent from Accordion Motel (1992), whose forebears include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Guus Jansen’s One Bar for harpsichord, and the dub tune Dread River by the reggae group Burning Spear. The miscegenation of these secular and sacred ancestors brings to mind the medieval isorhythmic motet, albeit with “motel” seeming more apt than “motet”.

The family tree of Violin Motel (1993) shows its descent from Accordion Motel (1992), whose forebears include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Guus Jansen’s One Bar for harpsichord, and the dub tune Dread River by the reggae group Burning Spear. The miscegenation of these secular and sacred ancestors brings to mind the medieval isorhythmic motet, albeit with “motel” seeming more apt than “motet”.

Idiot Sorrow takes its title from a line in Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations: “. . . en hurlant son songe de chagrin idiot” (“. . . yelling his dream of Idiot Sorrow”). The piece reveals itself in fits and starts: pitches are few and static, and durations and dynamics are black and white, although shades of grey gradually creep in. It was composed by trial and error between 1989 and 1991, and premiered on 1 February 1991 in Toronto by pianist Barbara Pritchard.