December 2, 1988: Opening Gala for New Music America Miami, day 1 of 9
Also NMA birthday to Adele Armin (Sound Pressure) in 1945
This is a section from a wraparound art that protected the individual program sheets which in turn were in a tight little plastic folder, I presume in part so that you could do some reading on the beath…
Charles Wuorinen: Bamboula Beach - the Miami Bamboula
(see below for lengthy New Yorker review of the piece)
The New World Symphony began the opening night concert with a piece it introduced this past February and which deserves the attention of any orchestra interested in demonstrating that serial technique can produce a riotously exciting orchestral showpiece - Charles Wuorinen's Bamboula Beach-The Miami Bamboula.
As the title suggests, Bamboula Beach is a jump-up kind of piece, whose Latin influences include a Cuban street song and the University of Miami fight song. Wuorinen even works steel drums into the orchestration. And yet he manages to remain true to his academic credentials as well. No small feat.
- William Littler, Toronto Star, “Making New Music in Miami”, December 7, 1988
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Actually the distressing thing about New Music America has been that so many composers have, like Feldman, taken their music to extremes, with no evident concern for real musical impact. Charles Wuorinen’s Miami Bamboula, written for the New World Symphony, keeps a very large orchestra frantically busy for about 10 minutes, throwing out a dissonant welter of jagged and raucous instrumental comments, all of them apparently battling for supremacy. Wourinen claimed to have written the piece, which takes its name from a West Indian dance, with festive intent. Its effect is more in the hysteria area.
- unsigned (online at least), Orlando Sentinel, “If it won’t play in Peoria, try Miami: New Music America has almost too much to offer”, December 8, 1988
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Elliott Carter: Remembrance - London Sinfonetta version
Elliott Carter's 1988 Remembrance for Paul Fromm, which begins with the dirge-like thud of a drum fading into bright, high, sustained strings; alternating piccolos, piano, delicate percussion, rueful horns and winds, and trombone plaint produce an eerie, glistening gravity.
- James Roos, Musical America, "New Music America Festival" May 1989
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Astor Piazzolla: Tangazo - Michael Tilson-Thomas and New World Symphony’s recorded version
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Argentine nuevo tango master Astor Piazzolla, who has already been unofficially co-opted into the new music sphere stateside, made some bold assertions in his orchestral piece Tangazo. On opening night, the New World Symphony deftly handled Piazzolla's admixture of Bruckner-like romanticism and jazzy riffs tossed around the stage.
- Josef Woodard, Option, March 1989
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As part of the festival’s aim — showing how the Americas have influenced one another — two pieces by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla exposed the sultry rhythms of the tango.
Piazzolla’s scores are dark-hued and richly woven, their minor-key melodies laden with as much melancholy as sensuality. Tangazo availed of the full-blooded tone of the orchestra as evocatively as Four for Tango did the defter shadings of the quartet.
- unsigned (online at least), Orlando Sentinel, “If it won’t play in Peoria, try Miami: New Music America has almost too much to offer”, December 8, 1988
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Steve Reich The Four Sections
Michael Tilson-Thomas version with the London Symphony:
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Steve Reich ... was the minimalist of choice. Reich's Four Sections is a stirring tapestry of orchestral minimalism, and the premiere of his technologically and narratively provocative new piece for the Kronos, Different Trains, was a high point.
- Josef Woodard, Option, March 1989
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The most brilliant festival novelties were [Steve] Reich's, whose Four Sections was hypnotic in his best minimalist vein. The orchestra's four string sections repeat a melodic refrain as in a round, which is reiterated and reinforced with pulsing winds and brasses, amplified organ, and four mallet instruments, evoking the dream-struck aura of The Desert Music.
- James Roos, Musical America, "New Music America Festival" May 1989
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But perhaps the most accessible music of all, in its way, was that of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The two composers are today’s leading, not to mention fashionable, exponents of minimalism: They create their music out of elemental building blocks, chords and fragments of melody repeated insistently with occasional shifts of color, rhythms and the like.
Many listeners thrill to this, as did most of those in Miami. Others, including me, find minimalism more often to be dulling, mindless and inexpressive. Glass has the barer style, as in his Company for quartet; rat-a- tat repeated chords seem to be his meat, whether he’s writing for a foursome or for a stage full of synthesizers.
Reich is more ingenious in coming up with stuff to repeat: In his Four Sections for large orchestra with four solo vibraphones, which the New World Symphony played mellifluously, he threads together a variety of curling, murmuring lines and punctuates them with crashing chords from two grand pianos. Still, his only real expressive device is the sudden change of harmony, which is nothing so new: Schubert did the same thing 150 years ago, with much more effect.
- unsigned (online at least), Orlando Sentinel, “If it won’t play in Peoria, try Miami: New Music America has almost too much to offer”, December 8, 1988
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Morton Feldman’s String Quartet and Orchestra, version by the Arditti String Quartet with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra:
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[Feldman's] 1973 String Quartet and Orchestra, reserved for [Michael Tilson] Thomas, is a soft-spoken 20-minute work inspired by such painters as Mark Rothko, Jackson Polack, and Willem de Kooning.
Repetitive string figurations expand slowly in a hush, suggesting vast spaces; blobs of color are then daubed on as piano chords, and a distant chime or a quiver of maracas contrasts with pale strings and mutted brasses. The effect is serenely sulky, yet poetic.
- James Roos, Musical America, "New Music America Festival" May 1989
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One of the festival’s most striking moments came when the New World Symphony and the Kronos foursome merged for Morton Feldman’s daring String Quartet and Orchestra — a 20-odd-minute piece that scarcely rises above a pianissimo. Consisting of little more than spare, usually high-pitched interweavings by the quartet and a dense chordal background from the orchestra, the music moves along so slowly that there’s hardly a feeling of rhythm at all. Yet Feldman, a leader of the avant garde, has been so ingenious in deploying subtle tone colorings and delicate fragments of melody that the eerie atmosphere he creates never loses its fascination.
- unsigned (online at least), Orlando Sentinel, “If it won’t play in Peoria, try Miami: New Music America has almost too much to offer”, December 8, 1988
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Ah, right, the unscheduled encore that the late beloved Gisela Gronemeyer publicly winced at! This version would be probably from 1989 or 1990…
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A nod towards music of the other Americas yielded music by Astor Piazzolla whose Tangazo turned the New World Symphony into a behemoth tango dance band...
- Josef Woodard, Downbeat, March 1989
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The Kronos treatment of another Feldman work was hotly discussed all week. In the festival's opening concert December 2, Michael Tilson Thomas conducted Kronos and the New World Symphony in Feldman's String Quartet and Orchestra. For more than half an hour both groups established a meditative atmosphere; then, rather than let that Thoreavian mood sink in during intermission, the Kronos shot it to hell (orchestra still onstage) with their obligatory version of Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze. Only a group more intent ...[part of clipping lost] the music could have been so insensitive.
- Kyle Gann "Like Veal, Only Chewier", Village Voice, January 3, 1989
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New Music America is one of the few festivals that can live up to its promotion. This traveling celebration of contemporary arts opened in Miami Friday evening with a provocative, often brilliantly imaginative, program performed by the New World Symphony.
Since the festival, now in its 10th year, may not make it back to this area again, music lovers with open ears ought to flock to the rest of it this week. Those with closed ears ought to be dragged, kicking and screaming, if need be.
The sheer craftsmanship involved in the music for Friday’s concert was alone worthy of attention and provided further evidence that the symphony orchestra as an institution need not be trapped in a mausoleum of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. When composers are writing so much interesting new material for large ensemble (and I mean large — the stage was practically overflowing with musicians and extra instruments), there simply is no excuse for any orchestra anywhere to drag out only the same old repertoire season after season.
It would be worth hearing any of the items on this concert again, even Charles Wuorinen’s Bamboula Beach — The Miami Bamboula, which was premiered last February at the New World Symphony’s inaugural performance. It isn’t any less noisy than it was on that occasion, but the vitality of the complex and often fiercely dissonant score is hard to resist. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted it with assurance and enthusiasm; the orchestra responded in kind.
That level of conducting and playing was maintained, with only occasional lapses, all evening.
Elliott Carter’s Remembrance, a eulogy composed this year in memory of arts patron Paul Fromm, is reminiscent, quite fittingly, of Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. Instead of a trumpet asking about the nature of human existence, Carter has a plaintive trombone periodically sighing a phrase that never seems resolved. And, as in the Ives piece, the strings are mainly concerned with soft, subtly changing chords that suggest the imperturbability of time.
It is a haunting work, far more accessible than much of Carter’s writing, though just as doggedly atonal, and it was delivered with remarkable sensitivity. For many people in the delightfully eclectic audience at Gusman Cultural Center, the Kronos Quartet was clearly the concert’s main feature — and with good reason.
This incomparable ensemble has helped inspire a whole new repertoire for string quartet, one of the most beloved of classical music vehicles, and has done so with the panache and marketing skill of the best rock bands. The musicians’ technical precision and interpretive fire is hard to beat.
The group joined the New World Symphony for a work called String Quartet and Orchestra written in 1973 by the late Morton Feldman, who is being honored by New Music America. Like much of Feldman’s music, it rarely rises above a mezzo forte as an almost pointilistic aural canvas is painted.
Concerned with the intricacies of sound and spatiality, the music requires a special concentration and technical control. That’s what the Kronos players provided, often producing an exceptionally clean unison line that sounded like a single violin. Tilson Thomas masterfully coordinated the orchestral portion of the score.
The Kronos Quartet obliged its fans with an encore — one of its biggest hits, an electrifying arrangement of Purple Haze by legendary rocker Jimi Hendrix. (The group wraps up its festival residency with a performance of Feldman’s five-hour String Quartet II starting at 7 this evening at Miami’s First Presbyterian Church.)
The concert also included a moody, coloristic 1987 score from Steve Reich — Four Sections. It is one of a growing number of full-sized symphonic works in the minimalist vein, and it is one of the most interesting. Each of the orchestra’s string sections pass around a rhythmically motivated theme, while the brass, woodwinds and a greatly expanded percussion and keyboard ensemble add assorted commentary. Though the repetitive aspects of the minimalist style certainly are present, the variety of melodic ideas and instrumental effects give the piece considerable weight and hypnotic appeal.
Since Four Sections was dedicated by the composer to Tilson Thomas, it was not surprising that the performance was so committed and involving. Some of the coarse brass playing was surprising, however, both here and in Tangazo, by Argentina’s Astor Piazzolla. Other than that distraction, the U.S. premiere of the work proved highly engaging, a sometimes melancholy tone poem that uses the essence of the tango as a propulsive and expressive device.
- unsigned, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "New Music America An Engaging Experience", December 5, 1988
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As with the other festivals, there will be a separate substack regarding the video and installation series. The Morton Feldman exhibit was in the Gusman lobby, and thus it was launched on December 2, 1988:
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Good at NMA: the New World Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, finding Charles Wuorinen's sense of humor in Bamboula Beach - the Miami Bamboula, finding Steve Reich's heart in The Four Sections [and] Morton Feldman's work - penetrating, sotto voce.
- Howard Mandel, Ear Magazine, February 1989
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Sounds from the Gala opening night reception:
Previously, on December 1, 1988:
From an event the previous night which made it into the what, judging by the names being in bold face, was a social events columnist in the Miami Herald:
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Adele Armin, Morris, Manitoba, 1945
Adele Armin was a member of the Sound Pressure ensemble who participated at the NMA Montréal 1990 festival, as well as at the “Wall of Rzewski” on the closing day of the NMA New York City 1989 festival. She was also known for 20 years as part of the Toronto Symphony. She passed away in June 2022 and the most extensive information I could find was actually a German Wikipedia entry…
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Armin
Toronto Star obituary:
https://obituaries.thestar.com/obituary/adele-armin-1088260200