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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO 2011-12 SEASON

Sunday, December 4, 2011 7:30 pm. Walter Hall

PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE

Beverley Johnston, director Dorian Cox and Jonathan Smith, coaches

PERFORMERS AJ Fisico

Anna Karpazis Andy McNeilly Jan Morris

William Tran Carol Xuanyu Wang Martin Wigle PROGRAM | Waiting In Line Jason Haughn 2. Nocturne Frédéric Chopin Arr. Maxine Lefever 4 October Mountain Alan Hovhaness INTERMISSION

4 Sambas pour Six Percussionistes Jacques Charpentier 4 Bakoua Matthias Schmitt ¢ Three? John Cage

7 Dance Music for Elfrid Ide (Movement I)

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Patrons are advised to use the washrooms on the main floor and second floor. We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Waiting in Line is a Canadian percussion work written by Nova Scotian percussionist and composer, Jason Haughn.

Nocturne: Chopin’s Nocturne in E miner, Op. 72 no. 1,a work for solo piano, was arranged by Maxine Lefever as a trio for three miarimbas, or in this case, two marimbas and vibraphone.

October Mountain: This year marks the hundred-year anniversary of prolific Arnienian-American composer Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000). As such we are honouring him by performing one of his works for percussion sextet, October Mountain. Born in Somerville, Massachusetts, Hovhaness

began composing at a very young age and completed over five hundred works by the time of his death. Many of his works for percussion, including October Mountain, have entered the standard repertoire of percussion music. Perhaps the most famous of these works is his concerto for xylophone and orchestra, Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints. His music has been described in the Boston Globe as having a “hushed, reverential, mystical, and nostalgic atniosphere”’. October Mountain is a five-movement work written in 1942 and revised in 1953, and is no exception to this description.

Sambas pour Six Percussionistes was written for the highly acclaimed percussion ensemble, Le Percussions De Strasbourg. The piece is essentially a six-part cannon composed of repeating single-measure rhythms in the style of Brazilian Samba.

Bakoua is a piece composed in the style of a Beguine. Beguine is a dance similar to slow rumba that was popular in the 1930s.

Three” was composed by the famous American composer John Cage in May 1991, only a little over a year before

his death. At the end of a lifetime full of composing, Cage composed a series of works in the late “80s and early ‘90s that were titled simply as something to the power of something else (such as Three’, or Four’, Five’, etc.) There were over 30 of these works in total, all with the same basic compositional idea: each musician performs a certain number of events within specific but flexible time brackets within a certain amount of time. These works embodied a compositional style known as “chance music” that was the basis of many of Cage’s works. The purpose is to create chance interactions between pre-planned sonic events.

Dance Music for Elfrid Ide is a piece that John Cage wrote while serving on the Dance Faculty at Mills College in Oakland, CA. It was written to accompany the graduation thesis of a talented graduate student and dance instructor, Elfrid Ide. Since its premiere performance on May 20th, 1941, it has been performed rather infrequently as even

the composer himself decided (for whatever reason) not to perform the piece with his percussion ensemble. However, two differing manuscripts of the piece have been recovered and studied extensively by scholars in order to produce the current version of the work. It has since found its place in the percussion ensemble repertoire and is yet another celebrated work of the brilliant composer, John Cage. We are presenting the first of its three movements.

BIOGRAPHIES

DORIAN COX is a Masters in Music candidate in Percussion Performance at the University of Toronto, where he was awarded the Eaton Graduate Fellowship. He was recently selected as the only Canadian percussion student to be invited and who performed in the Percussive Arts Society International Convention Fiftieth Anniversary Marimba Orchestra. In the summer of 2011, Mr. Cox was awarded a grant from the Willanison Foundation for Music to attend

the Zeltsmian Marimba Festival. A dedicated student, he has also attended the Juilliard Summer Percussion Seminar, the Leigh Howard Stevens Summer Marimba Seminar, the Toronto Sunimer Music Academy and Festival, and has performed with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada and the Banff Festival Orchestra.

JONATHAN SMITH is an avid performer of new and contemporary music. This past June, he was invited to perform with the Atlantic Canadian new music ensemble Motion at the Canadian University Music Society’s annual conference. Jonathan is also one of three founding members of the Mount Allison New Music Ensemble, a group conunitted to the study and performance of 20th and 21st century music. Recently, Jonathan travelled to Fairbanks, Alaska where he participated in the Alaska Midnight Sun Chamber Percussion Intensive. Under the direction of acclaimed percussionists Bob Becker and Morris Palter, he studied and performed many seminal works of the percussion ensemble repertoire including Reich’s Drumming and Varese’s Ionisation. Jonathan is a MMus student in Percussion Performance at the University of Toronto where he studies with Beverley Johnston and Russell Hartenberger.