University Musical Society - Ann Arbor District Library

John Williams
under the spell of the folk and popular music
of Andalusia in the south, and his success in
adapting its colorful idiom to concert music
soon denned it as typically Spanish for the
rest of the musical world.
Originally written for the piano, we hear
tonight John Williams' transcription of one
of the pieces in the Suite Espafwla. Asturias
is a hilly region along the Bay of Biscay in
the north and center of the Spanish coal
mining industry. The area has produced
many haunting folk-songs and this piece
is subtitled leyenda (legend).
El Decameron Negro
Leo Brouwer
Born March 1, 1939 in Havana, Cuba
Leo Brouwer's original career as a guitarist
was shared with a growing interest in com­
position, and this became his main vocation.
Brouwer's works for guitar are a major part
of the instrument's twentieth-century reper­
toire, but are only a small proportion of his
total output, which includes choral, vocal,
chamber, and orchestral works, and so far,
more than sixty film scores.
Early influences were Bartok and
Stravinsky, and Brouwer has been continually
interested in the developing language of com­
position over the years through the "avant-
garde" period of the 1960s and 1970s, in which
his aleatoric pieces show lasting imagination
and creativity in the use of minimalist ideas.
Today, Brouwer describes his language as a
"sort of neo-romanticism", with nationalist
Afro-Cuban influences not far behind.
El Decameron Negro (1981) was inspired
by a collection of traditional African tales
collected by the anthropologist Leo Frobenius
at the end of the ninteenth-century. The
evocative titles — The Harp of the Warrior,
The Lover's Flight into the Valley of Echoes,
and the Ballad of the Lady in Love — are the
starting point of a wonderfully imaginative
piece which seems to unfold as a single story.
Stele
Phillip Houghton
Born April 26, 1954 in Melbourne, Australia
Phillip Houghton was a relative latecomer to
classical music — his early musical interests
being rock, jazz, and folk music. Although he
has written in both acoustic and electronic
media for theatre, film and dance, the guitar
remains his first love and his music seems
to add a new sense of time and space to the
sound of the instrument. Phillip Houghton
writes:
"Stele is strongly influenced by Greek art
and mythology and the Grecian landscape.
The word stele itself describes a headstone or
monument, often erected on the coastline in
memoriam of sailors and travellers lost at sea,
or those never to return to their homeland.
In a sense, they were beacons for lost souls.
The Stele of Demokleides — which depicts
the image of a lost sailor seated alone on a cliff,
his head buried in his hands — provided great
inspiration for the entire work and, in particu­
lar, the first movement. The next movement,
'Dervish', is based on the statue of the mad
galloping horse and jockey or Artemission, its
musical form being a response to the ecstatic
dance of the Whirling Dervishes. The third
movement, 'Bronze Apollo,' (in two sections,
(a) Premonition and (b) Arpeggio, and inspired
by the magnificent early bronze figure Piraeus
Apollo), bears the subtitle 'Copper, Bronze,
Water, Air, Green, Perfume.' 'Web', a short,
relentless drone that compresses and weaves
elements used in the preceding three movements,
closes the solo."
Three Epitafios
Mikis Theodorakis
Born July 29, 1925 in Chios
The Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis
began the movement which transformed
and revitalized Greek popular music in
the 1960's. This combines elements of the
old Byzantine traditions, based on church