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demanding and affords the performers ample opportunity for technical display.
The first movement opens with a mysterious timbre trill in the bassoon's high register. It gradually
gives way to a boogie-like middle section before concluding by combining keystrokes with vocal sounds.
The second movement opens with the flute imitating the key slaps of the bassoon. Eventually the
music moves into dance-like sections, one built around the clave rhythm and the other in 7/8 meter built
around a Greek scale with two augmented seconds. A few metrical modulations ensue. The liquidation
of the dance like motives brings the movement to a close. The third movement opens with consecutive
lyrical solo lines in the flute and bassoon. The first piano gesture calls for plucking directly on the
strings of the instrument. The three instruments engage in an eclectic conversation that grows in inten-
sity. The climactic moment for the piece is reached when the piano starts playing a blues-derived figure
in 4/4 while the winds recapitulate previous materials in 3/4. The timbre trills in the bassoon that
opened the piece make a reappearance to signal its conclusion.
Two Absinthian Dances is a piece, though not entirely programmatic nor biographical, of despair and
ultimately selfdestruction. They are not true dances, but both begin with a very strong metric ground-
ing and constant subdivision of the beat, which gave me a feeling of a waltz in the case of the first
movement and images of a dervish for the second. The relation to absinth is one of distant association;
the music is inspired by bitterness like that of wormwood, once a primary ingredient of the liqueur.
Both movements are composed fiom a four note motive that is developed throughout the entire work.
William Toutant was born in 1948 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Educated at The George Washington
University and Michigan State University, he received training in composition, musicology, and con-
ducting. Robert Parris, George Steiner, H. Owen Reed, and Jere Hutcheson were his principal teachers.
His music has been performed in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. He was an annual
participant in the "Romanian-American Music Days" festival in Constants, Romania fiom 1995 through
1998. In 1997 and 1998 he served as the American Executive Director of the festival. He joined the
faculty of California State University, Northridge in 1975, and is Professor of Music and Dean of the
College of Arts, Media, and Communication. He hosts the weekly radio show "The KCSN Opera
House" on the Los Angeles station KCSN, broadcasting at 88.5 FM, and over the internet at
www.kcsn.org.
The Four CharacterMc Pieces were originally composed in 1993 for the Trio Neos, who premiered it
that year in Mexico City. The original instrumentation is clarinet, bassoon and piano, but the composer
arranged the clarinet part for flute in 2002 for the present performers. The first movement is "Eccentric"
in that the main musical motif is "eccentrica11y~' notated, sometimes on the beat, and sometimes off the
beat. The "Nostalgic" movement has several quotations fiom pieces I composed in the 1980s. The third
movement is a musical exercise in motion without movement, and the fourth is a fugue, sometimes
considered a rather "academic" musical process.
Alex Shapiro (Born in NYC, 1962) was educated at The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of
Music, with additional studies at Mannes College of Music and the Aspen Music School. She studied
composition with Ursula Mamlok and John Corigliano and later moved to Los Angeles, where she
composed scores for feature films, television shows and documentary projects for many years before
returning her focus to concert music. Published by Activist Music, her chamber works are heard weekly
in concerts and broadcasts across the U.S. and internationally, and can be found on the Cambria Master
Recordings, Innova Recordings and Millennia Arts labels. Ms. Shapiro is an active participant in the
Southern California music community, and is President of the Board of the The American Composers
Forum of Los Angeles, as well as the moderator of ACF5A's popular Composer's Salon series in