Alarm Will Sound: Baker, Balter, Norman, Komschlies, Tovar-Henao, Sheehan

Program Notes

Andrew Norman
Try (2011)

I never get things right on the first try. I am a trial- and-error composer, an incurable reviser. And this is a problem when it comes to high-profile commissions from world class ensembles in spectacular concert halls—because in these rare cases one gets exactly one try to get it right, and one really, really wants to get it right. Disney Hall and the Los Angeles Philharmonic have meant so much to me over the years that the overwhelming desire to write the perfect piece for them was enough to stop me dead in my creative tracks. It took me many months to realize the obvious: my piece was never going to be perfect no matter how hard I tried, and perfection was not even the right target on which to set my sights. The best thing I could do to honor the adventurous spirit of the Philharmonic and Disney Hall was to try as many new things as I could, to embrace the risk and failure and serendipitous discovery implicit in the word ‘try’. The piece I ended up writing is a lot like me. It’s messy, and fragmented, and it certainly doesn’t get things right on the first try. It does things over and over, trying them out in as many different ways as it can. It circles back on itself again and again in search of any idea that will stick, that will lead it forward to something new. And, at long last, after ten minutes of increasingly frantic trying, it finds one small, unlikely bit of musical material it likes enough to repeat and polish and hone until it finally (fingers crossed) gets it right.

Claude Baker
Carmen Infernarum Machinarum Fugax
(The Fleeting Song of the Infernal Machines) (2022–23)

When I told my former teacher, longtime mentor, and cherished friend Samuel Adler that I was going to undertake a new work for Alarm Will Sound, he said “You know, Baker, you can’t write your usual postmodernist, quotation-filled stuff for them. It’s Alarm Will Sound. Lots of noise. Lots of notes.” I had already determined that my ‘usual stuff’ would not be appropriate for this unique new music band, but I had not yet selected an alternative aesthetic direction. Because of Mr. Adler’s comment about lots of noise, however, I decided that I would extensively incorporate in my work multiple types of non-traditional and non-pitched performing techniques for each instrument (although, truth be told, these effects have been in use for so long and are now so ubiquitous that they can hardly be considered non-traditional). In preparation, I revisited pieces (some of which I had known for decades) of composers who are associated with using ‘noise-based’ materials—most notably Helmut Lachenmann and those he directly influenced. Of the latter, I was drawn especially to the music of Gérard Pesson, a brilliant French composer whose deftly crafted works invariably reveal his powerful intellect, his intense musicality, and his engaging sense of playfulness and whimsy. His influence can be seen throughout my score, both sonically and notationally, and the opening seconds of my piece are a respectful nod to the beginning of his 2002 orchestral work Aggravations et final.

The title of my composition is a riff on both Harrison Birtwistle’s Carmen arcadiae mechanicae perpetuum (The Perpetual Song of Mechanical Arcadia) and Christopher Rouse’s The Infernal Machine. For centuries, composers have been fascinated with and have drawn inspiration from the sounds and operations of mechanical devices of various sorts: consider Haydn’s use of the ticking rhythm in the second movement of his ‘Clock’ Symphony, Beethoven’s tribute to Johann Nepomuk Malzel’s metronome in the 8th Symphony, the Futurists’ attempts in the early twentieth century to imitate industrial machinery in their music, etc. During the course of my piece, relatively short, machinelike events (some pitched, some non-pitched) continually start up, sputter, and inevitably stall. Just when it seems as if they are at last humming along, having become increasingly pitch-centric in the process, a spanner is thrown into the works, and everything is brought abruptly to a halt. The machines struggle to restart themselves, but, in the end, their song does indeed prove to be all too fleeting.

Chelsea Komschlies
Hexactinellida (2019)

Hexactinellida, a class of ancient, unusual deep-sea sponges whose skeletons are composed of a complex lattice of six-pointed spicules made of silica, are also known as glass sponges. Lacking an epidermis like other sponges, hexactinellids are wrapped in a covering of multinucleate cytoplasm which can send electrical impulses through their glass skeletons better than any fiber optics humans have created. In contrast to this lightning-fast reaction time is their extreme longevity; one currently living specimen is estimated to be 15,000 years old.

The music evokes the structure of glass sponges: hard, densely packed, buzzing lattices are lit up by pulses of electricity, their texture, crunchy and spiky rather than smooth and crystalline, their bodily shapes, simultaneously resembling ultra-futuristic algorithmic architecture and Dr. Seussian plants.

Felipe Tovar-Henao
Enjambres (2022)

In Enjambres, the ensemble is imagined as a meta-instrument, in which individual parts come together to form swarmlike gestures. Through iterations of these gestures different musical processes emerge, until reaching a cacophonous, machine-like state.

Kelley Sheehan
splitting to collapse (2023)

Splitting to collapse is a piece meant to end.

Once becoming aware of itself, it collapses in, exhausted.

Marcos Balter
Code-Switching (2022–23)

Originally a linguistics term, code-switching broadly refers to the act of altering one’s language, speech patterns, mannerisms, or even appearance to enhance compatibility with others. For many, it is a survival technique, particularly among marginalized individuals who find themselves in environments hostile to their identities. This morphing often carries elements of subversiveness, with codes within codes. In “Tricksters, Troubadours, and Bartleby,” the late art critic Jean Fisher stated that “for the colonial subject dispossessed by force, resistance had, of necessity, to operate clandestinely at the micro-social level.” She cited the syncretism of Santería as an example, originating from the necessity to camouflage its Yoruban roots through Roman Catholic equivalences to evade persecution. Over time, what was once a subterfuge can (and often does) become a legitimized code itself, a way to exist intersectionally, thus rejecting any notion of a lingua franca or prescribed language while embracing the freedom of its own patois.