Professor Peter Child's world premiere of 10 Basho Poems will be performed Saturday, Novemember 4th at 8pm at the Longy School of Music in Cambrdige for Northeast by Far East.
The program also includes Zhou Long's Metal, Stone, Silk, Bamboo, David Horne's Spike, William Kraft's Kaleidoscope and Joyce Mekeel's Rune.
Click here for The Boston Music Intelligencer's reivew of the event.
Below is a first look at Professor Child's program notes for 10 Basho Poems:
10 Basho Poems is a musical response to the enigmatic, revelatory world of Basho’s haiku: most recently, a brief immersion in English translations by Lucien Stryk. Basho’s haiku are fleeting impressions that capture in three short lines synchronicities of timelessness and immediacy, stillness and spontaneity, and ‘intimations of immortality’ in the transient awakening of the senses. Accordingly, musical time in this piece—durations, proportions, rhythms, tempi—is changeable, whimsical and improvisatory in one moment, motionless in the next. There are ten contrasting sections, each anchored to its haiku through a system of musical acrostics, and the piece as a whole is about 9 minutes: some of the musical haiku are only a few seconds long. Like the originals, they are allusive and enigmatic:
1.Summer moon — clapping hands, I herald dawn.
2.How quiet — locust-shrill pierces rock.
3.Dusk — though last bell’s faded, air’s cherry-rich.
4.Violets — how precious on a mountain path.
5.On the dead limb squats a crow — autumn night.
6.Spring moon — flower face in mist.
7.Such fragrance — from where, which tree?
8.Fading bells — now musky blossoms peal in dusk.
9.Spring rain — under trees a crystal stream
10.Old pond, leap-splash — a frog.
I am grateful to the Boston Musica Viva and its redoubtable music director, and my friend and colleague, Richard Pittman for the commission that brought these explorations into being.
