Notes from Jacob Druckman, ANIMUS III, synapse>VALENTINE, Nonesuch Records H-71253:

This recording embraces three titles, two works, but one central concern. The works are involved with the actual presence of the performer theatrically as well as musically, limiting their focus to a particular area of human affections as well as a limited body of musical materials. Each work presumes that the theatrical and musical elements are inseparable; that the ideal performance of the music already embodies the performance of the drama. The music focuses reflexively on musicians and virtuosity.

The two sides of the record present the two polar possibilities of combinations of live and pre- recorded sound. On Side One they are inextricably combined. The sound sources of the tape are mainly concrete; the voice and clarinet playing of soloist Arthur Bloom in various degrees of transformation. During the performance of Animus III the clarinetist has at his disposal a microphone connected to a feedback device, which allows him to transform his playing so that he can move in and out of the electronic sounds. In this way the tape and the live player can approach each other, even crossing to opposite sides of the real/electronic gamut.

On Side Two, the electronic and the live are juxtaposed but completely separate. The tape sounds are made entirely of electronic sources (one tiny exception - the voice of bassist Alvin Brehm for less than one second), and the instrumental Valentine is completely without electronics.

The genesis of Animus III began with my asking Arthur Bloom to record some clarinet sounds as sources from which I could build the tape part of the work. The recording session was late at night. We worked efficiently and informally as we are good friends and colleagues of many years standing. The tape of that session contained not only the brilliant clarinet sounds of this extraordinary musician, but also the vocal sounds of the session-the laughter, the banter, the irritation, the fatigue, the impatience. Over all this fluttered the ephemeral virtuosity-untouched, uncommitted, disassociated from the human dynamic. As I worked with the tape in the following months, I found myself more and more fascinated with the recorded sounds of the irrational dynamic. These sounds began to shape the image of the work as strongly as the instrumental material from which, I believe, they are eventually inseparable.

The completed work assumes a surreal, aloof arch-virtuosity which follows its whimsy through many states leading to an eventual decay into a mindless hysteria.

Synapse (n., the junction point of two neurons, across which a nerve impulse passes), aside from the exception mentioned above, is totally synthesized on voltage-controlled analog machinery. It assumes the stance of Valentine. It functions as avant-propos, paraphrase, setting for Valentine.

Valentine begins with the same driven intensity with which Animus III ends. The work is one of the most difficult ever written for the contrabass and demands that the player attack the instrument with bow, tympany stick, both hands alternating percussive tapping on the body of the instrument with pizzicato harmonics, while the voice sustains tones, sings counterpoints, and punctuates accents. All of this necessitates the player's assaulting the instrument with an almost deSade-like concentration (hence the title). Valentine moves in the opposite direction from Animus III-from intensity to euphoria.

-JACOB DRUCKMAN

Jacob Druckman has produced a substantial list of works, several with electronic elements, a number of which have been recorded on Nonesuch, CRI, and Turnabout. He has also written for theater. films, and dance, and his music has been employed by the Jeffrey City Center Ballet for the past several seasons. The works heard in this album, composed to a Nonesuch Records commission, have been adapted by choreographer Gerald Arpino for his ballets Solarwind (Animus III) and Valentine.

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, Mr. Druckman has degrees from The Juilliard School of Music; he also studied in Paris at the Ecole normale de musique and at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, among them Guggenheim Grants in 1957 and 1968, the Society for the Publication of American Music publication award in 1967, Fulbright Grant in 1954, and he was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1969. He has been commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Groupe de recherches musicales (Radiodiffusion-Television francaise, LADO for the Juilliard Quartet, the Walter M. Naumburg Foundation, and others.

The composer now resides in New York where he has been teaching at Juilliard since 1957, and he has been associated with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center since 1967.

Virtuoso clarinetist and conductor Arthur Bloom has performed with every major musical ensemble and orchestra in New York. As clarinetist he has, since 1954, given premiere performances of 112 works-many of them composed for him. His affiliations with the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, the Lark and Dorian Quintets (he was a founder of the latter two ensembles), and with all the important new-music performance groups in New York City throughout the 1960s, have enabled him to participate in the creation of an extraordinary amount of challenging and important new music.

Mr. Bloom holds degrees from the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he studied with Augustin Duques (clarinet) and Jean Morel (conducting). His activities as a conductor encompass 37 programs of orchestral repertoire, and Mr. Bloom has conducted the premieres of 87 compositions, including that of Gustav Mahler's Tenth Symphony as realized by Joseph Wheeler (1965)

Alvin Brehm, whose remarkable virtuosity as o contrabass player has contributed to the creation of a number of new works for the instrument, is a composer in his own right. Mr. Brehm studied with Wallingford Riegger and at the Juilliard School of Music, is Artist-in-Residence at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, and is a faculty member of the Manhattan School of Music. As instrumentalist, Alvin Brehm has appeared with the Budapest and Lenox String Quartets, the New York Woodwind Quintet, and with Alexander Schneider at the White House in Washington.

As soloist in contemporary-music series, Mr. Brehm is active in college and community concerts His compositions have been performed in Europe and the Far East on U.S. State Department tours as well as throughout the U.S.A., and several of his works have been recorded on Golden Crest, Trilogy and Nonesuch Records.

Notes from Spectrum: New American Music, Volume III, Nonesuch Records H-71221:
Jacob Druckman's Incenters was written in 1968 for Arthur Weisberg and the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble and first performed by the group at Rutgers and in New York in the same year. Druckman, born in 1928 in Philadelphia, studied at Tanglewood, at the Juilliard School of Music, and at the Ecole normale de musique in Paris. Since 1957 he has been on the faculty of Juilliard. His awards and grants include a Fulbright and two Guggenheims, as well as SPAM, Lado, Juilliard, Naumburg, Mercury Music, Wechsler, and Tanglewood commissions. He has produced a substantial list of works, several with electronic elements.

An incenter is a triangle inscribed within a circle, or a pyramid within a sphere; the term is also related to a whole class of words derived from the Latin incenere, p.p. incentus: to sound an instrument, to sing, and also to weave charms or spells. The piece is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, piano, percussion, and solo strings. The brass dominate, and they set in motion each chain of musical events by upsetting the equilibrium established by the other instruments. These states of equilibrium derive from static, symmetrical chords whose ultimate, unlikely source is Boris Godounov! The actual Coronation Scene chords are quoted shortly before the final section of overlapping blocks of sound. The notation is sometimes precise, sometimes proportional so that the players relate to each other freely or at the conductor's whim, the result is flexibility within a carefully structured form.

Notes from Louisville Orchestra First Edition Records LS-764:

Lamia (1976) by Jacob Druckman

The magic of music has seldom celebrated the music of magic with as much force, directness and power as in Jacob Druckman's remarkable work for soprano and orchestra, Lamia. Commissioned by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, Lamia was premiered on April 20, 1974, under the batons of Julius Hegyi and Robert Kogan. The work was enlarged in 1976 with an additional movement based on a Malaysian folk conjuration. The new version was premiered by Pierre Boulez and David Gilbert with the New York Philharmonic in 1976, and was hailed as "a work of considerable imaginative power, imagery, and craftsmanship."

The incredible artistry of mezzo-soprano Jan de Gaetani. soloist at all the performances. figured largely in the composition of the work. Turning to the world of the occult, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer gathered together seven widely diverse texts - a "lucky" number - in order to celebrate those magical metaphysical powers to which people have always turned - whether an innocent provincial maiden longing for a husband. a frightened traveler warding off thieves or even death, or those darker figures like Medea whose terrifying links to the supernatural have always played havoc with the world's idea of the natural.

Lamia, a mythical witch and sorceress, has long been associated with the occult. Her name as the title of the present work is not meant to personify the soloist, but to evoke the mystical atmosphere which impelled the work's creation. The piece begins with a "Folk Conjuration to make one courageous" from Lorraine, chanted by the soloist midst a subdued menacing accompaniment. The second movement opens with a quotation from Ovid in which the soloist virtually becomes the tormented Medea. Suddenly, she is no longer Medea but an innocent French maiden beseeching the moon for a glimpse of her future husband. Those sudden character shifts are central to Druckman's conception. The soloist - the sorceress - becomes another being in an instant because all existence is potentially within her life force. This feature of the work is also reflected in the unexpected - and quite wonderful - stops and starts in the orchestra. The third movement is a conjuration from Malaysia "against death or other absence of the soul." Then, in a quotation from Druckman's earlier Animus 2, the soprano begins the final movement by becoming an instrument, and pitting one conductor against the other with teasing magical sounds, bewitchingly transcending text. The figure of Medea is then evoked once more with a powerful quotation - words and music - from a 1649 opera by Pier Francesco Cavalli entitled Il Giasone, initially played by the smaller of the two orchestras. Suddenly, the soloist turns to the conductor of the large orchestra and becomes Isolde, exclaiming of herself, "Entartet Geschlecht!" ("Degenerate offspring!"), then concludes the Cavalli quotation. Finally, the larger orchestra swells as Druckman's own music accompanies Isolde's powerful incantation from the beginning of Wagner's opera. The "work ends with an eerie text, a conglomeration of words worn in the 16th century on one's person as a "periapt" or charm against thieves.

To achieve his own musical sorcery, Druckman divides the orchestra into two unequal parts, each with its own conductor. The resulting sonorities are tantalizing, spooky, poignant and evocative. But more than that, the orchestral division allows the soloist to interact with them in a unique and beguiling way, cajoling them, mocking them, infusing conflict. The orchestra's percussion section is extremely rich, including many of the newer instruments that have become part of contemporary symphonic sound. A spring coil with sizzles is used with particularly haunting results.

Department Chairman and Professor of Composition at Yale University, Jacob Druckman has been named by the Chicago Tribune as "one of the most imaginative sound organizers at work today." Born in Philadelphia, the fifty-year-old composer counts among his teachers Bernard Wagenaar, Vincent Persichetti, Peter Mennin and Tony Aubin. For fifteen years he was on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music. His numerous awards include two Guggenheim Grants, a Fulbright and, in 1972, the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his orchestral piece-Windows. His many works in a vast array of media have been heard throughout the world and frequently recorded. He is currently working on several projects, including a viola concerto for the New York Philharmonic. Mr. Druckman makes his home in New York City.