​Sky Tinted Water Concert Notes

The premiere of Sky-Tinted Water by Marko Bajzer, an electroacoustic symphonic work that celebrates the 50th anniversary of Voyageurs National Park. Plus, the premiere of the Piano Concerto by Eric Ewazen featuring pianist Tammy Miller and Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 by Edvard Grieg.

Bajzer
Hear the music of the universe—from both near and far. Rochester native and composer, Marko Bajzer composed Sky-Tinted Water to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Voyageurs National Park. The title, “Sky-Tinted Water,” is a reference to the name ‘Minnesota,’ which is a Dakota expression. A more accurate translation is ‘where the water is so still it reflects the clouds in the sky.’ This electroacoustic, symphonic work includes Bajzer on the keyboard to create the sounds of the park: the rhythmic rowing of paddles; the plaintive howl of a distant wolf; the four distinct vocalizations (the wail, the yodel, the tremolo, and the hoot) of the loon; and the infuriating buzz of the mosquito. This music reflects the beauty of the natural landscape and cultural history of northern Minnesota.

From the composer:
At their conception the national parks were a uniquely American idea; in fact, they are often referred to as America’s BEST idea. They were the direct result of the lived experiences of Americans and the values they held. This piece is thus not only a celebration of nature in America but also of its values; it is an expression of patriotism that I think all Americans can agree with. 
Title
The title of the piece, “Sky-Tinted Water,” is a reference to the name ‘Minnesota,’ which is a Dakota expression. ‘Minnesota’ is often translated as ‘sky-tinted water,’ or ‘cloudy water,’ however the reality is more nuanced. The latter implies that the water is murky or turbid, and the former’s meaning is somewhat opaque. A more accurate translation is ‘where the water is so still it reflects the clouds in the sky.’ Thus it is not that the water is clouded with sediment, but rather that one can see the reflections of clouds in the water. At night, some can be so lucky as to see not the clouds, but the otherworldly curtains of light that make up the aurora being reflected in the water, creating a spectacular mirror effect that makes seeing the aurora in northern Minnesota a truly special experience. I intend the aurora to be central to the piece. 

Style
It is not lost to me that new music can be polarizing among classical music lovers, and that orchestras assume risk when programming new works, and especially when commissioning them. I create music because I want people’s lives to be more beautiful, meaningful, and fulfilling. I want my music to be moving in some way, and that isn’t possible if the music is written in a musical language that audiences do not understand. My ultimate goal is to write music that is both accessible and relatable, but also obviously a product of the 21st century. With this piece specifically, my musically philosophical goals are not unlike early 20th century Impressionists, conveying moods and emotions of the subject rather than literal interpretations, however I have the added benefit of an additional century’s worth of harmonic language from which to draw. Additionally, with my experience as an orchestral bassoonist and a music teacher who had to learn to play all orchestral instruments to some degree, I place a high value and give much thought to writing idiomatic parts that musicians enjoy playing, and which enable them to sound their best. 

Electronics
Taking after my mentor, Mason Bates, who has pioneered electro-acoustic orchestral music, the piece will also have an electronic component. There are only certain parks that I’m interested in for this project, and they are ones that have unique soundscapes. During my residencies I record sounds from the park and then assign them to a key on my keyboard, with which I then ‘play along’ with the orchestra. For my piece about Lassen Volcanic National Park for example, this included bubbling mudpots, hissing fumaroles, devastating landslides, and explosive eruptions. For Voyageurs this would include the sound of the rhythmic rowing of paddles; the plaintive howl of a distant wolf; the four distinct vocalizations (the wail, the yodel, the tremolo, and the hoot) of our state bird, the common loon; and the infuriating buzz of Minnesota’s other state bird, the mosquito. This would be integrated with the orchestra as an additional family of instruments, infusing the park into the concert hall, and expanding the orchestra’s timbrel palette.
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Ewazen 
Eric Ewazen was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1954. His composition teachers at the Eastman and Juilliard Schools and at Tanglewood have included Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, Gunther Schuller, and Joseph Schwantner. He has had works performed by the American Brass Quintet, the Greenwich (Connecticut) Symphony, and the Borealis Quintet (many of them commissions) at the Aspen, Tanglewood, Tidewater, and Caramoor festivals and elsewhere. He has taught at the Hebrew Arts School and the Lincoln Center Institute. Ewazen is on the faculty of The Juilliard School and has been a lecturer for the New York Philharmonic Musical Encounters Program since 1992. He has been composer-in-residence with the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble and the International Horn Society.
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Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Opus 46
Edvard Grieg stands as the most essential composer in the history of Norwegian music, a distinction he clinched during his lifetime and one that endures in posterity. When he was growing up, his native country could offer a composer only limited opportunities for advanced study, so he left Norway in 1858 to enroll at the Leipzig Conservatory, a destination for many international music students of the time and a sturdy source of traditional study in musical fundamentals and composition. Although Grieg would later speak of the Leipzig Conservatory in unflattering terms, the four years he spent there were undeniably important to his development, thanks to his work with such eminent teachers as Ignaz Moscheles for piano and Carl Reinecke for composition.

Following his conservatory studies Grieg spent a period in Copenhagen, which was enjoying the most cosmopolitan musical life of any city in Scandinavia at the time. There he developed a friendship with Rikard Nordraak, a compatriot who was spearheading a nationalistic movement among artists in Norway. Immediately following Nordraak’s early death, in 1866, Grieg returned to his native land, which would be his home from that point on.

​Norway’s most significant literary figure during that time was Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), although his countrymen were slow to recognize that fact. Unlike Grieg, he enjoyed a strictly Norwegian upbringing. During his early years as a writer, Ibsen scraped by with the slight income he derived from work as a playwright, director, and administrator at theaters in Bergen and Christiania (later renamed Oslo). Success eluded him, and he grew so disenchanted that in 1864 he left for Italy, where he mostly remained in self-imposed exile for 27 years. While on the continent he penned a succession of admired plays: Brand, Peer Gynt (in 1867), A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler.

When Ibsen began sending parts of the Peer Gynt manuscript to his publisher, he explained the work’s starting point:

“Peer Gynt was a real person who lived in the Gudbrandsal, probably around the end of the last century or the beginning of this one. ... Not much more is known about his doings than you can find in Asbjørnsen’s Norwegian Fairy Tales.... So I haven’t had much on which to base my poem, but it has meant that I have had all the more freedom with which to work on it.”

Left to his own devices, Ibsen came up with a meandering tale about an anti-hero (as described by Rolf Fjelde, who translated the play into English) “with no ruling passion, no calling, no commitment, the eternal opportunist, the charming, gifted, self-centered child who turns out finally to have neither center nor self.” In the course of 40 scenes, the title character has a variety of adventures and travels as far as North Africa before arriving back in Norway for a hallucinatory finale in which he is faced with the strands of his life that have gone awry and probably ends up dying, although we can’t be sure.

The verse-play met with reasonable success when published, but it was not staged until 1876, in Christiania, with accompanying music by Grieg. Neither the playwright nor the composer was in attendance for the occasion. Ibsen had written from Italy to ask Grieg to provide incidental music for that production, and the composer had accepted, misjudging the amount of music that would be required. While enmeshed in the project in 1874, he wrote to a friend:

“Peer Gynt goes very slowly. It is a horribly intractable subject except for a few places ... And I have something for the hall of the trollking that I literally can’t bear to listen to, it reeks so of cowpads and super-Norwegianism.”

​In the end, however, he provided 26 separate items for the play (a few having been added for revivals), totaling about 90 minutes of music.

Grieg extracted two concert suites from his Peer Gynt music, the first being published in 1888, the second in 1893. The First Suite is far the more famous, and for many decades it was a staple of music education curricula for the young. Most people probably assume that its opening movement, “Morning Mood,” depicts the sunlight of dawn playing among the fjords, but in the play (it falls in Act IV) it accompanies a sunrise in the North African desert. “Åse’s Death” (from Act III) involves the death of Peer’s mother, whom he treated ungratefully but whose passing he mourns deeply. “Anitra’s Dance” falls shortly after “Morning Mood” in Act IV of the play, where it serves as a seductive waltz for a dancing girl in the tent of an Arab chief. “The Hall of the Mountain King” takes us back to Act II, where Peer matches wits with a menacing troll king, although for some listeners it may summon up images of an obsessed Peter Lorre in the 1931 Fritz Lang film M.