Ensemble X presents 'American Masters' April 10

The Ithaca-based new-music group Ensemble X closes its 2003-04 season with a concert titled "American Masters" Saturday, April 10, at 8 p.m. Held in Barnes Hall Auditorium, the program features music of John Harbison (Six American Painters and Gatsby Songs), visiting composer Shulamit Ran (Mirage and Soliloquy) and, in celebration of his 50th-birthday season, Cornell's Roberto Sierra (Bongo-0 and Tema y variaciones). Ran and Sierra will participate in a pre-concert discussion on stage from 7:15 to 7:45 p.m., moderated by Professor Steven Stucky.

Ran

Sierra

"The American masters we honor to close our season could hardly present greater contrasts," said Stucky. "The elder statesman of the group is John Harbison, who can fairly be said to have inherited Aaron Copland's mantle as dean of American composers. His brilliant opera The Great Gatsby, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1999, is written with an ingenious combination of musical languages, incorporating great batches of popular songs of the 1930s -- but all written by Harbison in the 1990s. After the completion of the stage work, the composer asked lyricist Murray Horwitz to put words to several instrumental numbers from the opera; these additional songs, together with the originals from the opera itself, now form the collection Gatsby Songs. Tin Pan Alley could hardly have done better."

Israeli-born Ran is a professor of composition at the University of Chicago. She has won many prestigious composers' awards, including election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1989) and the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for her First Symphony.

"Shulamit Ran's music is distinguished by its fierce passions and emotional honesty, qualities that helped her win the Pulitzer Prize in 1991," said Stucky. "Lately, audible reminders of her Middle Eastern origins are there, too. Mirage, already something of a modern-day classic, is a good example: music in which a pronounced "east wind" blows through a sonic landscape both impeccably modern and immediately engrossing."

Sierra is considered to be one of the leading American composers of his generation.

"Like Harbison and Ran, Cornell faculty member Roberto Sierra, the youngest of our masters, has a distinctive voice," said Stucky. "His Puerto Rican roots are clearly to be heard, of course, but so are the lessons of his teacher, Ligeti, and Sierra's own fascinations with virtuosity and instrumental color. Like Mirage (and, for that matter, like Harbison's Gatsby), Sierra's Bongo-0 has established itself in a few short years as a classic of its own kind. His Tema y variaciones for clarinet and piano shows another side of his musical persona, the modernist virtuoso, but still with the distinctive voice shaped by his background. What better way to mark Sierra's 50th birthday? If American music is in the hands of composers such as these, it's still got a bright future!"

Stucky continued: "Despite their differences, what links these three composers -- in addition to the sheer mastery of their work -- is the strong sense of place and time in their best music. In Sierra's case, this means the Caribbean; in Ran's, the Middle East. In Harbison's case, it means the quintessentially American stew of jazz, pop and historically centered classicism ranging freely across the centuries from the 1600s to today. This commitment to their roots, combined with fervent powers of imagination, guarantees compelling listening from all three composers."