Program:
I. california
II. caiaphas
III. charlie
IV. cranes

Scoring: viola sola and tape playback

Duration: 13 minutes

Text: Federico Garcia Lorca

Premiere:
7 November 2000
Kulas Recital Hall
Glenda Goodman - viola

Program Notes: 
  California is a very beautiful city.
  Or at least it exists as such in García Lorca’s 1928 prose meditations, La muerte de la madre de Charlot.  The dark and beautiful surrealist world of the piece serves as an extended metaphor for Lorca’s ambivalent relationship with the United States and defines his grasp of the range of joy and evil contained within the national borders.  
  Lorca’s work holds a privileged place with contemporary composers, and even the briefest amount of time with the texts can explain why this is so: even without the benefit of the original Spanish, Lorca’s writing sings.  This is no small thing; the lack of internal melodic structure is a quality that even the best of poets and librettists frequently don’t posses.  It is not coincidental that García Lorca studied music up through his university years; the cadences and rhythmic structure, particularly in the poetry, betray this early training.  In addition, folk music has had a continuous and pervasive influence on García Lorca’s work: the Andulusian cante jondo (‘deep song’) in particular plays a significant role in much of his poetry and is most evident in the 1928 Primer romancero gitano (First Book of Gypsy Ballads). La muerte de la madre de Charlot, though unpublished for sixty-one years after the poet’s death, was composed in the period between the Primer romancero and Lorca’s first visit to the US. 
  california plays on the juxtaposition of the mechanical and the sublime in the same manner as its text.  The piece is in a duet for viola and tape, in the sense that the tape and the viola are each autonomous entities with equally significant roles.  In no way does the tape accompany the viola or vice versa, although the extent of each role varies from movement to movement.    Throughout, the viola acts out the human side of the narrative while the tape progresses as a static, unalterable series of events that play out in time and space.  Formally, california is reminiscent of the composer’s Massachusetts Music for cello and tape (1999) while the theatrical effect of fully enacting a micro-drama within the limited space of a piece recalls Calianno’s 1997 Marxist Gramophones.  Above all, the piece contains the driving, pulsating energy that characterizes Calianno’s electric cello concerto, Fuel.  The inherent theatrical sense of Lorca’s work makes it particularly effective in Calianno’s music, which in many ways possess the same sense of internal drama.

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