ONE: chamber music of Kurt Rohde
Concertino for violin and small ensemble (2010)	20:40
1	moto 	07:57
2	sotto 	08:45
3	rotto 	03:58
Axel Strauss (violin), Matilda Hofman (conductor), Left Coast Chamber Ensemble

ONE for speaking pianist on poems of Jakob Stein (2009)	22:07
PART I
4	One	  02:49
5	Such history	00:58
6	War now	 01:47
7	Here I stand	 01:23
8	Stones blossom	01:36 
9	Commanded to joy	01:05

PART II
10	Held in your hands	 00:56
11	Down the throat of the desert	00:46
12	The cave-mouth opens	  01:03
13	Or the cave-mouth speaks	 01:01
14	The walled kehillah	00:54
15	Ownless	01:59

PART III
16	Two stones ground to dust	01:26
17	Dust culled from deathÕs west		02:22
18	Thru the two doors	02:02
Genevieve Lee (piano/speaker)

Double Trouble for two violas and small ensemble (2001/2003)	16:47
19	Obsessive Compulsive 	04:55
20	Double 	06:46
21	Spazoid	05:06
Ellen Ruth Rose and Kurt Rohde (violas), Mary Chun (conductor), Empyrean Ensemble

Four Remixes for piano trio (2011)	16:44
22	Slowest Night	05:59
23	After 59pm	03:30
24	Looped Trip	04:16
25	Maxed Out	02:59
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble - Anna Presler (violin), Tanya Tomkins (cello), Eric Zivian (piano)


Left Coast Chamber Ensemble: Stacey Pelinka (flute/piccolo), Jeff Anderle (clarinet/bass clarinet), Eric Zivian (piano), Anna Presler (violin), Kurt Rohde (viola), Leighton Fong & Tanya Tomkins (cello), Michel Taddei (double bass), Loren Mach (percussion)

Empyrean Ensemble: Tod Brody (flute/piccolo), Peter Josheff (clarinet/bass clarinet), Karen Rosenak (piano), Terrie Baune (violin), Thalia Moore (cello)


All of the Nothing One Sees	
David Humphrey 

Once in a While 
Eric Bianchi
		

When Kurt Rohde trained as a composer, the tradition of contemporary music had dilated into a state of extreme pluralism: Serialists, minimalists, neo-romantics, John Cage-inspired rockers, multi-culturalists, third streamers and self-taught hybridizers were making and recording contemporary music being taken seriously by critics and audiences. Popular music was established as part of the habitat of growing up in the USA. While many artists labored to establish a relation to that context, Rohde found a space for himself within this disorientingly open-ended field. But what is the space he has so emphatically inhabited? Rohde neither adapts traditional forms as though they are timeless nor pretends that tradition doesnÕt exist. Rather, he engages innovation and tradition for their unstable capacity to purvey vitality, to create force-fields of memory and feeling in which thought-rhythms and musical narrative can tell us what it feels like to be a person today. 

CONCERTINO FOR VIOLIN AND SMALL ENSEMBLE
The Concertino is a tour de force of virtuosic display and storm-tossed lyricism. From the ramping up of its call-and-response beginning, to the angled turns and intensifying exhortations of the last movement Rohde develops a piece with the range and scope associated with an epic novel. The first movement spans an event-packed musical narrative with abrupt conclusions and false endings that turn into restless beginnings, until a final high-speed musical chase. The second movement begins as aftermath. The pulling restraint against an ache to go forward unfolds, interrupted by flashes of possible release, until a final lament hesitantly establishes itself. The athletic third movement lunges from the start as a light-footed run, flaunting unpredictable fleetness and excited agility throughout. Form struggles against the inchoate while the pulse of the violinÕs challenged vitality finally emerges triumphant. 
The Concertino shows off RohdeÕs subversive mastery of the Classical repertoire. The work is loosely fashioned after the Baroque concerto grosso, in which a small group of soloists alternate with a full ensemble. Although all the instruments become virtuosos in Concertino, solo passages and sequential writing recall the tropes of Baroque music. moto (ÒmotionÓ) also recalls Brahms in the intensity of the thematic working-out and in the large-scale implications of local harmonic events. The opening gestures set up the central conflict: the violin soloist arpeggiates a simple perfect fourth (AÐD), but the music quickly sags as the ensemble pulls it down a half-step (G#ÐC#). The soloist struggles against the ensemble with increasing rhetorical force and the courtly dialogue of the concerto grosso takes on a ferocious antagonism. The movement achieves closure on D, and there are even moments of pure D major sonority (with the violinist singing a bright F# high above the ensemble). Despite RohdeÕs characteristic tonal clarity, the old harmonic language has been shattered and reconstituted: Any sense of ÒkeyÓ is at once hollowed out, modally enriched, and chromatically compromised.

sotto (ÒunderÓ) takes its cue from the Adagio of BachÕs C major solo violin Sonata. Rohde begins by expanding a middle C into a major second and pursues these expansions throughout the movement, lingering in the sensuous quality of individual intervals.

rotto (ÒbrokenÓ), one of RohdeÕs great perpetual motion machines, bears a sonic and strategic resemblance to ShostakovichÕs String Quartet no. 8. Singular events like a sudden ensemble blast of C-major fracture the forward dash. As the violin races to a breathless conclusion, BachÕs E major solo violin Partita gradually emerges and, for an instant, snaps into focus. Here Rohde one-ups the master of fugue and turns the solo melody into a brief moment of imitative counterpoint. That soon devolves into a phrase that the violinist is directed to repeat Òalmost too many times.Ó The piece pushes again toward closure, but instead slams to a violent stop on the destabilizing interval (C#ÐG#) that set the music tumbling along at the outset of the first movement. Concertino is strewn with recognizable relics of the past, with masterworks mislaid and misused; RohdeÕs voice emerges through the cracks and fissures of his carefully engineered breakages.

ONE FOR SPEAKING PIANIST ON TEXTS OF JAKOB STEIN
The ÒONE,Ó constituting the title of this album, is a singularity that subdivides, multiplies and agglomerates; wholes come apart in the turbulent flow of music as roiling clouds of heterogeneous material coalesce into clear emphatic statements before breaking apart again. ONE has three distinct roles for the performer; singer, pianist and percussionist of the pianoÕs interior. The piece uses RohdeÕs selection of short poems by Jakob Stein in which the piano variously accompanies or challenges the intimately scaled, sometimes urgent voice. Oracular utterances, relating to a depleted time after the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, swell from ever-evolving harmonic or rhythmic contexts. ÒI,Ó ÒyouÓ and ÒweÓ shift and break apart along with the unfolding motifs and shifting moods. ÒThe rope of our wailing binds themÓ are SteinÕs words intoned by the speaker to conjure power for the vanquished, but also to speak about the power of music. Body images in the text transform into details of the landscape (cave as mouth) while the speakerÕs breath becomes musically associated with the interior of the piano. The image of dust is invoked in a way that could describe the mutability of RohdeÕs music. Dust is Òwind-sownÓ Ð it settles into mortar, drifts into eyes as motes and somehow retains the memory of its past as stone, and, as the text more metaphysically suggests, as light.

ONE exploits tensions between unity and plurality, contradiction and cohesion without fully resolving them: Rohde manipulates the sonic capabilities of piano and pianist, and fuses ensemble, musician and poet into a single soloist. As in Concertino, the music gradually emerges from a lone middle C, and the text accumulates haltingly from the syllable one; the opening poem is as much a point of arrival as a point of departure. The final section reverses (or completes) a thematic arch. ÒTwo stones ground to dust.... one stone & the one/stone within itÓ: two distinct harmonic fields rub uneasily against each other, then blur and coalesce into the unitary gesture from the workÕs opening moments.  

DOUBLE TROUBLE FOR TWO VIOLAS AND SMALL ENSEMBLE
The notion of ÒONEÓ is differently vexed in Double Trouble by using the two solo violas as a complicated, mirrored, singularity. Rohde is a violist, so it makes sense to see the piece as a story of a braided self-raveling and unraveling in a variety of contexts. Wholeness is occasionally obtained while a drama between self and other (violas and ensemble) tumbles through an order crafted by Rohde to include its own capacity for collapse. The ensemble oscillates between cooperative action and solo imperatives developed by the individual instruments. Musical thoughts are sometimes relayed like a racerÕs baton from one player to the other, but often a flute, clarinet or string will independently rise up to claim center stage. At other times the instruments gather into a brooding huddle before collectively springing forward in a rush. Rohde is a genius of the anticipatory mood; harmonic and rhythmic tensions build a sense of the impending as expectation is stoked with ingenious subtlety and exquisite cruelty. 

The first movement is Obsessive Compulsive in its pounding rhythm, frantic detail, and especially in chewing over and spinning out a motif developed from a descending half-step. The opening bars feature itÑsimultaneouslyÑin the mad contrapuntal play between violas and flute, in the pianoÕs hammered tone clusters, and in the violinÕs harmonics. Later, it is cloaked in the ghostly harmoniesÑconsonant but disjunctÑthat flit through the texture, and is set loose to a maniacal walking bass that propels the movement to an abrupt stop.

With a deft change of pronunciation, Double provides the conceit of the second movement, a variation loosely based on the Baroque double. The thematic material again emerges from the violasÕ conversation, a conversation punctuated by memories of the first movementÕs ghostly sonorities. The rich harmonies of the violasÕ final lyrical duet, however, are interrupted by bare open fifths Òas if a premonition.Ó

In Spazoid, melodic development takes a backseat to rhythmic urgency and sheer virtuosity. The perfect fifths that interrupted the slow movement, now fitted to an insistent syncopated rhythm, provide a recurring signpost in the spastic rush of music. They also lie at the heart of the movementÕs central solo episode, a space of sonorous play and lyricism that takes advantage of the technique of double-stopping and the violaÕs capacity for dark, full-bodied tones. In the final moments, the headlong rush is arrested when the strings suddenly return to a compressed exploration (marked ÒBrutal!!Ó) of the half-step with which Double Trouble opened; the violas enact a final doppelgŠnger reaching out a half-step on either side of a shared pitch.

FOUR REMIXES FOR PIANO TRIO
The radio in RohdeÕs family car and Mom and DadÕs records helped him not only to imagine ÒI can do that!Ó but also ÒI can show how IÕm different from all that!Ó RohdeÕs Four Remixes are variations after the pop music of his youth: The B52s, The Beatles, Elton John and Joni Mitchell. His treatments convert the simple harmonic source material into music of emotive seriousness and Ivesian grandeur. The Remixes seem to climb into a space of memory and loss to find something meaningful and abiding on new terms.

In fact, Rohde stages an act of memory, forcing listeners to hear unsung and half-remembered words against the grain of his untexted remixes. Although the original tunes are cast in verse-chorus format, Rohde seizes on the latent potential in the lyricsÑmeditative, dissonant, discontentedÑand allows it to spill across his music with disruptive force.

Joni MitchellÕs Night Ride Home is a gentle tribute to the America of deep Fourth-of-July nights. Slowest Night inhabits a nocturnal vision Òlike some surrealist invented.Ó MitchellÕs melody is barely recognizable, transformed from a tune into a dream, distended fragments set into a languid harmonic haze. The phrase Òonce in a whileÓ surfaces repeatedly in an atmosphere of nostalgia and desire. The music evaporates rather than ends, as MitchellÕs ÒI love the man beside meÓ fuses into a fragment of GershwinÕs The Man I Love.

The B-52sÕ Funplex takes up another icon of Americana: the mall. At first After 59pm sounds like a fairly straight remix with power chords, distortion, and a metal chain on the piano strings for the ÒelectricÓ effect: Rohde bops along with the B-52sÕ kitsch-laden tune to a steady dance beat. But everything comes unhitched at the line ÒO Honey, was it all about the money?Ó As the lyrics probe the darker side of consumer capitalism, the music struggles to get back on track, and the movement achieves tonal closure having lost its teenage exuberance.

Looped Trip preserves the original key and memorable melodies of Elton JohnÕs Rocket Man. JohnÕs upper-atmosphere escapes into falsetto (Òhigh,Ó Òrocket manÓ) launch Rohde onto distortions spanning three octaves. The remix loops the original melodies into dense out-of-phase counterpoint. Unhitched from the straight-ahead pop-song drive, JohnÕs tune achieves a kind of floating stasis: a meditation on deep-space weightlessness and middle-class melancholy.

Lennon and McCartneyÕs ballad of serial murder, MaxwellÕs Silver Hammer, recounts gruesome deeds to a sweet and predictable ragtime soft-shoe. But the unbalanced energy of Maxed Out overwhelms the neat succession of verse and chorus. Rohde deforms and deletes lines and stanzas, and sets the syncopated tune lurching awkwardly against the triple meter. When the chorus finally appears, the music briefly swings into a regular 4/4, only to be derailed by murderous obsession (ÒMaxwellÕs silver hammer made SURE, made sure that she was DEADÓ). The memory of the winsome original makes Maxed Out even more lurid and grotesque; when Rohde remixes, he rereads and reimagines.
      Eric Bianchi
      
Is the training of a contemporary composer/performer at all like the training to be a studio artist? Many art school freshman begin with a dedicated study of the techniques of late nineteenth century French painting in order to discard them and grow into the anti-traditions of modern art and the avant-garde. Learning to be a radical artist seems like the opposite of mastering an instrument (in order to play someone elseÕs music no matter how great), but perhaps the sense of being part of a highly specialized and disciplined discourse that is both outside and, perversely, an important part of the culture is metabolically similar. IÕm reminded of Theodor AdornoÕs statement, appealing and perplexing to a young artist, ÒEvery work of art is an uncommitted crime.Ó

Rohde might be a traditional innovator, but he is surely writing new music for concert halls that obtains a stirring and synthetic grandeur.
      David Humphrey

BIOS

Kurt Rohde is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize, and commission awards from the NEA, Meet the Composer, the Barlow, Fromm, Hanson, and Koussevitzky Foundations. He is Professor of Music Composition at UC Davis, is a founding member and former Artistic Director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and is a member of the New Century Chamber Orchestra.

A versatile performer of music spanning five centuries, Genevieve Feiwen Lee (Everett S. Olive Professor of Music at Pomona College), has dazzled audiences on the piano, harpsichord, toy piano, keyboard, and electronics. In solo and ensemble work, she has performed throughout the U.S., and China, Europe, and South America; she can also be heard on Albany Records.

Violinist Axel Strauss, winner of the 1998 Naumburg Award, has served as Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has recently been appointed Professor of Violin at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal. He has also served as guest concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Montreal Symphony and maintains a busy performance and recording schedule. 

Ellen Ruth Rose has been a champion of contemporary music in the US and abroad for 20 years.ÊA former member of Germany's MusikFabrik, she is currently violist of Empyrean Ensemble, in residence at UC Davis, Ecoensemble, in residence at UC Berkeley, and Earplay, the San Francisco-based ensemble, where she continues to premiere countless works.

Jakob Stein studied Talmud at Yeshivas Bircas HaTorah in JerusalemÕs Old City. The poems used here are from a five-volume series entitled Ein Sof (Endless) one of the many names of God.

Matilda Hofman works regularly with Empyrean Ensemble and is Music Director of the Diablo Symphony Orchestra. She has conducted at the Salzburg Festival, Berliner Festspiele, Kammerakadamie Potsdam and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra among others.

Mary Chun has worked with many composers such as Luc Ferrari, John Adams, Joan Tower, Libby Larsen and Tan Dun, to help shape the new classical chamber music repertoire of the 21st century. She is Principal Conductor of the Earplay new music ensemble and Music Director/Conductor for the Cinnabar Opera Theater.

Eric Bianchi is a musicologist who specializes in the Renaissance and Baroque. He is a member of the Department of Art History and Music at Fordham University and, in 2008-2009, he was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

David Humphrey is a New York artist who is represented by the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, NY. He is a senior critic at the Yale School of Art. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was published by Periscope Publishing and is distributed by Prestel.

For over twenty years, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble has communicated with audiences through inspiring performances of new and old chamber music. By embracing both musics, we enrich the audienceÕs experience Ñ we reawaken a feeling of immediacy in performances of familiar masterpieces and we reveal the powerful expressive intentions in the music of our time. 

New music ensemble-in-residence at UC Davis, the Empyrean Ensemble is dedicated to performing the music of our time, has premiered approximately 200 works and has performed throughout California,Êincluding appearances at many prominent music festivals and concert series. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jack Vad: producer 
Dann Thompson: engineer 
Jeanette Yu: CD design and photos
Innova Director: Philip Blackburn
Operations Manager: Chris Campbell
Many thanks to Leslie Ann Jones at Skywalker Sound, and Philip Blackburn and Chris Campbell at Innova Recordings for their tremendous flexibility and accommodating nature throughout this project. Innova is supported by an endowment from the McKnight Foundation.

This recording was made possible with support from:
The American Academy in Rome
The American Music CenterÕs CAP Recording Program, made possible by endowment funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and with funds from The Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University
Innova Recordings
University of California at Davis Publication Assistance Fund

Special thanks to all my dear friends in the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and the Empyrean Ensemble; to my colleagues and good friends at UC Davis for being so supportive; to Matilda Hofman, Mary Chun, Ellen Ruth Rose, Anna Presler, Tanya Tomkins, Eric Zivian and Axel Strauss for their incredible musicianship and indispensible insights; to my very special, and dare I say, my ÒoldestÓ friend Genevieve Lee who has been a true ally since we met long ago when we were 16; to Jakob Stein for his gorgeous, inspired poems that are ever revelatory; to the ever wonderful David Humphrey and Eric Bianchi for writing the splendid notes for this recording; to Jack Vad for being the very best at what he does while still being a tremendous person; to Jeanette Yu for her glorious design and imagination; individual thanks to Jennifer Coates, HŽrica Valladares, Gregory Tentler, Sam Nichols, Laurie San Martin, and Yu-Hui Chang: to Andrew Imbrie, who inspired me to begin composing again long after I had quit; and above all to my partner Tim Allen whose love and belief in what I do means more than I can express.






TEXTS

One grain of sand on my tongue

all the feasts of Edom

---

Such history, ungone

their founder went under
to after-warÕs after realm

articulate shadows, Daphnis
Tityrus Meliboeus

bloodless in Erebus

a whole crowd came streaming
but she

turned away

O three times he tried to embrace
his father

three times his arms slipped thru

---

War now & every war
ends in more war

bloody Edom, Bellum
Judaicum

Rome monumental
sent seven hills against one
stunted mountain

cast in their eyes as
destroyers of shrines


blood-milkers of children
& thieves of all value

now even in our eyes our
violent error

in what other order is this
chaos order

show us, & end

---

Here I stand on one foot

on a pillar of dust
facing the wind

casting no shadow
on a plane of shadows

at the X of two errors

one road to Edom the other road
back to Edom

---

Stones blossom

slow blooming of stone in stone-rain
throughout the sand garden

of all our long wandering

after such error even
the desert a river of riches

all one can imagine

until the black plume
the bottomless chasm

the blazing gate

---

Commanded to joy

such discipline escapes me

what joy in Edom where all joy

is monstrous all laughter hollow

---

Held in Your hands I make them
what holds

I am the hollow that shapes them

---

Down the throat of the desert
that ladder descends

only one rung of it visible

nor can this stump of a man reach up

so croaks instead every tale of ascent
but one

---

The cave-mouth opens, the urns turn East
& beckon

a lost boy

so too this Qumran calls

so too soulÕs Qumran calls
to no answer

turns toward the hidden

& the cave mouth is sealed

---

Or the cave-mouth speaks

from the pocked cliffs, the forty
year fest

is ended, the gates

of the Wars of the Lord burst open

dark camps of the kittim
who pass unseen among us, thru us

as us

now the first horn, the rope
of our wailing binds them

the feast of moshiach begins

---

The walled kehillah, the caves
where the little light left

is held fast for millennia

held captive & held against
all other light

beckon

---

Ownless

stripped so far even
nightless, fogless

even lossless

---

Two stones ground to dust

wind-sown to all the earthÕs edges
& mixed with all other dust

mortared with straw in the cracks

dust of this dust

mote lodged in the eye, all or
the nothing one sees

heat-pressed by heart
to this alter

---

Dust culled from deathÕs west, from all
the dark corners

ingather, mold

not crystal but coal
not glass-flower: furnace
& press

to heat-seed

after-ember, gem memory
of light

buried sun

one stone & the one
stone within it

---

Thru the two doors

thru paroches & the sealed gate

all thru to the sealed ear

how sing You in Edom
how sing

what song I am given

povertyÕs song

one true song of Edom


poems selected from Endless by Jakob Stein