Members’ Concert / Aaron Larget-Caplan
Program
My Darling’s Slumber (2008) by Francine Trester
Mi Tango (2008/2010) by Hayg Boyadjian
Tracing a wheel on water (2003) by Kevin Siegfried
Aaron Larget-Caplan, guitar
Francine Trester is Associate Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music. Trester received her BA, MA and DMA from Yale University and later was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study composition in Cambridge, England. She has been the recipient of an ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award as well as awards from the Fromm Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her works have been premiered at several venues worldwide including Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, recorded on Albany and Crystal Records, and published by Clear Note Publications. Commissions include works written for the Providence Mandolin Orchestra, guitar duo Mark and Beverly Davis, John Holt and mezzo-soprano Sophie Creech, the Wheeler School Handbell Choir, and the Merrimack Valley Philharmonic Orchestra. Most recently, her compositions have been featured as part of an installation at the Arnot Art Museum and performed by the Shasta Symphony Orchestra.
The melody to “My Darling’s Slumber” is loosely derived from an inversion of the melody to Stephen Foster’s folk lullaby, “Slumber My Darling.” That is the reasoning behind the inverted title as well.
The Foster melody is one that I grew up with and have always found comforting and beautiful. It was the first material that came to mind when Aaron approached me about his New Lullaby Project. As a Professor of Counterpoint, I’m often teaching inversion and other forms of motivic manipulation. So, under that influence, I began to wonder what possibilities inverting the Foster might bring…
The meter and harmony of my lullaby is independent of the Foster, and much of the melodic material is unrelated to the inversion as well. So perhaps the derivation is only somewhat relevant to the listener. But for me, the Foster provided a starting point, a comforting place of return and reimagining. – Francine Trester • www.FrancineTrester.com
Hayg Boyadjian was born in 1938 in Paris, France. At an early age he immigrated with his family to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he started his musical studies at the Liszt Conservatory. In 1958 he immigrated to the USA, and presently lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. In the USA he continued his musical studies as a special student first at the New England Conservatory and later at Brandeis University. Among his teachers were Beatriz Balzi (student of Alberto Ginastera, with whom Boyadjian had several consulting meetings), Seymour Shifrin, Alvin Lucier, and Edward Cohen.
He has composed a large number of works from chamber to symphonic. Many of his compositions have been performed throughout the world: USA, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Korea, Russia, France, Holland, England, Spain, Armenia and others.
A number of his scores are available through the American Music Center, New York and on the internet through Sibelius Music. Some of his chamber and symphonic compositions are recorded on the following CD labels: Living Music; Society of Composers Recordings; North/South Consonance Recordings; and Opus One Recordings. He is a member of the Composers’ Union of Armenia, ASCAP, Society of Composers, the MacDowell Colony, and others. His name is found in the Who’s Who in American Music, the International Who’s Who in Music. He has received awards from ASCAP, Meet the Composer, the Lexington Arts Council-MA, the New England Foundation-Meet the Composer, the Fiftieth Anniversary Commission Project-American Music Center, a Grammy nomination, and others. A number of his writings on music and a number of his poems have been published in various publications.
Mi Tango is written in memory of the famous creator of the new modern tango, Astor Piazzola. It was written for Robert Sullivan, former chairman of the guitar department of the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts. The music has the essential elements of the tango: its unique rhythmic structure of syncopation within a 2/4 basic rhythm. To give this tango my own distinctive imprint, I introduce some changes, such as displacing the expected accents and using different meters besides the usual 2/4. This tango would be very difficult to dance to! However, the composition retains the general aspect and feel of the tango because of its elemental rhythmic pulse. Mi Tango was recorded by Aaron Larget-Caplan for Vientos – Music of Hayg Boyadjian, and released on the Albany Records Label in October 2010.
Hailed by the British magazine Choir & Organ as writing music of “austere beauty” that exhibits the “pressure and presence of personal conviction,” Kevin Siegfried is a composer with an emerging international voice. His music is published by E. C. Schirmer, Earthsongs, and Trinitas and has been performed and recorded by leading ensembles including The Dale Warland Singers, The Tudor Choir, and Conspirare. Aaron Larget-Caplan recorded his first solo guitar work, Tracing a wheel on water, in 2006. Since 2004, he has been a faculty member at The Boston Conservatory. He currently resides in Dover, NH with his family. For more information, go to www.kevinsiegfried.com
Tracing a Wheel on Water was written in 2003, shortly after moving from Boston to the southern coast of Maine. My family and I were fortunate to rent a house directly situated on a tidal inlet, and it was only a matter of time before the cycle of tides and the play of light and water began to shape our lives. My first composition for solo guitar, Tracing is a meditation on my experience of the water’s surface. In particular, it reflects the interplay of stasis and movement, and the manner in which flowing circles on the water’s surface envelop one another in a rhythm that is always new, yet never changing. It received its premiere at Boston Conservatory in 2005 and its commercial release in 2006, both by Aaron Larget-Caplan, and has had over 60 performances across the US and in Italy since its premiere.
