2024 Program Guide | Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music

40 material band many of these are used in the concerto. These initial sketches actually became the basis for the piece’s central section and everything else sprung from this. In one continuous movement, the piece falls into three main sections but features extensive dreamlike interlinking passages that connect them. —Helen Grime Tread softly (2022) Nina Young (b. 1984) [West Coast Premiere] Had I heaven’s embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light; I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. The Cloths of Heaven , by W.B. Yeats 100 years after the 19th Amendment was ratified, it still seems radical that I can have a voice, that women can be heard, and taken seriously as equal weavers of the tapestry of American culture. Ideas fly rapidly through my head and paint a dreamscape that, despite all language of equality, always risks being thwarted too soon, edited, erased.  We protect ourselves, or we acquiesce, and our pedestal becomes a cage.   In 2020, the New York Philharmonic introduced Project 19—amulti-season initiative to commission and premiere 19 new works by 19 women composers—the largest women- only commissioning initiative in history. And so I ask you, as we spread our sounds into your minds, tread softly, because you tread on our dreams. —Nina Young Al Hakawati (The Storyteller, 2024) Karim Al-Zand (b. 1970) [World Premiere | Festival Co- commission] Co-commissioned by Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music with the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne with generous support from Russ Irwin. Al Hakawati  (The Storyteller) presents fragments from an opera-in-progress entitled The Book of Tales. The opera is inspired by a recent discovery about one of the most beloved story collections, the so-called “Arabian Nights.” The exact provenance of these medieval Arabic tales, properly known as 'Alf Laylah wa-Laylah (One Thousand and One Nights), has PARADE: PROGRAM NOTES CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC always been something of a mystery. That all changed when a forgotten 18th-century Arabic manuscript was found in the Vatican Library in 1993. It was a travel memoir written by a 75-year-old Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab. In 1707, the young Diyab had embarked on an extraordinary, years-long journey to Europe. His incredible adventures culminated in a meeting with the Sun King, King Louis XIV, in the halls of Versailles. Diyab told his entrancing stories to everyone he met in his travels, including to Antoine Galland, a translator and archaeologist in Paris. It was Galland who, in 1710, first introduced Western readers to the stories of Ali Baba and Aladdin in Les Mille et une Nuits —though Galland makes no mention of the storyteller. Diyab returned to Syria in 1709 and eventually became a successful cloth merchant in Aleppo. He seems to have had no idea how far his captivating stories had traveled. The opera connects stories and storytellers across time and place: from the present day, to the Ancien Régime of France, to the imaginary world of Scheherazade. The fragments in Al Hakawati comprise four “scenes” that feature the opera’s three principal female characters. I. I shiver, I tremble The famed storyteller Scheherazade contemplates her precarious circumstances: each night, she tells stories to the murderous Shahryar to postpone her execution. II. He sleeps, this one Shahryar is finally asleep. Consumed with fury, Scheherazade prepares to set his bed alight. III. Dance of the seven swords (orchestra) Murjana dances for her husband, Ali Baba, and a visiting merchant. She alone has discerned their guest’s true intent: he plans to kill her witless husband, who has foolishly stolen treasure from a band of thieves. At the dance’s climax she dispatches the villain.  !V. For all I know TarinaSafar*, a modernday scholar of medieval Arabic, has discovered Hanna Diyab’s manuscript in the Vatican Library. She marvels at the power of stories and of storytellers.  [*Safar’s character is fictional, but she is inspired by the American scholar of Islam, Nabia Abbott (1897–1981), the first female professor at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Abbott discovered some of the earliest known fragments from the Thousand and One Nights .] —Karim Al-Zand Parade (2023) Vivian Fung (b. 1975) [West Coast Premiere] Parade  is a celebration of community, but also explores the journey from solitude to togetherness. Like so many others, I was feeling quite isolated from human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I had the opportunity in 2022 to attend the San Francisco Lunar New Year parade as my then 6-year-old son was marching as part of a group of students representing his school in the parade. I was deeply moved by the festivities as masses of people came together to celebrate the occasion, and I wanted to express conflicting feelings of chaos and melancholy, at the same time as empathy and gratitude, in this new orchestral work.   The work starts softly in a dream-like state and slowly quotes the first line from a Hildegard von Bingen chant, O Ignee Spiritus (O Fiery Spirit, Praise to You). Just as the dream-like state reaches a climax, the parade begins and has an Ives-ian chaos to it, as different groups enter, playing the same music but out of time with one another (the tune alludes to a Chinese military song). The scene transitions to a more raucous, dance-inspired affair. As the dance disappears, the dream-like state returns, interspersed with fragments of previous melodies, and then builds to a triumphant climax, bringing the work to a roaring and euphoric close. —Vivian Fung Violin Concerto (2016) Helen Grime (b. 1981) [West Coast Premiere] Leila Josefowicz, violin My Violin Concerto came about after several collaborations with Malin Broman and many years of gestation. We first worked together with Malin’s piano trio (Kungsbacka Trio), but I also had a chance to work with the orchestra conducted by Daniel Harding, with Malin leading in 2010. I was immediately struck by the ferocity, power, and passion in her playing. She is equally at home playing with a sort of wild abandon but also with great tenderness, sensitivity, and many different colors. I knew when we started talking about the piece some years back, that I wanted to highlight and showcase these striking, opposing qualities. Violent, virtuosic music covering the whole range of the violin is contrasted with more delicate and reflective filigree material that features oscillating natural harmonic passages and searching melodies. Towards the beginning of the writing process, I sent Malin various fragments of