HOLST THE PLANETS
University of Maryland
Concert Choir
For University of Maryland Concert
Choir’s bio, please see pg. 16.
About the Concert
DUST DEVILS
Vivian Fung
Born 1975 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
As the BSO explores leading female
composers from around the world
this season, the focus of this concert
is Canadian composer Vivian Fung,
winner of Canada’s Juno Award for
“Best Classical Composition of the Year.”
Called “one of today’s most eclectic
composers” by National Public Radio,
Fung draws on her Asian heritage to
spark her Western classical works.
She has traveled extensively in China,
North Vietnam, Bali and, most recently,
Cambodia to explore her roots and seek
new inspiration for her musical creations.
However, Fung’s music also
reflects her own life in Canada and
California. Her The Ice is Talking
for solo percussion and electronics,
commissioned by the Banff Center in
the Canadian Rockies, uses three ice
blocks “to illustrate the beauty and
fragility of our environment.” Her
recent Earworms for Canada’s National
Arts Centre Orchestra “musically
depicts our diverted attention spans and
multi-tasking lives.” With her four-year-
old son Julian in the household, Fung
is very familiar with multi-tasking.
“For me, seeing the world through my
son’s eyes has completely rocked my
world,” she says. “He has opened me
up to feelings of compassion, joy and
connection, as well as being my teacher
on how to set boundaries, be persistent,
flexible and, above all, patient.…My
creativity is being recharged by life with
a child, who has given me so much fuel
to work with.”
Fung holds a doctorate in composition
from The Juilliard School, where she
studied with David Diamond—who told
her she could be a composer or a mother,
but not both: advice she ultimately
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dismissed—and Robert Beaser. She is
also passionately involved in fostering
the talents of the next generation of
composers and recently received the
Outstanding Career Influencer Award
from Santa Clara University, where she
serves on the faculty.
Dust Devils, written in 2011 and
revised in 2014, is a vibrant and
effervescent work. Here is how Vivian
Fung describes it:
“Dust Devils is the journey of
emotional swirls in my mind, sometimes
calm, but more often than not full of raw
and intense energy. The opening starts
quite forcefully and darts back and forth,
culminating in a fiery pounding of the
timpani, which wanes and brings this
section to mere silent breaths in the brass.
A slow section ensues, filled with upward
cascades of arpeggios that interrupt
the ethereal atmosphere. An ominous,
eerie string section follows, leading to
a powerful chorale in the brass, which
overtakes the music and brings the ten-
minute work to an emphatic close.”
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two
oboes, English horn, three clarinets including
E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, three bassoons
including contrabassoon, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani,
percussion, harp, piano and strings.
NOCTURNES
Claude Debussy
Born in St. Germain-en-Laye, France, August
22, 1862; died in Paris, France, March 25, 1918
Claude Debussy was the quiet
revolutionary of music. When most
other composers of his era were
blowing up the size and sound of the
orchestra to monstrous dimensions, he
focused instead on the subtle colors of
instruments and the softer end of the
dynamic range. Lacking any inclination
toward Wagnerian self-promotion, he
struggled vainly for financial security
even after the successes of Prelude to the
Afternoon of a Faun (1894), Nocturnes
(1897–99) and his great opera Pelléas et
Mélisande (premiered in 1902). Debussy
was an original, who saw music in a new
way and worshipped no sacred cows,
be they Beethoven or Wagner. And he
gave France its own voice and mightily
influenced 20 th -century music.
More influential to Debussy’s
aesthetic than other composers were
the great Impressionist painters of his
day—above all, James Abbott McNeill
Whistler, whose series of paintings
entitled Nocturnes may well have
been the genesis of this work—and
the symbolist poets, such as Verlaine,
Baudelaire and Maeterlinck, whose
words he glorified in his many songs
and one completed opera. As Oscar
Thompson wrote: “In literature, in
painting, in music, the aim of these
kindred artists was to suggest rather
than to depict; to mirror not the
object but the emotional reaction to
the object.” For Debussy, this meant
the abandonment of traditional forms
and of the hallowed rules of harmony.
Debussy also found new sounds in the
orchestra: subdividing the strings into
many parts with different functions (in
“Nuages” and “Sirènes”); creating an
eerie percussion section out of harps,
plucked low strings and triple-piano
timpani (“Fêtes”); and using wordless
women’s voices purely as instruments
(“Sirènes”). For Debussy, music “is all
colors and rhythms.”
Debussy first conceived Nocturnes
as Trois Scènes au crépuscule: (“Three
Scenes at Twilight”) after reading the
symbolist Poèmes anciens et romanesques
by his friend Henri de Régnier. Initially,
it became a work for violin and orchestra
for the Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe,
but Ysaÿe mysteriously dropped out
of the picture, and Nocturnes assumed
its present form, with “Sirènes” added
after the 1900 premiere of the first two
movements. For the premiere of the
complete work in Paris on October 27,
1901, Debussy wrote these notes:
“The title Nocturnes is to be interpreted
here in a general and, more particularly,
in a decorative sense. Therefore, it is not
meant to designate the usual form of
the nocturne, but rather all the various
impressions and the special effects of light