Wolfgang David, Violinist - Contemporary - David Gompper

Biography Program Notes Contact Download David Gompper

Music in the Glen (2004)

Top Biography

David Gompper has lived and worked professionally as a pianist, a conductor, and a composer in New York, San Diego, London, Nigeria, Michigan, Texas and Iowa. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London with Jeremy Dale Roberts, Humphrey Searle and Phyllis Sellick. After teaching in Nigeria, he received his doctorate at the University of Michigan, taught at the University of Texas, Arlington, and since 1991 has been Professor of Composition and Director of the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa. In 2002 - 2003 Gompper was in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching, performing and conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City.

Gompper's compositions are heard throughout the United States and Europe. In 1999 his Transitus (for wind ensemble) premiered at Carnegie Hall, and a number of his works have premiered in London's Wigmore Hall, including: Homage a W. A. (William Albright) for piano; and Shades of Love, a song cycle on the poetry of Constantin Cavafy.

Subsequent returns to Moscow have included premieres and performances of Crossed, Music in the Glen, Six Love Poems, Star of the County Down, Butterfly Dance, Spirals and Ikon. His latest work for violin and piano, Ikon, was taken on a 14-concert tour throughout the US and Europe last fall with Wolfgang David, a violinist from Vienna with whom Gompper actively collaborates as a pianist and composer. They have recorded three CDs on the Albany and VDE-Gallo labels.

He recently completed several new compositions including a 28' song cycle called The Animals on poetry of Marvin Bell written for Stephen Swanson. He is working on several new compositions including a piano solo in memory of William Albright, a piano trio and a work for solo cello for Timothy Gill in London. His Violin Concerto and other orchestral works were recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (London) in December 2009 for a release on Naxos in early 2011.

Top Program Notes

Music in the Glen draws upon portions of an Irish fiddle reel of the same name; but it also turns to the opening gesture of Pierre Boulez’s Sur Incises for material of another variety, thus reflecting Gompper’s interest in combining abstract tonal relationships (here derived from the Boulez) and music that is familiar (the reel). A slow introduction gives over to the two principal sections of the piece; the work is rounded off by a coda.

At first blush the audible division of the composition into four sections suggests an episodic design. And yet such a reading misses the stunning subtext predicated upon what at times are subtle interconnective threads that shoot through each section. Perhaps a better metaphor exists: the raw materials of the piece—based on the morphing together of linear fragments from the Irish tune and the Boulez-inspired vertical framework—represent dual light sources emitted at the head of the work that simultaneously pass through prisms variously located in the introduction such that the incident beams are refracted in the succeeding principal sections; the process is reversed in the coda where all events are refocused into an extremely intense singly directed ray of light.

Gompper generates rich tonal gestures out of the marriage of his source materials. Examples (a), (b), and (c) below in turn reproduce the reel, the Boulez sonorities, and the opening of Music in the Glen. Notice how Boulez’s cycle of perfect fourths/perfect fifths drives the piano accompaniment found at the head of Gompper’s piece; major and minor thirds are featured in the reel and logically enough in the violin line Gompper derives from it.

Example: source material, and the opening of Gompper’s composition

(a) “reel tune”

example

(b) Analysis of the Initial Sonorities in Pierre Boulez, Sur Incises

example

From the examples we further learn that Gompper inverts the order of the initial two measures of the reel tune and distorts its simple tonal structure (both on its own count, and even more so via the violin/piano combination). In fact, it is unlikely that we would identify the source material solely from the opening of the work. Instead the tune emerges slowly and becomes clearly recognizable near the three-and-a-half minute mark of this 11-minute piece. Constant “suggestions” of the reel tune occur prior to this point against the backdrop of an ever-expanding tessitura, the ebb and flow of intensity, and the rich contrapuntal interplay between the violin and the piano.

The second of the work’s principal sections represents a broad response to the first. The violin and piano continue to exchange leader/follower roles as the tempo and more critically the perceived pace of the work slows. Three strata are discernable in this section, with the right-hand of the piano in the role of arbitrator between the violin and the left-hand of the piano. Stark contrasts in register begin to collapse toward the conclusion of the section, as the pitch wedge turns inward until tolling bell-sounds in the piano accompany a captivating three-plus octave descent in the violin.

The coda begins with the juxtaposition of various tonal centers (among them B minor, E and G major) embedded within rapid scalar gestures and arpeggios. A final buildup is underway, leading to an ethereal sonic spectrum issuing forth from the combination of violin harmonics and the unique timbre of the piano in its extreme upper register. The effect serves as the perfect summary of the coda for Music in the Glen.

Program Notes by Gregory Marion
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
The University of Saskatchewan

Top Contact

David Gompper
www.davidgompper.com
david-gompper@uiowa.edu

Top Download

Music in the Glen: Score (pdf)

Music in the Glen: Violin Part (pdf)