May 2011 Subscription Concerts

With STRINGS ATTACHED:
SFCA meets The Alexander String Quartet

Clair de Lune (2011) by Paul Chihara

Living composers make living music, nothing is set in stone, and all three composers have been working with Magen Solomon, sometimes even with the singers and quartet in rehearsal, to hear and adjust their work. “Emotionally the music hits you very differently when you hear it outside your own head for the first time,” Chihara says, “so after I attended a Choral Artists rehearsal of Clair de Lune recently, I rewrote the beginning. Because only then did I realize that the start of the piece, before the moonlight comes in, had to be more mysterious.”

“When I think about San Francisco I think about ballet, and since Verlaine’s Clair de Lune (Moonlight) poem is also about dancing, it was inevitable I would pick this.” Paul Chihara, (a former composer-in-residence for the San Francisco Ballet), has had a unique connection with French Impressionism ever since he was a student and discovered the music of Ravel, Poulenc, and Debussy through his teacher Nadia Boulanger. Recently, he has been writing music with the same titles as Debussy’s works (Arabesques, 2009; Images, 2008; An afternoon on the Perfume River, 2005). So for this special commission, it was only fitting to refer to Debussy’s most popular composition – Clair de Lune. “But,” stresses Chihara, “it is more about Verlaine’s poem than about Debussy’s music, more about dancing in the moonlight than about the moon itself.”

The Text

Clair de lune (by Paul Verlaine)

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Que fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau
Les grand jets d’eau sveltes parni les marbres.

From Fêtes galantes (1869), Moonlight

About the Composer

Paul Seiko Chihara was born in Seattle in 1938. He received his doctorate degree from Cornell University as a student of Robert Palmer. Mr. Chihara also studied with the renowned Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Ernst Pepping in Berlin, and Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. With Toru Takemitsu, Chihara was composer-in-residence at the Marlboro Music Festival in 1971, and also the first composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Neville Marriner, Conductor. He was composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Ballet for ten years, from 1978 to 1987. More recently, Chihara has served as the composer-in-residence with the Mancini Institute in Los Angeles. His music crosses boundaries: 12-tone/tonal, Asian/American, Academic/Hollywood, instrumental/choral/ballet, and his prize-winning concert works have been performed in most major cities and arts centers in the U.S. and Europe.

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