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I grew up listening
mostly to rock and Broadway musicals, seldom to classical
music. My favorite albums were the Beatles' Abbey Road,
Kansas' Leftoverture, Elton John's Captain Fantastic and
the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and Billy Joel's Turnstiles. I
remember seeing musicals in New York with my family:
Jesus Christ Superstar, Barnum, Beatlemania. On many
Christmas Eves I sat spellbound at NY City Ballet's The
Nutcracker. I started composing at 15 (the year after I
stopped taking piano lessons)-mostly songs inspired by
Broadway musicals and rock idols. It wasn't until I was
in college, when I began to study composition more
seriously, that I fell in love with new classical, old
classical, classic classical, ancient classical (medieval
and renaissance), jazz, folk and world music.
My love of so many kinds of music is still leading me on
an exciting personal exploration toward a sort of fusion,
an eclectic dialect. I communicate through my music using
various components of existing languages, rather than
inventing new ones. I write music that matters to
me-music that explores my internal emotional life and the
relationships between individuals. I encourage myself to
write passionately, especially when daily concerns
threaten to distract me from the fragility and humanity
of life.
Winter Toccata (I can't believe you want
to die) grew out of my AIDS volunteer
work, beginning as a musical response to the polemics by
Larry Kramer in his book Reports From The Holocaust: The
Making Of An AIDS Activist. Initially I strove to make
the cello into Kramer's voice, imitating the driving
rhythms of his writing, creating melodies out of favorite
sentences, with the words written above the cello line.
In doing so, I found a connection to the rhythm and
passion of my own voice. What resulted was a vocal piece,
especially at the start of the first movement‹long,
slow, singing lines-arching, lyrical, yearning.
Cellist John Koen commissioned Winter Toccata in 1992 and
premiered it on April 25, 1994 at West Chester
University.
I started composing Two Quartets (desire,
movement, love, stillness) without conscious
external inspirations, following the lead of my initial
musical ideas and their characteristics: aggressive,
kinetic, public. About halfway through the first
movement, the music turned unexpectedly inward, becoming
private and unassuming. I began to consider the piece as
a kind of spiritual journey, exploring emotional
transformation, from distortion and distraction to
resolution and focus. The music moves through contrasting
landscapes toward a culmination-the passage near the end
of "love, stillness" where all four instruments
converge in the upper register, waves of a single melody,
out of sync, but finally all in the same place. This
culmination offers neither an answer nor a definition;
rather it is what one finds in removing interference and
noise-the empty space in which clarity exists.
I had a difficult time giving this composition a title,
considering such ideas as "Divided States" or
"Double Duo" to reflect the polarities,
attractions, and relationships between the two flutes and
two cellos. When the piece was nearly finished, I began
reading T. S. Eliot1s "Burnt Norton" from Four
Quartets. I was challenged on an intellectual and
emotional level by Eliot's ideas of desire, movement,
love and stillness. For Eliot, desire-the obsession, the
excess movement, the acute awareness of the passage of
time-is not desirable. This is the state of the fast
music in the first movement. Love, on the other hand, is
undesiring, a form of meditation, stillness, the
harvesting of energy, timeless: the state toward which
the music continually moves.
Flutist Bart Feller commissioned Two Quartets in 1993 and
premiered it with Kathleen Nester, Fred Sherry and
Jonathan Spitz on April 4, 1994 at St. Bartholomew's
Chapel in New York City.
Barcarole (seven mad gods who rule the sea) resulted
from my 'artistic blind date' with San Francisco
choreographer Stephen Pelton at the American Dance
Festival. We began with the image of shipwrecked people,
drawing on Joseph Conrad's "Youth" and, in
particular, Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"
from which we chose the work's epigraph. Early on we
decided to use a barcarole (a boat song of the Venetian
gondoliers) as the central musical idea for our
collaboration. At our first rehearsal together we played
Mendelssohn's barcarole Songs Without Words, Op. 19, No.
6, as counterpoint to one of Stephen's choreographic
images: a young woman lying face down, washed ashore,
unconscious, then awakening, numb and cold, only barely
moving, slowly regaining feeling in her limbs. We were
awed by the simple beauty of this marriage of music and
movement. From that moment on I focused intensely on
Mendelssohn's barcarole, taking it apart and putting it
back together over and over again-its atoms forming the
very substance and texture of all the melodies,
harmonies, and rhythms in Barcarole. Mendelssohn's boat
song is heard in full at the end, drifting in from a
faraway place and time, a distant memory.
Barcarole is dedicated to my father, Thomas E. Maggio,
who loves sailing, ships (both model scale and actual
size), and the sea. As I was writing this piece, I
remembered one sunny afternoon in my childhood when he
and I ventured not too far off the coast of Martha's
Vineyard in a little sailboat. There were gale force
winds, and though the actual danger was slight, I recall
being very frightened as we tossed about in what seemed
to be giant waves. Again and again, the sail caught a
gust of wind and swung around, the boat flipped suddenly,
my father and I tumbled into the water, then bobbed up to
the surface for air. Rita Felciano (San Francisco Bay
Guardian) described Barcarole as "a haunting
meditation on death." I1ve come to hear it as also
a haunting meditation on life, survival, holding on, and
remembering.
If I am going to be
drowned-if I am going to be drowned- if I am going to be
drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule
the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate
sand and trees?
-Stephen Crane,
"The Open Boat"
Barcarole was
commissioned by the American Dance Festival under its
Young Choreographer and Composer in Residence Program.
This program is supported in part by grants from the
Jerome Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, The
Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and Southern Arts
Federation/Meet the Composer, Inc. Barcarole was
premiered by Jean von Berg Sykes, Virginia Hudson, Mark
Kuss, and Christopher Deane, conducted by Thomas
Cabaniss, on July 12, 1994 at Reynolds Theater in Durham,
NC.
This recording is dedicated to my mentors, for their
encouragement, love, and support: Thomas and Beatrice
Maggio, Leonard Ogren, Midge Guerrera, Micky Mathesius,
Dennis Anderson, Harry Ballan, Dennis Rosa, Jonathan
Berger, Michael Friedman, George Crumb, Jay Reise,
Chinary Ung, and Richard Wernick.
-Robert Maggio
Born in New Jersey on
January 8, 1964, Robert Maggio began piano studies
at age 7, started composing at 15, and completed a
one-act musical comedy the following year. He began
private study of music theory and composition at 17,
graduated magna cum laude with honors in music from Yale
University in 1986, and subsequently received Master's
and Doctorate degrees in Music Composition from the
University of Pennsylvania. His teachers included Dennis
Anderson, Jonathan Berger, George Crumb, Michael
Friedman, Jay Reise, Chinary Ung, and Richard Wernick.
Maggio's music has been commissioned and performed by
musicians and organizations including the Cincinnati
Symphony Orchestra, Kennedy Center, Oakland East Bay
Symphony, NY Festival of Song, Civic Orchestra of
Chicago, Aspen Music Festival, American Dance Festival,
NY Youth Symphony, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival,
National Orchestral Association, Philadelphia Drama
Guild, NY Theater Workshop, Stephen Pelton Dance Company,
violinist Scott St. John, flautist Bart Feller, and
cellist John Koen.
Maggio has received awards, grants, and fellowships from
ASCAP, BMI, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Meet the
Composer, the Barlow Endowment, American Music Center,
the Bearns Prize, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the
Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the American Dance
Festival, West Chester University, and the Pennsylvania
State System of Higher Education.
Maggio's future projects include a work for the 1996
National Flute Convention in New York City, a work for
the Detroit Chamber Winds, a piece for the Meridian Arts
Ensemble for Brass Quintet and drums, and a third
collaboration with the Stephen Pelton Dance Company in
San Francisco.
Robert Maggio lives in Philadelphia with his partner, the
artist Tony LaSalle, and is an Associate Professor of
Music Theory and Composition in the School of Music at
West Chester University. His music is published by
Theodore Presser Co., Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
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