John Schneider, host of Global Village on KPFK in Los Angeles, interviews Anne LeBaron about her upcoming retrospective concert at UCLA.

LeBaron KPFK Portrait Jan 2024

The Heroine with a Thousand Faces - 4 for Saxophone (Gbowee, Ginsburg, MacKillop, Anthony)

The ethereal, breath-infused sounds of the shakuhachi served as the initial inspiration for the central subject of Breathtails, namely, the breath. Commissioned by Mutable Music for Thomas Buckner, it is scored for baritone, shakuhachi, and string quartet. The poet Charles Bernstein wrote the libretto, divided into twenty-one sections, with thirteen distinct poems and seven text-less breath interludes. As an exploration of different ways of conceiving, listening to, and imagining the breath, the libretto references sources as diverse as Buddhist writings connected to the ‘minding of breath,’ the yogic discipline of pranayama, Rudolph Steiner’s musings, and the poetry of Osip Mandelstam---all treated with Bernstein's uncanny ability to infuse playfulness into gravitas. The premiere took place in New York at Roulette, Nov. 2013, and featured Thomas Buckner with the Flux Quartet, and Ralph Samuelson on shakuhachi. This performance, from REDCAT in Los Angeles, Apr. 2014, is with the baritone Ian Walker and the Formalist Quartet, with Ralph Samuelson performing on shakuhachi.

Breathtails

Devil in the Belfry, for violin and piano, reflects Edgar Allen Poe’s values regarding the diabolic qualities in clockwork. Poe’s tale of 1839, with the same title, is set in the Dutch village of Vondervotteimittiss. The lives of its citizens, all obsessed with correct time and fine cabbage, are suddenly disrupted by the appearance of an outsider from “over the hills.” Carrying his fiddle, the newcomer scampers up the town steeple, attacks the venerable belfry-man, and commits the heretical act of striking the bell thirteen times instead of the expected twelve. The town, perfectly regulated until now, is thrown into unprecedented disruption and chaos.
            Devil in the Belfry was commissioned by the McKim Fund at the Library of Congress. The premiere was given in 1993 by the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. It was first recorded by Christopher Pulgram, violin, and and Paula Peace, piano, available on “Sacred Theory of the Earth,” CRI #865.  This newer recording will be released on an upcoming CD, and features Pasha Tseitlin, violin, and Nic Gerpe, piano.

DEVIL IN THE BELFRY

American Icons was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra  and premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. The Los Angeles Philharmonic performed it at the Hollywood Bowl in 2012.

American Icons

The music of Creación de las Aves, inspired by the eponymous Remedios Varo painting, reflects two elements that are striking in this surreal work of art: 1) the extreme concentration shown by the Owl Woman in the painting as she paints birds, with the assistance of alchemy and a cardio-violin, into living creatures, and 2) the ecstasy of the newly liberated birds as they take flight through a star-studded window. In my composition, a series of low, slowly articulated, sustained tones in the piano, erupt into vivid, lightning-quick arpeggios and trills in the extreme upper register. These florid passages, framed by the deep tones, eventually lead to an off-kilter scalar passage referencing the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, by J. S. Bach, woven into the piece as an homage to the unusual combination of mathematical precision within a surrealist context, depicted in so many paintings by Varos. Finally, the arpeggios return in fragmentation, leading to the end of the piece. The origin of life is thus transformed into a warm-blooded miracle, a song taking flight. Ana Cervantes commissioned and recorded Creación de las Aves, available on Canto de la Monarca. The soundcloud recording, for a new CD release, is of pianist Nic Gerpe.

Creacion de las Aves

In the iconic short story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” an ever-widening structural fissure culminates in the collapse of the house into the small mountain lake. This crack, repeatedly mentioned by the unnamed narrator, inspired the idea behind this piece. Composed for violin, piano, and fixed media during a 2016 residency at Yaddo, the neo-Gothic artist colony in Saratoga Springs, NY, the accompanying audio file includes sounds from a door harp located in Katrina’s room on a top floor in the mansion. Fissure was commissioned by and composed for violinist Pasha Tseitlin and pianist Nic Gerpe. They have performed it several times during the past year, and recorded it for an upcoming CD.

Fissure

A year ago, a hurricane nearly destroyed Crescent City. Now, a bigger one rumbles in the distance. Will “Voodoo Queen” Marie Laveau be able to save her city from the storm? In this excerpt of a live performance produced by The Industry, Baron Carrefour saunters in to a gathering of Marie and the Loa at the swamp on the city's edge, leaving a muddy destruction in his wake. With Cedric Berry, Gwendolyn Brown, Maria Elena Altany, Ji Young Yang, and Jonathan Mack; Marc Lowenstein, conductor. Photo by Dana Ross

Crescent City: Judgment At The Swamp (excerpt)

Breathtails, a collaboration with poet Charles Bernstein, is a forty-minute cycle of thirteen Songs studded with seven Breath Interludes. These settings, inspired by the ethereal, breath-infused sounds of the shakuhachi, are intended to reflect, enhance, and broaden our attention to the breath as life-force, in its infinite manifestations. This excerpt (p.1-32) contains the first four songs. Ian Walker, baritone; Ralph Samuelson, shakuhachi; the Formalist Quartet at REDCAT in Los Angeles, 2014. Commissioned by Mutable Music; premiere given by Thomas Buckner and the Flux Quartet, Roulette in NYC, 2013.

Breathtails (excerpt)

Invited by Piano Spheres and Mark Robson to compose a work that responds to one of the Debussy Études, I selected pour les Sonorités opposes, attracted to its contrasting sonorities. Étude no. 10 provided a formal template that I adapted, along with selected phrases, harmonies, and intervallic preferences that resurface and become re-contextualized in my composition. 

The pianist’s vocalizations move into and out of the realm of speech. Blending the performer’s singing voice with the piano resonances creates a mysteriously enriched sonority, diffused in space. By embedding Debussy’s answers to a series of questions (see explanation below) into the fabric of the piece, the performer’s vocalizations become more directed and functional.

Parisian society hostesses, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, often presented their guests with a questionnaire addressing personal, social, and artistic matters. In 1889, Claude Debussy, at the age of twenty-six, gamely provided answers when confronted with the queries. (Two years later, the twenty-year-old Marcel Proust answered similar questions.) Les Confidences du Salon—their answers and opinions—were published some years later, with Debussy’s appearing in the short-lived periodical Le Crapouillot. Nearly a century later, the magazine Vanity Fair resurrected this Victorian social diversion, eventually publishing over one hundred public figures’ answers to what has become known as the Proust Questionnaire.

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