Notes for: July 26, 2005
Since 1970, Jon Deak has been a member of the double bass section of the New York Phiharmonic, and he is now associate principal bassist. In addition, he is a prominent composer who specializes in working with children. Not only does he compose music for them but he also encourages them to compose themselves.
Deak is now working with the 4th graders of PS 183 in New York City as part of “Compose Yourself,” a joint program of two organizations, Meet the Composers and Young Audiences. The program, being piloted in New York City and Philadelphia, integrates composers into the development and implementation of music in the K-12 curriculum. “That’s what art is about, just to see them express themselves, even in anger or sadness, is going to be a big focus for the rest of my life,” Deak says. “It’s a look on their faces that will never leave me.”
In his own music, Deak is particularly interested in what is sometimes called “performance art” – a creation that has visual and theatrical elements transcending the customary relationship of pitch and rhythm. Preferring the term “concert dramas,” Deak calls for soloists who both narrate and enact the story and instrumentalists who take part in various ways in addition to recreating the notes on the page.
Bye-Bye! is a “concert drama” for a children’s audience. Deak has provided the following program note for this performance:
“Bye-Bye!” for flute and piano was commissioned by flutist Julia Bogorad and premiered by her and pianist Paul Schoenfield at Merkin Hall, New York City, 1987. The text is based on a Haitian folk-tale from the book The Magic Orange Tree by Diane Wolkstein, who worked with me on the preparation of this piece.
“I have always been attracted to folk tales for their wild flights of fancy and vividness of expression. I love the sounds of the words themselves, the phonemes directly embedded in the musical texture. So in this piece the text is transmitted by the instrumentalists themselves. It may seem unusually demanding to expect instrumentalists to play, speak, follow stage directions, and carry the drama of a piece as well as to display high degrees of musicality and virtuosity, but I am convinced that instrumentalists are a vast, surprisingly untapped source of dramatic ability.
“Bye-Bye! is a light-hearted but nonetheless loving tribute to the immigrants of America – including my own parents who emigrated from East Europe. ‘ ...All the birds were flying from Haiti to New York.....’”