This collection of piano music spans nearly two decades of music by Canadian composer David Mott, featuring three solo works, as well as his piano concerto Eclipse. The second movement of the concerto, “The Dark Shadowed Moon”, is dedicated to Canadian Astronaut Steve MacLean, who requested the music for listening while in orbit on a space shuttle mission in September 2006. Of his music, David Mott writes: “My feeling that music is about relationship, to Music, to a performer, to an audience, is paramount. Music is always an exploration of sonic time and space, a mystery, a part of the Creative Principle which governs all appearances and disappearances and challenges my desire for ongoing discovery.”

INTRODUCTION

This collection of piano music spans nearly two decades of music, invariably composed at the instigation of a performance opportunity and by request. Over my career, I've composed very little music for an unknown destination, preferring to work with wonderful performers like Christina, writing for ensembles in which I perform, or by taking the ultimate responsibility of composing solo works to play myself. My feeling that music is about relationship, to Music, to a performer, to an audience, is paramount. Music is always an exploration of sonic time and space, a mystery, a part of the Creative Principle which governs all appearances and disappearances and challenges my desire for ongoing discovery. This collection of works should serve to illustrate that process. – David Mott

THE COMPOSER

David Mott has a multifaceted musical career as a composer, a baritone saxophonist and an improviser in both new classical music and jazz. His music is greatly influenced by non-western musics and he has an active involvement in the mystical and healing aspects of music. The recording of his composition Regarding Starlight was taken on a Columbia Space Shuttle mission and listened to by Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean, while in orbit, resulting in a second composition, Eclipse, being requested and taken on MacLean's latest Atlantis Space Shuttle mission. Mott has improvised for Pope John Paul II and has performed with a wide variety of musicians from Stevie Wonder to I Musici de Montreal. His music has represented Canada on the International Rostrum of Composers and his opera Meme was nominated by CBC for a Prix Italia. His compositions have been performed around the world.

He has created a large repertoire of solo baritone saxophone compositions, using extended instrumental technique, for which one critic named him "the Chopin of the baritone saxophone".

David Mott is a member of Erosonic, a duo with concert accordionist Joseph Petric and was a founding member of the Toronto based saxophone quartet 40 fingers. He has received numerous awards for his music including a Juno nomination in 1994 for his duo CD The Standard Line with pianist David Lopato and, as well, Mott was the conductor of the jazz orchestra NOJO when it received a Juno in 1996. The David Mott quintet was sponsored in 2003 by the Canada Council to travel across Canada in a Jazz Festival Tour. The tour was met with such critical acclaim that as one critic wrote, "The David Mott Quintet comes as close to perfect creative expression as it's possible to get" (Musicworks).

PROGRAM NOTES

Eclipse (2006)

Part 1: Event Horizon
Part 2: The Dark Shadowed Moon
Part 3: Pulsar

Eclipse is a piano concerto in three parts written for and dedicated to my friend and colleague Christina Petrowska Quilico. The second movement, The Dark Shadowed Moon, is also dedicated to Canadian Astronaut Steve MacLean, who requested the music for listening while in orbit on a space shuttle mission in September 2006.

The unusual chamber ensemble which accompanies the piano is comprised of instruments from various world music traditions (dizi, oud, tabla) joined by western instruments not normally associated with piano concertos (voice, saxophones, accordion, synthesizer), rounded out with double bass and percussion. The ensemble reflects my long-standing interest in, and love of non-western musics. Eclipse incorporates reflections and acknowledgments of six different musical traditions: Chinese music, African music, Indonesian music, the music of India, jazz and western contemporary classical music. In some cases, these musical reflections are obvious. However, the central musical issue is about how things reveal and are obscured. In this way the music serves as a metaphor for how the habituated patterns of daily life and the dominant role of the discursive mind obscure the experience of stillness that reveals the depth of our humanity and our inherent connection to the Divine.

Chamber Ensemble for this recording: John Brownell (percussion), Rob Clutton (bass), John Farah (synthesizer), Ed Hanley (tabla), Kelly Jefferson (tenor saxophone), Kim Chow Morris (dizi), David Mott (baritone saxophone), Joseph Petric (accordion), Suba Sankaran (voice), Bassam Shashouk (oud), Sundar Viswanathan (soprano saxophone), Mark Chambers (conductor)

Oud Duo (1990) - As one might surmise from the title, I have more than a passing interest in incorporating musical palindromes into the fabric of this piece. However, I prefer pun-like transformations of musical material to produce a more organic order than in constructing literal mirror-like phrases or structures.

One summer in the mid 1970s my friend, composer and theorist, Robert D. Morris and I corresponded using as many palindromic constructions as were relevant to expressing the current events of our lives. What I like best were the false palindromes such as the way I addressed each letter, "Dear Bob read". Oud Duo owes much to those discoveries. The material also owes a lot to the wonderful expressiveness of Persian music.

Originally composed for harpsichord, (Christina bailed me out by learning to perform it with three days notice for its premiere –replacing an ailing performer), this piano version owes much to her encouragement. Oud Duo is also dedicated to my friend Robert Morris.

Tango: Under the Winter Moon (1987) - Tango was composed at the request of pianist Ivar Mikhashoff for his large tango project in the late 1980s. As a student, I was entranced by early Schoenberg piano pieces (Opus 11 and 19) and while composing Tango around the time of the winter solstice, attempted to convey the cool beauty of those austere and elegant influences.

Dark Masque Masks (1994) - Dark Masque Masks is dedicated to Christina Petrowska Quilico as it was composed at her request for a Glenn Gould recital. Christina's fabulous and somewhat gothic pen and ink drawings were the inspiration, particularly her drawings of theatrical masks. Like the drawing, the composition is dark and ominous, and as is my interest, the music hides and reveals things with veiled references to well-known musics. I've always been intrigued by the way the mind sorts out complex information and chooses that which is important – like at a party with a multitude of conversations, the perceptions hone in on a word or phrase of relevance or interest from across a crowded room.

THE PERFORMERS

Christina Petrowska Quilico - Christina Petrowska Quilico, Professor of Piano and Musicology at York University, is one of Canada’s foremost pianists. Her vast and diverse repertoire is reflected in 20 recordings of classical, romantic and new music, including a Juno-nominated CD with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and 4 CDs with her late husband, the legendary Metropolitan Opera baritone Louis Quilico. Her latest CDs are on the Centrediscs label and include the world premiere performance of Rivers by Ann Southam as part of 3-CD set Canadian Composer Portraits and the world premiere recording and performance on a 2-CD set of 16 Portraits by Michel-Georges Brégent. Born in Ottawa, she is a graduate of the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York with additional studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.

John Brownell - John Brownell has performed with the Toronto Symphony, the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra, the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra, Tafelmusik, and has been a soloist with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra. He has performed and recorded with many ensembles including the Soundstreams Ensemble, Sound Pressure, and the Hannaford Street Silver Band. He is principal timpanist of the Toronto Philharmonia and is a long-time member of the Toronto Percussion Ensemble.

Mark Chambers - Mark Chambers is a conductor, cellist and early music specialist. He studied conducting with Dr. Harold Kafer, cello with Martha Gerschefski, Lubomir Georgiev and David Miller, and has performed extensively in the United States and Ontario as both a chamber musician and orchestral player. At York University, Dr. Chambers directs the University Symphony Orchestra and the Baroque Ensemble. He is active as a clinician and adjudicator throughout Ontario and performs with pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico and violinist Heather Chambers in the York Trio.

Rob Clutton - Rob Clutton is a composer and double bassist who is active in the creative and improvised music scenes in Toronto. His solo project involves composing, performing and recording for solo bass, including the CD Dubious Pleasures, on the Rat-drifting label. Rob is a founding member of the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting local creative improvising musicians, and to facilitating events in Toronto that bring international visiting artists together with local improvisers.

John Kameel Farah - John Kameel Farah is a Toronto composer, pianist, electronic musician and visual artist, fusing forms of electronica with renaissance and baroque counterpoint, improvisation, Middle-Eastern texture, ambient
minimalism, and electro-acoustics, to synthesize an entirely original sound. Simultaneously using piano, synthesizer sound sculpture, computer sequencing, and at times even harpsichord and organ, his creative efforts are fueled by exchanges of energies on a galactic and microscopic scale. John received the Glenn Gould Composition Award twice in composition and piano performance at the University of Toronto, later having lessons with Terry Riley in California. Please visit www.johnfarah.com

Ed Hanley - Ed Hanley began his tabla training in Toronto, Canada with Ritesh Das in 1989, and has studied tabla with master drummers Swapan Chaudhuri and Anindo Chatterjee. His interest in all aspects of Indian classical rhythm have led him to study outside of the Hindustani tabla tradition as well, focusing on Karnatic vocal percussion and drumming traditions with Karaikudi Mani and Trichy Sankaran. Ed is co-artistic director of acclaimed world music ensemble autorickshaw, and has co-produced all three autorickshaw albums, including the 2004 world music JUNO-nominated Four Higher, and the 2007 release So the Journey Goes.

Kelly Jefferson - Saxophonist Kelly Jefferson has a Bachelor of Music from McGill University in Montreal and a Masters degree from Manhattan School of Music in New York City. Kelly has performed with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Maria Schneider, Bill Holman, Ray Anderson, Phil Woods, among many others. Kelly has been nominated for Saxophonist of the Year by the National Jazz Awards in 2005, 2006 and 2007. The Kelly Jefferson Quartet is his latest project featuring original compositions that stem from a variety of influences. Kelly is presently on faculty at York University in Toronto.

Kim Chow-Morris - Kim Chow-Morris plays western flute and Chinese wind instruments (dizi, xiao, bawu and hulusi), and has performed in China, India, Canada and the United States. She is an assistant professor in Ryerson University's Department of Philosophy and Music, and the director of the York University Chinese Orchestra and the Yellow River Ensemble. As a scholar of ethnomusicology, she has published articles on the intersection of music and architecture and on the techniques of the Chinese bamboo flute.

Joseph Petric - Accordionist Joseph Petric has appeared as soloist throughout Europe, the USA as well as with all Canadian new music societies including New Music Concerts, NEM, SMCQ, and VNMS. As a concerto soloist he has appeared with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Quebec Symphony Orchestra, and Vancouver Symphony, among others, and has commissioned 201 works with the support of the Koussevitsky Foundation, the CBC, the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Swedish Reikskonzerter. Joseph was the first instrumentalist recipient of the prestigious 2005 Friend of Canadian Music Award.

Suba Sankaran - From an early age, DORA award-winning, JUNO-nominated Suba Sankaran has effortlessly combined musical worlds. While studying European classical piano and voice, she also immersed herself in south Indian classical music with her father, master drummer Trichy Sankaran. As a multi-musician (voice, piano, percussion), Suba regularly performs across North America, Europe and Asia with world music ensembles autorickshaw and Trichy’s Trio. She has composed, recorded and produced music for theatre, film, radio and dance, including collaborations with filmmaker and Oscar-nominee Deepa Mehta.

Bassam Shahouk - Born in Israel, Bassam Shahouk graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He started to perform internationally as an oud soloist, and has now been playing the oud for 34 years. Presently, he teaches at York University, and is the musical director for the Arabesque Dance Company. Blending tradition and innovation, Shahouk forges important musical links between the Middle East and the West, from traditional Middle Eastern compositions and arrangements to jazz, film, and orchestral scores.

Sundar Viswanathan - Sundar Viswanathan is a saxophonist and jazz vocalist with extensive performance and teaching experience in the U.S. and Canada. He leads his own quintet and has also played with and composed for other ensembles, including the NEC Big Band and Ensemble Uniqua, and with artists such as Joe Lovano, Clark Terry, Billy Hart, Jim McNeely, Jeanne Lee, Al Martino and Kenny Wheeler. Professor Viswanathan joined the faculty in York's Music Department in 2001.