Robert Fruehwald learned from Mel Powell that everything new that’s good is based on something old. Rather than struggle against that fact like the modernists, he decided to embrace his musical past. All the works on this CD freely and obviously refer to diverse musics that are part of his heritage. Of César Franck’s beloved war horse, Robert said “It seemed an interesting challenge to take something I dislike and turn it into something I like,” but later explained, “I've been rewriting the Franck D minor symphony. There are things I like about the piece, but it's so damn long, it drives me crazy.” This 12-minute summary of Franck’s orchestral juggernaut is titled Sonata Franckoniana, as a traditional homage from one composer to another. The power of Franck’s cyclic themes and the inventiveness of Fruehwald’s rhythmic and motivic fragmentation drive the fast sections, while the extensions of Franck’s chromatic harmonies, with some fantastic voice-leading, leave us pondering the mysteries of tonality, then and now. According to the composer, The Monster, built on the Gregorian chant Terribilis est locus iste, was “inspired by a mechanical paddle boat designed by Brunelleschi to move stone to Florence to build the dome of the cathedral. The boat sank and Brunelleschi got in serious financial trouble. The music is based on a piece Dufay wrote to dedicate the new dome. It's one of those prolation canons, and when I realized it some of it didn't quite work out right, I left the problems in because just like the original machine, the piece goes off the rails once in a while.” Fruehwald also experimented with a vocal synthesis program, included on the CD, added over his rhythmic, fixed-electronics accompaniment for the solo oboe. In live performance, audience members play mp3s of the artificial voices on their phones, creating a surround-sound effect. For me, the chant, “Awesome is this place,” is a connection to our beloved U of L professor Karl-Werner Guempel, a world- renowned medieval music scholar. The Dawning of Music in Kentucky is 19th-century Bohemian-American composer Anthony Philip Heinrich’s first anthology of his mid-life flowering of song and chamber music. By his late thirties, he had lost his business to the Austrian Bank collapse and then his young American wife died after a rough trip to Europe, where he left his infant daughter behind, never to see her again. He fled down the Ohio River to Kentucky, seeking asylum in the wilderness. Alone in the lush woodlands, practicing in his small log house, Heinrich began to develop an idiosyncratic body of music. By January of 1819, he tucked in at the estate of Judge John Speed, near Louisville, “Farmington.” He lived there for two years, continuing to compose, publishing two large collections of his songs and chamber music. Extremely strange, harmonically inventive, highly ornamented, and technically nearly impossible, Heinrich’s music remains little-performed and mostly unknown. Robert makes use of motives derived from Heinrich’s works, most notably “Hail to Kentucky,” in this one-movement piece. Opening with ominous, widely-spaced piano chords that repeat the short-long rhythmic motive favored by Heinrich (“the Beethoven of America”), the slow introduction invokes the mists of a Kentucky morning. Isolated, piercing notes appear in the high register, like birds in the canopy. The oboe’s tritone motive develops into a melody favoring minor seconds and thirds. An accelerating transition of chromatic ostinatos leads to the triumphant discovery of dominant to tonic, announced by a sol-do motive derived from Heinrich’s patriotic state song. Fruehwald subjects the material to hypnotic fragmentations, rhythmic irregularities, and pointillism, before reprising the ostinato transition that leads to a full statement of Heinrich’s song melody. A rollicking celebration precedes the final anthem in the high register—the finale dissipates into the ether, as quiet abstractions of the oboe theme hover over the piano’s sustained variations on a D chord. “Midlothian Madness was inspired by a 1999 visit to Scotland. Our band performed at the Edinburgh Military Tattoo in that year and, as chairman of the music department, I accompanied them to Scotland. During my weeks in Edinburgh, I was struck by the atmosphere in the city. It was fun, funny, madcap. During that festival time, the Scots were 'mad' in the best possible sense of the word. As I looked at Scottish folk music, I was struck by how many of the songs dealt with madness in a darker sense of the word. Senseless death, betrayal, and insanity are all topics for Scottish folksong. I decided to write a piece that portrayed both the fun and the dark side of the Scottish personality. Most of the folk melodies I chose were from the region right around Edinburgh—the Lothians. Thus the piece is titled Midlothian Madness.”—Robert Fruehwald. Robert wrote Midlothian for flutist Liana Tyson, Blake Tyson, and me, and we premiered it on a faculty recital at Boise State University in 2002. My first experience with the de-composed hockets Robert uses in fast movements, together with the shouted and spoken parts, kept us all in stitches. In the central movement, “Stumpie-o” “from Robert Burns ‘Merry Muses’ a collection of generally lewd songs” the percussionist is required to mutter while performing a complicated stick/cymbal/gong pattern: “I thoucht I was a maiden fair, my Minnie she made mankie o, and I myself a thumpin’ queen, wita danced the reel of Stumpie-o.” Farmington, Judge Speed’s estate, is now within the city limits of Louisville. But during Heinrich’s extended stay and composition of his two large collections, it was removed from the hustle of urban life. The first movement of A Farmington Divertimento evokes the anticipation of traveling to a grand country house in early 19th-century rural Kentucky. Again, the composer plays with the short-long declamatory motive, moving it across the beat to keep listener and performer off-balance. “Irradiate Cause!” refers to a beautiful hymn set to a text by American lyricist William B. Tappan. Describing divine mystery, this text is sung in thirds by two treble voices, and by oboe plus one piano note in this arrangement. The “dirge-like” chordal accompaniment, built with passing tones and unresolved dissonances, suggests the impossibility of defining the Creator. The third movement, “Epitome,” uses the short-long motive in a triumphant piano vamp, soon overlaid with the oboe’s repetitive, highly-articulated melody. The contemplative slower middle section and da capo are followed by a coda that rides high on the dominant of E-flat major, concluding with a compelling modulation and joyous return to simple tonality—notes by Jeanne Belfy