Manifestos SCORE

Manifestos, commissioned by the consortium of the Big XII Band Directors Association, finds primary inspiration in the early twentieth-century avant-garde movement known as Futurism. According to the composer, "I first encountered the artwork in my doctorate when taking a class called "Music in Modernist Movements" taught by the great Jane Fulcher. Futurism, which started in Italy, is associated with technology, speed and violence." What made the Futurists (and other avant-gardes) prominent in their time was the proliferation of their manifestos, the widely circulated proclamations to the world on how they sought to completely abandon and obliterate all of Italy's storied artistic past and shape a new world order. They envisioned a world that celebrated the wonders of dynamism, motion, youth, the vibrancy of the urban city, the industry of factories, and the various technological achievements of modern man, primarily the automobile and the airplane. The movement's founder, Filippo Marinetti, announced the birth of Futurism with a manifesto published on February 20, 1909 ... exactly 110 years ago to the day of the national premiere of this work. I. Aero-poem The Futurists' obsessive fascination with machines, especially those powered by the internal combustion engine, found its apex with the airplane. Beginning in 1929, they sought to glorify man's achievement of flight and immortalize it through as many art forms as possible, publishing manifestos on aerial painting, architecture, sculpture, music ... and even aerial perfume. Futurist writers were the first group to follow the artists with other experiments in aerial expressions. In 1931, Marinetti published a Manifesto of Aeropoems (Manifesto dell'aeropoesia) to exhort Futurist poets to capture with words what visual artists prolifically captured with paint and brush, and they responded in kind with numerous poems celebrating the success of man to soar "far from the earthly feminine tic-toc." In his article, "The Poetics of Flight: Futurist "Aeropoesia," Italian Futurist scholar Dr. Willard Bohn says, "Evoking the physical and psychological sensation of flying, Marinetti and his fellow poets described not only what they felt but how it affected them. Attempting to describe what they saw from their aerial perspective, they indulged in verbal pyrotechnics and experimented with various visual effects." Dooley's first movement, Aero-poem, is a musical representation of aeropoesia. He vividly captures the repeating sounds of the airplane's piston engine in action, the weightless feeling of both pilot and passenger as they rise upwards from the bonds of earth, and the glorious achievement of the marriage between man and machine in their triumphal defiance of gravity. II. Futurist Flowers Within Filippo Marinetti's original ensemble of Futurist followers, no one stands out for exerting influence over a multiplicity of artistic genres more than the versatile Italian artist Giacomo Balla. He was a painter, sculptor, author, actor, tool maker, clothing and costume designer, furniture creator, musical instrument designer, set designer for Igor Stravinsky, scientist who studied light and the motion of humans, animals and machines, as well as an observer of the photographic innovations of the day. He truly earned the title, according to Virginia Dortch Dorazio, of "the Color Magician." In his 1915 manifesto, Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (Ricostruzione futurista dell'universo), Balla expressed his imaginative vision of the artificial Futurist utopian landscape which, he believed, would eventually supersede the natural. He envisioned a world flourishing with dazzling colors, where new types of abstract plants and animals would be the norm, including a robotic "metallic animal" and "transformable magical flowers" which would either go outdoors within a Futurist garden, or indoors as houseplants. This concept gave birth to the whimsical Futurist Flowers (Fiore Futurista), ten sculpture pieces conceived by Balla between 1918 and 1925 as part of his Il Gardino Futurista. As Valerie J. Fletcher summarizes in her book, Dreams and Nightmares: Utopian Visions in Modern Art, "The geometric shapes of these brightly painted flowers correspond to lines of force, and can be assembled into a variety of compositions, implying an altogether new nature over which man can exercise total control, reshaping nature's organic forms into geometric terms." The sculptures are currently housed in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Dooley's second movement, Futurist Flowers, is a serenata that tonally sculpts the fanciful imagination of Balla's magical landscape. Uniquely orchestrated with instrumental color combinations, modality and rhythm, the performer and listener alike will find themselves strolling through a reimagined garden of joy. III. Star Dancer + Her School of Dance The name of French painter and writer Francis Picabia is one that any serious student of art concerned with twentieth-century painting will immediately recognize. Though not an official member of the Futurist movement, his work influenced many of the Futurists who were associated with his art and theories. "Picabia is thought as one who formulated the concept of abstraction in art, not through theoretical discourse, but through convincing and powerfully self-revealing works." He was also a prolific poet and writer credited with at least three manifestos published in his magazine, 391. Picabia experienced many transitions in his artistic development. He was first an ardent convert to Impressionism, then Neo-Impressionism, then a Fauvist turned Cubist, even an Orphic-Cubist who later became a Dadaist, eventually rejecting Dadaism in the early 1920s and turning to Surrealism. He always sought to find his own artistic voice through the synthesis of various styles and is credited with being the artist who introduced the avant-garde to the United States. As one art reviewer commented, "To have out-futured the Futurists, to have out-cubed the Cubists that is the achievement of Picabia, the latest "Thing" in modern French art." In early 1913, Picabia and his wife undertook their first transatlantic voyage to New York to participate in the famous Armory Show 291, hosted by Alfred Stieglitz. While on board, he first observed a rehearsal of the renowned French actress and dancer Stacia Napierkowska. From this encounter, Picabia created several abstract works, one of which was Star Dancer and Her School of Dance (Danseuse e'toile et son ecole de danse), a painting that immortalizes Napierkowska, who was traveling to perform at the new Palace Theater in New York. Star Dancer and Her School of Dance presents the artist's perception of Napierkowska and her fellow cast members dancing with wild abandonment. Picabia's wife later spoke of this rehearsal and claimed that the dancer shocked the other passengers due to the star's bare feet and scant clothing. She also reported something particularly humorous to Picabia: the rehearsal was being observed by a Dominican priest, which amused Picabia to the point of including him in the painting. The painting now resides in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Within Dooley's Star Dancer + Her School of Dance, the composer paints a musical picture of a disciplined, ever-moving ballerina sur les pointes, occasionally framed with a descending repose or pas de deux that, in turn, extends an invitation to other sections to join along. The movement eventually increases in speed and technical furor as the corps de ballet of instruments begin to compete for prominence, pirouetting into a finale that becomes a tour de force of Bacchanalian proportion!