Derek Bermel will take over for the injured Marin Alsop.
Derek Bermel’s trans-cultural composition Dust Dances will open this season’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. That is not news. But what is news is that the composer himself will conduct this piece inspired by West African percussion idioms, specifically the 14-key gyil, after maestra Marin Alsop injured her wrist July 1.
“There’s some sadness about stepping in for Marin,” Bermel admits. “I would have been thrilled to hear her conduct my music. But she thought it would be interesting for the audience and the musicians to have me direct. It’s a chance to communicate directly with the performers.”
Even though this is composer Bermel’s first Cabrillo Festival appearance, he will be among many musician friends and colleagues. “Kevin Puts and I were in Rome together,” he says of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner whose work will also be performed at the opening concert. “I have a lot of musical friends who will be performing—it’s a thrill to be here because the Cabrillo orchestra is great, and has so many great players. It’s fun to work with colleagues from all over the country.”
And for opening night audiences, Bermel will provide a rare opportunity to hear the composer conducting his own work.
“I’m not technically an ethnomusicologist,” Bermel notes, “but let’s say I’m interested in music in context. I like to be in the place where the music originated, and hear it in context. Rather than on YouTube,” he jokes.
It was on a visit to Ghana and the Ivory Coast that Bermel encountered the gyil players and drummers who inspired his composition. “I wrote the piece 20 years ago, so it’s sort of an anniversary performance for me.”
Recalling the origins of Dust Dances Bermel admits that it was perhaps his “first mature statement. I was trying to synthesize aspects of the solo African instrument—it was challenging. I was taking a non-Western, non-tempered scale, and translating that form into an orchestral instrumentation. I was taking the harmonic landscape of the xylophone and drum and transforming that for orchestra.”
The question on the composer’s mind was how an orchestra could refresh the original source. “How can I use the orchestra to give birth to a new way of viewing this music? The orchestra brings so many colors, so many variations and subtlety, but it’s a far different thing than percussive African music.”
Back in Brooklyn now after four years as Artist-in-Residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Bermel is finishing up a musical called Golden Motors that he’ll be workshopping at Reed College in September. But for the next two weeks, the Dust Dances composer will be in Santa Cruz—and promises to show up for “everything the Festival wants me to be at.”
‘Dust Dances’ will be performed on opening night of the Cabrillo Festival, Fri, Aug. 2 at the Santa Cruz Civic.
