PROGRAM NOTE

Last modified 6 November 2020

A Portrait of Vanzetti (1962-63)

Narrator, 2 Fl (2 Picc), Cl, 2 Hn, Tpt, Tbn, 2 Perc,
4-channel electroacoustic sound
Text edited by the composer from the letters of Bartolomeo Vanzetti
by Roger Reynolds

During 1963, I was in Köln as a Fulbright Fellow, working under the generous guidance of Gottfried-Michael Köenig, I completed the electro-acoustic component of a work for narrator, ensemble, and tape. A Portrait of Vanzetti was premiered at the 1963 ONCE Festival, in Ann Arbor, where I had studied with Roberto Gerhard and Ross Lee Finney. It was the first work I completed after leaving the University of Michigan.

Although one now badly faded score has survived, along with a recording subsequently issued in the New World Record’s 5-CD set documenting the first five years of the ONCE Festivals, the tape part was lost along with most of the text.

In 2009, I set out to resurrect this work, in part because of the response to the recording, and in part because the story of Italian immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, along with the social, political, and judicial turmoil that their trial and subsequent appeals aroused, touches me still today. I re-read the volume of letters, reconstructed the text and have recreated an approximation of the electro-acoustic component, now using multichannel sound, and adding spatialization of the narrator’s voice.

Two major sections of the work along with their sub-sections are identified, now, and a set of individual cues (many further subdivided) has been added in order to make rehearsals more efficient.

A Portrait of Vanzetti was premiered 16 February 1963 on the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor. The narrator was Jack O’Brien; Donald Scavarda conducted the ONCE Chamber Ensemble.