TITLE: "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World"

COMPOSER: David A. Jaffe, with Radio Drum part developed in  
collaboration with Andrew Schloss

DATE: Jan. 30, 1995

DURATION: 70 minutes

ADDRESS: 295 Purdue Ave., Kensington, CA 94708, U.S.A.

PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS:  Mathews/Boie Radio Drum-controlled  
Disklavier Grand Piano and Instrumental Ensemble (harp, harmonium, 2  
percussion, mandolin, guitar, bass, harpsichord)

ADDITIONAL EQUIPMENT: Macintosh computer running Max.

PROGRAM NOTE: 	"Two statues, a temple, a roof-top garden, two tombs  
and a lighthouse.  All but one, the Pyramids, has been destroyed,  
either by Nature or human hands.  Taken as a whole, they reveal a  
crosshatch of parallels and oppositions:  Two deal with death-the  
Pyramids and the Mausoleum.  The Hanging Gardens glorify cultivated  
nature, while Artemis was the goddess of wilderness and wild animals.   
The two statues are of the heavens-Zeus, the god of thunder and rain;  
and the sun god of the Colossus of Rhodes.   

How can the essence of these monuments be conveyed in music?   
In searching for an answer, I turned to two remarkable new  
instruments: the Yamaha Disklavier and the Mathews/Boie Radio Drum.   
At the Banff Centre for the Arts, where Andrew Schloss and I were  
Resident Artists in 1992, I conducted a series of experiments  
combining the Radio Drum and Disklavier and discovered that the  
flexible and seemingly magical mapping of percussion gestures onto  
piano sound makes possible the grand, monumental, yet very  
uncharacteristically "pianistic", sounds I was looking for.  The  
sound of this Drum-Piano is further expanded by an unusual orchestra  
consisting of instruments that extend the sound of the piano.   
Finally, an improvisational approach to the Drum Piano part allows  
the performer to respond and react to his unusual instrument.  The  
result is a new kind of piano concerto. 

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is seventy-minutes  
long, in seven ten-minute movements:  

I. "The Pyramids" (Giza, Egypt; 3000 B.C.) is constructed of  
ponderous massive blocks of sound, comprising all 88 notes of the  
piano.  The movement ends in a mist of dead kings and forgotten  
slaves.

II. "The Hanging Gardens of Babylon" (Babylon, Iraq; 689 B.C.) is  
suspended on a simple melody, ornamented in a variety of ways, with  
the Radio Drummer performing a "time map" floating between harmonic  
and canonic textures.  

III. "The Statue of Zeus in the Great Temple of the Sacred Grove"  
(Olympia, Greece; 437 B.C.) is based on heavy pulsations at various  
conflicting tempi, each suggesting giant footsteps.  The Radio  
Drummer improvises metric modulations.  At the end of the movement,  
Zeuss' penchant for thunder is in evidence.

IV. " The Colossus of Rhodes" (Rhodes, Turkey; 280 B.C.) invokes the  
colossal statue of the Sun God, his feet on each side of the harbor  
with ships sailing beneath.  It opens with shimmering high trills  
that progress through a series of huge melodic arches.  The trills  
transform into a steady pulsation that becomes a wild fiddle tune,  
performed by the Radio Drummer over a string-band accompaniment,  
until diverging into chaos over a trilling statement of the "arch"  
melody.  

V. " The Temple of Artemis, the Mother Goddess" (Ephesus, Turkey; 400  
B.C.?), the climactic center-piece of the entire work, is an  
unbridled ecstatic celebration of Artemis, goddess of wild animals to  
the Greeks, and of all Nature and motherhood to peoples farther East.   
It depicts a religious procession, focused on the carrying of the  
cult statue and suggests the diverse cultural influences such  
pilgrims brought with them as they migrated to the West.

VI. "The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus" (Halicarnassus, Turkey; 350  
B.C.?) evokes a formal timelessness and stillness.  

VII. "The Pharos of Alexandria" (Alexandria, Egypt; 270 B.C.) serves  
as a coda to the entire work.  Like the ancient light-house beacon  
shining into the night, the Seven Wonders have shone through the ages  
as signs of the creative spirit of Humankind.   

Work on this piece was supported in part by a Collaborative  
Composer Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a  
federal agency. The solo piano part was shaped in collaboration with  
Andrew Schloss, using his extensive work with the Radio Drum as a  
foundation.  

BIOGRAPHY: DAVID A. JAFFE (b. 1955, New Jersey) began studying violin  
and composition at an early age. In high school, he played with  
improvising bands of various genres. He attended Ithaca College  
School of Music, Bennington College and Stanford University, where he  
received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition (1983) and  
continued as a post-doctoral Research Associate from 1984 to 1986.  
From 1986 to 1991 he worked at NeXT Computer as a music software  
engineer, where he designed the NeXT Music Kit in collaboration with  
Julius Smith. He has lectured extensively in Europe, Japan, and the  
Americas and has served as Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University,  
the University of California at San Diego and Stanford University. He  
is currently a free-lance composer and software engineer living in  
Berkeley, California.

Jaffe has written an extensive body of orchestral, choral,  
chamber, solo and computer music. His Silicon Valley Breakdown has  
been performed in over twenty countries and hailed as a landmark of  
the electronic music medium by Le Monde and Newsweek. His music has  
been performed by ensembles such as the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the  
Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Modern Mandolin Quartet,  
published by Schott and Plucked String Editions, and released on CD  
on Elektra/Asylum, Wergo, CDCM/Centaur, Vienna Modern Masters and  
Well-Tempered. His music has been recognized four times by the  
National Endowment for the Arts (USA), with two Composer Fellowships,  
an Composer-In-Residency with Chanticleer, and a Collaborative  
Composer Fellowship. In 1992 and 1993, he served as Resident Artist  
at the Banff Centre. He has received commissions from David Starobin,  
the Kronos Quartet, the American Guild of Organists and many others.  

Jaffe is also well-known for his technical research in the  
field of computer music. In the early 1980's he developed a  
revolutionary technique for synthesizing plucked strings, in  
collaboration with Julius Smith, Alex Strong and Kevin Karplus. He  
has published extensively on topics ranging from ensemble interaction  
to music software design in periodicals such as Computer Music  
Journal, Interface Journal for New Music Research, and Lulu; and in  
books including The Music Machine and The Well-Tempered Object.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:  This piece is not a MIDI file, but a  
real-time performance piece, in which the Disklavier's actions are  
entirely performed in real-time by the Radio Drum performer.  In  
performances, Andrew Schloss performs the solo part and David Jaffe  
can perform the mandolin part or conduct.