Composer: JAN BERAN (b.1959)

Information:
Jan Beran was born in Prague but then moved with his family to Switzerland. He studied music (piano/composition) in Zurich, but besides music he studied mathematics. He has been a visiting professor of mathematics at many universities in the US. Currently, he is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He is also an accomplished concert pianist and composer.
Christopher Raphael is a winner of the San Francisco Symphony Young Artists competition and also studied with Ray Still of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Here are some observations from the him about the works on this recording:
Over the last several years I have been collaborating with Swiss composer (and statistician) Jan Beran on two pieces for oboe and piano, written specifically for my accompaniment system. Jan's music is well-served by this medium, since the demands it places on the players are, at times, extrordinary (though I did convince him to "dumb-down" the oboe parts to Winter somewhat from the original conception). While the music is still technically demanding, even after my "suggestions," the main challenge is in coordinating the parts. Jan said of Winter that he tried to avoid any familiar sense of musical flow. In other words Jan's music doesn't give the performer (and listener) the usual cues needed to rhythmically organize the music. While the music is sometimes highly rhythmic, many sections contain no recognizable steady pulse, nor clear points of emphasis whose times differ in simple ways, as in much mixed meter music.
Winter is a complex interplay of 7-tuplets and 11-tuplets (sometimes simultaneously) that appear in several sections, as well as a somewhat obscure reference to "Winter" from the Vivaldi Four Seasons. The main melody in "Mist Covered Mountains" comes from an Irish folk song by the same name, appearing in all four movements. While Jan's compositional style is truly his own, this piece uses familar idioms of the oboe such as plaintive lyricism, the "little saxophone" and the shawm and sackbutt band. Over the years I have become something of a "weekend warrior" of the oboe; this might be part of the reason these pieces were so difficult for me to perform. I spent the better part of the summer of 2005 learning Mist Covered Mountains as well as refreshing my memory of Winter from an earier effort. Putting this music together required me to learn a new way to mentally organize rhythm, since the usual techniques didn't work for much of Jan's music. In addition to notating many cues and rhythmic groupings in my part, I simply memorized many sections the way a child learns the Pledge of Allegiance --- much of the music I understand at the sylable level without having a notion of the higher level "words." However, I believe that my musical understanding has not been completely thwarted by this idiot-like comprehension. How else could I find such pleasure in playing it?