The UB Music Department will be hosted by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave) this coming Monday, December 8th at 7:30 PM for a concert of student composer works performed by UB faculty and Buffalo-area musicians. Pianist Eric Huebner, violinists Melissa White and Shannon Reilly, and cellist Jonathan Golove will be playing pieces by Jackson Roush, Andres Bonilla Garcia, Trinity Prater, Lihuen Sirvent, and Thomas Little. In addition, composers Roush and Prater will follow their notated works with improvisations. New to the music department this year is Trinity Prater, who has written about their piece Crisálidas:
I wrote Crisálidas earlier in the summer of 2025 in Iowa City, where I had returned for some recuperation after 2.5 years study in Leipzig, Germany. During the study in Leipzig, I had become very close with a classmate of mine, Paula Rocosa Gañez, who was a student in the masters program in piano performance. Paula performed, and still performs, an aesthetically eclectic palette of 20th century composers, such as Hindemith, Debussy, Prokofiev, among several lesser-known 20th and 21st century Spanish composers. I was always impressed with the distinct approaches she took to each composer, which made any recital of hers an exciting experience of multiplicity: you never knew which Paula you were going to get.
I spent several concerts meditating on the mechanism behind this diversity, and every thought came back to articulation. Paula has, and pianists generally have, an acute, embodied awareness not only of the precise differences between all notated articulations, but also an intuition for which articulations a score was expressively implied to require. This realisation merged with conversations Paula and I had throughout our studies together about our experience of the masters studies as one of becoming, giving rise to feelings of being in a transitory state. The metaphor of the chrysalis (from which the piece takes its title) formed.
The articulatory character of each section of this piece is drawn from imagining an insect's interactions with the walls on the inside of its chrysalis. At the beginning of the metamorphosis, these interactions are more of a variety of tappings, and as the body liquidates, a pressing, or a flowing. The harmonic choices are exclusively intervallic, beginning on a G, and, taking distances in semitones from that G from the distances between "Trues" in a Boolean sieve process. Distances between rhythmic events, including durations, note flurries, and lengths of scrapings on the wire-wrapped strings inside the piano, emerge from the same process as the harmony.
This short piece marks the beginning of my interest in a music which is emergent from a space-in-between. There is so much that happens within a transformation beyond the arbitrary poles of its beginnings and endings.
The concert is free, and a donation to Hallwalls is recommended. Thanks very much to Hallwalls for their continued support of our activities!
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