Recent Graduate Student Professional Activities

Graduate composers at the University of Buffalo pursue many professional opportunities both at UB and outside of the university. We would like to celebrate the achievements of our current and former UB graduate composers by sharing their recent accomplishments.

Recent UB graduate Igor Marques performed his PhD Dissertation, Noturno (2018), with contemporary music ensemble Elision. A recording of the performance can be found here. Dr. Marques is now a Clinical Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University at Buffalo where he continues to compose and focus on teaching and research.

  

Alex Huddleston’s string quartet, I found a few configuartions//some stripes, was performed by the Mivos Quartet and was the winner of the 2018 Kanter Prize. Alex has received several commissions including from percussionist Steve Solook entitled how quickly for forget An Adolescence for drum set and a commission from trombonist Juna Winston for his duo project “Blechtrommell” for trombone and percussion. Huddleston is a music critic for Cambridge University Press’s TEMPO and has had several works presented as topics in lecture settings at UB, particularly of note was his work ThePreservation III in Musicologist Seth Brodsky’s lecture “Is there

music after analysis”.

John Aulich has had several opportunities to work with contemporary music ensemble Elision. He composed a piece for lap-steel, Uilleann pipes, and double bass for Elision which was workshopped last summer and received a request from Elision to compose them a second piece for bass clarinet, bassoon, cello, trombone, and saxophone. This new piece will be premiered May 2^nd in Melbourne at the Melbourne Recital Center which will be attended by John for the performance and a recording session.

In May 2019 Ka Shu Tam’s work, Beyond the Frontier of the Great Wall for SATB Youth Choir was premiered in Hong Kong and will be commercially published this year. Tam also had a work premiered in June 2019 by the Arditti Quartet during the Bilkent Composition Academy in Ankara, Turkey entitled …IntoDirt…. This coming April 2020 Tam’s string trio, Flux, will be premiered in Christchurch, New Zealand during the International Society for Contemporary Music and Asian Composers’ League Conference.

Edgar Girtain IV was appointed Director of La Casa de las Artes for the Universidad Austral de Chile in Puerto Montt in June where he conducts the Symphonic and Chamber Choirs, and maintains a piano and composition studio. In October, Edgar premiered a four hand piano concerto with Ximena Vasquez on a concert featuring several new works by North American composers. Edgar’s choir toured Schubert’s G Major Mass with a full string orchestra and in January Edgar will be doing some educational programs with a local wind band and performing several premieres with ensemble Nucleo Experimentacion Sonora Chiloe directed by Alejandro Lavanderos.

Jessie Downs's current focus is composing and producing her new opera The Second Sight. The opera's first performances will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo on June 27th 2020 at 7pm, and June 28th 2020 at 2pm. In 2019, Jessie was awarded both a Dissertation Fellowship and a Mark Diamond Fund award to help support this project. Additional fundraising is underway. In November, a piano transcription of a scene from the opera's third act – Diskana’s Lament - was commissioned by and premiered as a musical offering at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo. Jessie was a participant in the 2019 June in Buffalo Festival, and her ensemble - the Sotto Voce Vocal Collective - presented performances of her opera's second scene as well as a new mass by Brien Henderson. In April, her 2016 duet for piccolo and prepared piano, shadow a thing, was performed on a UCSD graduate student recital featuring Michael Matsuno. Jessie also continues performing regularly as a soprano soloist. Recent performances include Britten's "Ceremony of Carols," Hensel's "For the Feast of St. Cecilia;" scenes from Verdi's Rigoletto (as Gilda) and La Traviata (as Violetta) presented on programs hosted by UUCB, Buffalo Master Choral, and Nickel City Opera; and the soprano duet from Alex Huddleston's "The Sonnets" with Julia Anne Cordani for the 2019 MUGSA symposium.

During the fall semester, Joel Kirk, wrote a piece - "Titration" - for the Yarn/Wire Ensemble which was workshopped and recorded by them during their residency at the University at Buffalo in November. He has also been working on an acousmatic piece for electronics and multimedia - "Rust" - with visual artist Eloise Shaw which will be completed in the coming months. Joel is currently writing a string quartet for the Arditti Quartet’s Buffalo residency in April and is also in talks with the UK-based Leyland Brass Band towards writing a piece for them to perform later in 2020.

Ruixing Wang is a classical music composer and also works as a pop music producer. Recently he has been collaborating with local Buffalo musician Carly Beth to create an original pop song. Back View was recently published in Chinese media and has over 500 thousand online plays and downloads.

Alex Buehler conducted a performance of his work Z/28 for 16-piece trombone choir at the International Trombone Festival in Muncie, IN, in July 2019. In October, his work Obsolescense for open instrumentation and improvised electronics was performed by composer/violinist Dr. Andrew May at CEMIcircles International Electronic and Experimental Music Festival 2019. Recently Alex was commissioned by the Amorsima String Trio as a part of their new music miniatures concert series which will take place in June 2020.

In Fall 2019, Su Lee’s dissertation composition "Die Radikalen Tasten", a concerto for organ with keyboard ensemble, written specifically on our own tremendous Fisk Op.95 organ at UB, received attention for the innovative and radical aspects of its organ repertoire. It was premiered at her dissertation fundraiser concert with the support of the Mark Diamond Research Fund and generous donations from the Buffalo/WNY community. An audience of approximately 150 attended. (A recording is available on YouTube). After successfully completing her defense, she is expecting to receive her PhD in composition in February 2020.

Matias Homar has performed in a tour of Argentina in June and July with the Imaymana Duo and was a special guest speaker at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata for the composition department and also gave a workshop in composition for the IV Jornadas Musicales de Formacion Instrumental y Vocal in Salta, Argentina. Homar also completed new works Dans av Hjerter fra Nord for the Norwegian group Current Sax and Metamorphosis for Ensemble Mise-En. This year he is recording and producing Imaymana Duo’s 2^nd CD to be released in July and writing a new work for Ensemble Mise-En and the ECI Ensemble to be premiered in August in La Plata, Argentina.

Tyler Adamthwaite is a Presidential Scholar at the University at Buffalo and a graduate of both Colorado State University and Brandeis University in Buffalo. In the Fall of 2019 he had a recent composition workshopped and recorded by New York-based Ensemble Mise-En.

Tomek Arnold received the 2019 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for his work Non-AggressiveMusic Deterrent in May. In September 2019 his composition Are you a Vineyard? was premiered by the Mivos Quartet at the Academie Voix Nouvelles in Royaumont Abbey.

Ensemble Mise-En Residency at the University at Buffalo

Ensemble Mise-En will be in residence at the Center for 21st Century Music at the University at Buffalo from Friday, December 6 through Sunday, December 8 for a graduate composition workshop and two rehearsals of David Felder’s Jeu de Tarot 2. Ensemble Mise-En is a New York-based contemporary music collective led by composer Moon Young Ha. Comprised of talented young musicians, their personnel strives to bring a repertoire of challenging new sounds to diverse audiences. Mise-En wishes to impart an experience that is simultaneously multicultural and intellectually and aesthetically pleasing. As a collective, the multinational personnel has coalesced around a real aesthetic agenda, crystallized in the name “mise-en”: “mee,” in Korean, means “beauty,” and “zahn,” “to decorate,” and the group unabashedly promotes “beautiful” artwork to increasingly diverse audiences of contemporary sounds.

Ensemble Mise-En

The ensemble promotes large-scale, dynamic performances of contemporary music featuring the works of established and budding composers. Since its inception in 2011, Ensemble Mise-En has collaborated with such esteemed partners as Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, International Alliance for Women in Music, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Open Meadows Foundation, New York University, New York Foundation for the Arts, I-Park, Goethe-Institute Boston, Villa Gillet (FR) and others. To date, the ensemble has presented a total of 281 pieces, including 114 works written for the group, and 86 US/NY premieres. The ensemble has performed at exciting venues such as (le) poisson rouge, Bohemian National Hall, Italian Academy, the DiMenna Center, Tenri Cultural Institute and the cell.

Mise-En will read, workshop, and record new compositions by PhD. students Tyler Adamthwaite, Matias Homar, Kenneth Tam, and Richard Wang during their residency. 

Adamthwaite’s composition for alto flute, clarinet and bass clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, and piano is titled Silent Embers. The work is based on a poem that he wrote:

“The process of node flowing to path.

The feeling of ruminating.

A particular image.

Emotion. Idea. Identity.”

Homar’s composition is Metamorphosis, based on Kafka’s homonymous text. He has used the text to derive the musical elements, from the formal structure to the motivic ideas both in the melody/harmony as well as in the rhythms. The three sections of the piece develop the idea of metamorphosis by transforming the elements from more ’simple’ to more ‘complex.' The use of the live effects, as well as the way in which the sonic objects accumulate throughout the two thirds of the piece, is a way to represent the idea of metamorphosis following his own interpretation of the story being told by the author of the text. It is scored for flute, clarinet, percussion, and electronics.

Cover of Kafka’s short story, The Metamorphosis

Tam has written his composition, Path of Earth, for a large chamber ensemble of flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, viola, and cello. Tam’s program notes for his piece are,

“People seek for an ideal world. We hope for peace and freedom. We hope to live a calm and simple life. For that, people fight. Riots are all over the world, using aggressive and complicated means to achieve the ideal living conditions. There is no real utopia. Humans themselves are the subject of complexity. Where there are people, there are problems. We try to fix those problems, but we should also admit there is no way that we can reduce the world into an ideal simplicity. Most of us recognize the nature of the world. Why do we still hope for utopia? Why don’t we try to embrace the complexity? Why should we have to frame the world into simple forms and structures? The world needs a variety of people to maintain its function. If we could truly accept the nature of the world, we might be able to find at least a path to a temporary utopian moment among the complexity.”

The North Side of Li Mountain, written by Richard Wang, is composed using multi-tonal scales and neo-romantic stylings. Wang is a Chinese composer who was raised in northwestern China and has always had an interest and passion for mixing folk and historical music in his works. His piece tells stories of the Li Mountain from the Qin Dynasty to present day. The composition is scored for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, percussion, and piano.

All four works will be workshopped on Friday, December 6^th and then recorded by Mise-en on Saturday, December 7^th. Mise-en’s residency at UB will conclude on Sunday morning.

Guest Composer Kevin Ernste

On November 15, 2019 Guest Composer Kevin Ernste from Cornell University will be visiting, lecturing, and giving a masterclass to graduate composition students at the University at Buffalo. Kevin Ernste is a composer, performer, and teacher of composition and electronic music at Cornell University where he is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center. He is a founding member of the improvisation ensemble, CAGE. In 2006 he was the Acting Director of the Eastman Computer Music Center and Co-director of the ImageMovementSound festival.

His work is rooted in the exploration and expansion of acoustic instrumental sounds with electronic/computer means, working in close contact with musicians, delving into an instrument’s sonic and physical nature, seeking hidden voices and phenomena, in turn revealing new techniques for human performers.

Dr. Kevin Ernste lecturing at Cornell University

Recent music includes Interregnum for chamber ensemble and bowls of water–released in 2018 as an audio and video album, The Awful Grace for viola and percussion with unmanned piano and electronics, Chorale for chamber ensemble and live electronics–commissioned by the Society for New Music and dedicated to composer Steven Stucky, Palimpsest for the JACK Quartet–the result of a Harvard Fromm Foundation Commission, presented recently at the Sweet Thunder Festival in San Francisco and the International Computer Music Conference in Athens Greece, Nisi [nee-see] (“Island” in Greek) for hornist Adam Unsworth  released on Equilibrium Records “Snapshots” (CD111), Adwords/Edward, dedicated to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and composed for Google Glass, Numina for Brooklyn-based Janus Trio (flute, viola, harp) presented at the Spark Festival in MN, Seiend for brass quintet premiered by Ensemble Paris Lodron (Salzburg, Austria, Roses Don’t Need Perfume for guitarist Kenneth Meyer (gtr. and electronic sounds, 2009) recently released on CD (May 2018, Innova), a piece for saxophone and electronics called To Be Neither Proud Nor Ashamed (recently released on Innova Records), and Birches for viola with electronic sounds for John Graham performed on Mr. Graham’s recent China tour (Beijing, Wuhan, Xiamen, Hong Kong) as well as at the Aspen Summer Music Festival.  Mr, Graham presented Birches again in August 2011 at the International Computer Music Conference  (ICMC) in Huddersfield, UK and again in 2012 at CCRMA for the Linux Audio Conference.







Welcoming New Students

The University at Buffalo doctoral program in music composition is delighted to welcome four very talented composers, with unique aesthetic backgrounds and diverse geographical origins. We’ll take this opportunity to get to know them and their work, as we look forward to the music they will create in the coming years.

Tyler Adamthwaite is a composer and performer who writes music which seeks to explore the existential and affective aspects of space through sound. This has led him to study linguistics, social theory, and architecture to write pieces that draw on the concept of being. Some of his biggest sources of inspiration come from the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of spacial design which give his music a shadowed quality. He has studied composition with Erin Gee and David Rakowski at Brandeis University, where her received his MFA. While there, he participated in numerous festivals as a composer fellow and has garnered attention for his sound design, resulting in being a collaborator in “White Rush,” an opera in one act by the creative team of John Aylward and Laine Rettmer. As a performer, Tyler has studied violin and stage movement. He has crafted multiple works that include the affective use of space including his solo set Interior||Exterior for solo man, organ, and electronics. His movement works have been hailed as being “haunting, and cleverly developed” by his movement mentor Susan Dibble. He is currently pursuing his PhD in music composition and theory from the University at Buffalo under the instruction of David Felder.

Below is a video of Tyler’s composition InteriorExterior for organ.

Colorado born composer Alex Buehler (b. 1991), earned a Bachelor’s of Music Education and a Bachelor’s of Music in Composition and a minor in trombone performance during his time at Colorado State University where he studied composition with Dr. James David, jazz composition with Mr. Will Swindler, and trombone with Colorado Symphony Orchestra Principal Bass Trombonist Mr. Gregory Harper. Alex taught k-5 general music and beginning band for 3 years in southern Colorado while continuing to composer for chamber ensembles and educational materials for his students. In 2017 Alex enrolled in the Music Composition program at the University of North Texas and studied primarily with Dr. Kirsten Broberg and Dr. Joseph Klein. He earned his Master’s of Arts in Music Composition in 2019 and enrolled in the PhD. program at the University of Buffalo where he continues his studies with Dr. David Felder.

Alex has had his works performed by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, CSU Percussion Ensemble, CSU Concert Band, Webber Middle School, The Ralston Valley High School Chamber Orchestra, Harpist Rachel Ellins, Oboist Elizabeth Sullivan, the NewEar Ensemble, Violist Michael Hall, soloists and chamber ensembles at UNT, and the UNT Lab Bands. Alex’s Music has also been performed at the Electric LaTex Festival, Charlotte New Music Festival, International Trombone Festival, and CEMIcircles International Festival of Experimental Music and Intermedia.

Sunrise: Mind-Numbing Day of Noise (2017) draws significant influence from the Hindustani raag Bhairav, a traditionally morning raag. For me, the morning is not a gentle waking experience; it is an abrupt slap in the face ripping you from a blissful state of non-existence into a mind-numbing day of noise. The music reflects this, as it slowly transitions from soft noise-textures to frantic melodic trading between the two voices. Eventually, the shock of waking is passed and a return to bliss is achieved. This piece was written for Violist Kathleen Crabtree and Clarinetist Dr. Aileen Razey.

Joel Kirk (b. 1996) is a musician currently studying for a PhD in composition at SUNY Buffalo under the tuition of David Felder. He previously studied at the University of Huddersfield under Aaron Cassidy, attending masterclasses with composers such as Bryn Harrison, Liza Lim, Rebecca Saunders and Evan Johnson. He has had his pieces workshopped and performed by ensembles such as ELISION, loadbang, line upon line percussion and the SEM Ensemble, and soloists such as Roberta Michel (flute) and Joshua Hyde (saxophone). He was one of seven composers selected for the SEM Ensemble’s 2018 “Emerging Composers Workshop” with Petr Kótik and has had a paper published in the Fields 2018 issue.

[internal resistance to flow is named viscosity] was Written for loadbang in the Summer of 2017, [internal resistance to flow is named viscosity] evokes the image of a thick, churning, viscous liquid evaporating into a gaseous imprint of itself. The piece has a strong mechanical grounding that is manifested in the process through which pitch, rhythm, and tempo in particular unfold in the score; layers of process are superimposed and encrusted into each-other, forming a dense, grotesque body of interference through which the limbs of its constituent parts poke out. The text for the work is taken from Guillaume Apollinaire’s series of six poems collectively entitled À La Santé, making use of poems I-IV of said six. The poems were published as part of the Alcools collection in 1913, written after Apollinaire’s short tenure at La Santé Prison (Paris) in 1911. À La Santé contains running themes of both physical and mental imprisonment, vividly capturing both the literal and metaphorical effects of incarceration on the mind of the poet

“[Viscosity is] a measure of the flow transport behaviour of a fluid. It is the phenomenon

in which a fluid will withstand a slight amount of molecular tension between particles,

which will cause an apparent shear resistance between two adjacent layers.

The term ‘viscosity’ is used to describe the fact that certain fluids flow easily,

such as gases, water, and mercury, while others do not, such as tar, treacle, and glycerine.

These fluids are broadly classified as thin and thick fluids.”

- Carl Schaschke, 2014

Ruixing Wang (Xia fu yu xiang, the meaning is summer’s fragrant), born in Ningxia, Yinchuan in 1994. Richard completed his undergraduate studies at the Xi'an Conservatory of Music, majoring in solfeggio and composition theories (2012-2016) and Master’s at SUNY - Fredonia.  Now he studies at SUNY - Buffalo in the Music Composition PhD program.  He started Learning the piano at the age of 6, began to self-study classical composition at the age of 8. From 2015 - 16 Richard followed the composer Dr. Wang Lu (Guggenheim Award winner, graduated from Columbia University, now teach at Brown University) to learn modern composition, and received rigorous and standardized training. Since the age of eight, he has composed nearly 150 art music works and more than 150 pop songs. His primary works are: Salon Symphony 1-3, symphonic chorus Mass in D minor, symphonic sound painting Van Gogh Suite, Pioneer Symphony Overture Sunset • Particle(PM2.5) and Viaduct, Chinese national orchestra concerto Praise The West Lake, and Piano Sonata 1-10.  In 2016, he successfully held a concert of personal works at the Concert Hall of the Xi'an Conservatory of Music, the first undergraduate student to organize his own works concert in this conservatory.  In December the same year he held a personal pop concert at the Xi'an University of Electronic Science and Technology. His most successful works are The moon and shadow, and Praise The West Lake, which was played by China Central Television.

The Kyrie from Richards Mass in d Minor can be heard below.