The Center welcomes the Antares New Music Quartet to UB!

The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21^st Century Music is excited to be co-sponsoring a visit by the Antares New Music Quartet to the University at Buffalo on March 30^th for an evening concert of some of the finest and most elegant music composed in recent times. We are also looking forward to the composer workshop the day before, on March 29^th, when Antares will perform works by graduate composers selected from the University at Buffalo Department of Music.

 

The Antares New Music Quartet includes violinist Jesse Mills, cellist Rebecca Patterson, clarinetist Garrick Zoeter, and UB faculty pianist Eric Huebner, who specialize in bringing to life contemporary musical works created by today’s living composers, as well as masterpieces from the immediate past. On Friday, March 30^th, at 7:30 p.m. in Lippes Concert Hall, Antares will perform Roger Reynolds’ Shadowed Narrative, a recent piece that uses text written by author Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a model for assembling the individual voices of the ensemble into a complex conversation, with the instrumental phrases resembling the syntax and grammar of spoken language. The program will also feature Igor Stravinksy’s L'historie du soldat Suite, Paul Hindemith’s Quartet, and Maurice Ravel’s Trio for piano, violin and cello. Ticket information can be found at the Slee Hall Box Office. 

Antares New Music Quartet

The composer workshop will showcase pieces composed by six graduate students from UB’s diverse composition program: Clint Haycraft, Zane Merritt, Chun-Ting Pang, Nathan Heidelberger, Kenichi Saeki, and Dmitri Penchev. The first composer on the list, Clint Haycraft, has just recently moved to Buffalo from Switzerland, where he obtained a Masters degree in Music Composition from the Zurich University of the Arts. His piece, American Music, uses advertising jingles as found sound objects which he fuses, mutates, fragments, and puts together again, as he makes them his own and molds them into his own personal style. Clint describes the piece, “I tried to address the intense nostalgia elicited by these commercial jingles – it struck me how powerfully these melodies impacted my childhood and shaped my memory of my teenage years. While researching advertisements and commercial music from the past, I began to feel that these jingles shaped my memory, surprisingly, even more than the music I loved and chose to listen to at the time. American Music is my attempt to address the musical tools that were used on me as I grew up, and recapture them so that I may use them and explore them in a fresh and critical way.”

Zane Merritt, who comes to us after just completing a Masters degree from Butler University in Indiana, has a piece that will be performed by Antares titled Mixed Quartet No. 1 (breakdown), which includes intricate, interlocking rhythms, and tightly coordinated motivic gestures that develop, expand, and stretch throughout the piece, resulting in extreme rhythmic complexity and vibrant physical intensity. Zane says, “I was interested in pushing performers to the outer limits of rhythmic virtuosity so that the piece feels like it is on the brink of falling apart.” The composer workshop will be in Lippes Hall at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 29^th, and will be free and open to the public.

The Antares New Music Quartet was originally created to perform Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which the composer, shockingly, composed and had performed while he was a prisoner in an internment camp under the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. Below is a video of Antares performing the seventh movement of the Quartet. Absolutely Gorgeous!