Remembering Emmanuel Nunes...

We at the Center were sad to hear of the passing of great composer and musical thinker Emmanuel Nunes earlier this month. Emmanuel Nunes produced a vast and diverse output of instrumental and electroacoustic works that intimately link space and time, movement and metamorphosis, and numerical symbolism and organic processes. Nunes, originally born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1941, had been living primarily in Paris since 1964, where he spent twelve years as a Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire de Paris and later worked at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). Nunes has also taught substantially at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, as well as at the Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, where he studied extensively throughout the ‘60s.

Emmanuel Nunes

In an interview with our friends at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Nunes remarked about his time studying with the Darmstadt gang, and how it pushed him to develop his own separate, distinct voice, “I learned quite a lot from the courses by Pousseur, Ligeti, and Boulez. At that time Stockhausen did not come to Darmstadt, and among the crowd of composers having a subscription to Darmstadt, two extremes were in: either the so-called sérialisme intégral, or the graphic scores tendency proclaiming their illusion of liberty. Quite often the acoustical result was nearly the same.

“During those years I still did not compose really, my knowledge in terms of musical technique was more than incipient, but I did have a kind of internal compass, which detained me from stepping into such paths. As I used to say to my students: It is more important for me to know what I do not want, than to know what I want.”

Nunes’ work will be featured substantially at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2012: Litanies du feu et de la mer I and Litanies du feu et de la mer II will be performed by Noriko Kawai, Improvisation IV - l'électricité de la pensée humaine will be performed by Quatuor Diotima, and Nachtmusik I will be performed by the Remix Ensemble.

Listen below to Nunes’ La Main noire (2007) for three violas, performed and recorded in the studio by Christophe Desjardins, with accompanying video art by Sol mineur 5.

Composer Evan Johnson: UB remembered with "intense affection and gratitude"

Evan Johnson received his PhD from UB's composition program some five years ago, and his career is off to a flying start. Recent and upcoming highlights include performances at festivals in Darmstadt, Huddersfield, Witten, and others, as well as in Japan and Singapore; residencies at Copland House and the Millay Colony in 2011; and recordings on the HCR, Metier, and (later this year) Mode labels.  In June, at the Issue Project Room in New York, Claire Chase of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) will premiere a piece for bass flute commissioned by BMI and the Concert Artists Guild.

Says Evan, "When I came to do graduate work at Buffalo, it was a bit of a shot in the dark; I knew little more of the department than the June in Buffalo festival and the fact that David Felder and some of the other faculty were interested in having me there.  It turned out to be a tremendously significant decision for my professional career.  Buffalo is a unique place for composers, in that absolutely any sort of investigation is permitted and encouraged -- pieces written bycolleagues during my tenure included both works of incredible complexity and intricacy and a piece for amplified styrofoam cup -- as long as you continually question your assumptions and strive to improve your understanding of your own work.   David himself is the best composition teacher I have ever had, despite the fact that his own music has virtually nothing to do with mine, and his own approach to his craft and his profession have been crucial models for me to a degree I doubt even he understands.  And, five years after I received my Ph.D., some of the most significant relationships I have with performers around the world arose from visits they made to UB while I was a student there.

"The only thing I wish would change about UB's graduate composition program is that it would become better known, and its singular place in the American musical landscape more celebrated; but I remember UB with intense affection and gratitude, and I credit a good deal of my own musical and professional development to my experience there."

Visit the "Sounds" area of Evan's website for some intriguing excerpts from his work.

Aaron Cassidy: going places, coming home

Composer/conductor Aaron Cassidy is coming home. A proud product of UB's composition program, where his mentor was David Felder, Cassidy has been a Senior Lecturer in Composition at the University of Huddersfield in the UK since 2007. His career has been flourishing, with performances by ELISION, Ensemble SurPlus, musikFabrik, Ictus Ensemble, ensemble recherche, and other prominent groups; his music is featured at the Donaueschingen, Ultraschall, Warsaw Autumn, Huddersfield, Darmstadt, and Gaudeamus festivals, along with the ISCM World Music Days. His works have been played in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Austria, the Netherlands, Croatia, England, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Poland, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. ELISION has made two recordings of his music, with more to come. 

Cassidy returns to UB on February 23 for a residency that will include compositional masterclasses and seminars, lectures, and performance coaching. He will join the JACK Quartet -- a group that has long advocated his music -- for a composer reading workshop on February 25. (More about JACK's visit in an upcoming post.)

Cassidy's music can be characterized by an uncompromising dedication to instability and fragmentation. The received wisdom of performance practice is continually questioned and reasserted, often with intentionally unpredictable results. His recent works have experimented largely with the interaction of a performer with his/her instrument, introducing a decoupling of component performance techniques through a variety of extended tablature notations. Fracture is prioritized in timbral, structural, and rhythmic strata in such a way that resulting aural units are themselves only the byproducts or collisions of independent (and often cyclic) musical processes. The musical score becomes, then, both the locus of processual sediment and concurrently the cause of significant deterritorialization on the part of performer and listener alike.

Recent projects have included significant research of linguistic, semantic, and spatial theories, focusing in particular on heightened states of dislocation (as in Jakobson's analysis of aphasics or Deleuze and Guattari's writings on smooth and haptic space). It all may sound a bit abstract, but there's no denying the visceral impact of pieces such as I purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips (2007). 

SurPlus value

Among the noteworthy ensembles participating in June in Buffalo 2010, one name in particular may be unfamiliar to American new music fans: Ensemble SurPlus. But this highly accomplished German group plays an important role in this year's JiB, performing works by Augusta Read Thomas, Lukas Foss, Harvey Sollberger, Alvin Lucier, Charles Wuorinen, and Brian Ferneyhough on June 1, and playing participant composers' pieces on June 2. (A full concert schedule is available here.)

Based in Freiburg, Ensemble SurPlus was founded in 1992 by the eminent pianist and conductor James Avery (1937-2009). The Ensemble performs chamber music ranging from duos to large instrumental combinations, and aims to give new or unknown works optimal performances, regardless of compositional style or technical and intellectual demands. Its credits include performances at numerous European festivals including Darmstadt, Musica Viva, Donaueschingen, and others. Ensemble SurPlus has also collaborated closely with the Experimental Studio of the German Radio (SWR). Numerous CD productions and recordings (Ferneyhough, Clark, Spahlinger, Mahnkopf, Wolpe with Heinz Holliger) document the great versatility of the ensemble. For further information and sound samples, visit the Ensemble SurPlus website.