Awards, Commissions, Performances: Recent Composer Activities

The fall is a busy time for UB graduate composers, and several have had very eventful semesters.  The past few months have seen many of them composing new works, receiving commissions, and having works performed by top-tier performers around the world.  Here is just a quick sample of what some of the group are up to:

Weijun Chen

Weijun Chen was awarded the prestigious Jacob Druckman Prize by the Aspen Music Festival and School.  The award, offered "in memory of the great American composer who taught at Aspen from 1976 to 1995," is conferred on one student composer each season.  The prize consists of a commission for a new orchestral piece for the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, which will be premiered this summer.  In addition, Weijun has been commissioned by MATA to compose a new work which will be premiered at the 2016 MATA Festival. Finally, Weijun's string-quartet, Canoe, saw three performances in the past months by the Mivos Quartet, and received an honorable mention at the American Prize for Composition.  Congratulations Weijun!

Moshe Shulman

Also, recent UB graduate Moshe Shulman has won the 2015 Fromm Foundation Commission Competition.  Moshe is hard at work on the piece—a chamber work for singer and small ensemble with an original Hebrew text about Jewish prophetesses.  We look forward to hearing about this project as it develops, and we can't wait for the premiere!

Jessie Downs' music was featured on a concert in Chicago late last month, alongside works by Doug Farrand and Ryan Packard.  Streetlights, a string trio originally composed for young musicians was performed, in addition to I did not see it to the end for piano, percussion, and electronics (see below for a recording).  The latter work is a companion piece to work-in-progress, which Jessie is composing for Packard, Farrand, and UB pianist Jade Conlee), we'll look forward to hearing that piece soon.  Also, Jessie's vocal sextet, castings of light, which was performed by Voxnova Italia at their December residency at the Center, will see a performance in downtown Buffalo later this Spring.

Matt Sargent has been keeping very busy, with several commissions in the works, including a trumpet concerto for Jeff Silberschlag and the Chesapeake Orchestra, a piece for tuned gongs and real-time electronics commissioned by percussionist Julie Licata at SUNY Oneonta, and Pillars of Decay, a "multimedia collaborative performance for custom-designed metal/industrial instruments and real-time electronics," designed by Matt, vocalist Amanda Schoofs, percussionist Trevor Saint, and UB-alum Jeff Herriott.  The work will be toured across the Rust Belt next year.  In addition, Matt's Ghost Music, was recorded for a forthcoming album of solo percussion works by Bill Solomon of Signal.  Matt also recently completed two series of works:  More Snow to Fall, seven pieces for glockenspiel and vibraphone for Saint, who will premiere the works on his March 2016 tour, and Tide, three new works for 10 violins, 10 cellos, and 10 basses (i.e., multi-tracked soloist).  The latter saw two recent performances by UB-alum TJ Borden in California (see below for a recording).  Finally, Matt has been presenting a series of concerts with the Electroacoustic Ensemble at Bard College (where he serves as Visiting Professor of Electronic Music and Sound), including two performances with composer Michael Pisaro, who was in residence with the ensemble in November 2015.

Last month, Roberto Azaretto was in Madeira, Portugal, where he took part in the Estalagem da Ponta do Sol Residency for Contemporary Music and Electronics.  While there, he worked with composers Patricia Alessandrini and Gilbert Nouno,  and had an in-progress work performed by violinist Karin Hellkvist and flutist Richard Craig.

Ethan Hayden

Ethan Hayden's piece for stereo electronics, bats with baby faces in the violet light, saw two performances in the Fall:  at Ljudbio II in Uppsala, Sweden, and also at an electroacoustic music concert at Buff State.  In addition, Ethan's presented "…ce dangereux supplément…", his piece for solo voice, electronics, and animated projections, at the 2015 International Computer Music Conference in Denton, TX.  He'll perform the same work this spring at Narrations contemporaines, a poetics conference in Montreal hosted by bleuOrange, revue de littérature hypermédiatique.  Ethan's large ensemble piece, Let's celebrate our corpse-strewn future! will be premiered by Buffalo's Wooden Cities next month, at a concert which will also feature works by current/former UB composers Zane Merritt and John Bacon.  In addition, his four-voice arrangement of Kurt Schwitters' Ribble Bobble Pimlico was heard last weekend at Hallwalls' Dada centenary event, performed by BuffFluxus.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, there is lots of other music being made here at UB, and we can't wait to hear what's next for these artists in the coming months!

Voxnova Italia & Nicholas Isherwood to Tune Voices, Souls

Voxnova Italia perform Stimmung

This week, the Center is excited to host the residencies of Voxnova Italia and Project Isherwood, who will present three events of adventurous vocal music sure to engage, challenge, and transport listeners.  Known for pushing vocal and performative boundaries, these artists have cultivated a repertoire and an approach to vocal music that centers on the raw physicality of the voice itself, while always expanding listener's understanding of the voice through intrepid use of technology and extended vocal techniques.

Voxnova Italia is an ensemble of vocal soloists dedicated to the repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries.  They have made their reputation through the performance of works by the great composers of contemporary vocal music (Berio, Scelsi, Aperghis, Nono, Cage, et al.), and also through their mission of making heard the music of young and "unjustly neglected" composers.  In so doing, they have premiered a number of new works, including pieces by Giacinto Scelsi, Steve Lacy, Luca Francesconi, Betsy Jolas, and Gerard Pape (see below for a recording of the latter's Battle, commissioned by Voxnova in 1996).

Voxnova's December 5th program will feature two works:  a new arrangement of David Felder's …la dura fría hora… and Karlheinz Stockhausen's vocal opus, Stimmung.  Felder's work, originally composed in 1986 for chamber chorus and orchestra, is an ornate work of vocal counterpoint beginning from a simple seed of two notes, which expands at turns delicately and aggressively into rich harmonies that are at once forceful and mysterious—assertively present while hinting at whole worlds just over the sonic horizon.  Voxnova will perform a new adaptation for six voices.

Stimmung, Stockhausen's meditative masterwork for six amplified voices, is the first major Western composition to be based entirely on the production of vocal overtones.  Organized into 51 "moments," the work explores the natural resonances of the human vocal apparatus, while pushing the voice to create new timbres and rhythmic textures.  Evoking mystical and earthy elements pulled from Eastern religious traditions and the 1960s counterculture, Stimmung unfolds ritualistically, moving up and down the Bb harmonic series in a unique manner that is both ceremonial and theatrical.  The title, in the composer's words, "means 'tuning,' but it really should be translated with many other words because Stimmung incorporates the meanings of the tuning of a piano, the tuning of the voice, the tuning of a group of people, the tuning of the soul."  Voxnova's performances of this work have been called "stunningly beautiful, utterly serene, full of charm" by the LA Times, which adds, "the voices here might have been angels."  The ensemble specializes in performing a new version of the classic work, which uses Mongolian diphonic singing for the execution of the overtones.  This reinterpretation is perhaps closer to the composer's original vision, as Nicholas Isherwood, Voxnova's bass singer, worked closely with Stockhausen during the last years of the composer's life, performing the role of Lucifer in the world premieres of several of the Licht operas (Montag, Dienstag, and Freitag).

Nicholas Isherwood

Isherwood, Voxnova's founder, is one of the most widely-recognized bass singers active today.  Having worked with an impressive roster of composers, including Carter, Crumb, Kagel, Kurtág, Messiaen, and Xenakis, Isherwood has played a significant role in the creation of the contemporary repertoire for solo and operatic vocal music.  As a director, he has produced performances of Hans Werner Henze's El Cimarrón in Fontenay, Cage's Song Books Dijon and Paris, and Mauricio Kagel's Phonophonie at venues around the world (including a well-received performance at June in Buffalo 2006, see below).  Also a renowned performer of Baroque music and the commedia dell'arte, Isherwood has directed student productions of Adriano Banchieri’s La Pazzia Senile and Berio’s A-Ronne in traditional 'commedia' style.  An active teacher, he has taught vocal music opera at institutions in France, Germany, and the United States, including the IRCAM Summer Academy, Conservatoire de Montbéliard, Ecole Normale de Musique (Paris), California Institute of the Arts, the University of Oregon, and currently, Le Conservatoire national supérieur musique et danse de Lyon.  His book, The Techniques of Singing, was published by Bärenreiter in 2013, and quickly became a widely referred to work by performers and composers alike.

Isherwood's December 4th concert features works that extend his virtuosic vocality through the use of electronics.  The program includes Otro, a recent (2010) work by the computer music pioneer Jean-Claude Risset, Michael Norris's Deep Field, for voice and live electronics, and Isaac Shankler's evocatively-titled, Mouthfeel.  Also featured on the program will be Black Fire/White Fire, the third part of David Felder's Shamayim (2008), a work for voice, electronics, and video composed in close collaboration with Isherwood and video artist Elliot Caplan, which Haskins American Recod Guide called "abstract but not forbidding, [with] images arresting and unforgettable."  [An excerpt of Chashmal, the first work in the series, can be seen below).

The residency will conclude with a composer workshop on December 6th, at which Voxnova will perform new works by UB graduate composers Jessie Downs, Ethan Hayden, Brien Henderson, and Ying-Ting Lin.  Through this presentation, Voxnova and Isherwood carry forth their mission to articulate and embody the newest works of contemporary vocal music, always adding dynamic new pieces to the repertoire.  This, and the other events are definitely not to be missed!

New Composers Join UB Composition Program

This year, UB's Composition program welcomes six extremely talented new composers.  We're excited to get to know them and their music, and we look forward to hearing what they come up with as they pursue their PhD's in Buffalo.

Jessie Downs is a composer, vocalist, and teaching artist who recently graduated from Oberlin (2013).  For Jessie, music is a medium for sharing personal experiences and entering into community with others.  "My work aims to capture things of delicate and wild beauty, from the sound of my mother's backyard, to the decrepit intonation of an antique folk instrument, to elements of the work of other artists […] that resonate deeply with my own practice and view of the world."  Her most recent large-scale work, a piece written during a residency with a middle school band called Dismal Harmony, is a "a surreal sonic expedition."  Each section of the piece strives to capture the experience of a particular point along New Jersey's Dismal Brook.  The musical material comes both from harmonies and textures that resulted from a composing workshop with the band, as well as from Jessie's own time spent with the sounds of the park.

Jessie Downs conducting students at
the NJPAC “Fiddle and Fa-la-la” Fest.

In writing for non-professional musicians, Jessie combines her love of music-making and education.  Since graduating Oberlin, she has worked primarily as a music educator in Orange, New Jersey, where she played a vital role in creating Sonic Explorations, an after-school music program for the elementary school students.  "As a way of creating a space in the program for each student to find their own musical persona, my partner Douglas Farrand and I developed the Creative Musicianship curriculum, in which students build an embodied understanding of key musical concepts through and for creative applications (composing, improvising, instrument building, etc)."  As a vocalist, Jessie practices what is often considered an "arcane strain" of the bel canto technique.  With an approach to vocalization that is much like a gym workout—complete with its grunts and squeals—she aims to build vocal musculature through the practice of a variety of 'raw sounds.'  "The element of struggle with one's voice—both physical and psychological—and the divine variety of timbres, registers, and dynamics that (sometimes) result from this struggle, is a subject of great interest and importance to me."

Alex Huddleston studied composition at Columbia College Chicago with Marcos Balter, Kenn Kumpf, and David Reminick, and recently completed his Masters degree at the Boston University School of Music, where he studied with Joshua Fineberg.  A recent piece of his for pianist and assistant, neglected Gardens; layers of rust, patina, and rock, treats the piano as a complex assembly of mechanical objects and vibrating entities.  In the piece, the pianist sits at the keyboard while the assistant reaches into the body of the instrument and plays directly on the strings.  "As a composer, my interests tend toward oblique criticism of structures of music making in various traditional forms."  The work treats the piano as a series of oscillators in a great "analogico-mechanical synthesizer."

Brien Henderson

Brien Henderson's recent compositional work examines the introspective power of medieval plainsong and the textured melodicism of Renaissance polyphony.  Strongly guided by architect Antoni Gaudí's claim that "originality means returning to our origins," Brien reimagines these timeworn elements in a pitch organization system of his own invention that "embraces the full chromatic spectrum while maintaining a decidedly modal character."  Brien's work also treats noise elements, timbre, and musical fragments as essential material.  A June in Buffalo alum, his piece Fragments of Lost Words was performed by Ensemble SIGNAL at the festival in 2013.

Brien has studied composition with Richard Festinger, Christopher Jones, and Ben Sabey at San Francisco State University, where he earned both Bachelor of Music and a Master of Arts degrees.  Also a singer, for the past two years he sang with Ut Re Mi, a San Francisco-based choir specializing in Renaissance music, and for whom he composed Noli esse vana, a setting of a text from The Confessions of St. Augustine.

Igor Coelho Marques hails from Curitiba, a large Brazilian city 500 miles southwest of Rio de Janeiro.  Beginning his musical education at the city's public conservatory, he soon transferred to Brigham Young University, where he received his undergraduate degree in composition.  He later pursued a Master's degree at the University of Utah before arriving in Buffalo for his PhD.



Igor's style and skill is on display in his 2014 piece, I Win, for pierrot ensemble.  "At the time, I was taken by the idea that even when people discredit you, if you trust your choices and cherish meaningful relationships, you 'win' in the end."  Each of the five instruments is highlighted in a different section of the piece; the composer giving unique material and a characteristic affect to each part, with a conclusion that brings together all the disparate elements.

Nathan Kelly is a composer interested composing for large ensemble forces and in post-minimal music.

Derick Evans is a New York native who grew up just outside of Utica.  Spending his youth performing as an electric bassist in various bands—including his own instrumental jazz-rock trio—he went on to earn his Bachelor of Music degree from the College of Wooster.  He later earned his Master of Music degree from The University of Arizona, where he studied with Daniel Asia.  While in Arizona, Derick served as instructor of a self-designed undergraduate music course focused on improvisation and composition, and earlier this year he founded ensemble D.E.R.F., the school’s first ensemble dedicated solely to performing student works.  D.E.R.F. has performed a variety of works, including Derick's own GILA, a "quirky and playfully irreverent" piece composed for the ensemble.

Derick's academic interests center on American composers, rock music theory, and the assimilation of popular styles in Western concert music.  Derick is excited to leave the Southwest for a cooler northern state.  "Having spent the last two winters in Arizona, I’m excited about the changing seasons and experiencing a snow-filled winter this year in Buffalo.  Although I admit that, having been away for so long, I may have a nostalgic and romanticized recollection of what the snow is like.  My boots and I will find out soon enough."