Performances, Commissions, Residencies: A busy Fall for UB Composers

Our composers have been up to really extraordinary things, and the Fall semester saw many of them composing new works, receiving commissions, and having works performed by some of the most skilled performers in the field.  Neither snow, nor rain, nor lake-effect thundersnow stays these composers from constantly creating new and exciting work!  Here is just a sample of what some of the group are up to:

Nathan Heidelberger has been hard at work on his dissertation, an extended single-movement work for string quartet.  The first two sections of the piece were read and recorded last Fall during the Mivos Quartet's residency at the Center, and he was enthusiastic about the results.  In addition, Nathan and pianist Daniel Walden were recently granted a Special Award from the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music (named for the virtuoso pianist who was a professor of music at UB from 1973-1993).  Nathan describes their next project:  "The grant will help support an upcoming collaborative project:  a recital-length program that will combine a new multi-movement piano solo of mine with a complete performance of the Luigi Rossi manuscript, a collection of bizarre 16th-century Italian harpsichord music that includes the only extant keyboard work by Carlo Gesualdo."  You can hear Daniel's performance of Nathan's song cycle Descriptions of the Moon, with vocalist Marine Fribourg ,below:

Robert Azaretto had two new works premiered in the Fall.  His solo piano piece, lago. paisajismo abstracto. 2., was premiered in Buenos Aires by Bruno Mesz in the gorgeous Teatro Nacional Cervantes, Argentina's national theatre.  His flute and bass clarinet duo, paisajismo abstracto. 4., was premiered at the Distat Terra festival in Choele Choel.  The latter piece was commissioned by Musica AntiquaNova for Austria's Duo Soufflé.

Matt Sargent

Matt Sargent has had a very busy Fall semester.  He collaborated on a duo concert of electroacoustic music with turntablist Dani Dobkin, which was presented at the Hartford Art School in November.  Then in December, the Ghost Ensemble performed his work Tide for nine "sliding instruments."  The Undue Percussion Duo (featuring percussionists Nick Fox and Trevor Saint) included Matt's stunning small stones in a program they played on six-city Midwestern tour in October.  Saint is a frequent collaborator of Matt's, and will be performing a new work of his for solo glockenspiel in March.  Matt will see another premiere in March:  he was commissioned to write More Snow to Fall, a work for two electric guitars and 'cello, which will be premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.

Colin Tucker has received several commissions, and is no doubt hard at work composing new works.  Richard Haynes, clarinetist of ELISION, Weston Olencki, trombonist of Wild Rumpus/Fonema Consort, and Aaron Hynds, a tubist at Bowling Green State University all commissioned new solo works from Colin.  He also had several works performed in the Fall.  His solo saxophone work futures unmade in the boundlessness of the instant was performed at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur by Joshua Hyde, and was taken on a tour of Ohio universities by the New York-based saxophonist, Geoff Landmann.  In addition, his sound installation, voice dross, was commissioned by the Echo Art Fair, where it was installed in September.

Chun Ting Pang's Pulsating Garden—a commission by Hong Kong Composers' Guild—was premiered during the guild's annual new music festival, Musicarama, by Korea's Ensemble Eclat.  In addition, his Vocalize the Voicelessness for trombone, percussion, 'cello, and piano will have its German premiere in March by Ensemble Ascolta.  Chun Ting also became the composer-in-residence of the Hong Kong-based Zheng Quartet, ZhengMusic (the zheng is a Chinese zither).  A new commission for the quartet will be performed during this season.

Zane Merritt
photo by Megan Metté

Zane Merritt had two new works premiered in the Fall:  his chamber ensemble piece Sex-Bot (serial no. 5347) becomes self-aware and falls in love with an Allen wrench was premiered by Wooden Cities in October (read more about that performance here), and his orchestral work Dramatic Individuals was premiered by the Dubuque Symphony Orchestra in November.  This weekend, he and UB 'cello professor Jonathan Golove will premiere his Mercury Aqua Mirage for theremin 'cello and electric guitar at the SUNY New Music and Culture Symposium.  At the same event he will perform solo guitar works by fellow UB composers Nathan Heidelberger, Colin Tucker, and Meredith Gilna, and will premiere a new work by Megan Grace Beugger.  Megan will have two pieces played at this symposium:  in addition to her new guitar piece, her percussion duo Daring Doris will also be performed.  Megan is also gearing up for this year's MATA Festival in New York, which will see a performance of her piece for piano-dancer, Liason.

Several composers attended festivals and conferences in the Fall.  Su Lee was one of of eight composers selected to attend the Goethe-Institut Boston's December symposium.  There, she took part in composition workshops with composers Raphaël Cendo and Isabel Mundry.  Su was also commissioned to write a new piece for the New York-based ensemble mise-en, which the group will premiere during their 2015/16 season.  Weijun Chen's work In Search of a Shore was heard at the Composition in Asia Festival in Tampa, and he is planning on presenting other pieces at several conferences in the Spring, including the RED NOTE New Music Festival Composition Workshop (Normal, IL), the Mise-En Music Festival (New York, NY), and the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition 30th Anniversary Conference (Louisville, KY), where his string quartet, Canoe, will be performed by TALEA Ensemble.  Just this week, Weijun has been named a composition fellow at this summer's Aspen Festival.

Esin Gündüz recently revised a piece she composed for the Meridian Arts Ensemble (during their Fall 2011 residency at the Center) for performance by the Cleveland-based Factory Seconds Trio.  The revised work will be premiered at Baldwin Wallce Conservatory this spring.  She is also hard at work on a commissioned work for violists Yuri Gandelsman and Tuba Ozkan, which will be performed in September at Turkey's Mersin State Conservatory.  As the composer-in-residence at Buffalo's Friends of Vienna, Esin is writing another trio which will see an October premiere.  Also active with the Buffalo-based ResAUnance, Esin (a skilled vocalist) recently made a debut recording of folksong arrangements and original works with the improvisatory ensemble, which should be mixed and mastered by mid-semester.

Ethan Hayden had several works performed in the Fall, including his percussion quintet Clicks & Beeps, which was performed by the Concert Percussion Ensemble at Florida Atlantic University, and his four-voice arrangement of Kurt Schwitter's Ribble Bobble Pimlico, which was performed by ThingNY at two concerts in November.  He performed his (tRas) for solo voice and electronics at the INTIME symposium in Coventry, UK in October.  Ethan is also the artist-in-residence this year at the Electronic Poetry Center's annual Digital Poetry & Dance concert, at which he'll be premiering a suite of new pieces for voice, video, and electronic sounds called "…ce dangereux supplément…".

Matthew Chamberlain spent his Fall finishing a string trio commissioned by Ensemble Chartreuse, as well as a guitar solo that will soon be premiered by Zane Merritt.  Matthew is also the director of UB's Contemporary Music Ensemble, and is often hard at work preparing new works for performance with that group.

Clinton Haycraft

Several composers have been collaborating with choreographer Melanie Aceto, from UB's Department of Theatre and Dance.  Clinton Haycraft's work, Advocate, for violins, was choreographed by Aceto, and has already seen three performances throughout the Western New York area.  Jiryus Ballan collaborated with Aceto and UB percussionist Alexander Chimienti on a series of works.  After joining Aceto's modern dance class as an accompanist (Jiryus is an accomplished Buzuq player), he and Chimienti began an ongoing collaboration that began with live improvisation and eventually coalesced into 25 tracks of recorded compositions.  For Jiryus, a key part of the project was the intercultural exchange.  "I think the most important thing was the combination of different musical elements from diverse cultures.  For example, I used quarter tones in some of the tracks and employed the Maqam [a system of melodic modes used in traditional Arabic music]."  He compares this kind of compositional process to the manner in which traditional folk music is created.  "In my culture (Palestinian), the folk music was created by the people.  They repeated melodies and they remembered them by heart and with time these melodies attained their own unique characteristics."  An excerpt of some of these collaborations can be heard below:

With all this activity just last semester, we can't wait to see what's next for these composers in the coming months!

—Ethan Hayden

New Composition Students at UB

There are six extremely talented composers joining the Composition program this Fall!  We're excited to get to know them and their music, and we can't wait to hear what new things they'll be coming up with during their time in Buffalo.

Matthew Chamberlain is a composer and conductor from Leesburg, Virginia.  He studied composition at Oberlin with Josh Levine and Tim Weiss, eventually earning a Bachelor's in composition and a Master's in conducting.  As a conductor, Matthew has served as Music Director of the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestras’ Philharmonia Orchestra.  He has also led the Oberlin Sinfonietta, Arts & Sciences Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra, and Contemporary Ensemble with whom he performed at the 2013 Third Practice Festival at the University of Richmond.  As an advocate of new music, Matthew has commissioned works by young composers for the NOYO Philharmonia, and has premiered numerous new pieces.  

In 2014, Matthew premiered his large ensemble piece, Falstaff imagines a passacaglia with the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra.  His recent pieces have focused on defamiliarizing common formal devices, playing on listener expectation.  He says that Falstaff is a piece that doesn't trust it's own form.  "The piece is easily distracted; it wanders from the only goals it has been able to articulate, and when all is said and done, it’s not quite sure whether to be proud or sad about its nascent independence."  While Falstaff might not know whether to be proud or sad, Matthew is enthusiastic.  He's currently working on an essay about the concept of "relevance," aiming to "help people to talk about the art they make with less shame and more gusto!"  Matthew is also a fan of earlier music, an affinity which comes across in his own work.  "I am predisposed to [musical] materials that carry a great deal of historical baggage, as they have so much potential to illuminate the contexts in which they are presented."  We're sure he'll be at home in a city with as rich a musical heritage as Buffalo!

Jiryis Ballan grew up in Kafr Yasif, a city in Northern Israel near Nazareth.  As a child, he was exposed to a wide variety of music, including slassical opera, liturgical music, 1960s protest songs, as well as music from South America and Lebanon.  He studied music and archaeology at the University of Haifa, and, more recently, taught at an alternative school called "Hewar" (which means "dialogue" in Arabic).  While in Haifa, he studied classical and jazz theory, and played guitar and buzuq, a long-necked fretted lute from Lebanon.  Jiryis can be seen playing the buzuq in a recent film, 1913:  Seeds of Conflict and recently performed at the Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony.

As a Fulbright scholar, Jiryis is excited to join the program at UB.  "I wish to further work and develop my composition skills, with special focus on notation techniques, music analysis, and orchestration.  There is a warm atmosphere in the Music Department.  I am looking forward to being involved as much as I can here, and other departments."  He's already begun reaching out to the Theatre and Dance department, where he's an accompanist for the contemporary dance class.

Meredith Gilna recently received her MM in composition from the Hartt School, where she studied with Robert Carl and David Macbride.  Before that, she was at Butler University, studying with Michael Schelle, Frank Felice, and James Aikman.  As an accomplished electric bassist, much of her work explores the lower realm of the pitch spectrum.  "I love all sounds that are low pitched," she says.  You can certainly hear this in her recent piece, Ride, for three electric basses with delay, distortion, alligator clips, and electric lady razor.  Ride is a text-based guided improvisation composed for her Electric Bass Band, one of the few exclusively electric bass ensembles.  When she's not composing, Meredith is playing bass in whatever context she can find.  She's currently working on learning all of the bass parts in Steely Dan's Royal Scam and Aja—a pursuit which she says is informing her compositional work(!).

Roberto Azaretto comes to UB from Buenos Aires, where he studied composition at Universidad Católica Argentina.  While he comes from a more modernist background, his work is starting move closer to "an experimental, desubjectivized, speculative perspective."  He describes his ever-changing compositional process:  "During the last few years most of my work has been about filtering and permuting modules, to be later stretched or compressed according to arbitrary metric sequences, and further altered by the accumulation of timbral modifications."

Ying-Ting Lin is a Taiwanese composer with degrees from National Kaohsiung Normal University and National Taiwan Normal University, where she studied with Ching-Wen Chao.  Active as a composer and pianist, Ying-Ting's music has been awarded several prizes, including the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan competition in 2010-2011, and the Taiwan National Ministry of Education Composition Award in 2010.  Her recent piece, Memories of Landscape (2011) for sheng, erhu, liuqin, pipa, and guzheng was awarded second place in the Chai Found Chinese Musical Instruments Competition in 2011.  The piece, inspired by Yan-Ting Hou's painting, Spring, represent's the composer's attempt to reflect her deepest solicitude over her motherland by featuring dots and lines—the two main components of Chinese ink wash painting.  

She describes her piece:  "It begins with sheng and string instruments, which portray the initial black spot in a Chinese painting. It then continues on melodious elements that depict lines. These two main components interlock throughout the whole work, embellishing the contemporary outfit by a traditional way of thinking.  The piece ends with the pipa and guzheng playing harmonics, as though an egret and a clover hide within branches and weeds. This suggests the beginning of lives, and the beginning of everything."

—Ethan Hayden