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

Mivos Quartet Residency

Mivos Quartet

Next week, New York's Mivos Quartet will be in residency at the Center. The group that the Chicago Reader has called “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” will bring their unique brand of musical ferocity to Buffalo for an evening of contemporary music, at which they'll perform works by Taylor Brook, David Felder, Martin Stauning, and Helmut Lachenmann.

Devoted to the performance of new works for string quartet, Mivos has worked with several international composers with a wide breadth of aesthetic perspectives.  The quartet has performed works by composers as diverse as Harrison Birtwistle, Philip Glass, Annie Gosfield, György Kurtág, Alex Mincek, Wolfgang Rihm, and UB's own David Felder and Tony Conrad.  Committed to the production of new works and the expanding of the string quartet repertoire, Mivos enjoys close collaboration with composers over extended periods.  Such collaborations have resulted in new works by composers such as Mark Barden, Dan Blake, Patrick Higgins, Scott Wollschleger, and Sam Pluta—whose Chain Reactions/Five Events for quartet and electronics can be heard below. As an ensemble dedicated to education, Mivos will begin their residency with a workshop for graduate composers in Baird Recital Hall (Nov. 19, 3:00pm).  The quartet will read pieces by UB composers Roberto Azaretto, Nathan Heidelberger, Su Lee, and Zane Merritt.

As a genre, the string quartet manages to combine the nimble agility of a chamber ensemble with the genteel historical respectability of the symphony orchestra.  Indeed, sometime during the twentieth century, the string quartet seemed to overtake the symphony as the key genre in which composers were most likely to articulate their musical manifestos, the pièces de résistance of their catalogs.  Think of Carter's third quartet and Crumb's Black Angels, or more recently, Thomas Adés Arcadiana and Haas's String Quartet No. 3 "In iij. Noct."—all of which, it's worth pointing out, are in Mivos's repertoire.  Since commissioning and premiering new music is a key part of the quartet's mission, Mivos is devoted to continuing this tradition, employing—in the words of the New York Classical Review's George Grella—"a physically, intellectually, and aesthetically energetic engagement with the high Modernist values of harmonic, gestural, and structural complexity."

Next week's concert will feature two works composed just last year:  Martin Stauning's delicate, gossamery Atmende Steine ("Breathing Stones") and Taylor Brook's just-intoned El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.  The latter takes its title from the eponymous story by Borges, ("The Garden of Forking Paths"), which presents a conception of time in which all possible outcomes of any event simultaneously co-exist, evoking ideas of a hypertextual multiverse.  Brook's piece, winner of the quartet's 2014 Mivos/Kanter Prize, lives up to the ideas evoked by its title by drawing elements from a multiverse of traditions, including Japanese Gagaku, central African music, and free improvisation among others, endeavoring to create an "alternate history of music."

UB faculty composer David Felder will also be featured on the program.  Felder's first string quartet, Third Face, will finish out the first half.  Consisting mostly of aggressive, dramatic gestures separated by isolated islands of quiet, the piece was described by Andrew Porter in the New Yorker as "lucid, but with a controlled wildness in its making. Written for virtuosi, it challenges them by presenting its fierce, fertile ideas with almost reckless rhythmic and dynamic exuberance."  A brief excerpt can be heard below.

While the concert opens with Brook's imagined alternate musical history, Mivos will end the program with the third quartet by Helmut Lachenmann, a composer whose work has constantly commented on the historical traditions of European classical music, as well as the "aesthetic apparatus" of that music's social institutions and contingencies.  Certainly one of Lachenmann's most important works in the past 15 years, Grido ("cry") opens with gloriously strident sustained tones, before unfolding into a dense universe of complex harmonies, brilliantly vibrant tremolos, penetrating silence, and violent scratch tones.  The piece existentially scrutinizes the string quartet itself, as a genre, a medium, and a source of sonic material.

Mivos's program will thus cover all the extremes:  from the understated translucence of Stauning's piece to the  sinewy muscularity of Felder's.  And the concert will conclude with the strangely meta feat of a string quartet exploring the string quartet via a piece for string quartet, a musical Ouroboros of mind-bending composition and dazzling virtuosity not to be missed!

—Ethan Hayden

Mivos Quartet

Composer Workshop

November 19, 3:00pm

Baird Recital Hall

free admission

Concert

November 20, 7:30pm

Baird Recital Hall

$15 general, $10 seniors, free for all UB students

UB Composers have been up to Great Things!

Summer is often a very exciting and active time for composers, and that's especially true for those here at UB.  This past summer saw many of our composers having works performed, and participating in conferences, festivals, and seminars in the US and abroad.

Colin Tucker

Colin Tucker had a particularly busy summer.  While attending the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, he presented a lecture recital with renowned Australian saxophonist Joshua Hyde.  The lecture dealt with issues of notation, interpretation, and performance practice in the solo pieces that Colin wrote for him (including futures unmade in the boundlessness of the instant).  In May, Colin had his newest piece, not this (2014) for bass flute, bass clarinet, saxophone, piano, percussion, mezzo-soprano, and strings premiered by the French ensemble, soundinitiative, in Paris.  Finally, his chamber piece, engulfed, constrained in a widening gap (2013), which was premiered at last year's June in Buffalo festival, saw three performances this summer, including two by the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble.

Su Lee also traveled to Europe, as her Melting Crystal for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and 'cello was a winner of the Kazimierz Serocki International Composers’ Competition in Warsaw, Poland.  In addition, her exciting large ensemble piece, Soundless Cry, was performed at the Mise-en Music Festival in New York. 

Chun-ting Pang was also at this festival, which saw the US premiere of his Vocalize the Voicelessness for trombone, percussion 'cello, and piano.  On the festival’s last day, Chun-ting flew to Finland to attend Sävellyspaja 2014, an annual composition masterclass in Porvoo. While in Finland, he studied with Jukka Tiensuu, Jouni Kaipainen, and Tomi Räisänen, and heard the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra perform his piece, The Flowers Appear on Earth. Later, Chun-ting was privileged to be one of the fellows at the Composers Conference at Wellesley College, a course led by Mario Davidovsky, Steve Mackey, and Augusta Read Thomas.  At Wellesley, Chun-ting revised Vocalize the Voicelessness, which had a successful performance at the conference’s final concert. 

For the past year, Nathan Heidelberger has had the honor of being the first ever composer-in-residence for Oerknal!, a new music collective based in The Hague. The culmination of this partnership took place in June, a portrait concert of Nathan’s music called Lunatics!, featuring his pieces, My Hands Are Empty (which was premiered by the Slee Sinfonietta in April 2012), Descriptions of the Moon (his epic song cycle for soprano and piano), and Breather, a brand new sextet composed for Oerknal!. You can hear some live audio from the performance here.  “It was deeply rewarding to work closely with such a phenomenal great of young performers,” Nathan said, “and I'm looking forward to future collaborations with them.  I was grateful to received support from The Center to help cover my travel expenses.”

Juan Colón-Hernández traveled to Valdeblore, France for the Zodiac Festival, where his trio for clarinet, 'cello, and piano, Sobre el camino y otras cosas, was performed.  While there, he took master classes with composer Andrew List.  Later, Juan's string quartet, A Discontinuous Flux, was awarded third prize at the Malta International Music Competition where he participated in master classes with composer/performer John M. Kennedy.  Finally, Juan's solo guitar piece, Tropos, was selected as part of the 12th Annual Festival of Contemporary Music in San Francisco.

Weijun Chen

Weijun Chen's Canoe for string quartet was premiered by the Freya Quartet at the Charlotte New Music Festival.  Inspired by the poem 'I Am a Canoe' by the Misty Poet, Cheng Gu, Canoe won 2nd prize in the University of Louisville's Frank Robert Abell Young Composer Competition for New Chamber Music.  The reviewer, Perry Tannenbaum, said of Weijun's piece, "Strands of melody broke loose from the quartet harmonies as the score replicated the drift, the loneliness, the longing, the emotion, and the despair of the poem. Toward the end, there were ethereal passages that jumped beyond the template of the poetry and showed that Chen, unlike many of his contemporaries, is unafraid of lingering in intense expression."  Weijun's music was also celebrated when his wind ensemble piece, Distance, won the Hat City Music Theater's American Prize.

Wooden Cities prepares to perform in Cleveland, OH

Other UB composers packed up and took their works on the road.  Buffalo's up-and-coming new music collective, Wooden Cities—which features a number of UB composers among its members—played a five-city DIY tour across the Rust Belt that included performances in university concert halls, experimental theaters, indy bookstores, and even a dive bar. In addition to performing works by Berio, Eastman, Ives, and Zorn, the ensemble's performances were bursting with new music from UB composers, including Ethan Hayden's (tRas), Nathan Heidelberger's Occasionally, music, Zane Merritt's The Reputation, and Matt Sargent's Tide, in addition to UB faculty composer Jeffrey Stadelman's Koral 8.

Megan Beugger

Several other UB composers had eventful summers.  Matt Sargent's large-scale glockenspiel solo, Saint, was premiered by its namesake, percussionist Trevor Saint at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.  Matt also began an appointment as visiting lecturer in composition and electronic music at the Hartt School of Music.  Megan Grace Beugger spent the summer working on a new piece for her dissertation, as well as editing her Liason for piano-dancer, which was performed by Melanie Aceto at Hallwalls in late July (many of you will remember this intriguing piece from June in Buffalo 2013).  In addition to a performance of his bats with baby faces in the violet light at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and performances with Wooden Cities, Ethan Hayden saw the publication of his book on Sigur Rós's ( ) by Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series.

All in all, a remarkably busy summer for our composers!  We can't wait to see what's next for them this year!

—Ethan Hayden

UB graduate composer Nathan Heidelberger at the Aspen Music Festival and Copland House

In our last post, we took a look at our graduate composers at the University at Buffalo, who had an incredibly active summer participating in seminars, conferences, and festivals across all of Europe and the United States. We sat down with one of them, Nathan Heidelberger, a composer entering his third year at the doctoral program here, and asked him to talk about the places he went, the musicians he worked with, and the pieces he had performed.   

Nathan Heidelberger
photo by Megan Metté

“This summer I spent a month as one of six participants in the Master Class Composition Program at the Aspen Music Festival and School. The travel to the Festival was made possible by a generous grant from the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21^st Century Music. The program was led by Christopher Rouse, currently the composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic, and Augusta Read Thomas, a longtime friend of the Center. In addition to working with these two distinguished composers, the Festival afforded me the opportunity to take in a number of concerts performed by world-class musicians, get some focused composing done, and, of course, climb a few mountains. I was also treated to premieres of two of my pieces.

“I wrote in flux / in flecks / influx / inflects, a trio for alto flute, viola, and metallic percussion, specifically for the Aspen Festival. It was premiered by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, an elite group of student performers under the direction of Sydney Hodkinson. The piece is an exploration of fluctuating sounds. There are rarely any steady pitches – rather, notes are constantly being destabilized through trills, tremoli, detuning, singing while playing, and so on. My goal was to create an iridescent and constantly shifting texture, one befitting the elusive charm of the “alto” instruments I was writing for. A revised version of this piece will be performed in Buffalo by the Norrbotten Neo Ensemble when they visit the Center in December.

             

“My second performance at Aspen was the long-overdue premiere of an old orchestral piece, …moves through a space… I wrote the piece in 2009 at the end of my undergraduate studies at Oberlin Conservatory, but I was never able to hear it. The piece is mostly very sparse, with the full orchestra only coming together once or twice. A rocking, footstep-like figure is present almost the entire time, passed between different instruments, creating a sense of foreground behind which various other sounds drift in and out. The piece was performed in a reading session by the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen Orchestra, under the baton of Alexandra Arrieche, one of the Festival’s conducting fellows. Robert Spano, the conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the artistic director of the Festival, was also there to help guide us through the reading.

“After my time at the Aspen Festival I also had the privilege to join four other composers in the first ever Cultivate workshop  Cultivate Workshop at the Copland House in my hometown of Cortlandt Manor, New York. The program, organized by artistic director Michael Boriskin and composer Derek Bermel, consisted of a week of intensive rehearsals and discussions, culminating in a concert of premieres by the Music from Copland House Copland House ensemble. My piece, a quartet for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano called Halve Time, began as a series of rough sketches read by the Antares Quartet when the Center brought them to Buffalo last April, which were fleshed out while I was in Aspen. The piece consists of five movements; the longest lasts about three minutes, with the other movements repeatedly halving each others’ durations until the shortest one lasts only ten seconds. These durational restraints elicit radically different behaviors from the same basic musical materials from movement to movement. The form is a nod to Zeno, the ancient Greek philosopher who suggested a series of paradoxes in which one can never really travel from point A to point B, since one must first travel half the distance, and then half the remaining distance, and then half the remaining distance again, and so on, ad infinitum. Local ensemble Wooden Cities will be presenting the Buffalo premiere of this piece on December 14^th, at Hallwalls.”

Last Spring, Nathan participated in a concert with our friends at the A Musical Feast concert series at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. His song cycle, Descriptions of the Moon, which uses text from a diverse array of writers including Dante Algheri, e.e. cummings, Galileo Galilei, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, and others, was performed by mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley and UB’s own faculty pianist Eric Huebner. Check out their stellar performance in the video below:

Busy summer for UB graduate composers!

Our composers had a very active summer participating at seminars, institutes, conferences, and festivals in the U.S. and all across Europe:

Jacob Gotlib was a selected as a participant composer for a two-week residency at the Wellesley Composers Conference in Wellesley, Massachusettes, where he studied closely with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Melinda Wagner and June in Buffalo veteran composer Eric Chasalow. His piece, Year Without Summer (Daumenkino), was performed by some of today’s expert musicians, including conductor and friend of the Center James Baker, as well as UB faculty clarinettist Jean Kopperud. You can listen to Year Without Summer (Daumenkino) here.

UB graduate composer Jacob Gotlib
photo by Megan Metté

Juan Colón-Hernández spent two weeks at the soundScape Festival in Maccagno, Italy, just south of the French/Swiss Alps, where his piece Hazy Transmutations for violin and piano was performed, coached by pianist and conductor Thomas Rosenkranz.

Dimitar Pentchev participated in this year’s June in Buffalo where his piece, 1:05, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano was performed.

Robert Phillips was selected to be one of twelve composers to spend two weeks at the Harvard University Summer Composition Institute, where his piece Shindō no su for flute, bass clarinet, glockenspiel, keyboard with laptop, violin, viola, and cello, was performed by the Talea Ensemble under the baton of Eduardo Leandro in Paine Hall at Harvard University. He was also invited be a panelist at the Harvard Colloquia during the final days of the Institute, where he discussed the topic, (Un)Original(ity), curated by Aaron Einbond, from the University of Huddersfield.

Nathan Heidelberger had perhaps the most active summer of all – he was chosen to be one of only six composers to spend a month at the Aspen Music Festival led by New York Philharmonic composer-in-residence Christopher Rouse and joined by longtime friend of the Center Augusta Read Thomas and visiting Pulitzer Prize winning composer Jennifer Higdon. Nathan’s piece, in flux / in flecks /influx / inflects, for alto flute, viola, and percussion, was performed by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, an elite group of student performers directed by Sydney Hodkinson. The festival also chose to workshop an orchestra piece of Nathan’s, titled Moves Through a Space, under guidance from conductor and Academy director Robert Spano. Nathan then continued on to the Cultivate Workshop at the Copland House, where his piece, Halve Time, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano was performed.

And the summer is not quite over yet! At the moment, Chun Ting Pang is currently in France participating as a selected composer at Fondation Royaumont with June in Buffalo veteran composer Brian Ferneyhough, and Diana Soh is just beginning her second year as an invited composer for the Cursus II at IRCAM.

Several other University at Buffalo musicians and performers were active this summer as well. UB graduate clarinetist, philosopher, and musicologist Christopher Culp attended the fresh inc. festival in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he worked with some of today’s top new music composers and musicians, and performed Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and Francis Poulenc’s Sextet. UB undergraduate flutist Jamie Sweringa spent two and a half weeks at the Orfeo Music Festival in Vipiteno, Italy, where she studied with flutist Elizabeth Goode and performed in several solo, chamber ensemble, and orchestra performances, and UB undergraduate trombonist Matt Stewart was able to attend both the Atlantic Brass Quintet Summer Seminar and the Summer Brass Institute. 

Charles Wuorinen and the New York New Music Ensemble in residence

The incomparable Charles Wuorinen visits UB on Tuesday, April 19 in conjunction with a four-day residency by the New York New Music Ensemble, distinguished proponents of his music -- along with many other composers working in "the more rigorous end of the contemporary repertory," as The New York Times put it in a recent, admiring review.

At 7:30 pm on Tuesday, Wuorinen will conduct members of the New York New Music Ensemble in four of his works at Lippes Concert Hall at Slee Hall: Salve Regina: John Bull (1961, rev. 1997); The River of Light (1996); Fifty Fifty (2002); Metagong (2008). That concert will be preceded by a lecture/demonstration on his music at 3 pm.

On Wednesday (4/20), the NYNME will give readings of works by four fortunate students in UB's graduate composition program: Kenichi Saeki, Chun Ting Pang, Jacob Gotlib, Ethan Hayden, Nathan Heidelberger, and Felipe Ribiero.  And on Thursday, the NYMNE steps into the spotlight at Lippes to perform works by Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Tania Leon, Wuorinen, Alexandre Lunsqui, and Mario Davidovsky. Tickets for the latter event are available here.

Wuorinen is no stranger to Buffalo, having been a Senior Faculty member at June in Buffalo during the early 1980s, and in 2003.  His many honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize (the youngest composer to receive the award).  His more than 250 compositions encompass every form and medium, including works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, soloists, ballet, and stage.  

His newest works include It Happens Like This, a dramtic cantata on poems of James Tate to be premiered at Tanglewood in Summer 2011, Time Regained, a fantasy for piano and orchestra for Peter Serkin, James Levine and the MET Opera Orchestra, Eighth Symphony for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Metagong for two pianos and two percussion. He is currently at work on an operatic treatment of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain to a libretto by the author. (Wuorinen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories based on the novel of Salman Rushdie was premiered by the New York City Opera in Fall 2004.) Described as "maximalist," his works have been recorded on nearly a dozen labels including several releases on Naxos, Albany Records (Charles Wuorinen Series), John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and a CD of piano works performed by Alan Feinberg on the German label Col Legno.

Founded in 1976, the New York New Music Ensemble is one of NYC's quintessential groups, noted for its authoritative interpretations of challenging "uptown" repertoire. With more than 120 commissions and 20+ recordings to its credit, it is one of the leading ensembles of its kind. Wrote the Times's Allan Kozinn in a recent review, "These are musicians for whom sharp-edged themes, complex rhythms, and dense harmonies hold no terrors, and they usually make the works they play, however thorny, sound fresh and vital."