Talea Ensemble Residency

The internationally-renowned Talea Ensemble made their anticipated second trip to Buffalo and are preparing to premiere six works by UB graduate student composers Andres Bonilla-Garcia, Lihuen Sirvent, Jackson Roush, Francisco Corthey, Sohwa Lee, and Chi-Yen Huang. Each composer participated in a recorded workshop during the ensemble’s fall residency, and embarked on edits, revisions, and in a few cases complete rewrites of their drafted pieces. The pieces are extremely diverse in terms of instrumentation (from trio to full ensemble), use of electronics, use of contemporary or extended techniques, and they includes sonic material similar to that found during Beethoven’s time, Korean folk tunes, noise, and everything in between. This concert is FREE and open to the public.

Location: Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall

Date: March 14, 2025 

Time: 3:00PM

 

About Talea Ensemble

Heralded as “a crucial part of the New York cultural ecosphere” by the New York Times, the Talea Ensemble is comprised of nineteen of New York City’s finest classically-trained musicians, with a mission to champion musical creativity, cultivate curious listeners, and bring visionary new works to life with vibrant performances that remain in the audience’s imagination long after a concert.

Recipients of the 2014 Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, Talea has brought to life more than 30 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008. Partnering with institutions like the Austrian Cultural Forum or the French American Cultural Exchange, Talea has helped introduce NYC audiences to important works of such esteemed composers as Pierre Boulez, Georg Friedrich Haas, Beat Furrer, Pierluigi Billone, or Georges Aperghis.

Praised for their “verve and immaculate virtuosity” by the Washington Post, the Talea Ensemble is sought after both in the U.S. and Europe for its range, precision, risk-taking, and superior performance quality. Recent festival engagements include performances at Lincoln Center Festival, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, the Fromm Concerts at Harvard University, Warsaw Autumn Festival, Wien Modern, Chicago’s Contempo series, Royaumont Voix Nouvelles, Vancouver New Music, and many others. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels, and been radio-broadcast on ORF (Austria), HRF (Germany), and WQXR’s Q2.

Talea assumes an ongoing role in supporting a new generation of composers, and has undertaken residencies in music departments at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, New York University, and many others.

 

James Falzone's Ricercar in Sixth Tone Harmony

Program Note

Falzone's piece searches for a new harmony by revisiting the sixth-tone system, developed over a hundred years ago in the first modernist efflorescence of microtonality, but worthy of a fresh reconsideration. It seeks to answer the question, "By expanding the gamut of available pitches," [that is, by "adding more notes,"] "can we both create interesting relationships of dissonance in addition to expanding the acoustic framework of harmony?"

Behind the Score:

Recently released on New World Records is a portrait album of Falzone's music, featuring performances by ensembles with a variety of instrumental forces, including the Arditti Quartet and ELISION Ensemble, as well as an orchestral work for the Ostrava New Orchestra. Taken together, these pieces investigate how unexpected but compelling results might emerge from seemingly euphonious and otherwise familiar materials.

About the album:

Falzone has a unique approach to music, and the result is multilayered. Recommended for the adventurous! —Fanfare

The music has a sensuous and imaginative quality that goes beyond the purely cerebral. —Fanfare

 

 

Brian Caswell's Arrow Through the Window

 

 

Program Note

This work is an answer to a question that I have long been asking: how can multiple meters happen at the
same time?

Arrow Through the Window has two groups of musicians. The two groups share a common pulse, or beat. But the larger groupings of that pulse – or in other words, the meter – differ.

What you are hearing tonight is an excerpt of the piece. It is the first major section of the piece. There are three more major sections to follow.

 

Behind the Score:

Brian Caswell has spent his time at UB exploring diverse musics such as Jazz and Latin drumming and pipe organ playing. He has written Minimalist process pieces, and Neoclassical pieces. Brian's approach was to use this time to continually search. This cycle of exploration has led back to where he started: Jazz composition and piano playing. However, his approach to this music is entirely different than where he was five years ago. It might be better categorized as "Third Stream," which describes a music in between Jazz and Classical. His piece Arrow Through the Window is an arrival point for the composer, which embraces the foundations of his musical practice.

Brian's music can be found on Bandcamp.

William Brobston's SOJOURN

Program note:

SOJOURN is a meditation on a variety of musical gestures that are loosely based on the sounds emanating from a particular kinetic sculpture that I was fascinated with as a child in Birmingham, Alabama. The sounds become increasingly familiar as the tension of the piece unfolds, ultimately driving toward their impending cessation. 

Behind the Score:

Much of my compositional interest lies in the musical parameter of time. The way in which my work often explores this parameter is through the sequencing of repeated musical fragments. These fragments may act as interjections within a musical texture or they may occupy space harmoniously, depending on the nature of the piece. I am interested in the multitude of ways in which these small musical units can combine to create larger networks of sound, while also playing with the listener’s sense of time, memory, and expectation. Sojourn is an example of a piece that relies on a dense texture composed of several recurring fragments, but just as crucial to the composition is the sudden cessation of these sounds once they become familiar. 

Will supplied the following track as an example:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0LKWhvxKi0NH02F2XiNa2v?si=2e962c40689e472b

To explore more of his music, visit Will Brobston's website.

Thomas Little's Two Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel

 

First on the Sinfonietta's program is Thomas Little's Two Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel.

 

Program Note

This tone-poem is based on the first and thirty-seventh chapters of the Book of Ezekiel. The opening section sets Ezekiel (the oboe) against a foreign landscape of strings, before the heavens open to visions of the heavens, strange creatures with multiple faces, and wheels within wheels. The hymn tune “Helmsley” leads to the horn’s vox Dei, empowering Ezekiel on his mission. He soon encounters the second vision: the valley of dry bones, where God commands Ezekiel to prophesy and raise an army of skeletons from the earth. But as the second vision fades, will the people listen?

Behind the Score

The 21st-century composer comes on the heels of a vast and productive era of experimentation. Originality is no longer about generating a style sui generis; one can come up with a personal idiom by mixing and matching different things from different eras, depending on what the piece requires. To that end, Two Visions has the late-Romantic tone poem as a large-scale structure, and fill that mold with an Ivesian approach in textural layering (particularly between the oboe and strings, which bookend the piece), use of a hymn tune at a culmination point (the first vision), and the organ-esque orchestration at the beginning of the coda.

The second vision uses one of my own techniques. I call it “post-ergodic,” after James Tenney's term “ergodic form,” which describes static music of consistent parametric values. My post-ergodic music usually moves faster and consists of fragmentary material. This was taken to the limit in my percussion/electronics piece … as the sparks fly up [embedded below], where a digitized score re-composes itself for each performance, all based on an analysis of the starting motive. In the second vision of Two Visions, similar techniques control the relationships between different kinds of skittering, “bony” material across instruments. This allowed me to write fast music that never exactly repeats, and that can be as long or as short as the pacing of the music requires, and freed me to think more about how and when to tweak these parameters to shape the structure of that vision.

...as the sparks fly up 

 

 Premiered by UB faculty member Tom Kolor at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

Thomas Little’s work can be explored on his website, lentovivace.com.

His educational video series about classical music, Classical Nerd, can be seen on YouTube.

 

Concert! Slee Sinfonietta, March 11, 2025

The Robert & Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, with the Slee Sinfonietta conducted by Matthew Chamberlain, will premiere four pieces by UB graduate student composers on March 11, 7:30pm in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall.

Program:

Thomas Little, Two Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel

William Brobston, SOJOURN

Brian Caswell, Arrow Through Time

~~Intermission~~

James P.A. Falzone, Ricercar in Sixth-Tone Harmony

Falzone, in particular, takes the Sinfonietta to new places, as he utilizes his newly devised sixth-tone tuning system. The work features three separate pianos (tuned differently!) for the first time in the Sinfonietta’s history, and will show the ensemble in its largest formation in over a decade.

Brian Caswell’s work Arrow Through Time is also in an ‘absolute music’ vein and features polymeter, a technique in which different musical parts play at the same time but using different meters, or time signatures, for a richly complex rhythmic effect. 

William Brobston’s SOJOURN is a hefty revision of work presented at June in Buffalo 2024, and plays with time, memory, and expectation as fragments morph and return in unexpected ways.

Leading off the concert, and writing from specific extramusical inspiration, Thomas Little’s work Two Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel is a tone poem based on the first and 37th chapters of the Biblical book of Ezekiel.

Tickets may be purchased here ($10, or free with student ID).

Stay tuned for program notes, further details into the composers’ processes, and extra behind-the-score info this week!