Hanna Eimermacher: On Movement and Space

Hanna Eimermacher

Continuing our profiles of June in Buffalo faculty composers, we look at the music of Hanna Eimermacher.  Eimermacher has studied in Bremen, Graz, Frankfurt, and Buffalo, with Younghi Pagh-Paan, Beat Furrer, Pierluigi Billone, Mark Andre, and David Felder.  She has received a number of prestigious prizes and awards, including the Berlin-Rheinsberger Kompositionspreis (2012), a scholarship of the Deutsche Bundesregierung for Villa Massimo Rome (2014), and, most recently, a scholarship to study in Villa Concordia in Bamberg where she currently resides.  She has had works commissioned by SWR Südwestrundfunk, MaerzMusik Berliner Festspiele, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Deutsche Oper Berlin, and the Frankfurt Opera, and has worked with new music ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Interface, Ensemble Moto Perpetuo, and Klangforum Wien, for whom she is currently composing a music theatre piece.

Much of Eimermacher's music focuses on, in the composer's words, "the relationship between ear and eye:  sound, light, movement, picture, and space."  For her, this stems from the observation that "composition includes all these elements and the deep connection between them."  Such ideas manifest in a variety of different ways.  For instance, Hommage an den Klimerkasten (2011) takes its influence from a sculpture by the Swiss surrealist/existentialist artist, Alberto Giacometti.  The piece examines the ways that the perception of space can be impacted by the articulation of sounds in the quietest dynamic ranges.  Such sonic subtlety requires extremes of focus on the part of both the audience and the performer—for whom the fragility of these sounds require significant instrumental skill—and such sounds will be perceived differently in different spaces, indeed, in different locations in the same space.  "The piano fixes the axis of the piece, leading the other instruments in relationships of contrast and fusion with the details of their sonorities."  Commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture, the piece can be heard below in a performance by Ensemble Linea.

A related focus on space can be seen in Überall ist Wunderland, a large-ensemble work in which the twenty-three performers are positioned across a wide stage in a symmetrical manner.  The piece takes advantage of the spatial positioning to create canons and dialogues that move back-and-forth across the performance area.  When the performers are not playing, they stand still and stare forward in a statuesque manner, creating a ritualistic character to the overall performance (a factor most apparent during the final silence during which they all lean slightly toward stage right).  The work therefore explores the relationship between body, movement, and stage, and in a larger sense, between sound, location, and form.  (A live performance can be seen here.)

Audiences at June in Buffalo will hear the Slee Sinfonietta perform Eimermacher's Luftpost für L. (2012) for two 'celli and percussion, a work marked by even greater subtlety than the two pieces above, as soft 'cello oscillations encircle one another, occasionally undergirded by erratic bass drum pulses.  Ensemble Uusinta's program will feature two of the composer's works:  Transparenz (2003) for three percussionists playing glass bottles, accompanied by fixed media electronics; and Kannst du diesen verkehrt iegenden Vogel sehen? (2008) for bass flute and accordion.  Both works have a unique mix of innocence and sophistication—the former in the understated simplicity of their materials (most apparent in the delicate austerity of the bottle sounds in Transparenz), the latter in the way these materials are developed and incorporated into the composer's ongoing explorations of movement, space, and form.



We're looking forward to hearing not only Eimermacher's music, but also to hear her elaborate on these explorations during her lecture (June 9th, 10:00am).  Her perspective will be a valuable one to fellow composers and interested audiences alike.

Josh Levine: Imagination and Memory

June in Buffalo has been an international festival since its inception, attracting composers, performers, and other artists from around the world.  Its aesthetic has always been a broad one, where one is likely to hear American experimentalists programmed alongside the European avant garde.  It is for this reason, that Josh Levine makes a perfect addition to the JiB faculty, as he is an American composer with significant international ties, and a broadly cosmopolitan aesthetic.

Josh Levine

While he was born in Oregon, Levine originally trained as a classical guitarist in Basel, Switzerland.  He continued his musical studies in the same country as he switched to composition, studying with Balz Trümpy.  He later studied at the Paris Conservatory with Guy Reibel, and worked at IRCAM, later returning to the US to earn his PhD from UC San Diego, where he studied principally with Brian Ferneyhough.  Since then, his music has been internationally recognized and has received several awards, including First Prize and a Euphonie d'Or at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition.  His works have been commissioned by widely-recognized soloists including Aiyun Huang, Marcus Weiss, and Jürg Wyttenbach, as well as ensembles such as the soundSCAPE Trio, Calliope Duo, Ensemble Contrechamps, and Les Solistes de l’Ensemble Intercontemporain.  He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Composition at Oberlin.

For Levine, music is a locus where the unity of imagination and memory can be found.

The musical work is, for me, a site where the irrational and the rational, the sensual and the conceptual, and, most basically, sound and silence, spar and dance and transcend their seeming dichotomies.  Through ever-evolving interpretations of recurring musical materials, I explore the unity of memory and imagination—remembering as an act of imagining, and imagining as an act of remembering.  My composing is inspired by movement and the contemplation of change, whether in the physical world or in the psyche.

Despite the abstractness of such conceptual imagery, Levine's music is dynamic and rooted in the concreteness of the physical gesture.  "The physicality of musical performance and our emotional identification as listeners with its energy, gestures, and implicit drama are among its further driving forces."  His early work in the field of electroacoustic music led to an interest in temporal fluidity and harmonic nuance, as well as an attention to detail that seeks to bring "a richer resonance to every moment."  Such temporal and timbral examination can be heard in Levine's recent acousmatic piece, Oneirograph, which uses violin samples as its source material, but pulls open these sounds, finding vast resonant soundscapes within.  The piece's title refers to an instrument for measuring dreams—dreams, of course, being another site in which the divisions between memory and imagination become suspect.

This year's festival will see the performances of three of Levine's pieces.  The Slee Sinfonietta will present two of these.  The first, Four places, many more times (2011), is a percussion quartet which revolves around twelve specially tuned metal pipes.  Continuing Levine's interest in flexible perceptions of time, the composer describes the work as a series of "'sound objects' [which] shift and spin through space and different time zones in a kind of timbral kaleidoscope."  The second, Former Selves, for solo guitar, ensemble, and electronics features JiB special guest Magnus Andersson.  Approaching the idea of memory from a different angle, this work incorporates elements from several of the composer's earlier works, both as musical gestures articulated by the performers, as well as samples which are transformed by the electronics—even to the extent of incorporating recorded material from the piece's own 2007 premiere.  Levine describes the relationship between the soloist and ensemble:  

[The ensemble's music moves in largely homophonic blocks, like forms emerging from a void and receding again for no apparent reason.  The guitar does not participate in their creation, but passes between them.  As the homophony gradually unravels, the guitar in its turn begins to find openings into the ensemble, eventually (re)discovering there the full sound of its voice.

Levine, Former Selves (2007)

Finally, the Uusinta Ensemble will open their program with Levine's Glimpses (1986), an earlier work which reverses the play of memory found in Former Selves:  rather than pulling from previous works, Glimpses consists of material that would preoccupy the composer for years to come—that is, musical ideas that would be continuously remembered.  "The listener 'glimpses' moments of parallel musical narratives, aural images whose incompleteness leaves their possible pasts and futures to the imagination.  Much of the material is heard again in new contexts, but it rarely seems the same."  This work also features Andersson on guitar, who whispers a description of this material during the work's own performance, referring to them as "points of embarkation on a bankless river."

As a guitarist himself, it is no surprise that Levine's work often emphasizes that instrument, and as a performer, Levine has performed with the likes of Ensemble Contrechamps, the Basel ISCM Ensemble, the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, SONOR, and members of the sfSoundgroup.  He has recorded works by Mark Applebaum and Kristian Ireland on the Innova label.

As a dedicated teacher, Levine takes great joy in hearing the different approaches the students embrace in their own music.  As he explains:

I love it when a student comes in to the lesson, puts the music on the music stand, and it may be—in fact, it's almost surely going to be—in a style, or with a particular aesthetic orientation that doesn't correspond to what I personally would write.  But it's so fascinatingly done—it explores in such a beautiful way certain ideas, instrumental colors, or sounds that I've never quite explored in that way, and yet that I can empathize with and communicate with both through the score and through my personal relationship to them.

There is perhaps no better place for Levine to encounter the varied aesthetic orientations of young artists than at June in Buffalo, and we are excited for the composers who will learn from their dialogues with him, as they reckon with their own imaginations and memories.

Joshua Fineberg: An organic architecture

The word 'organic' is often (over-)used in music writing to describe music that develops seemingly of its own accord, that avoids blocky, sudden changes in favor of naturally flowing lines that coalesce toward arrival points that seem both unexpected and inevitable.  In truth, the word has often been used specifically to contrast the lyrical textural subtleties of French composers against the (perceived) mechanical intellectual rigor of Germanic music.  But the problem with the term 'organic' is that it relies on the untruth that any music could be 'natural'—as a cultural expression of human beings, music does not evolve of its own accord (at least, not composed music), but is always deliberately constructed and organized.  

Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid

No composer's work exemplifies this paradox perhaps as well as Joshua Fineberg.  Much of the neo-spectralist's output is marked by a Debussyan emphasis on texture, a highly decorated, contemplative attention to timbral detail.  However—as Fineberg will be the first to admit—this 'organic' appearance is illusory.  Instead, it is the result of careful psychoacoustic observation, research, and a meticulous compositional construction.  The result is something which is both free-flowing and punctiliously assembled, a kind of 'organic architecture'—not in the Fallingwater sense, but like the more recent work of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid—works that maintain the superficial impression of diaphanous elegance while clearly the result of careful and considered construction.

Fineberg, one of the foremost experts on the tradition of spectral music, studied with Tristan Murail at IRCAM before returning to the US to pursue a PhD in composition at Columbia.  He was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor for the Humanities at Harvard University from 2000-2007, and since then has been a professor, and director of the Center for New Music, at Boston University.  An accomplished writer on music, Finberg's book Classical Music, Why Bother? was published by Routledge Press in 2006, and he has served as editor for two issues of The Contemporary Music Review on Spectral Music (Vol. 19 pt. 2 and 3) and for a double-issue featuring the collected writings of Tristan Murail in English (Vol. 24 pt. 2 and 3).

We are excited that Fineberg will be joining the composition faculty at June in Buffalo 2016.  As a gifted pedagogue, his expertise will surely prove insightful to the emerging composers with whom he will be working.  The festival will see the performances of three of the composer's works, including an early piece, Paradigms, for six instruments and live electronics, which will be performed by Dal Niente.  The work's title illustrates the composer's frequent reliance on models in his work, whether these be "acoustic, physical, energetic, or simply poetic."

The festival will also feature a performance by Ensemble Uusinta of Objets trouvé, a piece based on an idea that has been frequently explored by visual artists:  that a familiar object may shift into "something else, something startling, or strange, or even beautiful."  [The Center was proud to host Ensemble Court Circuit in 2013, the ensemble for whom the piece was composed, who played it during their residency that year.]  In addition, the Arditti Quartet will be on hand to perform La Quintina, a work for string quartet and electronics Fineberg composed in collaboration with the ensemble in 2012.  The composer describes the inspiration for the piece:

There is a wonderful repertoire of four-part vocal polyphony in Sardinia in which singers attempt to create an illusory fifth voice while singing in harmony through excellent intonation, careful shaping of vowels, and the acoustics of resonant churches.  Our auditory processing system misinterprets the combinations of the vocal quartet’s overtones and suppressed frequency regions as a separate voice, producing this astonishing effect.  This vaguely feminine phantom voice is called la quintina (the fifth part), and is considered to be the Virgin Mary singing along.

In Fineberg's piece, the four members of the quartet combine to produce similar phantom tones acoustically, until the electronics eventually join in to assemble these ghostly fragments into an autonomous fifth part.  While a piece so dependent on resonance and acoustics can likely only be fully appreciated in a live performance, a well-rendered studio realization can be heard below.

Such works will put on display for listeners the aforementioned organic architecture of Fineberg's music, the effortful effortlessness of his colors and textures, and the dynamic interplay between study and realization.

—Ethan Hayden

Uusinta Ensemble: JiB's 'newest' resident ensemble

It's hard to believe, but June in Buffalo is already only three months away!  We've been hard at work planning for the event, and are excited about all the great music that will be made.  This week, we begin our series of profiles on the composers, ensembles, and artists who will be in residency at this year's festival.  We begin with a newcomer to JiB, Helsinki's Uusinta Ensemble.

Uusinta performs at 2014 MATA Festival

Uusinta was founded by composer Osmo Tapio Räihälä in 1998, and during their early years, when most of the members were themselves composers, the ensemble specialized in premiering new works by Finnish and Nordic composers.  More recently, the ensemble's repertoire has expanded to include works by composers from around the world, and they have oriented themselves around a prime mission to "bring the most exciting composers from all countries to its concerts in Helsinki and abroad."  Over the past two decades, the ensemble has found itself at a number of highly-regarded festivals and in venues around the world, including Berlin (Ohrenstrand), Paris (Theatre Dunois), Vienna (Arnold Schönberg Center), Valencia (Mostra Sonora), Oslo (Nordic Music Days), and Tallinn (Estonian Music Days).

In particular, Uusinta's performance at the 2014 MATA Festival earned them high praise, with the New York Times remarking on their versatility and virtuosity, and describing their performance as containing "ample gravity and dignity," while being marked by an "athletic brio" and a "playful ease and anything-goes attitude."  A concert at Helsinki's Musica Nova Festival with Nicholas Hodges and Magnus Lindberg prompted the Financial Times to applaud Uusinta's combination of "waves of energy" and 'fragility,' as well as to remark on the evocative textures of "shivering strings, rustling percussion and slithering woodwinds" in their performance of Toshio Hosokawa's Poe monodrama, The Raven.

Uusinta director, Ville Raasakka

Uusinta's commitment to realizing new works is an integral part of their DNA.  Formed by composers for composers, the group has premiered over 100 new works, and has collaborated with some of the most internationally-recognized composers currently active, including Beat Furrer, Chaya Czernowin, Mark Andre, Michel van der Aa, Hèctor Parra, and fellow Finnish artist (and recent visitor to the Center) Kaija Saariaho. In 2011, Uusinta initiated the contemporary concert series, Klang, which focuses on music composed after 2000.  The most recent Klang performance featured two premieres Uusinta commissions by composers Oscar Bianchi and Max Savikangas.  In 2000, the ensemble started its own publishing house, Uusinta Publishing Company, to publish new works by Finnish composers.  Over the past sixteen years, they have published works by artists such as Ralf Gothóni, Markus Fagerudd, and friend-of-the-Center, Sebastian Fagerlund.  During their tenth season as an ensemble, Uusinta was part of the EU's Re:New project, which promoted European contemporary music in eleven countries.  Uusinta, whose name can translate as both "replay" or "newest", was well-suited for such a project, as they have devoted themselves to producing, and reproducing the most exciting new works by established and emerging composers alike.  Under the artistic direction of composer Ville Raasakka, the ensemble has continued to stay true to this mission.

It is for this reason that we are so excited to welcome Uusinta to the festival this year.  A group so devoted to the realization of new works by young composers will fit right in with the mission of the festival, and we're looking forward to hearing them play and 'replay' the 'newest' music this summer in Buffalo.

June in Buffalo 2016: Call for Works

Ensemble SIGNAL will be among the
resident ensembles at June in Buffalo 2016

The Center is excited to announce the June in Buffalo 2016 call for works!  Below you can find application requirements for composers interested in attending the festival and writing for one of the many renowned resident ensembles, including the Arditti Quartet, Uusinta Ensemble, Dal Niente, and Ensemble SIGNAL.  Additional information can be found on the June in Buffalo website.

JUNE IN BUFFALO CALL FOR WORKS:

Presented by the Department of Music and The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, June in Buffalo, a festival and conference dedicated to composers, will take place from June 6-12, 2016 at the University at Buffalo.  June in Buffalo offers an intensive schedule of seminars, lectures, master classes with selected faculty composers, workshops, professional presentations, participant forums and open rehearsals as well as afternoon and evening concerts open to the general public and critics.  Each of the invited composers will have one of his/her pieces performed during the festival (please see application process for specifics).  Evening performances feature faculty composers, resident ensembles and soloists renowned internationally as interpreters of contemporary music.

Application Procedures

1. A résumé or curriculum vitae detailing your education, experience, and creative activity.
2. A letter of reference from someone acquainted with your current compositional activity.
3. A proposal requesting the performance of a recent work for:

1. 2 violins, viola, cello (or subset) – Arditti Quartet
2. flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, viola, cello (or subset) – Uusinta Ensemble
3. flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, cello (or subset) – Dal Niente
4. flute, clarinet, oboe, piano, violin, cello (or subset) – Ensemble Signal
5. solo instrument

Proposals with electronics and/or multimedia will be considered.

Included with the proposal should be a brief description of the work that includes length, full instrumentation, and any technical requirements.  Proposals for works in progress will be considered. A portion of the score plus the description listed above must be included with application materials for in-progress works.

4. One or two scores that demonstrate your recent work and accompanying recordings, if available.
5. A $25 non-refundable processing fee. Checks or money orders should be made payable to June in Buffalo.  Foreign applicants must pay by international money order in US currency. Do not send cash.
6. An e-mail address at which you can be easily contacted and a SASE (optional) for the return of application materials.

Application materials sent to:

June in Buffalo
220 Baird Hall
Department of Music
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260

To apply as an auditor please send a resume and the processing fee. Auditors attend all June in Buffalo events, but will not have a piece performed.

Participant fee is $775 USD
Auditor fee is $400 USD

Application materials must be postmarked by February 15, 2016.