Brian Ferneyhough: Fractured Energies

This year June in Buffalo is delighted to welcome Brian Ferneyhough back to its composition faculty. Ferneyhough is one of the most celebrated composers of his generation, with performances at most major European new music festivals by most major European new music ensembles, a publishing deal with Edition Peters (who sign few living composers), and numerous recordings (at least 29 currently in print) devoted to his music. His Collected Writings, published in 1995, is widely read, and his influence on multiple generations of younger composers (a not unreliable predictor of future reception) is enormous. His pedagogy is also highly regarded: he is currently Professor at Stanford University, having taught previously at the University of California San Diego, the University of Chicago, and the Freiburg Musikhochschule. He is also a frequently invited guest teacher at music festivals around the world, most notably at the Voix Nouvelles Course at the Abbaye de Rouyamont near Paris; he returns to June in Buffalo after previous engagements in 2013 and 2015. At this year’s festival, Ferneyhough will give a lecture and masterclasses, while guest ensembles and soloists will perform five of his pieces drawn from different periods of his output.

from the score of Unity Capsule

Before discussing specific pieces, it is worth taking time to unpack Ferneyhough’s project as a whole. While he is among the most lauded composers today, he is also one of the most widely misunderstood. The term “complexity”—whether meant as a criticism or not—is not exactly conducive to a wholistic understanding of his music. The significance of his music lies not in its quantitative complexity alone, but in how its increase in quantitative notational complexity induces a more consequential qualitative shift in the nature of the score, performance practice, and interpretation. Therefore, to understand his work primarily in terms of a quantitative deviation from a presumed notational norm overemphasizes its surface features while obscuring their unique, innovative raison d’ȇtre.

Unity Capsule performed by Ine Vanoeveren

The material of Ferneyhough’s music is kinetic energy: melodic mobility, and instrumental physicality, as well as intersections between the two. His approach to notation does not per se specify an ideal sound image, but codifies a field of colliding energies--an obstacle course of sorts--for the performer to navigate. The notation aims to create a white-hot but specific energy in live performance, bringing the liveness of music making to the fore. 

Unity Capsule performed by Carlton Vickers

Ferneyhough’s scores employ a range of strategies in their quest for a variegated, animated energy in live performance; here I will discuss three strategies: turbulence, torque, and pressurization. Turbulence means deliberate undercutting of stable reference points through the use of fine, rapidly changing differentiations of pitch, dynamics, articulation, physical parameters (i.e. bow position), and above all rhythmic density (whose shift at each barline undercuts the orientation afforded by a stable pulse). Torque refers to intentional collisions between notational parameters: phraseological emphasis operates against metric emphasis, meaning that the performer must swim upstream against the inherent tendency to emphasize downbeats; concurrently, dynamics, accentuation, and register often operate semi-autonomously, creating resistance to received linear phrasing conventions. Finally, pressurization involves extreme performative and notational registers--high, continuous rhythmic density, together with a saturated notational image--which raise the temperature in live performance. If turbulence and torque fracture kinetic energy in different ways, pressurization intensifies its impact. Therefore, for all its intricacy, the notation conveys and elicits a fundamental physicality.

Electric Chair Music, a documentary about performance practice in Ferneyhough’s Time and Motion Study II

For performers, the path towards unlocking this music’s restless kinetic energy lies in learning the music from two incompatible perspectives: on one hand, attending to the accuracy of individual details, and, on the other, focusing on kinetic energy, on wholistic volitions of gestures and phrases (as the composer describes in more detail in the preface to his solo piano work Lemma-Icon-Epigram). Learning a Ferneyhough piece means finding a personal way to mediate between these competing perspectives. As such, interpretation is not a process of applying conventions for phrasing on the basis of melodic/harmonic analysis (as in pre-1800 Western art music), but rather one of working out a personal solution to the notation’s overdetermined dilemmas from the ground up. Performer and score enter into a non-hierarchical, non-identical relationship: the score renders audible the performer’s individual proclivities, while, in a successful performance, the performer must render audible the broader energetic tensions at the heart of the work. In an era when the overproduction, overconsumption, and museumification of Western art music tightens the grip of habit on performers, encouraging ever more literal, conventionalized interpretations, Ferneyhough’s approach to notation and performance practice offers a unique and ingenious way to place the spontaneity, unpredictability, and vulnerability of live performance at the center of the concert music experience. The two contrasting interpretations of Unity Capsule posted above give some idea as to what this entails in practice.

Time and Motion Study II performed by UB alumnus TJ Borden (cello) with JiB alumni James Bean and Paul Hembree (live electronics)

These concerns are perhaps realized most “purely” in two solo works from the mid-1970s, Time and Motion Study II (1973-76) for cello and live electronics, and Unity Capsule for solo flute. The works programmed at this year’s June in Buffalo date from both before and after this period. Coloratura for oboe and piano (1966), to be performed by Dal Niente, marks an early attempt to translate the pointillistic style of the 1950s Darmstadt composers into a musical language concerned primarily with kinetic energy.

Coloratura performed by former JiB guest performer Peter Veale and former UB Professor James Avery

The Second String Quartet (1980), to be performed by the MIVOS Quartet, marks a break from the solo works of the 1970s. Unlike the solo works, the quartet enters into a more overt dialogue with historical Western art music. Here fractured linear momentum, density, and physicality become a way to defamiliarize clichés of Romantic and expressionistic string writing. The iconic significations of these clichés become liquidated in the music’s multidimensional fractured continuity; their pathos evaporates as heightened physicality gives them a new life.

Second String Quartet performed by frequent JiB guest performers Arditti Quartet

By the 1990s, Ferneyhough had expanded his approach to historical musical materials: “subjective” Romantic gestures are not only recontextualized, but are also placed in conversation with contrasting “objective” materials. Terrain (1992), to be performed by Irvine Arditti and Signal, epitomizes this approach, above all in its instrumentation, counterposing (historically) “subjective” violin soloist with “objective” wind/brass/double-bass octet (the same ensemble as Edgard Varèse’s Octandre).

Terrain performed by Mark Menzies and Wasteland Music

While Terrain activates a collision between Romantic materials and modernist materials, both ostensibly invented from scratch, later pieces have explored what happens when expressionist gestures enter into dialogue with materials from Renaissance music. That is, expressionist materials, predicated upon authenticity of subjective expression, comes into contact with Renaissance materials that predate notions of subjectivity in music (which might be traced to mid-16^th century madrigals). Unsichtbare Farben (1999), to be performed by Irvine Arditti, is built from passages of Ockeghem masses that are ultimately inaudible to the listener; here the historical dialectic functions perhaps more as a compositional process towards a result that might not be achieved in other ways, rather than as concrete feature of the listening experience. In In Nomine (2001), however, materials from an eponymous piece by Christopher Tye are more apparent to the listener; Ferneyhough writes that the piece presents found materials “in various distorted forms," exploring a continuum of materials from intact Tye materials at the opening to materials that bear no audible relationship to Tye's style.

In Nomine performed by Mark Takeshi McGregor, Kristen Cooke, and Liam Hockley, clarinet

-Colin Tucker

David Felder: Composer, Pedagogue, Artistic Director

As the next installment in our series of profiles of this year’s June in Buffalo composition faculty, we feature David Felder, who is also the festival’s director. Currently a SUNY Distinguished Professor and the Birge-Cary Professor in Music Composition at the University at Buffalo (UB), Felder wears many hats: as professor, practicing composer, and arts administrator. In these roles, he has built UB’s music department into a formidable powerhouse for new music.

As a composer, Felder has recently completed two large-scale works: Netivot for string quartet, electronics, and video, and Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux, for vocal soloists, orchestra, electronics, and video, both of which have been featured at recent June in Buffalo Festivals. This year’s festival features two Felder premieres: Canzona, to be performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic’s brass section, and Violin Concerto, a portion of a longer work in progress to be performed by Irvine Arditti and Ensemble Signal. Three other Felder works will also be presented: Incendio, performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic brass; Another Face, performed by Irvine Arditti; and partial [dist]res[s]toration, performed by Ensemble Dal Niente.

Like Felder’s earlier work Incendio, Canzona is, as the composer describes it, a “trans-literation” of an existing vocal work of his own. Historically, the canzona emerged in precisely this fashion during the late 1500s, and Felder’s interest in the music of this period, particularly in Robert King’s brass arrangements of Giovanni Gabrieli’s canzonas, was a crucial point of departure for the work. Although Felder’s Canzona is a 21^st century work written in his strikingly individual musical language, it engages with numerous aspects of the historical canzona: a consciously “choral” approach to ensemble writing, continuity of rhythmic momentum, and quasi-antiphonal textures.

Violin Concerto will be a preview of a few movements from what will eventually be an eight-movement, 25-30 minute work, to be premiered in full by Irvine Arditti and Ensemble Linéa on a concert at UB’s Center for 21^st Century Music in November. While Felder’s works of the 1980s and 1990s explored extended single-movement forms (such as Another Face), starting in the early 2000s, he started exploring a unique approach to multi-movement form (such as in partial [dist]res[s]toration). While in 18^th- and 19^th- century approaches to multi-movement form, movements contrasted with each other, and internally unified through key, tempo, instrumentation, topoi, and more, Felder describes his individual movements as “kaleidoscopic,” as each drawing upon multiple, contrasting threads of material.

Also a tireless arts administrator, he oversees four arts initiatives at UB. Through diligent work over more than three decades, he has built up one of the leading centers for new music in North America, and sustained it in the wake of declining state funding and local foundation funding. Perhaps most notably, he has led June in Buffalo since 1985, taking the reins from former UB Professor Morton Feldman; former June in Buffalo faculty member Harvey Sollberger has chronicled Felder’s tenure as director in detail here. Felder also leads Center for 21^st Century Music at the University, an institute that produces guest artist concerts and guest lectures by high-profile national and international new music luminaries. Through the Center, Felder is artistic director of the Slee Sinfonietta, UB’s resident faculty chamber ensemble, whose focus is the performance of 20^th century classics and new works. Felder’s activities also extend beyond the music department: together with fellow SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson, Felder is founding co-director of the multi-disciplinary Creative Arts Initiative, a platform for master artists to conduct residencies at UB.

This year’s festival is notable for its partnerships with two European institutions, the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, Norway, and the Voix Nouvelles Course for Young Composers at the Abbaye de Royaumont near Paris, France. Two composition professors from the Norwegian Academy will be featured faculty at the festival, while an ensemble of Academy graduate performance students will perform works by graduate composition students from both the Academy and UB; this publication detailed these activities in a past post. In partnership with Voix Nouvelles, June in Buffalo and its partner course will exchange participant-composers each year.

Beyond partnerships, this year’s festival presents an unusually stylistically diverse rostrum of faculty composers, together with some exceptional concert programming. In non-coastal America, it is uncommon to hear top-notch European new music chamber ensembles like Cikada; it is perhaps even more unexpected to hear live performances of music like Brian Ferneyhough’s challenging chamber music (particularly a lengthy, ultra-virtuosic work for larger forces like Terrain). Similarly, it is rare in the US to hear a full program of new orchestral works, as the festival offers on its final concert. A full concert schedule is available here—we look forward to seeing you there!

Transatlantic Music Exchange: Cikada Trio and Bifrost Ensemble

June in Buffalo marks the culmination of an exchange project between composers and performers in Buffalo and Oslo, Norway. Organized by June in Buffalo Director and UB Distinguished Professor of Composition David Felder, Norwegian Academy of Music Professor of Composition Henrik Hellstenius, Norwegian Academy of Music Associate Professor of Percussion Kjell Tore Innervik, and UB PhD candidate in composition Colin Tucker, the project will bring two Norwegian ensembles—Cikada Trio and Bifrost Ensemble—to the June in Buffalo Festival, alongside two faculty composers—Henrik Hellstenius and Eivind Buene—from the Norwegian Academy of Music.

Cikada Trio, a subset of the larger Cikada Ensemble, returns to Buffalo after an acclaimed visit to the Center for 21^st Century Music in 2010. At this year’s June in Buffalo, a trio of longtime Cikada members—Anne Karine Hauge, flute; Rolf Borch, clarinet; and Kenneth Karlsson, piano—will perform works by living Norwegian composers: faculty composers Henrik Hellstenius and Eivind Buene as well as Maja Ratkje and Asbjørn Schaathun. One theme running across the concert is the re-imagining of found material: Buene’s Landscape with Ruins alludes to fragments of tonal vocables, while Ratkje’s Two small pieces for Arnold S. takes its point of departure from two chords found in Arnold Schoenberg’s Little Piano Pieces op. 19; Schaathun’s Stravinsky goes Bach and Schaathun goes Frescobaldi is also based on small fragments, in this case from Stravinsky’s Cappriccio and Concerto for Piano and Winds. In previous posts, this publication profiled two composers--Eivind Buene and Henrik Hellstenius--featured on this program.

Active for over two decades, the ensemble is renowned for its high-profile festival appearances and recordings alike. From its earliest days, Cikada distinguished itself by pursuing ambitious projects—music of great performative difficulty by Liza Lim, James Dillon, and Richard Barrett, multimedia collaborations, and numerous concert length works, for instance, by Martin Raune Bauck and Richard Barrett (the latter in collaboration with the Australian ELISION Ensemble). The ensemble is also known for its long-term collaborations with Scandinavian composers; the trio’s program at this year’s festival, featuring works by four living Norwegian composers is evidence of the ample fruits of this endeavor.

Cikada is now a widely recognized senior ensemble in the Scandinavian new music scene; complementing this, this year’s festival features a young, up-and-coming ensemble from Oslo. Bifrost Ensemble is a recently formed sextet (trumpet, clarinet, percussion, harp, violin, and cello) made up of graduate students in performance at the Norwegian Academy of Music. Advised by percussion faculty member Kjell Tore Innervik, the group will give world premiere performances of works by graduate student composers from UB (Roberto Azaretto, Derick Evans, and Colin Tucker) and the Norwegian Academy (Jonas Skaarud) at June in Buffalo. 

Jonas Skaarud, Il vento…

Two of the composers spoke with Edge of the Center about their new works. Jonas Skaarud’s Il vento to ha lasciata un’eco chiara, nei sensi, delle cose ch’ài vedute – confuse – il giorno takes its title and inspiration from a poem by Sandro Penna. Skaarud writes that

The piece is about chrysanthemums, shivering lakes, yellowgreen trees in the sunlight and other nice pictures. But often they pass quickly. And while you try to grasp them, they reshape and reshape. And they pass. And you try to grasp them, and they reshape.

Exploring ephemerality from another angle, Colin Tucker’s a rift, like the breath drawn in, immaculate thematizes incompatible tensions between melody and instrument. Tucker writes that

If 19^th century Western art music’s aesthetics of melodic lyricism sought to transcend the materiality of the instrumental medium, scripting musical sound as a transparent vessel for ineffable meaning, the present work materializes these aesthetics’ conditions of impossibility, staging melody’s submersion into its physical medium. The instruments strain to enunciate melodic fragments against the headwinds of hushed, high tessituras and instrument-specific techniques that magnify unpredictable interactions between performers’ bodies and their instruments: air sound (clarinet), quiet tremolo from a close distance (percussion and harp), and extremely slow bow (strings).

Colin Tucker, a rift

The program will also include Innervik’s interpretation of former UB professor Morton Feldman’s King of Denmark, a “graph piece” from 1964 to be played at a very quiet dynamic, using only fingers and hands on a variety of instruments. Shortly after its Buffalo presentation, the program will travel to New York City for a concert at the Norwegian Seamen’s Church (317 E 52nd St.), on June 8 at 6pm. Plans are underway for further performances of the new works in Oslo.

Feldman, King of Denmark, performed by UB Percussion Professor Tom Kolor

June in Buffalo 2017 Participants

The June in Buffalo Festival is pleased to announce its 2017 composer participants: 

Phil Acimovic
Roberto Azaretto
Michael Bang
Joseph Bohigian
Lily Chen
Yu-Chun Chien
Paul Duffy
Derick Evans
Meredith Gilna
Kolten Heeren
Alex Huddleston
Zhuosheng Jin
Jihyun Kim
Jiyoung Ko
Leslie Lang
Sunyeong Pak
Jakub Polaczyk
Matt Simon
Ben Stevenson
Adam Strawbridge
Adrien Trybucki
Colin Tucker
Jacob Walls
Jung Yoon Wie

The June in Buffalo Festival takes place June 5-11 2017 on the University at Buffalo campus. June in Buffalo offers an intensive schedule of seminars, lectures, 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 their pieces performed during the festival. Evening performances feature faculty composers, resident ensembles and soloists renowned internationally as interpreters of contemporary music. Faculty composers include Eivind Buene, David Dzubay, David Felder, Brian Ferneyhough, Henrik Hellstenius, and Jeffrey Mumford, while resident performers include Dal Niente, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble SIGNAL, Slee Sinfonietta. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Cikada Trio, and Irvine Arditti.

A schedule of all June in Buffalo concerts is available here.

Henrik Hellstenius: Voyages and Rifts

June in Buffalo is delighted to welcome Henrik Hellstenius as a faculty composer in 2017. Hellstenius will be featured at June in Buffalo alongside composer Eivind Buene, the Cikada Trio, and the Bifrost Ensembles as part of a broader musical exchange between Buffalo and Oslo during 2017, to be profiled in a future blog post. Currently professor of composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, Hellstenius has written music that has appeared on 22 commercially available recordings, spanning chamber music, orchestra, opera, electroacoustic music, and music for theatre. This year’s June in Buffalo will feature performances of Hellstenius’s chamber and solo music. During the festival, Hellstenius will also give a lecture and will give feedback to participant-composers in masterclasses.

Rift, a string trio from 2014, will be performed by the MIVOS Quartet; Trio Aristos’s recording of the work is available on Tidal, Spotify, and iTunes. Perhaps most immediately striking about the piece’s musical language is its approach to accumulating and dissipating gestural energy. While the piece follows a familiar global shape of accumulation to a high point (4:50 in the Trio Aristos recording) followed by dissipation, this shape unfolds in unpredictable and remarkable ways on a local level. In accumulating momentum over the piece’s first five minutes, the piece charts a patient, often discontinuous trajectory. Much of the first half of the piece attempts to gather rhythmic energy on descending scalar figures, as if trying to roll down a hill; these efforts rarely sustain themselves, and often end up far afield of their goal. At times, one’s location within the global energy shape is clear, but at other times, it is not apparent at all, making for an exciting play of expectation and realization as the piece unfolds. The piece’s nuanced dramatic shape is undoubtedly assisted by the piece’s subtle pitch language. Pitches are derived from spectral chords, yielding a colorful range of microtonal intervals. These intervals—sometimes reminiscent of tonal sonorities—together with the piece’s widely varying registral spacing in a striking sound world wholly distinct from the saturated chromaticism of high modernist atonality.

June in Buffalo will also feature a performance by Irvine Arditti (of the Arditti Quartet) of the violin solo The Argonaut (2010). You can hear a performance of the work by Emily Fowler in the recording above. Drawn from the material of a larger instrumental theatre piece Victoria Counting for staged violinist. Hellstenius writes that “the title refers to the seamen following Ulysses on his many voyages,” based on Heiner Müller’s text Landscape with Argonauts.

Victoria Counting II from Henrik Hellstenius on Vimeo.

This year’s festival will also feature a new Hellstenius piece Unfolded, as it were, performed by the Cikada Trio, who commissioned the piece. The composer writes that

This piece shifts between short sections, or moments, with repetition of a sparse material of chords and sound objects, and moves towards a more linear music. It begins in an environment of small cells of noise sound and repeated musical objects. Then it moves towards the linear outstretched music, unfolding gradually a long garland or chain of tight piano chords forming the nave the last part of the piece. The piece develops from fragmented music towards compound music, from objects towards process. 

Despite the attention that his music has received across Europe, Hellstenius’s music has rarely been performed in the US. This year’s June in Buffalo, with performances of multiple recent works by top new music ensembles, provides optimal introduction to his music.

Juliet Fraser: Wondering, Reaching, Grasping

This week renowned British soprano Juliet Fraser visits the Center for 21^st Century Music for a residency. Fraser, principal soprano and co-founder of the Exaudi Vocal Ensemble, will present a solo concert Thursday featuring an extended vocal work by former UB Professor Morton Feldman. In addition to a concert, she will conduct a new workshop with graduate composition students, focusing on a new work for solo voice by PhD composition student Jessie Downs. Drawing on her experiences performing contemporary vocal ensemble music, Fraser will also coach the local Sotto Voce Vocal Collective on its interpretations of works by James Weeks and Lauren Redhead to be featured on an upcoming concert.

Active in performing a wide range of repertoire, Fraser has performed classical and early music with the Monteverdi Choir, The King's Consort, The Tallis Scholars, and BBC Singers, and was a soloist of the Collegium Vocale Gent, directed by Philippe Herreweghe, for six years. In new music, she is principal soprano and co-founder of the Exaudi Vocal Ensemble, and has also appeared as soloist with Klangforum Wien, ICTUS, Plus-Minus, We Spoke: New Music Company, London Sinfonietta and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and is active in duos with pianist Mark Knoop and percussionist Maxime Echardour. She has appeared at festivals such as as hcmf//, Tectonics Glasgow, Transit 20/21, Donaueschinger Musiktage, MaerzMusik, Wien Modern, Aldeburgh, Spitalfields, hcmf//, ManiFeste, Festival d'Automne, Ars Musica, Wittener Tage and Darmstadt Ferienkurse.

Fraser has developed close collaborative relationships with numerous renowned living composers. The list of composers who have written solo works for her is impressive: Michael Finnissy, Bernhard Lang, Rebecca Saunders, Stefano Gervasoni, Frank Denyer, Christopher Fox, Matthew Shlomowitz, Cassandra Miller and Andrew Hamilton. As a member of Exaudi, she has worked with many of today's great compositional talents, including two graduates from UB’s Center for 21^st Century Music.  Aaron Cassidy’s A Painter of Figures in Rooms was commissioned for Exaudi by the high profile PRS for Music New Music 20×12 as part of the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad, and was later recorded by the ensemble on Huddersfield Contemporary Records. Meanwhile, Fraser has premiered multiple vocal ensemble works by Evan Johnson, a collaboration that will continue in 2019 with a new work for voice and piano.

At UB, Fraser will perform Three Voices, a work by another UB-affiliated composer, Morton Feldman, who was Edgar Varèse Professor during the height of the Center for Creative and Performing Arts. Feldman wrote the work for innovative vocalist/composer Joan La Barbara, who premiered it singing simultaneously with two recordings of herself, a practice Fraser will adopt in her performance (although the score is written conventionally for three voices). Written in 1982 in Buffalo, much of the piece is wordless, with the choice of vowels at the performer’s discretion. A ways into the piece, words emerge, in the form of fragments of a poem dedicated to Feldman by his friend Frank O’Hara.

Fraser recently recorded Three Voices on Hat Hut Records. Her first solo disc, the album has already received international acclaim, including a nomination for a German Schallplattenkritik Prize, and a four-star review from The Guardian music critic Andrew Clements. Fraser wrote the liner notes for her CD, discussing how she formulated an interpretation of this work, which is surely among the most difficult contemporary vocal works:

The challenge of recording this piece is to avoid rendering the delicate tapestry either too cold, too clinical, or too gorgeous; to rest in the ambiguous space between beauty and evil, between the living and the dead. On every level, from the text of O’Hara’s poem to the demands of Feldman’s music, this is a work that is about the very human effort of wondering, reaching, grasping.

Signal: New Music Dream Team

This week, in our series of profiles of June in Buffalo resident ensembles, we introduce Signal. A “new music dream team” (TimeOutNY) of players highly regarded as soloists in their own right, Signal continues its annual residency at June in Buffalo. The ensemble will present four works by faculty composers: ensemble works by David Dzubay and Eivind Buene, and violin concertos—with guest soloist Irvine Arditti—by Brian Ferneyhough and June in Buffalo director David Felder. The Felder piece will be a preview of a new work for solo violin and ensemble, featuring a few movements from what will eventually be a 25 minute multi-movement work. June in Buffalo audiences will recall the ensemble’s excellent performances in past festivals—for instance of Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee in 2016, David Felder’s Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux in 2015, or Brian Ferneyhough’s Terrain (with Irvine Arditti) in 2013.

Founded in 2008, Signal has been recognized as one of the leading new music ensembles in the US. In the past, they have appeared at festivals and venues such as Lincoln Center Festival, Walt Disney Concert Hall, BIG EARS Festival, Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, Tanglewood Music Festival of Contemporary Music, Ojai Music Festival, Miller Theatre, (le) Poisson Rouge, Cleveland Museum of Art, the Wordless Music Series, and the Bang on a Can Marathon. The group has released nine albums to international, acclaim including a coveted Diapason d’Or and an appearance on the Billboard Classical Crossover charts. Emphasizing close collaboration with composers, the group has worked with many of today’s most well-known composers, including Steve Reich, Helmut Lachenmann, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Oliver Knussen, Hilda Paredes, and Charles Wuorinen.

Notable past projects have included stage works such as Steve Reich’s video opera Three Tales, David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe’s video opera Shelter, and Lincoln Center Festival’s production of Monkey: Journey to The West, with music by Damon Albarn, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. The ensemble has maintained a particularly close relationship with Steve Reich, giving a headline performance of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Radio Rewrite at the 2014 BIG EARS Festival in Knoxville, TN, and co-commissioning a new work for 19 musicians by Reich to be premiered during 2017. Signal’s current season has included events for Reich’s 80^th Birthday at the Guggenheim and Miller Theatre, a concert curated by Reich at Carnegie Hall with works by Terry Riley and John Adams, and a portrait concert of Johannes Maria Staud at the Miller Theatre; the season closes with a revival of Ornette Coleman’s neglected chamber music and film music at the Lincoln Center Festival.

At this year’s June in Buffalo, the ensemble will be led by its long-time conductor Brad Lubman. Lubman. A leading conductor of new music, Lubman has appeared with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony, and major radio orchestras in France, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, and with many of the world’s leading new music groups, such as Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble MusikFabrik, Asko|Schönberg Ensemble Amsterdam, Ensemble Resonanz, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Chicago Symphony MusicNOW, and Steve Reich and Musicians. Currently on faculty at Eastman School of Music and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, the conductor has premiered works such as Steve Reich’s Three Tales, Daniel Variations, Radio Rewrite, and Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings, and works by Helmut Lachenmann, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Philip Glass, Charles Wuorinen, John Zorn, and Hilda Paredes.

MIVOS Quartet: Expanding the String Quartet

The Center for 21^st Century Music is excited to welcome the MIVOS Quartet as a resident ensemble at this year’s June in Buffalo Festival. The ensemble, who previously visited the University at Buffalo for a residency in 2014, will perform works by faculty composers Jeffrey Mumford, Eivind Buene, Henrik Hellstenius, and Brian Ferneyhough.

Founded in 2008, the group has quickly gained recognition as “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” (The Chicago Reader). The quartet’s festival appearances include the New York Phil Biennial, Wien Modern (Austria), the Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Germany), Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf, Germany), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Shanghai New Music Week (Shanghai, China), Edgefest (Ann Arbor, MI), Música de Agora na Bahia (Brazil), Aldeburgh Music (UK), and Lo Spririto della musica di Venezia (La Fenice Theater, Italy). Central to the quartet’s mission is advocacy for new works by living composers; commissioned composers include Sam Pluta (Lucerne Festival Commission), Dan Blake (Jerome Commission), Mark Barden (Wien Modern Festival Commission), Richard Carrick (Fromm Commission), George Lewis (ECLAT Festival Commission) Eric Wubbels (CMA Commission), Kate Soper, Scott Wollschleger, Patrick Higgins (ZS), and poet/musician Saul Williams.

​In its commissioning projects, the group has often collaborated with guest artists from fields other than notated concert music, opening up previously unexplored possibilities for the string quartet. For instance, the quartet has collaborated with improvisers such as Ned Rothenberg, Timucin Sahin, and Dan Blake in the creation of new works for improvising instrumentalist with string quartet (MIVOS’s collaborative work with Ned Rothenberg was performed live in Buffalo in 2011, presented by Hallwalls). MIVOS has also collaborated with media artists in multimedia works, such as a 2014 collaboration with Samson Young on an interactive work for “extremely amplified” string quartet, 20-channel spatialized sound, 8 video tracks, and EEG (brainwave) sensors. Significantly, quite a few of the quartet’s projects are concert length works, facilitating a depth, immersion, and ambition that might not emerge within the confines of the customary 7-22 minute duration typical of many new music festival commissions.

Complementing their endeavor to expand the string quartet through improvisation and interactive multimedia, the group has also collaborated with spoken word artist Saul Williams. In this project, composers Ted Hearne, Jace Clayton, and the quartet’s own members created material for string quartet to be played alongside Williams’s live performance of his poems. An article from Minnesota Public Radio gives more detail about the innovative project.

Finally, one cannot help but be struck by the volume of the group’s activities that have unfolded in a mere nine years. In addition the genre-bending collaborations described above, the group has release five full albums—including two albums devoted to notated works—and has appeared on numerous other recordings as well. The internet thankfully offers ample documentation of their performances: the group’s soundcloud page is a great place to start; be sure to also check out the plentiful videos available on youtube and vimeo.

                                                                         

Slee Sinfonietta: New Perspectives on Familiar Classics

The Center for 21^st Century Music presents the Slee Sinfonietta, conducted by Robert Treviño, on April 11. On this concert, the Sinfonietta will perform two rarely-heard arrangements of well-known turn-of-the-20^th-century masterpieces: Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) and Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth). Both works will be presented in chamber-scale arrangements by Arnold Schoenberg (the latter completed by German musicologist Rainer Reihn).

The arrangements originated in the Society for the Private Performance of Music (Verein für Musikalische Privataufführungen), a weekly concert series spearheaded by Schoenberg in Vienna during 1918-1922. In response to the hostile disruptions that often greeted public presentations of their music, Schoenberg—together with friends and students—founded the Society, whose concerts were open only to subscribers. Critics were barred, as was applause and other overt expressions of approval or disapproval; concert programs were not revealed in advance. The Society’s concerts focused on music written after 1890, including works by Schoenberg, his students (Anton Webern, Alban Berg), and predecessors (Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss), as well as works by non-Germanic composers pursuing contrasting aesthetic directions: Ferrucio Busoni, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Alexander Scriabin, and Igor Stravinsky.

The Society’s private, ground-up enterprise necessitated a low-budget operating style, resulting in the need to arrange large ensemble works for a more affordable chamber music format. During the Society’s four years, Schoenberg and members of his circle arranged numerous works for concerts, often for a core group consisting of an abbreviated orchestra of sorts, with single woodwinds, piano, harmonium, and single strings. However, it would be simplistic to understand the Society’s interest in truncated orchestral ensembles solely in terms of financial constraints. Schoenberg had in fact been exploring the possibilities of similar ensembles in his works for a decade prior to the Society’s foundation, for instance, in his 1908 Chamber Symphony no. 1, or the 1912 work Pierrot Lunaire; the chamber medium appealed because of its possibilities for intricate contrapuntal detail, close performer-composer interchange, and clear textures in contrast to the hazy fluidity of the post-Wagnerian orchestra. This new approach to orchestration was also of interest to Schoenberg’s contemporaries like Stravinsky (cf. Pribaoutki, L’Histoire du Soldat), and together these efforts might be understood as a precedent for today’s new music sinfonietta ensemble with one orchestral instrument to a part. Therefore, the Society’s arrangements can be read as fascinating documents of a cross-historical dialogue, of how composers on the threshold of a major shift in thinking about orchestration thought about the work of their predecessors.

Schoenberg arranged Debussy’s 1894 orchestral tone poem Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune for a chamber ensemble of single woodwinds, harmonium, piano, antique cymbals, and single strings. The arrangement retains many materials in woodwinds and strings, while transferring woodwind harmony parts to harmonium, the harp part to piano, and splitting the horn part between the two keyboard instruments. As Debussy scholar Richard Parks notes, the arrangement preserves the underlying structural architecture of Debussy’s orchestration—overlapping entrances and exits to obscure structural boundaries, heightening syntactic ambiguity. Beyond this, however, the arrangement fundamentally alters the original: the newfound clarity of texture emphasizes harmony over color, rendering the original’s steamy impressionist landscapes into the chamber music’s solid portrait perspective. This change poses a striking reinterpretation of the piece, downplaying its link to its predecessor Wagner in favor of its descendant Stravinsky, and in turn inviting listeners to hear it less as a terminal development of Romanticism and more as a proto-Modernism.

Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, a hybrid symphony/song cycle for two voices and orchestra completed 1909, might have seemed relatively contemporary to the Society in relation to Debussy’s 1894 Prélude. Even while the arrangements use similar instrumental forces, the Mahler is far less at odds with the Society’s arranging practices than the Debussy. Specifically, Mahler’s work delights in hauntingly sparse moments of chamber music in the midst of its orchestral textures, particularly in its inner movements, and in the desolate cadenzas of its final movement, in sharp contrast to the blurry impressionist textures of the Prélude. In this sense, Das Lied—roughly contemporary with Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony no. 1—might be understood as a forerunner of the Society’s arranging style. As such, Schoenberg’s arrangement does not so much desiccate the original’s lushness, as with the Debussy, as much as further pare down its threadbare constitution. Even while this approach flattens the force and depth of the occasional orchestral tutti passage, it sheds poignant light on the originality of the work’s sparer moments.

For this performance the Sinfonietta will be conducted by Robert Treviño, and will be joined by vocalists Amanda Pabyan (soprano) and Corby Welch (tenor) for the Mahler. Treviño, who will be familiar to Sinfonietta audiences from past appearances with the group, was recently named music director of the Basque National Orchestra, and was previously associate conductor at the Cincinnati Symphony and New York City Opera. Like Treviño, the singers are also rising talents, rapidly gaining accolades for performances at renowned musical institutions. Pabyan has appeared as featured soloist at the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera, and with the symphonies of Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Seattle, while Welch’s solo performances include the Staatsoper Hamburg, Aix-en-Provence Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Schwetzingen Festival, and with the Berlin Radio Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Lahti Symphony, RIAS Kammerchor, Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, and WDR Orchestra (Cologne).

The Sinfonietta will also be performing in June at this year's June in Buffalo--stay tuned for details.