Louis Karchin: Fearless Eloquence

The Center for 21^st Century Music is pleased to welcome Louis Karchin as senior composer at this year’s upcoming June in Buffalo festival. Currently Professor of Music at New York University, Karchin has received many of the most prestigious awards and commissions available to an American composer: the Koussevitzky, Fromm and Barlow Foundation Commissions, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and three awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Praised by the New Yorker for his music’s “fearless eloquence,” his work has been presented by many of the most recognized classical music institutions in America: with performances at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Fort Worth Opera, the Center for Contemporary Opera, Tanglewood, the Guggenheim Museum, the Louisville Orchestra, the Group for Contemporary Music, the Da Capo Chamber Players, and the New York New Music Ensemble, and recordings on Bridge, Naxos, New World, Albany and CRI labels. In any era when few new works are published, his music has been published by both C. F. Peters Corporation and the American Composers Alliance.

As senior composer, Karchin will collaborate with resident ensembles on performances of his work, meet with participant composers in masterclasses, and give a public lecture on his work (Thursday, June 7 at 10am in Baird Hall). The Slee Sinfonietta will present two of his vocal works on Monday, June 4 at 7:30pm in Slee Hall. The Sinfonietta will perform Gods of Winter for voice, flute, clarinet, horn, two violins, cello and percussion. Featuring the poetry of Dana Gioia, Karchin writes that the piece

[Stems] from personal tragedy and loss…the poems are somber and stark. The first song is introductory in nature. The second, preceded by a long, ruminative prologue is the more intense expression, with suggestions of tumultuous motion and restlessness. The mood finally disperses in favor of the music of the opening, but no the voice is added where there were only instruments previously. The ending seeks to fuse vocal and instrumental colors in a stately epilogue.

The vocal soloist will be Thomas Meglioranza, an “immaculate and inventive recitalist” (The New Yorker) who has previously appeared with the National Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, MET Chamber Ensemble, Houston Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Les Violons du Roy, and at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival.

The same concert will also feature Karchin’s Four Songs on Poems of Seamus Heaney for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, with UB voice faculty Tiffany DuMouchelle as soloist. Karchin assembled the four poems himself, writing that

although [the poems] are not ostensibly related to each other, in my mind, I constructed a scenario linking them. …I related the various songs to the growth and development of an imagined ancient town by the sea.

The festival will also feature a purely instrumental Karchin work. On Friday, June 9, in 7:30pm in Slee Hall, Ensemble Mise-En presents the local premiere of Karchin’s As the circle opens to infinity…, for flute, clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin, and cello, a work written for and premiered by Mise-En earlier this year.

John Harbison: Distinguished Composer Returns to UB

The Center for 21^st Century Music is delighted to welcome John Harbison as senior composer at the upcoming June in Buffalo festival. Currently Institute Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harbison has achieved a level of visibility and institutional recognition rare for a living composer. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among the highest honors available to an American artist. The composer has also written for the most hallowed institutions in American art music: the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His recent opera The Great Gatsby has been staged at the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Semperoper Dresden. Harbison has also held composer-in-residence positions with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the American Academy in Rome. Also active in service to the field behind the scenes, the composer is trustee of the American Academy in Rome, and was President of the Aaron Copland Fund for New Music for fifteen years.

After an acclaimed appearance at June in Buffalo in 2007, Harbison returns this year to collaborate with resident ensembles on performances of his compositions, lecture on his music, and mentor participant composers. Harbison will lecture on his works at 10am on Saturday, June 9 in Baird Hall, and four of his pieces will be featured during the week-long festival.

On Monday, June 4, at 7:30pm in Slee Hall, the Center’s own Slee Sinfonietta will perform Harbison’s Mirabai Songs, settings of the ecstatic religious poetry of the eponymous sixteenth century Indian poet, with UB voice faculty Tiffany DuMouchelle as featured soloist. On the following day at 7:30pm in Baird Hall, the MIVOS Quartet performs the prolific composer’s String Quartet no. 6, originally commissioned by an impressively prestigious consortium of the Lark, Ariel, and Telegraph Quartets, and the Tanglewood Music Center.

This year’s festival also features a rare chance to hear a full concert of orchestral works by living composers, performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. The concert includes two pieces by Harbison: Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera, and Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra). Darkbloom was created from the remnants of an abandoned opera project. The composer writes that “I am as reluctant as any artist to part with good material…I am very fortunate to be able to collect up strands of the music in this overture.” The title derives from the name Vivian Darkbloom, “a secondary character in a famous and infamous American novel.” Harbison explains that “I borrowed Darkbloom as a title because it effectively conjures up the mood of this overture. It serves as an emblem or anagram for the complex tragicomic spirit of the story and its author.”

Remembering Gatsby references the foxtrot, a dance that reached its height of popularity during the 1930s. Like Darkbloom, this work also derives from an abandoned opera project, in this case based on (onetime Buffalo resident) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. The composer explains how the work portrays the novel’s scenes:

The piece…begins with a cantabile passage for full orchestra, a representation of Gatsby's vision of the green light on Daisy's dock. Then the foxtrot begins, first with a kind of call to order, then a [1920s] tune I had written for one of the party scenes, played by a concertino led by a soprano saxophone. The tune is then varied and broken into its components, leading to an altered reprise of the call to order, and an intensification of the original cantabile…A brief coda combines some of the motives, and refers fleetingly to the telephone bell and the automobile horns, instruments of Gatsby's fate.

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Returns to June in Buffalo

Next in our profiles of resident ensembles at this year’s June in Buffalo we profile the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, who continues its annual appearance at the festival with a concert on June 10. The ongoing partnership between the Center for 21^st Century Music and the Orchestra is one of a number of collaborations with local organizations—others include A Musical Feast, The Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Pausa Art House—which strengthen the local arts ecosystem. Partnerships like these encourage closer interaction between arts organizations, maximize the impact of involved organizations’ resources, and boost visibility and attendance. The Center’s partnerships are not exclusively local, however; in fact, a recent post of this publication discussed the Center’s extensive international partnerships.

This year, the orchestra presents three works by senior composers featured at the festival. It is a rare occurrence for an orchestra to perform a program consisting solely of works by living composers; in doing so, the Center and Orchestra have made a significant contribution to Western New York’s cultural scene. The concert features two works by senior composer John Harbison: Darkbloom: Overture for an Imagined Opera, and Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra). Darkbloom was created from the remnants of an abandoned opera project. The composer writes that “I am as reluctant as any artist to part with good material…I am very fortunate to be able to collect up strands of the music in this overture.” The title derives from the name Vivian Darkbloom, “a secondary character in a famous and infamous American novel.” Harbison explains that “I borrowed Darkbloom as a title because it effectively conjures up the mood of this overture. It serves as an emblem or anagram for the complex tragicomic spirit of the story and its author.”

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra at JiB 2015

Remembering Gatsby was composed for the Atlanta Symphony, one of a large number of works commissioned by major musical institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The work references the foxtrot, a dance that reached its height of popularity during the 1930s. Like Darkbloom, this work also derives from an abandoned opera project, in this case based on (onetime Buffalo resident) F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. The composer explains how the work portrays the novel’s scenes:

The piece…begins with a cantabile passage for full orchestra, a representation of Gatsby's vision of the green light on Daisy's dock. Then the foxtrot begins, first with a kind of call to order, then a [1920s] tune I had written for one of the party scenes, played by a concertino led by a soprano saxophone. The tune is then varied and broken into its components, leading to an altered reprise of the call to order, and an intensification of the original cantabile…A brief coda combines some of the motives, and refers fleetingly to the telephone bell and the automobile horns, instruments of Gatsby's fate.

Harbison explains how the piece emerged from unlikely circumstances of his biography: “My father, eventually a Reformation historian, was a young show-tune composer in the twenties, and this piece may also have been a chance to see him in his tuxedo again.”

The concert also features two movements from Center artistic director David Felder’s Six Poems from Neruda’s “Alturas…”, based on the poetry of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. It is fitting that the Buffalo Philharmonic will perform this piece, given that New York State Council on the Arts commissioned it for the Orchestra, who premiered it in 1992.

The work, a sample of whose score is available online, has the additional distinction of being the only American orchestral composition selected by the international jury of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) in 1994, leading to its performance in Sweden. The quality of the piece lead Mode Records to release it on disc; the liner notes explore the nature of this music’s unique poetry:

Like Neruda's cycle of twelve poems on which it is based, the music weaves together images and themes such as reverence for nature, cyclical aspects of regeneration, irresistible death and its accompanying transience of the individual against a background of the collective vastness of time. This is accompanied by a strong sense of individual isolation and alienation and a powerful feeling of loss and longing for a discovery of a greater identity.

Ensemble Signal: New Music Dream Team

In this post, we continue our portraits of resident ensembles featured at this year’s June in Buffalo with Ensemble Signal. A chamber ensemble of flexible instrumentation, the group was founded in 2008. A “new music dream team” (Time Out New York) of new music specialists, many of them highly regarded soloists in their own right, the group has rapidly ascended through the ranks of the new music world to appear at prestigious venues such as the Lincoln Center Festival, 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. Signal has collaborated with leading artists such as Steve Reich, Helmut Lachenmann, Irvine Arditti, Kristian Bezuidenhout, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Oliver Knussen, Hilda Paredes, and Charles Wuorinen, and has recorded for Cantaloupe, Harmonia Mundi, Mode, Orange Mountain, and New Amsterdam Records.

Signal at JiB 2015
(performing Center artistic director David Felder's Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux)

The group’s sheer volume of activity is astonishing in and of itself: in only a decade, the group has performed over 150 concerts, co-produced nine recordings, and given numerous NY, national, and world premieres. Signal’s long term commitment to the field has not gone unnoticed, with the New York Times itself noting calling the group “one of the most vital groups of its kind.” The group’s intensity of activity is in part a function of its flexibility in size and instrumentation, encompassing “everything from solo to large contemporary ensemble in any possible combination.”

The Center for 21^st Century Music has contributed to Signal’s success via its long-term partnership with the ensemble. The group has been a resident ensemble at June in Buffalo each year since 2010, and has also been invited to the Center for appearances on its visiting artist series during the academic year. The group’s flexibility has been an asset here, enabling occasional presentation of rarely presented extended works for large ensembles, such as Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (in 2017) Sextet and Double Sextet (2012), Center artistic director David Felder’s Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux (2015), and Louis Andriessen’s La Passione (2012). Most recently, the group appeared at the Center for another ambitious programming venture, a portrait concert of the demanding, detail-oriented music of acclaimed American composer Charles Wuorinen in late April.

At this year’s festival, Signal will present two concerts: one featuring works by participant composers, and another with works by senior composers: Hilda Paredes’s Chaczibzib for solo piccolo, Roger Reynolds' Positings for flute, horn, piano, violin, cello, and electronics, and David Felder’s Jeu de Tarot for violin and ensemble. At last year’s June in Buffalo, Signal gave a preview of select movements from Felder’s piece; Ensemble Linea premiered it during their November residency at the Center. In all of these performances, the guest violin soloist has been Irvine Arditti, who collaborated closely with David Felder in the creation of the solo violin part.

Signal has continually astounded Buffalo audiences with their high level of execution on even the most ambitious, demanding projects, so we greatly look forward to their return visit in June!

Ensemble Mise-En: Generative Partnerships

This week in our series of profiles on this year’s resident ensembles at June in Buffalo, we are delighted to introduce Ensemble Mise-En. The ensemble is a flexible NYC-based collective of young performers, founded in 2011, whose name originates from two Korean words—“‘mee ,’…means ‘beauty,’ and ‘zahn,’ ‘to decorate,’” and the name crystallizes the ensemble’s focus, as a “multi-national personnel…unabashedly promotes “beautiful” artwork to increasingly diverse audiences of contemporary sounds.” The ensemble has established itself with surprising speed, with performances at high profile venues like (le) poisson rouge, Bohemian National Hall, Italian Academy, Tenri Cultural Institute, a residency at the cell, and partnerships with Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, International Alliance for Women in Music, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Open Meadows Foundation, New York University, New York Foundation for the Arts, I-Park, Goethe-Institute Boston, Villa Gillet (FR) and others.

The ensemble is remarkable in its commitment to emerging as well as established composers. The group runs a programming space in Brooklyn and produces an annual festival; both platforms take much of their content from open calls for proposals, eliminating barriers to access while at the same time ensuring accountability in quality. To find out more about the ensemble’s activities, have a look at their website, soundcloud page, and the ample documentation of their performances available on youtube.

Following a successful residency at the Center in March 2017, Ensemble Mise-En was invited as residenty ensemble to June in Buffalo 2018. As with many of the Center’s partnerships, the relationship with Mise-En is emerging to be a fundamentally collaborative, long-term one. The group’s visit to the Center in 2017 was not merely a one-off “gig,” but planted the seeds of deeper partnerships between the ensemble and the Center, including not only the ensemble’s appearance at June in Buffalo, but their performance of works by Center graduate student composers such as Meredith Gilna, Matt Sargent, Weijun Chen, and Su Lee. This approach in turn positions the guest ensemble not merely as a hired contractor but as a crucial collaborator, and, more importantly, advocate for the important work the Center is doing.

It is in this context that the ensemble appears at this year’s June in Buffalo festival, where they will present two concerts. The ensemble performs works by participant composers on Wednesday, June 6 at 7:30 in Baird Hall, and works by senior composers on Friday, June 8 at 7:30pm. In the latter concert, the ensemble will perform Hans Thomalla’s moments musicaux (for flute, clarinet, piano, viola, and cello), Louis Karchin’s As the Circle Opens to Infinity (for flute, clarinet, trombone, piano, percussion, violin, and cello), and Roger Reynolds’s Shadowed Narrative (for clarinet, piano, violin, and cello). All three works have distinctively extensive and thoroughly worked out formal structures—in the case of the Reynolds, a sequence of four contrasting movements. Center audiences may remember the Reynolds piece, played expertly by the Antares Quartet on their guest concert at the Center in 2012. Mise-En’s second concert will feature works by participant composers selected from the festival’s recent call for scores, which drew submissions from multiple continents.

Celebrating Charles Wuorinen at 80

The Center for 21^st Century Music is delighted to present an 80^th birthday concert for Charles Wuorinen on April 24. Under the auspices of the Center’s Slee Sinfonietta series, guest ensemble Signal will perform a rare full concert of Wuorinen’s work. For event details and ticket information, visit Slee Hall’s website.

Wuorinen is among the most recognized living composers worldwide. He has received many of the highest honors available to an American composer—a Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and American Academy of Arts and Sciences—while his works have been performed by many of the most respected American orchestras, with commissions for new works from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and more. As an opera composer, Wuorinen has collaborated with noted literary figures Salman Rushdie and Anne Proulx, in works commissioned by the New York City Opera and Teatro Real Madrid, respectively.

Also active as a performer (conductor and piano), in 1962 he joined Harvey Sollberger, past June in Buffalo faculty member, to create and lead the noted Group for Contemporary Music in NYC. The group has been credited for raising standards across the board in contemporary music performance, and functioned as an important model for later contemporary music ensembles. In fact, UB’s own Creative Associates in the 1960s and 70s were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s project to create Group for Contemporary Music “spin off” ensembles; more recently, the Center’s flagship Slee Sinfonietta (founded in 1997 by the Center’s Artistic Director David Felder) continues to refine models of new music ensemble performance pioneered by these earlier ensembles.

Throughout his long career, Wuorinen has been a frequent guest at UB. He has served as faculty composer at numerous June in Buffalo festivals, from the early days of the Festival in the 1970s all the way through to recent years. In turn, the festival has functioned as an important outlet for Wuorinen’s work over the years, including large-scale works such as the complete Fenton Songs (performed by Ensemble Surplus in 2006), the orchestral Microsymphony (performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic in 2007), and the cantata It Happens Like This (performed by the Slee Sinfonietta in 2013). Building on this long-standing relationship, the State University of New York awarded Wuorinen an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York during the 2013 June in Buffalo Festival, where a ceremony was followed by a portrait concert.

Charles Wuorinen speaks at the ceremony at which he was awarded a SUNY honorary doctorate, with composer David Felder, University President Satish K. Tripathi, and SUNY Trustee Eunice Lewin on stage. Photo by Irene Haupt.

The Center’s upcoming 80^th birthday concert features performances by Ensemble Signal of three Wuorinen works for instrumental soloist and large ensemble: Megalith (with piano soloist), Spin 5 (with violin soloist), and Iridule (with oboe soloist). Megalith will feature UB Associate Professor Eric Huebner as piano soloist, while the other works will feature highly regarded guest soloists: Olivia De Prato (violin)—known to Buffalo audiences for past appearances with Signal and the MIVOS Quartet, and Jacqueline Leclair (oboe)—known to Buffalo audiences for past appearances with Signal and the Slee Sinfonietta. Iridule was in fact written specifically for Leclair, and the composer has made audio of her performance available on his website here.

Ensemble Court Circuit: Building International Relationships

Since its foundation in 2006, the Center has functioned as a key pillar of support for European new music ensembles touring in the US through its visiting artist series and annual June in Buffalo Festival. During its twelve years of existence, the Center has created an extensive network of partnerships, with Arts Council Norway, Central Arts Council (Finland), Embassy of France in the United States, FACE (French-American Contemporary Music), Swedish Arts Council, the University of Pittsburgh, and others. This has resulted in a formidable lineup of visiting artists, with many of the most in-demand European new music ensembles conducting residencies at the Center: ensembles Surplus (2010), Linea (2011, 2013, 2016, 2017), Court-Circuit (2011, 2013, 2014, 2018), Interface (2012), Norrbotten NEO (2012, 2014), Son (2013), Uusinta (2016), Cikada (2017), and the Arditti String Quartet (2007, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2017).

Ensemble Court Circuit at June in Buffalo 2014

 In the near future, this programming will continue in the form of Ensemble Court-Circuit’s residency at the Center in April. The Ensemble will conduct a workshop with the Center’s graduate composers on April 16 (to be discussed in a future blog post) and give a concert of works by established French and American composers. The ensemble’s activities in Buffalo are part of a larger US tour including visits to NYC (Roulette), Massachusetts (Le Laboratoire, Cambridge & Clark University), and Pittsburgh (Music on the Edge/University of Pittsburgh/Andy Warhol Museum); the touring program includes Center artistic director David Felder’s partial [dist]res[s]toration, as well as works by Sean Shepherd, Christophe Bertrand, Philippe Hurel, Philippe Leroux, John Aylward (world premiere), Helmut Lachenmann, and Ludwig von Beethoven. The tour is supported by l’Institut Français, part of the Office of Exports and Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in the United States, and the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, who will play alongside Court-Circuit at the concerts in NYC and Massachusetts.

Court-Circuit writes that their tour is “both the opportunity to integrate American and French composers in the same concerts and to work with young university student composers.” Face to face encounters between artists are uniquely generative for artists’ growth, and the opportunity for young American composers to work with an ensemble of this caliber is as rare as it is invaluable. New music specialist performers may be able to provide special insight into innovative compositional projects—encouraging promising new directions, while pointing out possible practical problems. The ensemble recognizes the importance of this endeavor, based on past experience: “All know how well French composers are welcomed in the United-States and the relationships built between musicians from both countries are a real artistic and personal asset that Court-circuit wishes to protect and reinforce.”

Ensemble Court-Circuit at June in Buffalo 2014

Ensemble Court-Circuit’s concert at the Center for 21^st Century Music is on April 17 at 7:30 in Slee Hall. For details about tickets, visit Slee Hall’s website.

Program:

Sean Shepherd, The Birds are Nervous, the Birds have Scattered, for clarinet, violin, piano

Christophe Bertrand, Sanh, for clarinet, cello, and piano

David Felder, Partial [dis]res[s]toration, for ensemble

Philippe Leroux, Continuo(ns), for ensemble

Performers:

Flute: Jérémie Fèvre

Clarinet: Pierre Dutrieu
Violin: Alexandra Greffin-Klein
Cello: Frédéric Baldassare
Piano: Jean-Marie Cottet
Conductor: Jean Deroyer

MIVOS Quartet: A Decade of Reimagining the String Quartet

In advance of the upcoming June in Buffalo Festival, Edge of the Center will introduce resident ensembles featured at this year’s festival. Planning for the festival is in full swing—most recently, applications from potential participant composers have been

arriving from all over North American, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

We kick off our series of profiles by introducing the MIVOS Quartet as a resident ensemble at this year’s June in Buffalo Festival. The ensemble will be known to Buffalo audiences from appearances at the Center last year and in 2014. At this year’s festival, the quartet will perform masterworks of modern string quartet repertoire by senior composers as well as hot-off-the-press new works by participant composers.

The quartet has an ambitious programming history at the Center. At last year’s June in Buffalo, the quartet gave a riveting account of Brian Ferneyhough’s superlatively difficult and rarely performed Second String Quartet, while introducing American audiences to the music of Norwegian composers Henrik Hellstenius and introducing Buffalo audiences to the music of Jeffrey Mumford. On top of this, the quartet also gave top-notch performances of works by the festival’s participant-composers. Their invitation to last year’s June in Buffalo was in part a result of the stellar performances the quartet gave on the Center’s guest artist series in 2014. Following a workshop with Center graduate composers, the quartet played a concert including Center artistic director David Felder’s first string quartet Third Face, as well as the relentless, challenging String Quartet no. 3 (“Grido”) by Helmut Lachenmann, and recent works composed specifically for MIVOS by Martin Stauning and Taylor Brook. This publication wrote about that concert here.

In 2018 MIVOS celebrates ten years of existence, a surprisingly short time span given the group’s development of boldly individual approaches to programming, as well as their appearances at the world’s most prestigious new music festivals, such as 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).

MIVOS’s programming is remarkable within the new music world in a number of respects, particularly in their advocacy for emerging composers and their expansion of the string quartet’s possibilities in duration, technology, and new approaches to composer-performer relationships. The quartet emphasizes the work of emerging composers through a number of avenues: annual open-call competitions (MIVOS/Kanter and I Creation MIVOS) resulting in performances of winning works, collaboration with emerging composers through residencies at festivals like June in Buffalo and university music departments, and commissions for new works.

Perhaps in part because the string quartet as a medium is associated with the conventions of a certain (primarily classical-period) repertoire, MIVOS has sought to expand the medium’s parameters in a number of ways. Challenging normative durational frames for chamber music, the quartet has commissioned multiple concert length works, and the group has also sought to widen the medium’s technological parameters. Work with electronics, often of an interactive nature, has become a mainstay of the group’s practice.

MIVOS also reconfigures normative composer-performer relationships. Augmenting their roles as performers, the quartet has performed works involving notational indeterminacy and improvisation, and quartet members have written works for the group (recently, works by violist Victor Lowrie and cellist Mariel Roberts were featured on a Miller Theatre Pop-Up Concert). The ensemble has also sought to expand notions of who is a composer, for instance, through commissioning hybrid composed/improvised works by improvising musicians and collaboration with spoken word artists like Saul Williams.

At the Center, we greatly look forward to MIVOS’s upcoming visit; we believe that their stellar track record with both established repertoire and new works suggests exciting prospects for their collaborations with composers at June’s festival. Be sure to check out footage of the group in action: MIVOS has released five 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 embedded above is a great place to start; be sure to also check out the plentiful videos available on Youtube and Vimeo.

Aaron Cassidy: Composing Physicality

The Center for 21^st Century music is delighted to welcome PhD alumnus Aaron Cassidy for a guest lecture and masterclass on Friday, February 16. Currently Professor of Composition at the University of Huddersfield in England, Cassidy serves as Director of its Centre for Research in New Music. After completing his PhD at UB in 2003 under the tutelage of David Felder, now artistic director of the Center for 21^st Century Music, Cassidy has gone on to notable successes not only as composer, but also as a pedagogue and arts administrator.

His compositions have been performed, commissioned, and recorded widely. Many of the world’s most highly regarded new music specialist ensembles have performed his works: ELISION, Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Musikfabrik, EXAUDI, Ictus Ensemble, ensemble recherche, Talea Ensemble, and Kairos, Diotima, and JACK string quartets. Since his doctoral student days at UB, Cassidy’s music has been presented and commissioned by prestigious cultural institutions, most notably the Bludenz and Donaueschingen festivals and PRS Foundation’s 20×12/London Cultural Olympiad 2012 project; the latter project received mainstream press coverage reaching far beyond the art music scene. Much of Cassidy’s output has been released on CD, including on a portrait CD on NEOS, with additional works on the NMC, HCR, and New Focus labels.

As Professor at the University of Huddersfield, Cassidy has played a key role in building its Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM), of which he is now Director, succeeding Liza Lim in 2017. From its beginnings in 2006, the Centre has grown to be a major presence in the international new music scene, including running its own record label, a peer-reviewed journal, and an international research network. Cassidy has played a crucial role here, for instance in curating a concert series with guest artists and ensembles in residence, running the post-graduate seminar and lecture series, organizing symposia, and cultivating partnerships with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Electric Spring, and universities across the globe. The video below gives a brief impression of CeReNeM’s activities.

Over the past two decades, Cassidy’s music has methodically and exhaustively explored what it means to make music when:

1.     The primary content of musical sound is closely bound up with the physical process of producing that sound (“the way in which a sound is made, and the sound it makes, are fundamentally intertwined”).

2.     The physical process of making a sound (bowing, fingering, embouchure, etc.) is fragmented into its component parts, which are “decoupled,” or treated temporally and morphologically independently of each other.

In this music, the notated score does not codify a sound object as much as it initiates unpredictable collisions between independent layers of instrumental or vocal sound production.

This is music that takes delight in the embodied, live nature of musical performance; it is written as much for the performer as the listener.

Cassidy's The Crutch of Memory for solo bowed string instrument

In this project, a key challenge for the composer is how to best communicate musical substance to the performer. Over the past two decades, Cassidy has refined his approach to notation in a variety of ways, above all by seeking out a notational image that prioritizes the physicality of performance.

In early works, Cassidy strove to move beyond descriptive notations—conventional Western notations describing an ideal sounding result—towards prescriptive notations (AKA tablature) specifying physical actions. While his 2002 UB PhD dissertation String Quartet notates fingering in traditional Western pitch notation, his 2004 work The Crutch of Memory created a prescriptive tablature notation diagramming hand position, finger spacing, and fingerings independently. In the latter piece, pitch results from interaction between these autonomous physical phenomena; as such, it could not be notated in another way.

Having more overtly foregrounded music’s physical process of production, Cassidy then moved to simplify the visual layout of his scores. While most of his early works notated different layers of physical motion on separate staves, the composer writes that “in the Second String Quartet these movements are compressed onto a single, multi-coloured stave…My goal with the notation of Second String Quartet was to maintain the same level of gestural independence in the physical, choreographic, sound-production component of the work while developing a much more unified, integrated approach to the notation of that physical material.” As a solution, Cassidy arrived at “a multi-coloured stave that indicated the complete length of the string…[with] all indications of movements of both left and right hands are given graphically.” Color is used to distinguish between left (black) and right (red) hands; other parameters like bow pressure and finger pressure are shown graphically via line thickness and line darkness, respectively.

Cassidy, Second String Quartet, excerpt from second violin part

At this point, Cassidy had discarded conventional descriptive notations for pitch and volume; in the quartet, pitch is a resultant of hand position, finger spacing, and fingering, while volume is a byproduct of bow pressure and movement. However, in the domain of rhythm, the Second String Quartet’s notation was more conventional, with its basis in sequences of regular impulses, albeit whose speed changes frequently.

Frustrated by the limitations of this approach to notation, Cassidy began to investigate alternatives. A recent talk unpacks his process of arriving at what he calls a “non-geometrical rhythm,” a rhythm based not on regularity, but upon tactile physicality of gesture:

In my rethinking of my rhythmic language over the last few months and years, I’ve tried to force myself to really return to first principles, to thoroughly interrogate what the most fundamental characteristics and properties of rhythm actually are. For me, ‘beat’—and, even more so the repetition of beats through ‘pulse’—is actually only a fairly small subcomponent of rhythm. It is true that rhythm is about pattern, repetition, and regularity, but it’s also about speed and slowness, and compression and dilation, about waves and clouds, about stasis and absence, and about vibration and dissipation.

The research is still in its early stages, but these inquiries may turn out to be hugely consequential for the entire field of notated music, opening up entirely new avenues of compositional research. Throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries, composers have sought out meaningful notational representations of non-geometrical rhythms, but with highly limited success; as his talk outlines, Cassidy’s attempt to build a rhythmic language from first principles steers clear of many of the pitfalls of earlier notational methods.

Cassidy, The Wreck of Former Boundaries, excerpt from clarinet and electric lap steel guitar parts

These rhythmic researches bore fruit in his recent work The Wreck of Former Boundaries for ensemble and electronics, commissioned and premiered by his long-time collaborators ELISION. This 35-minute work—two years in the making—will be the subject of Cassidy’s artist talk at the Center. Interweaving electronics and instruments, notation and improvisation (the astonishing improvising trumpeter Peter Evans joined ELISION for the project), the work both extends lines of inquiry opened two decades ago and opens new possibilities. At the Center, we greatly look forward to hearing about Cassidy’s exciting latest work.

A Musical Feast: UB in the Community

The Center for 21^st Century Music is delighted to co-sponsor the next concert in the “A Musical Feast” series, featuring UB music performance faculty in virtuosic solo and chamber works by György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Stuart Saunders Smith, and the Center’s artistic director, David Felder. A highlight of the February concert will be Felder’s Coleccion Nocturna for clarinetist (doubling bass clarinet), piano and 4-channel tape, a work inspired by the composer’s lifelong engagement with the poetry of Pablo Neruda.

The February 2 concert continues a long-standing partnership between “A Musical Feast,” the Center for 21^st Century Music, and UB’s music department. The concert series has served as an important liaison between the city of Buffalo and UB’s composers and performers. Notable past collaborations include a concert celebrating the birthday of Center artistic director David Felder and a staged reading of a new production of Faust with music by Center PhD alumnus Nathan Heidelberger (the latter sponsored by UB’s Creative Arts Initiative).

Jean Kopperud

The concert features four UB music faculty members—Jean Kopperud (clarinets), Eric Huebner (piano), Tiffany Du Mouchelle (soprano), and Megan Kyle (oboe)—who will be joined by Stephen Solook (percussion). Jean Kopperud is a veteran of the New York City new music scene, where she was a member of The New York New Music Ensemble, Omega, Ensemble 21, and Washington Square Chamber Players. Over the course of her long and distinguished performing career, she has often received rave reviews from the press, being called “absolutely smashing,” “superhuman,” “magnificent,” “unforgettably visual,” “staggering,” “sensational,” “dazzling,” “wonderful,” and “the total clarinetist.”

Pianist Eric Huebner is also active in New York City, in both historical and contemporary art music. In addition to teaching at UB, he currently serves as pianist of the New York Philharmonic and as adjunct faculty at the Juilliard School. In the city, he has played at Carnegie’s Zankel and Weill Recital Halls, Miller Theatre, Merkin Hall, (le) Poisson Rouge, and Roulette, and with ensembles including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea, New York New Music Ensemble, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, Manhattan Sinfonietta, So Percussion and the American Modern Ensemble; from 2011-12 he was a member of the award-winning chamber ensemble Antares.

Aurora Borealis Duo

The concert also showcases UB’s newest music faculty members. Tiffany Du Mouchelle currently serves on UB’s music faculty, where she serves as director of the voice program. Particularly renowned for her opera and music-theatre work, she has received the Richard F. Gold Career Grant for American Opera singers, and has given world, modern, continental, and regional premieres of works by Stockhausen, Dusapin, Reynolds, Seckendorff, and Botelho.

Du Mouchelle and percussionist Stephen Solook arrived in Buffalo in 2015 following doctoral studies at the University of California San Diego. Together they founded Aurora Borealis Duo, an ensemble committed to performing and commissioning music for soprano and percussion; one or both of them has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Eighth Black Bird, the International Contemporary Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Joseph Alessi, Bob Becker, David Krakauer, Steven Schick, and Lucy Shelton. As members of the non-profit organization Cultures in Harmony, they have traveled to perform, teach, and lead workshops in Cameroon, Egypt, Mexico, and Papua New Guinea.

Megan Kyle

Oboist Megan Kyle joined UB’s music faculty this past fall. She has performed with classical ensembles such as Erie Chamber Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Symphoria, Omaha Symphony, and New World Symphony, and new music ensembles such as Null Point, Wooden Cities, and Parvenue. In addition to UB, she also teaches oboe and English horn at Houghton College and SUNY Geneseo.

“A Musical Feast”

Friday, February 2, 2018, 8pm

Burchfield Penney Art Center

Artistic Director: Charles Haupt

General Manager: Irene Haupt

Tickets: $10 members/$20 not yet members/$5 students

Program:

Coleccion Nocturna, for clarinet, bass clarinet, piano and 4-channel tape (1983)
David Felder
Jean Kopperud, clarinet
Eric Huebner, piano              

The Lilies of the Field (2013)

Stuart Saunders Smith

Tiffany Du Mouchelle, soprano

Stephen Solook, vibraphone

Dmaathen (1976)

Iannis Xenakis     

Steve Solook, percussion        

Megan Kyle, oboe

Études for Piano (Book 2) (1988-94)

Glamb Borong

Fém

Vertige

Der Zauberlehrling

En Suspens

Entrelacs

L’escalier du diable

Coloana infinită

György Ligeti

Eric Huebner, piano                                              

 

Eric Huebner