Month: September 2015

I’m very happy to have been selected for a residency at Willapa Bay AiR in Oysterville, WA next summer.  This is a relatively new residency in a very beautiful part of the country, and I’m looking forward to making a lot of new music and getting to know my fellow artists over what will certainly be some delicious local meals.  (That was certainly the case at Camargo Foundation last spring….)

I’m delighted to be presenting my music to students and colleagues at UMBC tomorrow afternoon and plan to focus on three different works:

Sandburg Songs, my current project, a portion of which was premiered in Italy at the SoundSCAPE Festival last summer;

In Search of Planet X, a work from 2009 that shows a bit of what I think about rhythm; and…

Celebrations, a solo work for gayageum, as a way of talking about my works for Korean traditional instruments and how that experience plays into my work more broadly.

All three works are available on my soundcloud page.

I had the pleasure of attending Friday night’s season opening concert by the Lunar Ensemble, a young, virtuosic, and energetic new music ensemble and Ensemble-in-Residence for the Baltimore War Memorial Arts Initiative.  Led by the brilliant Gemma New, a conductor whose talents I witnessed two years ago when we were both fellows at Aspen, the concert offered three viewpoints on combining text and music.

Two of the selections allowed the ensemble’s soprano, Danielle Buonaiuto, to share her remarkable vocal gifts.  Baltimore-based composer Douglas Buchanan’s Prospero Variations was a fantasia on texts from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and showcased Buonaiuto’s dramatic flair in a variety of textures and moods.  Another vocal work, Canadian composer David Passmore’s My Mistress’ Eyes, on Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” sonnets, stood out for its rhythmic nuance, changing timbres, and playful humor.  Passmore was able to immediately capture the mood of the text with succinct and memorable gestures and evocative melodic lines.

The concert began with John Harbison’s Songs America Loves to Sing, an instrumental work pairing solos and canonic treatments of popular American tunes like “Aura Lee”, the “St. Louis Blues”, and the “Anniversary Song” (better known for its birthday function).  What I love about this piece and Harbison’s music generally is that technical prowess is always at the service of expressive intent.  Within his strict framework, Harbison moves from honkey tonk to hymn tunes to hints of Ives with ease and charm.  For me the most striking portion of the work came in his treatment of “Poor Butterfly.”  After a lyrical opening clarinet cadenza (Bravo, Gleb Kanasevich!), the tune emerges in haunting, pale hues, while a subdued clarinet obbligato continues to dance slowly above.

For a different but no less ravishing take on this melody, I recommend Sarah Vaughan’s interpretation here:

 

I enjoyed Zachary Woolfe’s review of the Resonant Bodies Festival in Friday’s New York Times. It featuring an amazing trio of new music sopranos–Tony Arnold, Lucy Shelton, and Dawn Upshaw–in performances of works by a grand selection of contemporary composers, including my former teacher, David Liptak.  I especially enjoyed Woolfe’s description of Tony Arnold:

“Her eyes wide and piercing, Tony Arnold is a master of bleakness, with a powdery white voice that rises to uncannily pure floated high notes. She always leaves the impression of singing, alone, in the middle of a vast, empty landscape of ice.”

I couldn’t agree more!  It was such a pleasure to write for Tony at last summer’s SoundSCAPE Festival in Italy.  Watch her thrilling premiere of my Sandburg Songs here.

The concert season at UMBC got off to an great start last night with a solo performance by violist Jessica Meyer.  As a member of the ensemble counter)induction, Meyer is an experienced presenter of contemporary music, and it was clear from the start that she thrives on exploring the viola’s full expressive capacity, regardless of stylistic boundaries.  Through the hour-long performance of her original works, Meyer showcased the expressive possibilities of amplified viola with loop pedal, transforming the instrument into larger ensembles through careful layering and repetition of a variety of timbres and playing techniques, notably pizzicato and scordatura.  My favorite of the works was Afflicted Mantra, which, with its drone and gradual introduction of speech, created a mesmerizing texture and harmonic landscape.  Like many of the works, I felt this could have gone on even longer, but there was something alluring about the brevity of these encounters.  With each selection preceded by introductory remarks from the stage, the evening paired performance with confession.  Meyer’s biographical vignettes allowed for a more immediately personal connection between the audience and the performer, which was very welcome; many classical performers could learn something from this example.  Because of this comfort, I could easily have imagined the performance taking place in less formal surroundings…with dim lighting.  And good drinks.