20240202_FNM Chamber Concert IIb

THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents the

21st Biennial Festival of New Music Chamber Concert (IIb) featuring works by

Nathaniel Parks Isaac Barzso Nico Gutierrez Peter Gilbert Meg Okura

Friday, February 2, 2024 11:15 a.m. | Opperman Music Hall

PROGRAM in these pockets of quiet (2021)

Tommaso Bruno, violin Landon Holladay, percussion

wire splinters and collapses (2021) Armero (2023)

Nathaniel Parks

Isaac Barzso

Molly Reid, piano

Burned into the Orange (2016)

Nico Gutierrez

Peter Gilbert

Close Quarters Micah Cheng, soprano saxophone; Collin Bankovic, alto saxophone AJ Nguyen, tenor saxophone; Matthew James, baritone saxophone

Phantasmagoria (2020)

Meg Okura Brad Pilcher, clarinet; Anna Kirkland, violin Mitchell George, cello

To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All… Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting during performances. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Recording or broadcasting of the concert by any means, including the use of digital cameras, cell phones, or other devices is expressly forbidden. Please deactivate all portable electronic devices including watches, cell phones, pagers, hand-held gaming devices or other electronic equipment that may distract the audience or performers.

Recording Notice: This performance may be recorded. Please note that members of the audience may at times be included in this process. By attending this performance you consent to have your image or likeness appear in any live or recorded video or other transmission or reproduction made in conjunction to the performance.

Florida State University provides accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please notify the College of Music at (850) 644-3424 at least five working days prior to a musical event to request accommodation for disability or alternative program format.

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM Nathaniel Parks: in these pockets of quiet in these pockets of quiet grew out of a long walk through Baltimore with a new friend in November of 2020. As we walked through the city, we paused at two of my favorite places; a small park cut out of the middle of a street in Bolton Hill and a spot along the water, behind the aquarium in Inner Harbor. I was struck by how suddenly the sounds of the city dropped away in both spots, leaving only faint echoes of cars and the eerily beautiful ring of the light rail’s brakes as they scraped through the neighborhood. There’s something strangely romantic about carving silence out of sound and finding moments of peace in the midst chaos.

Throughout this piece you’ll hear the frenetic energy of downtown Baltimore, the squeal of the light rail, the echoes of the aquarium’s ambient music, and the reminiscent sounds of the wind chimes that hung in my alley in Charles Village. This piece is inextricably tied to Baltimore and the many beautiful sights and sounds you can discover in it.

Nathaniel Parks is a Baltimore-based composer and singer whose work has become increasingly obsessed with vulnerability and the beauty found in the mundane. Nathaniel’s music has been performed around the country by members of Ensemble dal Niente, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and Jack Quartet, and has been presented at both the Society of Composers, Inc. National Conference (2017) and the Society of Composers, Inc. Region VI Conference (2018). He has received fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (2023) and Millay Arts (2023). Nathaniel was the recipient of the Otto Ortmann Award in Composition (2020) and was a semi-finalist for the American Prize in Choral Composition – Student Division (2018).

Isaac Barzso: wire splinters and collapses The materials for wire splinters and collapses are fully-formed objects spit into a vacuum, splintered and shattered into threads and shards before they are once again, repeatedly, pressed back together. Subjected to the process yet and yet again, the objects yearn for a re-contextualisation and search for their purpose within the sound space.

Composer and improviser Isaac Barzso strives to explore the activity of placemaking and the transfer of data and methods of communication between different mediums, aiming to create music and multimedia art that exists in the gap between. Heavily influenced by the textures of post-rock music, the structures of literature and film, and other aspects of pop culture, his work utilizes computer-generated music and computer-assisted composition to close the gap between disparate forms of objects and media. Alongside recent collaborators such as Longleash, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Yarn/Wire, Isaac’s work has been featured at SEAMUS, NYCEMF, ICMC, and the Darmstadt Ferienkurse. A PhD candidate in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University, Isaac previously studied at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, University of Louisville, and Florida State University with mentors Yannis Kyriakides, Mayke Nas, Richard Barrett, Krzysztof Wołek, and Ladislav Kubík.

Nico Gutierrez: Armero Armero was a town located in Tolima, Colombia, that was wiped away by a mudslide caused by a volcanic eruption on November 3, 1985. At the time, my uncle, his wife, and their five-year old son lived in Armero. Just before the disaster, Sergio’s parents left him at home with their nanny, but were unable to return because of the volcanic eruption. Their home was swept away in the mudslide from the eruption, and Sergio was nowhere to be found. For years Sergio was thought to have been lost to the disaster until reports came of children from Armero being found living in Europe. Instead of trying to reunite lost children with their parents, the Colombian government gave many of these children up for adoption under the assumption that their families had perished in the mudslide. Worse still

was that geologists and other experts had warned authorities to evacuate the area after detecting volcanic activity two months earlier. It is estimated that 22,000 people were killed in this natural disaster. A banner at a mass funeral for the victims read, “The volcano didn’t kill 22,000 people. The government killed them.” To this day my family does not know whether Sergio is alive or not.

This piece depicts the tragedy of Armero and the loss of my cousin in the first half while the second expresses frustration and anger towards the Colombian government. The piece is very motivic with the opening line representing Sergio and his innocence appearing repeatedly throughout the work. The first half builds dramatically depicting the mudslide wiping away the town of Armero. The second half incorporates a quote from the Bunde Tolimense, Tolima’s state anthem composed by my great-granduncle, Alberto Castilla. The text to this anthem is about the happiness and pride people from Tolima feel about their state. In this piece, the anthem is slowly distorted and juxtaposes the meaning of these lyrics against the government’s negligence before and in the aftermath of this horrific tragedy.

The following is a link to the non-profit organization that aims to rebuild and support the community and families affected by the natural disaster: armandoarmero.org/en Nico Gutierrez is a Colombian-American composer whose compositions have been performed by the Santa Fe Symphony, Austin Opera, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá.

An ambassador of Latin-American art song, Nico has regularly served as composer-in-residence for the Barcelona Festival of Song premiering electro-acoustic works for voice. His Catalan cycle, Signat l’amic del cor, was premiered at the historic Palau de la Música Catalana and was given production by the Spanish government to professionally record and publish the composition.

In March 2018, Nico was invited to Fundación Fox in Guanajuato, Mexico where he rehearsed with their youth orchestra and conducted his music, in concert, for former Mexican President Vicente Fox. Additionally, Nico was nominated for Best Overall Composition in the 2019 London Composition Awards and placed second in the 2023 Marion Brown Prize.

As a multimedia composer, Nico has worked in the music department for several films and television series for A&E, CBS, HBO and companies like Huawei and Netflix. Nico earned the bachelor’s degree in music composition from Texas Christian University in 2015 and an MFA in Scoring for the Screen from Columbia College Chicago in 2017. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in composition at Florida State University.

Meg Okura: Phantasmagoria Phantasmagoria is a trio work for bass clarinet/clarinet, cello, and violin and through-composed chamber work in the composer’s signature style of mixing jazz, world music, and classical music. The music starts and ends with a depiction of the composer’s mental state during the first few weeks of the pandemic, waking up every morning to a world more surreal than a dream.

A Tokyo native, Meg Okura is a Grammy-nominated violinist and composer based in the Bronx, New York. She won the 2023 ISJAC Fundamental Freedom Commission Awards, 2022 BRIO Awards, 2021 NYC Women’s Fund, 2021 Jazz Road, 2020 Copland House Residency Awards, 2018 Chamber Music America New Jazz Works, and others.

After earning BM and MM degrees from Juilliard as a violinist, she made a difficult switch to jazz upon graduation. Dubbed “the queen of chamber jazz” by All About Jazz, Okura leads her Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble. Okura has released nine albums under her name and two more in the works this year. Her credits appear over 100 times in albums, films and live videos. PACJE’s fourth album, Ima Ima (2018), was chosen the “Best Releases of 2018” on All About Jazz and the New York Times Editor’s Pick, and her release of 2018 NPO Trio Live at The Stone was Bandcamp’s Best of March 2018.