Theresa Wong
cello, voice
"The Sentience of Sound"
Jayden Laumeister, English horn
Tristan McMichael, tenor saxophone
Magdalene Myint, piano
Michelle Han, piano
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe, English horn, electronics
Kathryn Schulmeister, double bass
Friday, February 21, 2025
7:30 pm
Recital Hall
Improvisation
Theresa Wong (b. 1976)
Jayden Laumeister, English horn
Tristan McMichael, tenor saxophone
Magdalene Myint, piano
Michelle Han, piano
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe, English horn, electronics
Kathryn Schulmeister, double bass
PROGRAM NOTES
Theresa Wong is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and intermedia artist active at the intersection of composition, improvisation, and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Her primary interest lies in the transformative potential of performance for both the artist and receiver alike. As a cellist and vocalist, Wong has forged a unique vocabulary on her instruments through extensive explorations in new playing techniques, extreme detuning, and the timbral merging of singing and playing together.
Her compositions include Fluency of Trees for solo cello and voice which premiered at the Other Minds Festival in 2022; She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees, commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill for The Future Is Female project; and The Unlearning, a multi-media song cycle inspired by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, released on Tzadik and premiered at Roulette in 2013. Her collaboration with Long String Instrument inventor Ellen Fullman includes Harbors, released on room40 and chosen as one of Wire’s top 50 releases of 2020, and Soundless, which was presented at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles in 2024. Other commissions include works for San Francisco Girls Chorus, NakedEye Ensemble, Long Beach Opera, Del Sol Quartet, and Splinter Reeds.
Wong is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition and a 2012 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow. She has shared her work internationally at venues including Fondation Cartier in Paris, Cafe Oto and Barbican Centre in London, San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Sydney Festival, and The Stone in New York City. Originally active in the field of design, she embarked on her current artistic path after encountering experimental music while working as a designer in Venice, Italy.
Wong is the founder of fo'c'sle, a record label dedicated to releasing adventurous music from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
Notes by the composer
Nightwatching
Nightwatching is a meditation on the profound wonder of sailing at night on the open sea. Using an extreme scordatura to evoke the groanings of a tallship, I play and sing of the time between the ages of 17 and 23 when I found myself working aboard schooners on the California and New England coasts.
Castings
1 : something (as the excrement of an earthworm) that is cast out or off (primal product of the creative process) 2 : the act of one that casts: as a : the throwing of a fishing line by means of a rod and reel (acts of casting vibrations; sending something off in order to locate oneself) b : the assignment of parts and duties to actors or performers (a central question of composition concerning the roles of the composer and performer) 3 : something cast in a mold (to break out of)
She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees
This piece begins with an incantation of the song “Images,” by Nina Simone, with pitches of its melody embedded within an amalgam of glissandi and counter-melodies. Rendering the song austerely in a cappella, Simone sings the text of No Images (1926), a poem by the Harlem Renaissance poet William Waring Cuney. In this piece, the notes of the melody are sounded by way of silently pressed keys which are allowed to ring with the use of the sostenuto pedal. When a glissando sweep is played across the depressed keys, all pitches of the sweep are immediately dampened, but the tones of the melody continue to resonate.
The melody of the last stanza of the poem, however, is not intoned. What follows instead is the interruption of Cuney's depiction of oppression with the music of a dance in 13/8 meter. I have been drawn to this meter because of its lilt and instability—an uneven alternating between 7 and 6 beats which propels forward motion. After I began to first compose with this meter, I learned how the now 'unlucky' number originated in many ancient cultures as a symbol of the divine feminine. For example, there are 13 cycles of the moon and menstrual cycles a year, and Friday (from the Norse goddess Freya
PROGRAM NOTES
or in Neo-Latin languages, Venerdi from Venus) the thirteenth represented the day of the Goddess—a day to celebrate the cycles of creation, death and rebirth. The dance is an evocation of movement into self-knowledge and worth for those who have not felt themselves duly reflected in the world. This piece was commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill for The Future Is Female project.
No Images
She does not know her beauty, she thinks her brown body has no glory.
If she could dance naked under palm trees and see her image in the river, she would know.
But there are no palm trees on the street, and dish water gives back no images.
—William Waring Cuney
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Oboist and electronic musician Kyle Bruckmann is assistant professor of practice and program director of Varied Ensembles at University of the Pacific. He freelances throughout the greater Bay Area’s Euro-classical music scene while actively producing experimental solo and collaborative work within an international community of improvisers and sound artists. His current ensemble affiliations include Splinter Reeds, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Quinteto Latino, Eco Ensemble, sfSound, and the Stockton Symphony.
Bruckmann tramples genre boundaries in widely ranging work as a composer/performer, educator and New Music specialist. His creative output—extending from conservatory-trained foundations into gray areas encompassing free jazz, post-punk rock, and the noise underground—can be heard on more than 100 recordings. Three decades of chameleonic gigging have found him performing in settings including the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Venice Biennale, 924 Gilman, Berghain, a 12-foot diameter bomb shelter, and dangling 30 feet in the air by a harness from a crane.
Bassist Kathryn Schulmeister joined the faculty of University of the Pacific’s Conservatory of Music in fall 2023. Praised for her “expressive and captivating performance” (GRAMMY.com), she enjoys a creative music practice as a versatile performer, educator and researcher. Recent honors include a 2020 Grammy Award nomination as a collaborating artist featured on Susan Narucki’s “The Edge of Silence,” a contemporary classical album of chamber works by György Kurtág on AVIE Records (2019).
Schulmeister has appeared as a soloist with leading international contemporary ensembles including Klangforum Wien, the ELISION Ensemble and Ensemble Vertixe Sonora. She has given solo performances at venues and festivals around the world including the Melbourne Recital Centre, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, ECLAT Festival Neue Musik Stuttgart, San Diego Museum of Making Music, soundSCAPE Festival, Vértice Festival and the Clive Davis Theater at the Grammy Museum. She is a member of the ELISION Ensemble, Fonema Consort (Chicago/NYC), and Echoi Ensemble (LA).
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