Black Square Quartet Camille Barry (violin) Mike Patterson (violin) Charlotte Burbrook de Vere (viola) Dan Curro (cello) Cathy Likhuta (piano) Peter Luff (horn)
"Out of the Woods?" Piano Quartet String Quartet No. 1 "Tangle and Tear" Trio for Horn, Violin & Piano
Cathy Likhuta (2014) Thomas Green (2019) Cathy Likhuta (2018)
Out Of The Woods? A friend of mine once said: “Cathy, one day you will write a very calm and quiet piece.” Perhaps he is right, but this is not that piece yet. This is essentially a toccata that attempts to reflect the spectrum of emotions and actions of a person being chased. It jumps between a playful chase, an adventurous runaway, and a runfor-your-life escape. There are moments in the piece where one is trying to catch his breath and regain energy, although there is not much time for that. There is also a part where one hides, anxiously awaiting an opportunity to flee (which might never come); in that section I wanted for every musical phrase to say: “I am scared.” Altogether, the piece depicts a risky and desperate yet necessary attempt to get out of the woods. The question is whether this attempt is going to succeed…
String Quartet 1. In four movements. Dedicated to Mum and Dad. Jumbles, sharp turns, confusion. Con un po 'di fusione. Something old, something new. Music was not introduced to me in an orderly way. This is partly a symptom of our time, where so many contrasted ideas and influences are par for the course in our interconnected world. Like many of my musical friends, I did not have a stock-standard formative period. I’m an oddball, and not content to settle and focus on a single thing. My musical education and life chopped and changed (in my early years mostly what I achieved was bamboozling my teachers). As much as I have loved composing (and probably couldn’t do much else), I must admit it has taken me decades to work out how to put music together. As I understand it, a string quartet is considered a sort of composer’s autograph. At the tender young age of forty-three, this is my first complete string quartet, and I wanted to invest as much of my personality as I could jam into it. More than that, it’s verging on being biographical, with many influences present, and not always getting on well. And like me, I suppose, it’s not so serious. Well, hold on, it is! It is hard to write music, and I am very serious about it. But I also think music can be fun, and I couldn’t complete my first “autograph” and not make it fun. It’s both things – serious and fun. It’s both historical, and it is me right here and now. Performance Notes
This quartet is both serious and amusing at once. I take my cue here from, say, a good stand up comedian, who is neither entirely slapstick nor boringly didactic. OK, it’s not really like that. It’s about my own personal musical history, so it incorporates various musical streams, and I’ve used some light-heartedness as a way of navigating this pluralism. Sometimes it is serious, but the line between that and mild satire is thin; in any case it doesn’t matter because either way the upshot is (hopefully) an energetic and engaging performance. In short, animation and exaggeration are key. Take as much liberty as you please with tempo indications. My hope is that you can make it your own – inject your personality. My preference is to see performers move about. . . hopefully this music almost obliges you to do so. Scattered throughout the entire piece are many subtle dissonances. Ideally, I would like the players to know these sounds well, so that they aren’t produced like accidents in a broadly tonal landscape. The best solution for this is very slow playing of such sections in rehearsal, to internalise those harmonies. There are many contrapuntal episodes in this quartet (including the fugue of course). My own preference for delivery is that held notes are given a little accent at their start, then dropped off somewhat to allow any moving parts to be heard more clearly. Or, in any case, that moving parts are constantly in the spotlight. There is not much explicit indication of this in the dynamic markings, but you can assume it’s generally what I’m hoping for. But use your discretion and build your own dynamic forms out of it (go against what I’ve indicated if you have a better idea). The short cadenzas for Violin 1 in Movements One and Four (bars 39 and 23 respectively) work fine as-is. However, I quite like the idea of a violinist experimenting with these and should V1 wish to elaborate on them or incorporate their own cadenza (improvised or prepared) they are most welcome. In this case would suggest somehow keeping the little mordent-like figures as they link in with other parts of the music.
Tangle and Tear Tangle and Tear (2018) was originally written as a trio for violin, bass clarinet and piano, commissioned by Plexus, and later adapted for horn trio. Inspired by the amazing musicians in this ensemble and everything they do for Australian music, I wanted to use the concept behind the name Plexus as the base for the piece. One of the meanings of this word is “an intertwining combination of parts or elements in a structure or system [from Latin plectere–to braid]”. As I was looking into this definition, the word tangle kept coming to mind. Then, as I enjoy juxtaposing musical ideas and characters behind them, I thought of the opposite of “tangle”–“tear”. The concept of tangle and tear grasped me immediately, and my brain kept coming up with various ways in which this concept applies to our everyday lives. For me, it represents any situation that gets out of hand and cannot be untangled or resolved in a destruction-free way. It can be something lighthearted, like having to cut blue tack out of your pre-schooler’s hair (don’t ask me how I know this…); something devastating from within, like life-threatening addictions; finally, something dramatic and terrifying, like the only possible way out of an unhealthy and violent relationship. This last one kept churning in my head, influencing several sections of the piece, perhaps due to our country’s out-of-control situation with domestic violence… The concept is also intentionally reflected in the form of the piece: unpredictable, with some sections taking a long time to tangle and some built around the struggle of tearing something irreparable apart. Musically, the entire piece is built on the opening’s emotional four-bar motif from the piano part. This horn trio version is dedicated to my friend and collaborator Peter Luff.
CATHERINE LIKHUTA (b. 1981) is an Australian-based composer, pianist and recording artist. Her music exhibits high emotional charge, programmatic nature and rhythmic complexity. Catherine's works have been played throughout the United States, Europe and Australia, as well as in Canada, Mexico and Brazil. Her music has enjoyed performances by prominent symphony orchestras (such as Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra of the National Radio of Ukraine), chamber ensembles (such as Atlantic Brass Quintet, Ensemble Q, HD Duo, NU CORNO, U.S. Army Field Band Horns, PLEXUS and Western Brass Quintet) and soloists (such as Griffin Campbell, Ronald Caravan, Paul Dean, Michael Duke, Peter Luff, Trish O'Brien, Andrew Pelletier, Denise Tryon and Adam Unsworth). Her pieces have been played at Carnegie Hall (Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage), Glyndebourne Opera House (Organ Room), five International Horn Symposiums, two World Saxophone Congresses and many festivals and conferences. Catherine’s recent residencies include the University of Connecticut, the University of Georgia and North Carolina NewMusic Initiative. She was the winner of the International Horn Society Composition Contest (virtuoso division) and the 4MBS Kawai Composition Contest, as well as the recipient of several awards, including two grants from the Australia Council for the Arts. Her music can be heard on Albany, Cala, Equilibrium and Summit Records. Catherine’s wind band works have enjoyed performances by Columbia University Wind Ensemble, SUNY Potsdam Crane Wind Ensemble, Sydney Conservatorium Wind Symphony, University of Georgia Hodgson Wind Ensemble, University of Kentucky Wind Symphony and many other groups. Her music has been played at Australian School Band and Orchestra Festival (Sydney), CBDNA Conference (Norman, OK) and Midwest Clinic (Chicago, IL). Catherine holds a Bachelor's degree in jazz piano from Kyiv Glière Music College, a five-year post-graduate degree in composition from the Tchaikovsky National Music Academy of Ukraine (Kyiv Conservatory) and a PhD in composition from the University of Queensland. She is an active performer, o fen playing her own music. She was the soloist on the premiere and the CD recording of Out Loud, her piano concerto commissioned by the Cornell University Wind Ensemble, and the pianist on Adam Unsworth’s CD Snapshots. Together with her collaborators, she has played numerous recitals, including ones at a World Saxophone Congress, two International Horn Symposiums, Eastman School of Music, Northwestern University and University of Michigan.
THOMAS GREEN has a reputation in Brisbane (Australia) as a versatile composer whose focus is finding a musical home between many and varied streams, ofen seamlessly melding classical and contemporary idioms. He is the recipient of various government grants, commissions and is a prize-winner in national composition competitions. He completed his PhD in 2016, and his music has been premiered around Australia and internationally, with performances in Italy, France, UK, Croatia and China in recent years. He has composed and arranged music for The Sydney Symphony (with Josh Pyke), The Australian String Quartet, Katie Noonan, Opera Qld, La Boite Theatre, Plexus (Melbourne), and the Brisbane-based organisations Collusion Music, Trichotomy, Trivium Ensemble, The Black Square Quartet and Argo. In 2017 he was commissioned by The Queensland Music Festival to write a concerto for Manu Delago and QYO. In 2018 his original dance music for Turbine, a show by Collusion, was toured in Brisbane and Shanghai, and in 2019 his music was featured on Katie Noonan’s AIR and ARIA-nominated album, The Glad Tomorrow, and is collaborating with Noonan again in 2021, writing original music for the newly formed Australian Vocal Ensemble. Thomas has been commissioned by community ensembles around Australia, including a trumpet
concerto for Morten Bay Symphony Orchestra in 2020. He also releases experimental electronic music under the moniker Praxis Axis. He lectures in music theory at the Queensland Conservatorium.