C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective in collaboration with Poets Out Loud
VOICES UP! Tuesday April 30th, 2019 at 7:30pm Fordham University Lincoln Center
Cheryl Aden C4's 2018-19 Featured Artist
C4 welcomes photographer Cheryl Aden as our 2018-19 Featured Artist and creative collaborator. She has contributed photos from her body of work to C4's season. Cheryl describes her artistic style and inspiration:
www.cheryladen.com
Nature is my photographic playground. From wideangle to micro-landscapes, and close-up portraits of organic life or inorganic forms, I explore the sensuosity and drama of the natural world. My training and background as an actress and singer lay the groundwork for a visual storytelling: my work investigates tension, relationship, tonality, vibrancy in what is discarded as well as what is saved, in what is mundane and commonplace as well as what is extraordinary. Always a bit of the rebel, I challenge the notion of beauty and traditional views.
Watch for your opportunity to own one of these beautiful photographs at an art auction in 2019, for the benefit of C4.
Many thanks to Cheryl for her generosity and creative dedication to C4.
C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective
VOICES UP!
Tuesday, April 30, 7:30pm: Fordham University Lincoln Center, Manhattan, NY
Blue Phoenix
Kala Pierson (b. 1977)
Jessica Corbin, conductor
*Part Songs
Benjamin Arendsen, conductor Alexandra Schleuderer, soprano
*John Eason Stops Preaching Benjamin Arendsen, conductor
*Octopus
Erin Halpin, conductor
*Dear Ghosts Karen Siegel, conductor Alexandra Schleuderer, soprano Mario Gullo, tenor
*Elegy for the Gesture Perry Townsend, conductor Karen Siegel, soprano Erin Halpin, alto Sherwin Chao, tenor Daniel Andor-Ardó, bass Brian Mountford, bass
text by Esam Pasha
Lawrence Kramer (b. 1946)
poems by Shelley, Plato, Eliot, Sappho, Whitman, and Keats
Hilary Purrington (b. 1990)
poem by Julia Bouwsma (from Midden)
Karen Siegel (b. 1980)
text compiled by Karen Siegel, from statements by Jessica Drake, Cathy Heller, Jessica Leeds, Summer Zervos, and Donald Trump
Bettina Sheppard (b. 1962)
poem by Julia Bouwsma (from Midden)
David See (b. 1958)
poem by Henk Rossouw (from Xamissa)
*Rearrival
Brian Mountford (b. 1964)
Timothy Brown, conductor poem by Henk Rossouw (from Xamissa) Benjamin Arendesen, tenor Hilary Purrington, alto Karen Siegel and Melissa Wozniak, sopranos Sherwin Chao, tenor Mario Gullo and Jamie Klenetsky Fay, solo speakers
So Breaks the Sun
Melissa Wozniak, conductor
Shavon Lloyd (b. 1997)
poem by Shavon Lloyd and Ben Jonson * world premiere
A Note from C4 “Artists are the eyes of the culture.” This line, spoken by Iraqi artist Esam Pasha and set to music by Kala Pierson, embodies the spirit of tonight’s concert. C4 is pleased to be collaborating with Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud series in this celebration of two art forms that are so intrinsically linked: music and poetry. Voices Up! is centered around the two winners of the 2016-2017 Poets Out Loud Prize: Julia Bouwsma’s Midden and Henk Rossouw’s Xamissa. Each work examines a series of true events in a place that the poets call home: for Bouwsma, it is the forced eviction and erasure of an interracial community on Malaga Island, off the coast of her home state of Maine; for Rossouw, it is the complicated history of the South African city of Cape Town, the place where he grew up. Through these poems and the musical works that C4 composers have created around these texts, we see often uncomfortable moments in history, longforgotten people, and perhaps reflections of ourselves. Likewise, the other pieces on this program train our eyes and ears to events in our culture, inviting us to experience emotional responses to what we perceive in the world around us. We hope you will enjoy and be inspired by the music and poetry you hear tonight, and that this program can be a testament to the power of the arts.
C4 exists to enrich artists and audiences alike, through passionate advocacy of new choral works, performing pieces written within the last 25 years, premiering and commissioning new choral works, and mentoring emerging singers, composers, and conductors of today's choral music. www.c4ensemble.org
Poets Out Loud & Voices Up! Poets Out Loud is a community of poetry at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. Poets Out Loud's mission is to provide opportunities for the creation, dissemination, and enjoyment of poetry. Fordham's annual Voices Up! concerts at its Lincoln Center campus are devoted to the art of today's vocal art music. A highlight of each concert is the premiere of new vocal works composed to poetry from the most recent winning volumes in the Poets Out Loud publication prize series from Fordham University Press.
Julia Bouwsma Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic, and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). Honors she has received include the 2018 Maine Literary Award, the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, and residencies from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems and book reviews can be found in Cutthroat, Grist, The Ilanot Review, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx, Verse Daily, and other journals. Bouwsma currently serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine. https://www.juliabouwsma.com/
Henk Rossouw Henk Rossouw's book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor's Prize. Wesleyan University Press's Best American Experimental Writing 2018, edited by Myung Mi Kim, featured an excerpt and the African Poetry Book Fund and Akashic Books included his chapbook Xamissa: The Water Archives in the 2018 boxed set New-Generation African Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. Poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Boston Review, among other publications, as well as fiction in Tin House, non-fiction in The Threepenny Review, and an interview with Nadine Gordimer in Virginia Quarterly Review. Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, Henk earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a PhD from the University of Houston, where he served as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast. Currently, he is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly. An assistant professor in creative writing, Henk teaches both undergraduates and doctoral students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. https://www.henkrossouw.com/
Blue Phoenix
Kala Pierson; text by Esam Pasha Blue Phoenix is part of my long-term project, Axis of Beauty, which I started in 2004 as my ongoing answer to the George W. Bush administration's “Axis of Evil” wartime propaganda. That phrase was meant to reduce the people of an entire region to a faceless, undifferentiated mass of 'evil.' This project has been my response to that reductive and repugnant notion. My process has been to highlight individual Middle Eastern voices by collecting and setting texts by journalists, poets, and everyday citizens. The remarkable text for Blue Phoenix leaped out to me when I listened through all the existing episodes of the grassroots interview project War News Radio. Axis of Beauty has expanded to include many vocal, choral, and audio pieces. Over the project's 15 years so far, I've watched the climate of Islamophobia in the U.S. slowly change for the better, then notably shift for the worse again. The work of inviting music audiences, especially audiences outside our relatively progressive urban bubbles, to spend time listening to individual Middle Eastern voices is still critical. Blue Phoenix, in particular, has had a performance life for which I'm very grateful. Tonight, my sincere thanks to C4 for being part of the process with the piece's NYC premiere. — Kala Pierson
Text When the bombs were falling, I was crazy enough to get on the roof. I felt I should see this, because artists are the eyes of the culture. It was beautiful — you know? When all the stores were closed, and Baghdad was really a hot spot, I kept on doing art until I ran out of pigment. There was nothing to paint with, except boxes of crayons. So I mixed up wax paint, using heat. I made thirty wax works: some on cardboard, some on old record sleeves. The blue one is my favorite. You see the blue color taking over everything, but also reds and yellows penetrating the blues, like flashing rockets penetrating the calm sky. — from an interview (in English) with Iraqi artist Esam Pasha; used with kind permission of warnewsradio.org
Part Songs
Lawrence Kramer; poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Plato (Greek Anthology), T. S. Eliot, Sappho, Walt Whitman, John Keats The title “Part Songs” refers to the genre of the work's vocal miniatures, i.e., mainly homophonic songs for four voices a cappella, and also to the fact that none of these songs is quite complete, each being a setting of a fragmentary or fragmentlike poem that records only a fleeting moment or the moment's fleeting. This uneasy alliance of lyric recollection and its elusiveness, reflecting but also resisting nostalgia for an unavailable wholeness, finds its echo in the harmony, which mixes chord types and sonorities in way that are sometimes familiar and sometimes strange. The long final song changes the equation: instead of a whole conceived as fragments, it multiplies a single fragment to conceive, or at least to intimate, a whole. Its text yields a paradox: music that emerges and persists in the act of recalling the vanishing of another music. — Lawrence Kramer
Text Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory. (Shelley) Sit underneath this tall green pine whose voice is a rustling of branches in the western breeze. Beside my shimmering waters the pipe of Pan will call down drowsiness on your enchanted eyelids. (Plato [Greek Anthology]) The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street. . . An aimless smile that hovers in the air And vanishes along the level of the roofs. (Eliot)
The stars around the beauteous moon Hiding their shimmering forms When she shines at the full on the earth.... Silver... (Sappho) I stand as on some mighty eagle's beak, Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and sky) The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance, The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps—that inbound urge and urge of waves, Seeking the shores forever. (Whitman) Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep? (Keats)
John Eason Stops Preaching
Hilary Purrington; poem by Julia Bouwsma In the early 20th century, the Maine government dismantled the Malaga Island community and forced its residents to evacuate. Midden, a collection of poetry by Julia Bouwsma, tells this story from the residents' perspectives. “John Eason Stops Preaching,” the poem I chose to set, describes the preacher's reaction to watching his neighbors and congregation leave and having to plan for his own departure. His faith has been shaken. He feels abandoned, and Julia's gut-wrenching words convey the shock of his irreparable loss. Julia’s words are powerful enough on their own, and I felt like text painting would diminish their impact. So, I aimed to create text painting on a larger, formal scale. The first half of the piece—and most of Julia’s text—describes a series of painful, shocking sensations, and I sought to use form to produce a similar sense of shock within the music. The second half of the piece, which only uses the last three lines of the poem, serves as a subdued, stunned reaction to the preceding material. Many thanks to Julia Bouwsma and Fordham University Press for allowing me to set these exquisite words. I’m also tremendously grateful to conductor Benjamin Arendsen and the singers of C4 for their tireless and devoted work. — Hilary Purrington
Text One time I slid from a ladder. When I hit ground my breath arced out of me vertebrae wheezed teeth punched right through. Today the nails are backwards screaming: split boards pop and fall in a heap beside my un-building. Ever suck in a great gulp of air on a fifteen below night? It’ll burn a hole right through your lung leave you doubled up gasping spitting blood on the barn floor. The Lord left me today— all those years inside my body like my breath was his house.
John Eason repairs a building on Malaga Island in 1908. Courtesy of Peter Roberts. In “Malaga Island: A century of shame,” Portland Press Herald, May 20, 2012.
Octopus
Karen Siegel; text compiled by Karen Siegel, from statements by Jessica Drake, Cathy Heller, Jessica Leeds, Summer Zervos, and Donald Trump Donald Trump’s history of actions towards women ranging from disrespect to accusations of criminal conduct received a lot of attention during his presidential campaign in the fall of 2016. Now that his inappropriate actions as president range from lying and bullying to accusations of treason, the sexual harassment allegations are largely forgotten as yesterday’s news. Jessica Drake, Cathy Heller, Jessica Leeds and Summer Zervos have not forgotten. These are their words, and Donald’s, reimagined into a single story and response that mirrors the actual storytelling and unapologetically hostile response. Many thanks to the trebles of C4 for giving a voice to this story. — Karen Siegel
Text Like an octopus Hands were everywhere Entered the room Grabbed each of us tightly Kissed each one of us Went for the lips Hand on my breast Up my knee and toward my skirt Wherever he could find a landing spot Just start kissing them Just kiss Don’t even wait Just kiss Like an octopus
Dear Ghosts
Bettina Sheppard; poem by Julia Bouwsma “In 1912 the State of Maine forcibly evicted an interracial community of roughly forty-five people from Malaga Island, a small island off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine. Though Malaga had been their home for generations, nine residents (including the entire Marks family) were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded in Pownal, Maine. The others struggled to find homes on other islands or on the mainland, where they were often unwelcome. The Malaga school was dismantled and rebuilt as a chapel on another island. Seventeen graves were exhumed from the Malaga cemetery, consolidated into five caskets, and reburied at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. Just one year after the start of the eviction proceedings, the Malaga community was erased.” — Introduction to Midden, by Julia Bouwsma I am honored to set excerpts of Julia Bouwsma’s Midden. Her collection of poetry tells a chillingly relevant true story of discrimination and eviction. The choral sections in which the poet directly addresses the ghosts, the previous inhabitants of Malaga Island, are set for full choir, but surrounded by the solo voices of ghosts trying to answer her questions. Ghost solos contain African American and Native American musical references as they interject comments in their attempt to be heard. “Agent Pease’s Defense” hints at the German style of Sprechstimme, and current rap style to remind us that the same defenses offered by oppressors exist in contemporary society. — Bettina Sheppard
The Loring Wallace family in 1900. Courtesy of Peter Roberts. In “Malaga Island: A century of shame,” Portland Press Herald, May 20, 2012.
Text Dear ghosts, how can we stop the sunlight spinning the story from our hands? The best plan would be to burn the shacks down With all their filth Conditions there not credible to the state And we ought not to have such things near our front door Dear ghosts, How did you leave? Our houses became our bodies - we lashed ourselves to rafts. Our bodies became boats. Some left as cargo in boats, boxes. We wept or did not weep… We left as the land Stripped from the land Carrying our hearts in our fists. Agent Pease’s Defense It was just math. They asked. The State. So I worked. The figures. Every person has a cost. Every person. Has a price. Divide and subtract. Which to. Commit. Place. Buy out. Order to leave. I was just carrying out. Orders. From the state. And they weren’t. Real people. You know. Not like you and me. Ducked their heads. Wouldn’t meet our eyes. Couldn’t tell. What they were thinking. If they were thinking. Like children. Yes-sir. No-sir. You’ve got to. Be firm. No use. Feeling pity. I did what was asked. At the end of the day. It was just numbers. It was just math. Dear ghosts, What did you leave behind? Our arms spread out around it all Until our hands could not Meet our hands.
Elegy for the Gesture
David See; poem by Henk Rossouw The scene: A white South African boy in Cape Town is walking home after a dreadful day at elementary school. He has been routinely bullied of late, and today his classmates have roughed him up badly, for good measure stealing and destroying his borrowed camera. The music for this text is restrained at first, gradually building up tension as the situation is fleshed out. Certain emotionallyladen words (“school,” “camera,” etc.) are angrily torn apart into constituent phonemes, and the tension eventually discharges in a section based on the words "broken and clogging," which is intended to sound, well, broken and clogged. As the boy mulls over his loss, a truckload of black workers drives by, and their presence provides for him a small opening out of the circle of violence. He gets the workers' attention by chasing behind the truck, raising a fist in imitation of another boy photographed by David Goldblatt (imagined to be the father of our protagonist) saluting anti-apartheid activists who had just been murdered by South African secret police. One may hear in the music of this last part an evocation of a heroic and elegiac strain in our classical music. This of course is not native to South Africa and would have come there with the “seafoam” (white colonists), though as that aesthetic conceit punctures and deflates in the final bar, the workers accept and reciprocate the boy's offering. — David See
David Goldblatt, After their funeral, a child salutes the Cradock Four, Cradock, Eastern Cape, 20 July 1985. Used with the permission of the David Goldblatt estate.
Text I was the sea-foam kid bruises on my face with a school tie copied from the British and knotted like a garrote. Seamount Primary was segregated then. Rush hour traffic ran over my shadow; I let an empty hand drag against the cyclone fence along the roadside, the median strip oleanders perforated with light I couldn’t keep. The camera my father gave me with his thumbprint on the lens I had left there and the dent in the body from the time the police took it at the funeral, before opening fire on the crowd the camera with the light meter he let me figure out, in silence on second weekends the camera I’d taken to school, to be like him who donnered me the locker room urinal. And the cooling towers issued shadow like a sundial standing on the flatbed
and document the kids - the camera broken and clogging
of the distant power station as a truck, crowded with black men crossed Ascot Road -
men in azure coveralls, picks and shovels at their feet faces ashen. They were holding onto each other for balance. I was artless then. I ran behind the truck and I copied the boy in the Argus photograph my father had taken the boy my age at the graves of his friends in the resistance who raised his fist above the stones, as if holding onto the air, and I was seen by the men in my school uniform, fist aloft and the men copied me.
Rearrival
Brian Mountford; poem by Henk Rossouw Rearrival, the first poem in Xamissa, sets the tone for the book with an extended description of Cape Town. The poet, returning home after a seven year absence, stands with his brother in a foothill suburb, watching the city and its inhabitants as the sun slowly goes down. After the end of apartheid, some things have changed, but some things remain the same, and the city is still enmeshed in its complicated and multilayered history. When I first read through Xamissa, I was taken with Rossouw's style, literary and restrained, yet unflinching in taking on the injustices of the past and present. Rearrival in particular seemed to strike a good balance as a musical text. It is long enough to give rein to the poet's wide-ranging introspection, yet short enough that I could set most of it. And I thought it would push me out of my comfort zone as a composer without pushing me into inauthenticity, a concern for someone like me who has no direct experience of South Africa. Hopefully I have managed to find the right middle ground. — Brian Mountford
Text
(bracketed ellipses [...] indicate omitted text)
i. starlings
The loops of telephone wire on creosote poles copy—in dusk-lit sine waves—the arcade flight pattern of the city starlings. Red-winged, shadow-bodied, the birds cloud the stone courtyard of the Slave Lodge and parking garages and eaves. This is civil twilight. I have been absent for seven years. Murmuration— collective noun for the cloudburst of starlings in the early winter sky, my brother says. Starlings on the telephone wires line the foothill streets of Walmer Estate.
ii. the footbridge
Our roadside perception of the houses and warehouses and lots, sloping toward the harbor below, has been anchored momentarily among the crowd on the footbridge, once segregated [...] with legislative sheet metal, and now a suspended desire line above Rolihlahla Boulevard—renamed for the president imprisoned on the island often visible from here. The tarmac with his name contours against the table-shaped mountain as it bisects the city. Xamissa vs. Cape Town, the city in the brochure, little more than a summer dress, all air, colour and light, cast off onto the indigenous peninsula—like a beautiful wet bag over the mouth of. [...]
iii. Xamissa
Xamissa, the city at nightfall double-lit,
by the artificial and the fleeting.
Electric sunset. The early sodium-vapor street lamps echo the burnt orange.
iv. katabasis
Domestic servants leaving Walmer Estate cross the footbridge in their nightly katabasis downhill. Shoprite bags in hand or balanced on their heads—wages tithed to get home to Lavender Hill, Mitchell’s Plain, Lost City, Khayelitsha, Langa, Gugulethu outside the city gates— as the touts in the white minibus taxis echo the muezzin: Vredehoek, Vredehoek, Vred’hoek, W-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-lmer.
v. the shipping line of sunlight
On the footbridge, my brother and I look at the city in silence. [...] You must be hungry, my brother says. I have aged without him. He lives near the abutment of the bridge— starlings in his attic, and the dock cranes, new since democracy, frame the sea as if to lower the sun, a starboard-red container, beyond the coastal shelf. The shipping line of sunlight
leaving for
vi. sleep
In the city begin and begin again sleep’s graffiti The city is tidal. In the day, people stream into the city to sebenza to thetha to be here by the sea. I take the bus from Philippi for over two hours to get to high school here. At night the tide of us departs and it’s the umlungu city again, the sea-foam ncinci. (Songo Tinise I recur in the city, song-lit, in Songo’s tidal city now a landscape, now a room (Walter Benjamin now the Cape, now Xamissa —urban legend, El Dorado, place of sweet waters? Plural for the sake of its springs, the water archive incipient on the mountainside artesian and running under the city asleep. The city separate as the sleep of another
epilogue: distant water
If one were scattered at the end from a cardboard urn after the flood, with a view of the sward descending to the bights and the coves, the sea-bitten coast one was born far from, one’s beginning forgotten— a handful of South African ash— even the ash would echo names of water, distant water. [...]
So Breaks the Sun
Shavon Lloyd; poem by Ben Jonson “So Breaks the Sun” is my choral setting of Ben Jonson’s beautiful poem of the same name. In his text, he describes the long-awaited transition from winter to spring. He makes a point to share the good things that come with spring, while also reflecting on the characteristics of winter. I wrote my own text to give the piece more of a transition from cold to warmth and light. My text reads, “The night is dark and cold, the Earth is fettered with snow, and the chill of the air confines me to sorrow.” Again, this is in congruence with the metaphorical traits of winter that Jonson portrays. From this, I was able to capture a sense of jubilation when arriving at the section of the piece where the choir finally sings, “So breaks the sun…” To me, this text goes further than just the change in season. I believe it is metaphorical for leaving a cold place in your life to a place of warmth, light, and happiness. — Shavon Lloyd
Text The night is dark and cold. The earth is fettered with snow, And the chill of the air Confines me to sorrow. (Shavon Lloyd) So breaks the sun earth's rugged chains, Wherein rude winter bound her veins; So grows both stream and source of price, That lately fettered were with ice. So naked trees get crisped heads, And colored coats the roughest meads, And all get vigor, youth, and spright, That are but looked on by his light. (Ben Jonson)
Composers (in concert order) Kala Pierson is an American composer and sound artist. Vivid, expressive, and full of bold colors, her music has been performed in more than 30 countries on six continents, widely awarded and commissioned, and published by Universal Edition. Her music's “seductive textures and angular harmonies” (Washington Post) build into “massive chords throwing out a wall of sound, like a modern-day Gabrieli” (San Francisco Classical Voice), and her focus on setting documentary and culturally resonant texts leads to works of “marvellous political power” (Louis Andriessen). Recently, she has been the featured guest composer of Truman State University's New Horizons Festival; a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Britten-Pears Foundation; and a Big Sky Choral Initiative Composer Fellow with The Crossing. Born in 1977, she studied composition at Eastman School of Music. She's a self-taught santur (Persian hammered dulcimer) player and a laptop/audio performer. She lives in Philadelphia with her spouses and son. kalapierson.com Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University, turned to composing after winning international renown as a musicologist. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Thought of Music, winner of the 2017 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism, and the newly published The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening. His vocal and chamber music, including sixteen song cycles and seven string quartets, has been performed throughout America and Europe. Kramer’s string quartet movement “Clouds. Wind. Stars.” won the 2013 Composers Concordance “Generations” Prize. His song cycle Angels of Wind and Fire, for mezzo soprano, baritone, and piano will be premiered in Graz, Austria, at the end of May.
Hilary Purrington (b.1990) is a New York City-based composer of chamber, vocal, and orchestral music. Her work has received recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, the International Alliance for Women in Music, and the National Federation of Music Clubs, among others. Purrington’s music has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Modern Ensemble, the Peabody Modern Orchestra, and the Yale Philharmonia. Recent commissions include the Albany Symphony, Yale Glee Club, New York Youth Symphony, and Sioux City Symphony Orchestra. Upcoming commissions include the American Composers Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra. For the current 18–19 season, Purrington is composer-in-residence for the Musical Chairs Chamber Ensemble. Originally from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Purrington currently lives and works in New York, NY. She holds degrees from the Yale School of Music, The Juilliard School, and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. www.hilarypurrington.com Hailed as “complex and wonderful,” (TheatreScene.net) and “colorful and at times groovy” (WQXR.org), composer Karen Siegel creates innovative vocal and choral works that have been performed across the US and internationally. She has won awards from the Yale Glee Club, Khorikos, the Esoterics, Boston Metro Opera, New York Virtuoso Singers, CUNY Graduate Center, Manhattan Choral Ensemble and NYU Steinhardt. Karen’s one-act opera, The Hat: Arendt Meets Heidegger, was recently premiered by the Thompson Street Opera Company in Chicago. Her work Saguaro can be heard on C4’s album Volume 1: Uncaged (2013), and her work Why Do We Love Our Guns can be heard on Tonality’s album Sing About it (2019). A founding member of C4,
Karen has benefitted from years of mentoring by her conductor colleagues in the ensemble and is active as a conductor both within C4 and in performances of her own works. Karen holds a PhD in composition from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studied with Tania León (2014); a BA in psychology from Yale (2002) and an MM in composition from NYU Steinhardt (2014). Karen lives in Hoboken, New Jersey with her husband and two sons. Bettina Sheppard’s works reflect her varied background as singer, pianist, and composer, after many years spent in dramatic and musical theatre. As a Welsh/American, her writing is multi-ethnic and demonstrates a fusion of styles and cultures. Some of her vocal works and commissions include song cycle settings of the poets Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Misuzu Kaneko. Stage productions include the opera, Stillwaters, TraumNovela, 365 Days/365 Plays by Pulitzer prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and ballets Dream Story and Gaia. Her ballet music for LLMoves’ latest work, Plastic Ocean, was performed at the United Nations in June 2018. Bettina holds graduate degrees from both University of Virginia and CUNY and studied at The Juilliard School. She is the author of The Everything Singing Book, and is on faculty at City College CUNY. Some of her works are published by See-a-dot Music Publishing, and her CD Solus, Brythonwen is available on CD Baby. Since returning to New York City from Tennessee in 2014, ostensibly to retire, David See has enjoyed a varied and often pounding work schedule as collaborative pianist, choral singer, teacher and composer. His compositions include The Argument Rag for viola and piano, presented by NYCC in 2017; a piano concerto premiered by Symphony of the Mountains (Kingsport TN) with soloist Gary Hammond of Hunter College; and a series of two piano pieces typically performed
by the composer with his wife Lynn RiceSee. He is currently a staff pianist for Mannes School of Music at the New School and for Broadway Dance Center. In Tennessee, he was staff pianist at Middle Tennessee State University performing in instrumental and vocal recitals as well as musical theater productions, and principal keyboardist and choral pianist with Symphony of the Mountains. A recording of Seven Franchetti Songs composed by Michael Linton, with David on piano, is available for free at refinersfire.us (CD release pending). David holds a B.M. degree in Music Composition from Oberlin Conservatory, where his teachers included Randolph Coleman, Richard Hoffman and Dary John Mizelle. Brian Mountford studied music and electrical engineering at Yale and UC Berkeley. He sings with the New York City Master Chorale as well as C4, plays piano and organ, and composes occasionally. www.mountford.net Shavon Lloyd (b.1997) is a student at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, where he studies both Music Education, with a vocal emphasis, and Composition. Lloyd writes a wide variety of music, ranging from intimate solo pieces to exciting choral and orchestral works, which have been performed and read by ensembles such as the Crane Concert Choir, Crane Symphony Orchestra, Akropolis Reed Quintet, and the Ethel String Quartet. In 2014, Lloyd won the Manhattan Choral Ensemble’s “New Music for New York” composition contest with his choral piece, “Untitled,” becoming the youngest person to ever win the competition. In 2018, his “So Breaks the Sun” was selected out of over 130 pieces nationwide as the grand prize winner of the 18th Street Singers’ Composition Contest.
We wish to thank and acknowledge our donors: Concert Sponsors Feryal Algosaibi Lauren Mitchell & Michael David Ellen Stafford-Sigg & Daniel Sigg Cutting-Edge Circle Kit Smyth Basquin* Innovative Circle Colin Britt James Hudspeth Debby Katz & Ian David Moss Bruce Saylor Patricia Siegel Creative Circle Jonathan David Charles Dorkey John Evans Gerald Gelber Ira & Becky Horowitz Linda & Leslie Libow Elizabeth Marker Sue Backstrom & Jon Minikes Charles Natt Amy Rice Claude & Maryalice Schleuderer Linda Schrank* Harold See Gregory Shikhman Kenneth & Jean Telljohann Mary Ellen Townsend David Wozniak Contemporary Circle Thomas Baker John Blaylock-Cooke Elizabeth Clark Nan Corbin Donald Crockett
Contemporary Circle (cont'd) Orianne Dutka Kathy & Hugh Eddy Karen Fay Sara Flowers Joseph Fong* Andrea & David Gelber Ellen Gesmer Grace Goodman Diane Gottlieb Jeanine Hartnett Ernest Hood & David McCorkle Larry Iversen Kamilah Jackson Janet Keogan Bob & Jan Klump Jon & Miriam Lafferty Parky Lee Stanley & Nannette Lieblein Evelyn Liston Shavon Lloyd James Stephen Longo Clara Longstreth Peter Lurye Stella McKeown Angela Menghraj Peter & Christine Metz Mary Meyer Ruth Mueller-Maerki Valerie Norton Tarik O'Regan George Orzel Debra Rich Joseph Rubinstein Phillip Schroeder Mina K. Seeman Mary Severinghaus Nancy Smardz Martin & Barbara Solomon Caroline Stinson
We wish to thank and acknowledge our donors (cont'd): Contemporary Circle (cont'd) Anne Thulin* Richard Walker William Wydro Katharyn Zinn
Special thanks to: Lawrence Kramer Fordham University Julia Bouwsma Henk Rossouw
Includes donations from 7/1/18 - 4/19/19 Concert Sponsor: $1,000-$4,999 Cutting-Edge Circle: $600-$999 Innovative Circle: $350-$599 Creative Circle: $125-$349 Contemporary Circle: $1-$124 If we have made an error, please accept our apologies and notify us at info@c4ensemble.org. *Friend of C4
C4 Board of Directors
Advisory Board
C4 could not function without the dedicated work of its board of directors. We are very grateful to:
Eric Banks Lisa Bielawa David Harris David Hurd Aaron Jay Kernis Tania León Harold Levine Clara Longstreth Ian David Moss Tarik O'Regan Kent Tritle Toby Twining
Fahad Siadat, Chair Colin Britt Rebecca Ehren Karen Siegel Larry Siegel Melissa Wozniak, Treasurer
C4 is proud to be a part of the
C4's activities are funded in part with the generous assistance of:
Don't miss C4's next concert! C4 and the West Village Chorale are pleased to present Fire & Light, a concert featuring both choirs and two world premieres of works for double choir. For tickets and more information, visit c4ensemble.org/june-2019-cycle-3.
Fire & Light Sunday, June 2, 2019 - 5:00pm Judson Memorial Church 55 Washington Square South New York, NY
Support Us! Please consider joining C4's family of supporters! Visit c4ensemble.org/support-c4 for ways to make a charitable, tax-deductible donation to C4.
C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective Sopranos Jessica Corbin Alexandra Schleuderer Addy Sterrett Karen Siegel Melissa Wozniak Jennifer Wu
Tenors Benjamin Arendsen Sherwin Chao Mario Gullo Drew Ivarson Perry Townsend Richard Tucker
Altos Eli Berman Erin Halpin Jamie Klenetsky Fay Jane Lawson Leonore Nelson Hilary Purrington
Basses Daniel Andor-Ardó Alexander Boostrom Timothy Brown Jack Delac Brian Mountford David See
For more information on C4 members, visit our website: c4ensemble.org/the-ensemble.html