New Music New Haven

November 4, 2010 Thursday at 8 pm Sprague Memorial Hall

christopher theofanidis Artistic Director david felder Featured Composer music of Felder Knight Kuspa Loiacono Neustadter Tierney

Robert Blocker, Dean

PROGRAM

Justin Tierney

ROTA Brian Reese, tenor trombone Ruben Rodriguez, tenor trombone Jennifer Griggs, tenor trombone Craig Watson, bass trombone

Jordan Kuspa

Metronome Peng Zhou, flute Janice Lamarre, viola Esther Park, piano

Garth Neustadter

String Trio No. 1 I. Allegro vivace II. Adagio serio III. Allegro giusto Ka Chun Gary Ngan, violin Kristin Chai, viola Mo Mo, cello

Adrian Knight

the tears Maura Valenti, harp Adrian Knight, electronics

Loren Loiacono

Musica Humana I. Presto–Andante II. Passacaglia III. Vivo–Presto Geoffrey Herd, violin Edwin Kaplan, viola Weipeng Liu, cello Shih-Wei Huang, piano

November 4, 2010 路 Sprague Memorial Hall

intermission

David Felder (b. 1953)

partial [dist] res [s] toration (2001-03) Adrian Slywotzky, conductor Rosa Jang, flute, piccolo, and bass flute Ashley Smith, clarinet and bass clarinet Edson Scheid, violin and viola Arnold Choi, cello Adam Rosenblatt, percussion Michael Noble, piano

Shamayim for video playback and electronics I. Chashmal (speaking silence) 2006-7 III. Black Fire / White Fire 2008-9 Music: David Felder Cinematography/Video: Elliot Caplan Bass Voice: Nicholas Isherwood Musical assistants for computer realizations: JT Rinker, Olivier Pasquet, Ben Thigpen Music Recording: Joel Gordon, Bernd Gottinger, Chris Jacobs, Olivier Pasquet Music Mixing and Editing: JT Rinker, Ben Thigpen Music Mastering: Bob Ludwig /Gateway Mastering Video Editors: Elliot Caplan, Donald DuBois Video Mastering: Tracy Centrone / Devlin Video A production of Picture Start Films in association with Center for 21st Century Music and Center for the Moving Image, SUNY Buffalo

PROFILES + NOTES

JUSTIN TIERNEY composer Justin Tierney (b. New Haven, Conn.) is pursuing an Artist Diploma in music composition at Yale University. His recent projects include The God Script, a music drama based on the short story “La Escritura del Dios” by Jorge Luis Borges. The fifty-minute work relates the cosmic revelations of an imprisoned Aztec mystic who deciphers the words of God embedded in the skin of a jaguar. The premiere performance by the Firebird Ensemble was declared “superb, robust, and grand” by the Boston Globe, who avowed that “Tierney’s dark-hued music had polished, ominous richness… [and that] the sound-worlds were cogent and immediate.”

Regarding his aesthetic, Tierney has stated that “the nightly stars can be admired from either a scientific or aesthetic view, yet the coupling of the two modalities creates an appreciation greater than their sum.”

Mr. Tierney has studied composition with Jeffrey Johnson and Douglas Townsend at the University of Bridgeport, John McDonald at Tufts University, and privately with Ryan Vigil.

He spent the past summer composing in Japan and building a bathroom in his attic.

JORDAN KUSPA composer Jordan Kuspa’s music has been praised in the New York Times as “animated and melodically opulent” and “consistently alive and inspired.”

Jordan’s works have been performed in venues such as Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall and the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall, as well as in Canada, Croatia, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. His works have been commissioned by the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, American Festival for the Arts Summer Conservatory, and the USAF Heritage of America Band. He has been a fellow at festivals including June in Buffalo, MusicX, and the Chamber Music Institute at UNL with the Chiara String Quartet. Jordan was the winner of the 2010 ISCM–League of Composers Competition and the 2007 Robert Avalon Young Composers Competition. At age 16, Jordan founded the Houston Young Musicians, a group that sought to broaden interest in classical music among new listeners as well as promote the works of contemporary composers. Jordan was also co-founder and artistic director of the Sonus Chamber Music Society. He has continued his community engagement work in schools across Connecticut, with programs including musical collaborations with students in writing, drama, and filmmaking. Jordan is a second-degree black belt in traditional karate. He was homeschooled before entering Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Jordan is currently pursuing his doctorate at the Yale School of Music.

METRONOME notes While attending the 2009 MusicX workshops in Blonay, Switzerland, I had the great fortune to work with the members of eighth blackbird, one of the most exciting new music groups working today. It was truly inspiring to see how eighth blackbird worked in rehearsal, since they had so many tricks and techniques to bring out the best in themselves and, most importantly, in the music. When I was asked to return to MusicX this past summer, my thoughts immediately turned to those amazing rehearsals. I felt that the secretive world of rehearsal was ripe for compositional exploration. Thinking of the metronome, that tiny little device meant to keep us performers honest, I decided to write a piece that would have a metronome built into its very fabric.

Just as one might do in a real rehearsal, the tempo of the metronome is bumped up in small increments, until what began as a reasonably paced work becomes a madcap dash to the end.

PROFILES + NOTES

GARTH NEUSTADTER composer Garth Neustadter is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer from Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The Baltimore Sun says of his work, “The guy’s a natural, as his soaring theme makes plain.” In 2007, Garth was named the First Prize winner of the Turner Classic Movies Young Film Composers Competition. His score was chosen out of a field of over 850 international participants and judged by Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer. He was subsequently commissioned

by Turner Classic Movies and Warner Bros. to compose, record and produce the featurelength musical score for the film The White Sister, which premiered on the TCM channel.

Neustadter has been recognized as a four-time DownBeat Magazine award winner in the areas of composition, classical violin performance, and jazz saxophone performance. His achievements have been profiled in USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, Film Music Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, DownBeat, and the National Federation of Music Clubs Review. He recently received an ASCAP Morton Gould Award as well as multiple awards from the National Federation of Music Clubs. Neustadter has performed as a violin soloist with numerous orchestras and has held lead opera roles in various productions. He currently studies with Christopher Theofanidis and has also studied with Samuel Adler and Claude Baker.

He is working on a feature-length documentary for PBS profiling John Muir.

STRING TRIO NO.1 notes String Trio No. 1, for violin, viola, and cello, was initially planned to be a string quartet.

After working with the materials in the early stages of composition, I realized that the second violin was often inhibiting the opensounding sonorities that I was trying to create.

The Trio, along with a few of my other recent works, attempts to create a certain Americana sound, paying homage to the country’s early roots in folk and jazz music. I have recently been working on music for a documentary about the early American naturalist John Muir, and have been influenced by the grandeur and expansiveness of the American landscape, which I have been trying to capture in my recent works.

ADRIAN KNIGHT composer Adrian Knight is a composer (b. 1987, Uppsala, Sweden) of mainly works for mixed ensembles of acoustic and electronic instruments. Between 2006 and 2009 he studied with, among others, Per Lindgren and Jesper Nordin at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and is now pursuing a master’s degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, studying with David Lang. His music is generally characterised by its sense of breath through the use of volume envelopes, monolithic forms, pulse textures, and harmonic saturation. He has collaborated with the Swedish Wind Ensemble and Michael Bartosch, harmonica virtuoso Filip Jers, Jan Risberg’s Futurum ensemble, and the KMH Symphony Orchestra with Daniel Blendulf.

Recent works include livet innanför väggarna for two violas, cello and double bass; världens undergång for four loudspeakers; ricky bruch for five micro modular synthesizers; manchester for large orchestra with electronics; and music of spaces for chromatic harmonica, piano, percussion and fixed and live electronics. Since 2008, he operates “the world’s smallest record label,” Närproducerat, which has released five albums so far. He is a member of Fylkingen, one of the oldest societies for new music and intermedia art in the world. » adrian-knight.com

NOTES + PROFILES

LOREN LOIACONO composer Loren Loiacono (b. 1989), a native of Stony Brook, New York, is currently a first-year graduate student at the Yale School of Music, where she is a student of Christopher Theofanidis.

She received her B.A. in music from Yale University, where she was the recipient of the 2009 Abraham Beekman Cox Composition Prize. She is also the recipient of the 2010 Susan and Ford Schumann Fellowship from the Aspen Music Festival. She has received awards from ASCAP’s Morton Gould Awards and the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, among others. Her works have been performed by the Yale Symphony Orchestra, 5th House Ensemble, Argento Ensemble, Berkeley College Orchestra, Jonathan Edwards College Philharmonic, soprano Rachael Garcia, and many others.

MUSICA HUMANA notes According to the Ancient Greeks, there existed three types of music. These were musica instrumentalis, or the music created by instruments and singers; musica humana, the internal music of the human body; and musica universalis, the music created by the movements of the celestial bodies. It was this philosophy that inspired Musica Humana, for piano quartet. In the piece, I tried not only to explore but also to layer and intertwine

diverse musical worlds. Musica instrumentalis can be heard in the formalistic constraints of the inner movement’s passacaglia, creating a nostalgic refuge; musical universalis can be heard in the occasional distant harmonic or out-of-place trill, existing outside of the immediate narrative of the piece. Musica humana can be heard in the inner drama of the music, as it strives towards stability, but is constantly pulled back by the disinterested chaos of musica universalis.

DAVID FELDER composer David Felder has long been recognized as a leader in his generation of American composers. His work has been broadly characterized by its highly energetic profile, through its frequent employment of technological extension and elaboration of musical materials (including his “Crossfire” video series), and its lyrical qualities.

Felder has received numerous grants and commissions, including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, two New York State Council Commissions, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, two Fromm Foundation Fellowships, two awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, two commissions from the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, and many more. In May 2010, he received the career-recognition Music Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Felder serves as Birge-Cary Chair in Composition at SUNY, Buffalo, and has been artistic director of the June in Buffalo Festival since 1985. Since 2006, he has been Director of the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st-Century Music at the University. From 1992 to 1996 he was Meet the Composer “New Residencies” Composer-in-Residence with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and WBFOFM. In 1996, he formed the professional chamber orchestra Slee Sinfonietta, and has been artistic director since that time. An active

teacher and mentor, in 2008 he was named SUNY Distinguished Professor. Felder served as Master Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in early 2010. He has taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music, University of California San Diego (UCSD), and California State University Long Beach, and earned a Ph.D. from UCSD in 1983. His works are published by Theodore Presser. The first full CD of his work was released to international acclaim (including “disc of the year” in chamber music from both the American Record Guide and BBC Music Magazine) on the Bridge label in 1996. A disc of orchestral works (Editor’s Best of the Year selection, Fanfare Magazine) was released by Mode Records in 2000, and EMF #033 was released in 2001, containing premiere recordings of two orchestral works each by Morton Feldman and David Felder to enthusiastic critical reviews. Two 5.1 surround recordings of his music featuring works with electronics were released in 2009 on Albany Records. Additional surround recordings will be released in 2010-11.

NOTES + PROFILES

partial [dist] res [s] toration notes (2001-03) for flute/piccolo/bass flute, clarinet/ bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin/viola, and cello The story told by Felder in his seven-movement sextet is as elusive (and allusive) as its title.

The composer explains: “Numerous materials are brought together in this composition: both newly composed fragments and those rescued from older sketch pads – all are subjected to both ‘restoration’ (making the older appear refreshed), and ‘distressing’ (newer materials are treated to ‘age’ them). And the word ‘partial’ refers both to incomplete presentation, and to the harmonic series, which serves overtly to harmonize different things.” Like the “partials” that sound above any given pitch as part of its overtones or harmonic series, the fragmentary components of partial [dist]res[s]toration sometimes run together and sometimes remain discrete, as their titles suggest: 1. a puro sol escribo… (I write in the pure sun…), Pablo Neruda 2. I remember, I remember, Memory the great pretender, Robert Creeley 3. a. I sing…

3. b. because I sing…

3. c. and because I sing…, Pablo Neruda 4. Ris de ton nom… (laugh at the sound of your name), René Daumal 5. Die Felder sind grau… (The fields are grey), anonymous

Commissioned by Harvard University’s Fromm Foundation for the New York New Music Ensemble, partial [dist]res[s]toration invites one to listen for layers of sound and meaning: fragmentary bits of song; timbres ranging from the brilliance of “pure sun” to the “grey” of fields in winter; an array of textures wholly original yet reminiscent of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, Webern’s lucid expression, and Renaissance polyphony. The work even contains some “textural washes” that Felder initially composed for the American Dance Festival in 1982. The old is hidden within the new, the new is altered as if through recollection – “Memory, the great pretender.”

– Beth Levy, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, 2008

Shamayim notes Shamayim began as a music work commissioned as three separate parts by numerous European festivals and Project Isherwood, an initiative to create new works for bass singer Nicholas Isherwood. Funds were also provided by the Grame Center in France, the Argosy Fund for Contemporary Music, and the New York State Music Fund, as well as the Birge-Cary Chair in Music, the UB2020 Scholar’s Fund, and the Morris Creative Arts Fund (image realization) all at the University at Buffalo.

Shamayim is a work for solo bass voice, eight channels of electronic sound made or modeled upon bass singer’s Nicholas Isherwood’s vocal instrument, with video created by Elliot Caplan.

The work is an extended meditation inspired in part by the Book of Formation (Sefer Yetzirah), the writings of thirteenth-century mystic Abraham Abulafia, and descriptions of states of consciousness that accompany prophetic experiences, as in Ezekiel. The work is in three sections: 1. Chashmal (speaking silence) 2006-7 2. Sa’arah (stormy wind) 2007-8 3. Black Fire / White Fire 2008-9 The unique talents and abilities of bass singer Isherwood (a five-octave range, experience in harmonic singing, and much more) were the primary sources for all of the sounds in the piece, with accompanying natural sounds and selected ringing metals.

Video maker Elliot Caplan began work in Spring 2006 on Chashmal, and the premiere of that portion of the work occurred at June in Buffalo in June 2006. Sa’arah was previewed in October 2007, and the entire work received its premiere in June 2008. Final mixing and realization for the DVD presentation was made from December through May, 2009.

It is important to note that this work is designed to exist in two complementary versions; the first, is a conventional live performance, with image, in concert halls with live amplifi-

cation, processing, and eight channels of sound; the second, a version for installation, or home theater (cinema) presentation in surround 5.1 and with a specially prepared image presentation. The latter was commercially released in October 2009 by Albany Records.

Spatial distribution of musical elements is a critical component in the composition. The dvd/dts may be played through a dvd multichannel audio player by connecting the output to a surround receiver and a system that has a 5.1 setup as a prepared reduction of the original 8 channels.

Yale School of Music 203 432-4158 concerts@yale.edu music.yale.edu/media

concerts & media Vincent Oneppo Dana Astmann Monica Ong Reed Danielle Heller Richard Henebry operations Tara Deming Christopher Melillo piano curators Brian Daley William Harold recording studio Eugene Kimball Jason Robins

COMING UP Yale Guitar Music Today Nov 8 | 8 pm | Mon | Free Music by Bresnick, Kernis, Laderman, Lang, Marshall, Vees, Verdery, and more.

New Music for Orchestra Dec 9 | 8 pm | Thu | Free With the Yale Philharmonia.

Featuring Martin Bresnick’s flute concerto with soloist Ransom Wilson.

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN

artistic director Christopher Theofanidis managing director Krista Johnson production assistant Roberta Senatore librarian Renata Steve assistant Joseph Peters music librarians Holly Piccoli Liesl Schoenberger Elizabeth Upton Sara Wollmacher stage crew Landres Bryant Paul Futer Brian Reese Ruben Rodriguez Andreas Stoltzfus Craig Watson David Wharton