New Music New Haven 02-03-2011

February 3, 2011 Thursday at 8 pm Sprague Memorial Hall

christopher theofanidis Artistic Director david lang Featured Composer music of David Lang Paul Kerekes Jordan Kuspa Loren Loiacono Garth Neustadter Daniel Wohl

Robert Blocker, Dean

PROGRAM

Jordan Kuspa

Flybys Rosa Jang, flute Emily Holum, oboe Emil Khudyev, clarinet Vincent Oneppo, bass clarinet Thomas Fleming, bassoon Timothy Riley, horn

Paul Kerekes

Reasons for Moving Ryosuke Yanagitani, piano

Loren Loiacono

Jitterbug Loren Loiacono, piano

Garth Neustadter

untangoed Aura Go, piano

Daniel Wohl

pixelated Michael Compitello, glockenspiel Ron Michael, piano and toy piano

intermission

David Lang (b. 1957)

pierced Adrian Slywotzky, conductor Shannon Hayden, cello Michael Compitello, percussion Jeannette Fang, piano Alexander Read, Laura Keller, Igor Pikayzen, violin I Youngsun Kim, Hyewon Kim, Naria Kim, violin II Min Jung Chun, Hyun Jung Lee, Eve Tang, viola Alvin Yan Ming Wong, Ying Zhang, cello Eric Fischer, bass

PROFILES + NOTES

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.

FLYBYS notes Flybys was commissioned by the United States Air Force Heritage of America Band, directed

by Rafael Toro-Quiñones. When I was asked to write for the Air Force musicians, I thought back to the history of the Armed Forces as major supporters of new music. Many preeminent composers have been called upon to write works that could show the high level of American music-making and give the public a sense of cultural pride. One such composer was Samuel Barber, whose Second Symphony was commissioned by the Air Force. Flybys begins with a gesture that is a direct tribute to Barber’s work, and to the legacy of the Armed Forces as supporters of the best in American music.

PROFILES + NOTES

PAUL KEREKES composer Composer and pianist Paul Kerekes (b. 1988, Huntington, NY) is currently pursuing a master’s in composition at Yale School of Music, studying with David Lang. His music draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including free improvisation, early music, repeating patterns, and visual art.

He received his undergraduate degree in piano performance and composition from Queens College where he received numerous awards, including the Gabriel Fontrier Award and the George Perle Award for achievement as an undergraduate composer.

In his spare time, Paul enjoys playing baroque cello and riding his bicycle.

In addition to attending notable programs such as the Young Artists Piano Program at Tanglewood, California Summer Music, the Norfolk New Music Workshop, and MusicX, he has participated in master classes both as a composer and pianist with Lisa Moore, Lisa Kaplan, Joel Hoffman, and Bright Sheng.

The poetry of Mark Strand is my inspiration for vantages. Though the poems are somewhat narrative, Strand’s use of first-person goes far beyond mere storytelling. Rather, these stories serve as channels for the conveyance of the emotional state of his characters. In each movement, I’ve tried to recreate my own interpretation of these palpable emotions, but this time, from the musical vantage point.

Paul has had the privilege of hearing his music performed by TwoSense, Second Instrumental Unit, Stonewall Chorale, Mannes Preparatory Division Choir, Norfolk Contemporary Ensemble, cellist Nicholas Photinos, flutist Kelli Kathman, and saxophonist/composer Ed Rosenberg in such venues as Symphony Space, Centre de musique Hindemith, Lefrak Hall, and Central Park.

REASONS FOR MOVING notes

I. The Whole Story

II. Keeping Things Whole

How it should happen this way I am not sure, but you Are sitting next to me, Minding your own business When all of a sudden I see A fire out the window.

I nudge you and say, “That’s a fire. And what’s more, We can’t do anything about it, Because we’re on this train, see?”

You give me an odd look As though I had said too much.

In a field I am the absence of field.

This is always the case.

Wherever I am I am what is missing.

But for all you know I may Have a passion for fires, and travel by train to keep From having to put them out.

It may be that trains Can kindle a love of fire.

I might even suspect That you are a fireman In disguise. And then again I might be wrong. Maybe You’re the one Who loves a good fire. Who knows?

Perhaps you are elsewhere, Deciding that with no place To go you should not Take a train. And I, Seeing my own face in the window, May have lied about the fire.

When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been.

We all have reasons for moving.

I move to keep things whole. from Sleeping With One Eye Open (1964), Mark Strand.

PROFILES + NOTES

LOREN LOIACONO composer

JITTERBUG notes

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 Ezra Laderman. 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.

In a deleted scene from the classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West sends a flock of Jitterbugs after the heroes, to “…take the fight out of them.” A play on a popular dance of the time, the Jitterbugs were a flock of “furry pink and blue mosquito-like ‘rascals’” that would bite the protagonists, causing them to dance until utter exhaustion.

This piece was commissioned by Berkeley College at Yale University for the inaugural concert of their new piano.

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.

UNTANGOED notes untangoed is a study and deconstruction of the elements inherent in the traditional tango.

The underlying rhythms, harmonies, and melodic contours of a typical tango are subtly suggested throughout the work, as they are heard in short fragmented stages.

PROFILES + NOTES

DANIEL WOHL composer

PIXELATED notes

Daniel’s work draws on his background in electronic music and delves into sounds produced by decayed audio and prerecorded media. His pieces have been commissioned and/or performed by ensembles including the American Symphony Orchestra, eighth blackbird, the California E.A.R Unit, the Calder Quartet, New York Youth Symphony, Dither electric guitar quartet, Mantra, and the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, among others. His music has been heard internationally in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, Symphony Space, Disney Hall’s Redcat, the Chelsea Art Museum, Mass MoCA, Dia Beacon, and over media outlets such as PBS, TF1, CANAL+, and France 2.

Upcoming and recently completed projects include commissions from the Jerome Foundation, Meet the Composer, the Albany Symphony, So Percussion, and Two Sense.

Recently I’ve been interested in sounds produced in performance by what in my opinion are happy accidents: pedal hits on a piano, clicks from mallets, flaws in recordings.

Elements that seem unwanted in a traditional context become raw material for many of my pieces. Pixelated started with a close-mic recording of a glockenspiel (you can hear this recording as a recurring theme). After listening to the audio file many times, various unclear melodic and rhythmic motifs started gradually coming to the foreground: I imagined I was hearing the pixels inside the sound.

DAVID LANG featured composer David Lang is the recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music for the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, directed by Paul Hillier. One of America’s most performed and honored composers, Lang’s recent works include writing on water for the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; the difficulty of crossing a field, a fully staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie; and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, staged by Ridge Theater and featuring the Norwegian vocal ensemble Trio Mediaeval. The commercial recording of the little match girl passion will be released this June on Harmonia Mundi, coupled with a cappella choral works sung by Ars Nova Copenhagen. Lang is the co-founder and coartistic director of New York’s legendary music festival, Bang on a Can.

PIERCED notes My piece pierced was commissioned by the ensemble Real Quiet – Felix Fan, cello, David Cossin, percussion and Andy Russo, piano – as a concerto for their ensemble and string

orchestra. I was trying to imagine a way the soloists and the orchestra could relate to each other that would honor the fact that both the soloists and orchestra were usually separate ensembles. I didn’t want the kind of competition that traditional concerti generate, where the heroic individual struggles with society for the supremacy of his or her ideas. I started thinking about how I might make two almost completely separate musical worlds exist at the same time, but in which the musical material from one world would be needed in order to decode the meaning of the other. I imagined, for example, a dissonant, chromatic line in one ensemble and a tonal chord progression in the other – maybe we would perceive the two as related and necessary to each other, but the material in each world would remain distinct. There would be a wall between them – they wouldn’t hear or influence each other, but we could hear their separate contributions mixed together. (And it goes without saying that the combination of materials that we hear would have to sound whole.) »

PROFILES + NOTES

PIERCED notes (cont’d) The idea I came up with was to imagine a wall that wasn’t completely solid, but was more of a permeable membrane, a kind of filter or fabric between the soloists and the ensemble – most sounds and notes and tunes would stay in their respective worlds, but some sounds might be able to pass through easily and virtually unchanged. Because of this image of a fabric separating the musicians, I had the idea that at some points the fabric could be pierced, or maybe even ripped, as parts of the material move from one musical grouping to the other. pierced was premiered 12 June 2007 by Real Quiet and the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Christoph Altstaedt, conductor.

– David Lang

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN

artistic director Christopher Theofanidis

Thursdays at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall Free admission

managing director Krista Johnson production assistant Roberta Senatore librarian Renata Steve assistant Joseph Peters music librarians Yeseul Ann Holly Piccoli Wai Lau Kaitlin Taylor Elizabeth Upton Sara Wollmacher stage crew Landres Bryant Paul Futer Michael Levin Brian Reese Ruben Rodriguez Hermelindo Ruiz Andreas Stoltzfus Craig Watson David Wharton

MAR 24 Featuring composer Ezra Laderman, with the world premiere of his Piano Sonata No. 5.

Also on the program will be Ingram Marshall’s Authentic Presence for solo piano.

APR 14 Yehudi Wyner, guest composer. Featuring Wyner’s On This Most Voluptuous Night (1982) for soprano, flute, horn, string quartet, and piano.

APR 28 Aaron Jay Kernis, featured composer, with his String Quartet No. 2, performed by the Jasper Quartet. The concert also presents new choral music, with the Yale Camerata under the direction of Marguerite L. Brooks.

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

concerts & media 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

A doi tenori: music for two tenors Feb 4 | Fri | 8 pm | Sprague | Free James Taylor and Thomas Cooley, tenors; Robert Mealy, violin; and Avi Stein, continuo. Music of Monteverdi, Schütz, Bernhard, Castello, Kerll, and Krieger.

Romantic and twentieth-century music Feb 7 | Mon | 5 pm | Sprague | Free Selected graduate performers perform music of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Hindemith, Bizet, Ravel, and Xenakis.

Tokyo String Quartet Feb 8 | Tue | 8 pm | Sprague Tickets $25–$35 | Students $15 Mozart: “Hunt” Quartet in B-flat major, K. 458; Szymanowski: Quartet No. 1 in C major; Mendelssohn: Quintet in B-flat major, Op. 87, with violist Ettore Causa.

Yale Opera: Don Giovanni Feb 11–13 | Fri & Sat at 8 pm | Sun at 2 pm Shubert Theater | Tickets $19–$41 at www.shubert.com or 203 562-5666 Yale Opera’s exciting new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, conducted by Giuseppe Grazioli and directed by Sam Helfrich.