NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN Christopher Theofanidis & Hannah Lash · Artistic Directors
AARON JAY KERNIS & HANNAH LASH Featured faculty composers Morse Recital Hall • Thursday, October 3, 2013 at 8 pm
Robert Blocker, Dean
NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN
AARON JAY KERNIS & HANNAH LASH Christopher Theofanidis & Hannah Lash · Artistic Directors
Benjamin Wallace b. 1989
Birthday Suite I. Danny Clay menacingly tells you why Michigan is the greatest state II. Brendon accidentally trips on birthday shrooms III. Alyssa sips tea in the breeze of a cool North Carolina afternoon IV. Adam rocks out at the Marburg Hotel Dance Party V. Jonny warns to NOT attend tonight’s birthday event VI. Yu-Chun hosts a lovely birthday barbecue VII. David, instead of celebrating, explains to you the meaning of the universe on his drums Ki Won Kim, violin • Ian Gottlieb, cello Jonathan Slade, Jacob Mende-Fridkis, flute Tianyu Zhang, bass clarinet Jonathan Allen, Douglas Perry, percussion Paul Kerekes, Daniel Schlosberg, piano Brendon Randall-Myers, electric guitar Samuel Suggs, electric bass
Brendon Randall-Myers b. 1986
For Ronny
Bálint Karosi b. 1979
Ciaccona
Julia Ghica, violin • Benjamin Bartelt, viola Alan Ohkubo, cello • Alexi Dadakovsky, piano Ian Tuski, guitar
Barbora Kolarova, violin • Elisa Rodriguez Sadaba, cello Christina Hughes, flute • Kevin Schaffter, clarinet Mari Yoshinaga, percussion • Oliver Jia, piano Bálint Karosi, conductor
NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN
Paul Kerekes b. 1988
Focus Christina Hughes, flute/alto flute Hsuan-Fong Chen, oboe/English horn Joshua Anderson, clarinet • John Searcy, bassoon Patrick Jankowski, horn
Daniel Schlosberg b. 1987
Frau Trude Jacob Ashworth, conductor Dustin Wills, stage director Seth Bodie, costume designer Oliver Wason, lighting designer Amy Lee, libretto frau trude: Brian Vu, baritone girl: Claudia Rosenthal, soprano chorus of logs: Kathleen Allan, Sylvia Leith, Jean Laurenz, Kelly Hill, Nate Barnett, Mark Biggins orchestra: Colin Brooks, Batmyagar Erdenebat, Daniel Stone, viola Bora Kim, Ji Eun Lee, cello • Gregory Vartian-Foss, bass Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, flute/ piccolo Bo Hee Kim, flute/alto flute/ piccolo Eric Anderson, clarinet/ E-flat clarinet Ashley William Smith, clarinet/bass clarinet/saxophone John Craig Hubbard, horn • Mikio Alan Sasaki, trumpet Garret Arney, percussion Antoine Malette-Chenier, harp Lee Dionne, piano/harpsichord
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, turn off cell phones and pagers. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN
Aaron Jay Kernis b. 1960
Morningsong with Mist (Aubade sous Brume) 2011 Henry Kramer, piano Clear Midnight (2013) Edmund Milly, baritone Miki Sawada, piano
Hannah Lash b. 1981
Moth Sketches Nathan Lesser, Marina Aikawa, Gayoung Cho, violin Isabella Mensz, viola Allan Hon, cello Ha Young Jung, bass Victor Wang, piccolo Timothy Will, trumpet Georgi Videnov, Terrence Sweeney, Mari Yoshinaga, Garret Arney, Douglas Perry, percussion Haley Rhodeside, harp Miki Sawada, celesta Louis Lohraseb, conductor
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biography Benjamin Wallace Ben Wallace, originally hailing from Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a New England based composer, pianist, percussionist, and conductor. His works have been performed at various venues in Cincinnati, New Haven, New York, Switzerland, and Albuquerque. He received his Bachelor of Music degree in 2011 from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, where he studied with Joel Hoffman, Michael Fiday, Mara Helmuth, and Al Otte of Percussion Group Cincinnati. Ben is currently pursuing a Master of Music degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, where he has studied with David Lang, Christopher Theofanidis, and Martin Bresnick. Ben has twice attended the MusicX festival in Swizterland where he has worked with composers Stephen Hartke, Martin Bresnick, Mathias Pinstcher, and David Lang, as well as performers Matthew Duvall and Nick Photinos from eighth blackbird. In 2011, CCM commissioned and performed the new work “Psappho” for chamber winds and percussion conducted by Terrance Milligan. During the summer of 2013, Ben participated in Musical Theatre Southwest’s production of The Pajama Game, serving as music director, arranger, and rehearsal pianist. program note Birthday Suite I have always been a terrible gift giver. Even if I know a person well, I can’t seem to find the right present to give them. So instead of physical gifts, I decided to use my one and only skill and write my friends each a short piece of music for their birthday. And soon I created a daily or weekly habit of creating a melody from a name and wedding it to the ever beloved and
despised birthday song. And so The Birthday Suite is a collection of seven gifts I’ve written for seven different friends over the past year, each one tailored to reflect their personality as well as our relationship.
k biography Brendon Randall-Myers Brendon Randall-Myers is a composer, guitarist, and improviser. His music examines people’s interactions, expectations, and boundaries, often drawing on his experiences as a performer and fan of extreme music genres. Brendon is a co-founder of the punkinflected composing/improvising group Grains and the math-rock group Marateck. He has been a fellow in both guitar and composition at the Bang on a Can summer festival, and received a 2013 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award. Brendon has been commissioned by the Guitar Foundation of America, the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, and the Guerilla Composers Guild, and by performers such as The Living Earth Show, Tigue, New Keys, Friction Quartet, clarinetist Gleb Kanasevich, Nonsemble 6, Mobius Trio, and flutist Esther Landau. Brendon grew up homeschooled in rural West Virginia, attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Pomona College, and spent three years living and working in San Francisco. He is currently pursuing an MM degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, where he has studied with David Lang, Christopher Theofanidis, Ingram Marshall, and Martin Bresnick.
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program note For Ronny
Conservatoire de Musique de Geneve, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest.
This piece was written in memory of my grandfather, Ron Myers. Ronny lived with my grandmother on a farm in Western Massachusetts for almost 50 years, where he helped raise seven kids, pulled teeth professionally, drove tractors, helped run an organic farmers conference, sang in community choirs, and collected antique clocks. He was as full of life as anyone I’ve ever met. I remember pretty vividly going to visit him in the hospital during the last few weeks of his life, at which point he spent most of his time sleeping. He would wake up and be his witty, warm self for a while, before sinking back into sleep. I miss him a lot.
program note Ciaconna
k biography Bálint Karosi Hungarian composer and organist Bálint Karosi is currently a candidate for the DMA in composition at the Yale School of Music, where he is also working on his doctoral thesis on baroque improvisation techniques. As an acclaimed performer of J. S. Bach, he has been invited as a guest conductor for the 2013–14 season of Bach at the Sem in St. Louis, Missouri, has been featured as a soloist and lecturer at the 2013 Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival in Ohio, and performed at the 2010 international J. S. Bach Festival in Leipzig, Germany. Balint has taught at Oberlin Conservatory at Boston University and at UMass Boston. His compositions are published by Wayne Leopold Editions and Concordia Publising House and have been aired on Pipedreams and the Hungarian National Radio and Television. Balint is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory,
Ciaccona (or Chaccone) is a slow-moving dance on a ground bass, a variation form popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. My piece is a set of variations on an eight-measure hexachord progression (set of six pitches) that is repeated eight times. The harmonic rhythm moves slowly, while the surface moves quickly in rapid gestures, landing on long resonances. The dance character is emphasized in variations IV and VII, while the other variations offer a dichotomy between harmony and counterpoint inspired by the high baroque.
k biography Paul Kerekes Paul Kerekes was born in Huntington, New York. His music has been described as “striking… ecstatic…dramatic” (WQXR), “highly eloquent” (New Haven Advocate), and able to create “an almost tactile picture” (New York Times). He has had the privilege of hearing his music performed by many outstanding ensembles, some of which include TwoSense, American Composers Orchestra, and Dinosaur Annex, in such venues as (le) poisson rouge, the Dimenna Center, and Symphony Space. He has also attended notable programs such as Aspen Music Festival, MusicX, Yale’s New Music Workshop in Norfolk, Connecticut, California Summer Music, the Young Artists Piano Program at Tanglewood, and Stony Brook Summer Music Festival. Additionally, he has participated in master classes both as a
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composer and pianist with Lisa Moore, Lisa Kaplan, Steven Stucky, and John Corigliano. In June 2012, Paul joined forces with five of New York City’s top pianists to form Grand Band, whose debut was featured on Bang on a Can’s annual marathon. Grand Band has been described by the New York Times as “the Travelling Wilburys of the city’s new-music piano scene.” Paul is currently pursuing an M.M.A. degree at the Yale School of Music and received his undergraduate degree from Queens College. program note Focus “focus” was written for the 2013 Aspen Summer Music Festival. I wanted to use the ensemble as if it were a camera lens that slowly moved in and out of focus. Musically, this is portrayed by setting rhythmic and textural alignment against blurred disorder. After listening to Ligeti’s ten pieces for wind quintet, I was struck by his ability to achieve a lush, quasiorchestral sound, more so than the many standard quintet works I had never found particularly interesting. Inspired by his use of doublings, I tried to orchestrate “focus” to achieve a similar effect.
k biography Daniel Schlosberg Composer and pianist Daniel Schlosberg (b. 1987) is currently pursuing is MMA at the Yale School of Music. His works have been performed by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, Yale Philharmonia, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Cantata Profana,
Center City Opera Theater, Yale Baroque Ensemble, New Morse Code, and counter) induction. His choral piece Letter was cocommissioned by the Yale-China Association and the Yale Glee Club, who premiered it in Hong Kong in June 2013. Simon Carrington conducted the premiere of nightingale + rose, commissioned by Astrid and John Baumgardner, at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in August 2013. Daniel also re-orchestrated and conducted Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George at the Yale School of Drama in December 2013. Daniel performs regularly and remains dedicated to playing works of his contemporaries. Recent piano performances have included Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in a staged production at the Yale Cabaret, Thomas Adès’s Living Toys with Le Train Blue, George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae, and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King with Cantata Profana, of which he is a founding member. He has played Barber’s Piano Concerto and Scriabin’s Prometheus with the Yale Symphony Orchestra, as well as numerous solo recitals featuring music from Scarlatti to Ustvolskaya. Upcoming concerts include a work for flute and piano, commissioned by the flutist Ginevra Petrucci (YSM ’13) for her recital with Bruno Canino at Carnegie Hall in November 2013, and a new orchestral work for the RiteNow Project, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. He will also be writing incidental music for Dustin Will’s production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan at the Yale School of Drama in December 2013. Daniel’s teachers have included Martin Bresnick, David Lang, Aaron Kernis, and Christopher Theofanidis, and he has studied piano with Hung-Kuan Chen, Peter Frankl, Wei-Yi Yang,
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and Melvin Chen. He enjoys baking cookies and watching David Lynch films (though not necessarily both at the same time). program note Frau Trude a brief opera, adapted from the Grimm fairy tale An old woman known as Frau Trude is knitting by the fire when it sputters out. She tries a few more logs, but to no avail, and begins to bemoan the lack of naughty children in the world today. There is a knock on the door, and an innocent young girl, led by a dog, appears. Frau Trude immediately turns the child away in disgust, and then continues to lament her cold fate. A confused boy shows up, and Frau Trude similarly dismisses him. Then, a girl comes up the way to the house and knocks on the door. When she enters, she tells Frau Trude that she has come, despite her parents’ warnings, and describes the terrible things she has just seen — a black man, a green man, a red man, and, through the window, the devil crowned in fire. Frau Trude delightedly tells the girl that she is the one she’s been waiting for, and transforms her into a log, which she immediately throws on the fire. Returning to her rocking chair, Frau Trude happily picks up her knitting with a sigh, praising the warm, bright fire.
k biography Hannah Lash Prize-winning composer Hannah Lash has emerged as a leading voice of her generation. In addition to numerous academic awards, she has received the ASCAP-Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Naumburg Prize, the Bernard Rogers Prize, and the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize. She has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the Naumburg Foundation, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, the Orpheus Duo, the Howard Hanson Foundation, Case Western Reserve’s University Circle Wind Ensemble, MAYA, Great Noise Ensemble, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. Her orchestral music has been singled out by the American Composers Orchestra, which selected Furthermore for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings, and by the Minnesota Orchestra, which selected her work God Music Bug Music for performance in January 2012 as part of the Minnesota Composers Institute. Her chamber opera Blood Rose was presented by NYC Opera’s VOX in the spring of 2011. Lash’s music has also been performed at Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, the Chelsea Art Museum, Harvard University, Tanglewood Music Center, the Times Center, and the Chicago Art Institute. Hannah Lash earned a bachelor’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, her Ph.D. from Harvard University, a performance degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music. Her primary teachers include Martin Bresnick, Bernard Rands, Julian Anderson, and Robert Morris. Her music is published by Schott.
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program note Moth Sketches Moth Sketches began as a piece that was to score a short animated movie about a moth. Although my musical ideas eventually parted company with the movie and my work became a standalone piece, I did find using the movie as starting point to be interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the initial sense of the pacing of ideas came from an outside impetus, which is otherwise never the case in my music. I also found myself defining my ideas as characters in ways I would not normally do. The piece is constructed as a very basic formal shape that involves several layers of related yet distinct material. The piece’s form is defined by the mutation of the materials in layers. There is a rotation of musical characters throughout the ensemble that takes place over the piece’s span and allows a dramaturgy to unfold. As I rotate material, I imagine I am braiding a rope involving many strands of differing colors. When one fiber comes in contact with another, both fibers’ colors are altered, so that the rope’s essential character is constantly in flux as the braid continues.
orchestral, chamber, and recital programs worldwide and he has been commissioned by many of America‘s foremost performing artists, including soprano Renee Fleming, violinists Joshua Bell and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, soprano Dawn Upshaw, and guitarist Sharon Isbin, and by institutions including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Birmingham Bach Choir, Minnesota Orchestra, and Los Angeles and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, the Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History in New York, among many others. He looks forward to new works for trumpet soloist Philip Smith with the New York Philharmonic and a consortium of “Top 10” college wind ensembles, the Seattle Symphony, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Recent and upcoming recordings include a disc of his song cycles by soprano Susan Narucki (Koch) and orchestral works by the Grant Park Festival Orchestra (Cedille). His music is available on Nonesuch, Phoenix, New Albion, Argo, and CRI.
biography Aaron Jay Kernis
One of America’s most honored composers, Mr. Kernis received the Grawemeyer Award for the cello concerto “Colored Field” and the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2 (“musica instrumentalis”). He has also been awarded the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize, and received Grammy nominations for “Air” and the Second Symphony.
Aaron Jay Kernis, winner of the coveted 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and one of the youngest composers ever awarded the Pulitzer Prize, has taught composition at the Yale School of Music since 2003. Among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation, his music figures prominently on
He has become an especially familiar and much-admired presence in Minnesota’s Twin Cities; he has served as Composer-inResidence for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Public Radio, and the American Composers Forum, and, since 1998, as New Music Advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra. He
k
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has also served as chairman and co-director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute.
text A Clear Midnight Walt Whitman
program note Morningsong with Mist (Aubade sous Brume) 2011
This is thy hour, O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Clear Midnight (2013) These two recent pieces were not written to be performed together, but I thought they might pair well, as their titles, taken together, suggest the expanse of a day. Morningsong with Mist is a miniature written for the 70 th birthday of my friend John Gidwitz, and Clear Midnight was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival for the 25 th anniversary season of their Steans Young Performer Institute. Both share a similar harmonic world, with their atmospheres and approach to pianistic color world coming out of French music, particularly late Ravel. The song suggests an homage to Messaien and Ives, two composers whose music and sense of spiritual grandeur I dearly love. — AJK
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes though lovest best. Night, sleep and the stars.
PERSONNEL
artistic directors
Christopher Theofanidis & Hannah Lash
manager
Andrew W. Parker
music librarian
Roberta Senatore
production assistant
Kate Gonzales
assistant conductor
Jonathan Brandani
assistant conductor
Louis Lohraseb
office assistant
Timothy Gocklin
music librarians
Batmyamar Erdenebat Darren Hicks• Matheus Souza Michael Holloway • Allan Hon Choha Kim • Hye Jin Koh Fiona Last • Michael Laurello David Mason • Alan Ohkubo Nicole Percifield • Rachel Perfecto Elisa Sadaba Rodriguez
stage crew
Jonathan Allen • Garrett Arney Bogdan Dumitriu • Philip Browne Patrick Durbin • Jonathan Hammonds Christopher Hwang • Stephen Ivany Fiona Last • Louis Lohraseb Jacob Mende-Fridkis • Thomas Park Douglas Perry • Zachary Quortrup John Searcy • Elizabeth Shafer Daniel Stone • Terrence Sweeney Gregory Vartian-Foss Georgi Videnov • Mari Yoshinaga
UPCOMING EVENTS Homegrown on Common Ground
Takács String Quartet
october 4
october 15
Morse Recital Hall | Friday | 7 pm Ellington Jazz Series Featuring jazz, blues, and art songs from the James Weldon Johnson collection housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library. In celebration of the Beinecke’s 50 th anniversary. Tickets start at $12 • Students $6
Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 8 pm Oneppo Chamber Music Series Beethoven: String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4; Janácek: String Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters”; Smetana: String Quartet No. 1, “From My Life.” Tickets start at $30 • Students $12
Farewell to the Good Wine
Robert Blocker, piano
october 6
october 23
Dwight Chapel | Sunday | 8 pm Institute of Sacred Music • Faculty Artist Series Courtly Love and Real Life in Medieval French Song. Featuring James Taylor, Judith Malafronte, Robert Mealy, Drew Minter, and Mark Rimple. Free Admission
Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 8 pm Horowitz Piano Series Music by Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, including the Liebeslieder Waltzes. Tickets start at $12 • Students $6
Concert Programs & Box Office: Krista Johnson, Carol Jackson Communications: Dana Astmann, Monica Ong Reed, Austin Kase Operations: Tara Deming, Chris Melillo Piano Curators: Brian Daley, William Harold Recording Studio: Eugene Kimball P.O. Box 208246, New Haven, CT · 203 432-4158
music.yale.edu
Robert Blocker, Dean