New Music New Haven

christopher theofanidis Artistic Director & Featured Composer october 7, 2010 Thursday at 8 pm Sprague Memorial Hall music of Christopher Theofanidis Christopher Cerrone Jacob Cooper Reena Esmail Adrian Knight

Robert Blocker, Dean

PROGRAM

Adrian Knight

20 maj Sung Mao Liang, violin Holly Piccoli, violin Eleanor James, viola Yoon Hee Ko, cello

Reena Esmail

Piano Quintet Domenic Salerni, violin Xi Chen, violin Amina Tebini, viola Ben Larsen, cello Lee Dionne, piano

Jacob Cooper

Cello Octet Adrian Slywotzky, conductor Arnold Choi, cello Alvin Yan Ming Wong, cello Neena Deb-Sen, cello Shannon Hayden, cello Jeonghwan Kim, cello Jurrian Van Der Zanden, cello Sung Chan Chang, cello Philo Lee, cello

intermission

Christopher Cerrone

Averno: A Fragment Adrian Slywotzky, conductor Mary Mackenzie, soprano Rachel Calloway, mezzo-soprano Eve Tang, viola Shannon Hayden, cello Mark Wallace, bass Dariya Nikolenko, flute Ashley Smith, clarinet John Corkill, percussion Hwa Young An, piano

Robert Honstein

Why Are You Not Answering?

Yoon Hee Ko, cello Ashley Smith, clarinet Owen Weaver, drumset Robert Honstein, glockenspiel Joo Hyeon Park, piano Max Zuckerman, electric guitar Lisa Dowling, double bass

Christopher Theofanidis

Visions & Miracles Hyerin Kim, violin Won Young Jung, violin On You Kim, viola Jung min Han, cello

As a courtesy to others, please silence all phones and devices.

Photography of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

PROFILES + NOTES

Foundation’s Leadership Program. He has been on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Juilliard School in New York City. He joined the Yale faculy in 2008.

© 2009 Bob Handelman

Christopher Theofanidis Christopher Theofanidis, composer, has had performances by many leading orchestras from around the world, including the National Symphony, the London Symphony, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Moscow Soloists, the Atlanta and Houston Symphonies, the California Symphony (for which he was composer-in-residence from 1994 to 1996), the Oregon Symphony, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, among others. He served as Composer of the Year for the Pittsburgh Symphony for their 2005-2006 Season. Mr. Theofanidis holds degrees from Yale, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Houston, and has been the recipient of the Masterprize, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barlow Prize, six ASCAP Gould Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Tanglewood Fellowship, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Fellowship. Mr. Theofanidis’s recent projects include an opera for the Houston Grand Opera, a ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, and a work for the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus based on the poetry of Rumi. He has served as a delegate to the US-Japan

reena esmail Reena Esmail’s compositions have been heard in performances and festivals in the United States, Canada and Europe. She holds a bachelor’s degree from The Juilliard School, and has studied composition with Susan Botti, Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler.

She has won two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, and was the inaugural recipient of the Milton and Sylvia Babbitt Scholarship for Women Composers at Juilliard. Esmail is currently pursuing a masters degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, where she is a student of Christopher Theofanidis.

As a pianist, Esmail was a winner in the mtacwla Chamber Music Competition, and performed chamber music with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She has also studied violin with Ella Rutkovsky-Heifets, and has sung with the New Amsterdam Singers and C4 (The Choral Composer/Conductor

Collective). She collaborates with Indian Carnatic singer Shobana Raghavan. Esmail is currently on the composition faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, where she served on the theory and ear training faculty from 2006 to 2009.

“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 : 20 maj

adrian knight Adrian Knight (b. 1987, Uppsala, Sweden) is a composer 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 breadth 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 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;

“20 maj” (Swedish for May 20), composed March-July 2010, was commissioned by loadbang, a New York new music ensemble.

The work was originally scored for trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and voice. This is a version for string quartet.

jacob cooper Jacob Cooper’s diverse compositions have earned him a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Morton Gould Award from ASCAP, and a grant from the American Music Center’s Composer Assistance Program. He has held residences at the Banff Centre for the Arts and twice at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, as a composer and

PROFILES + NOTES

most recently as a sound/video artist. He has also attended the Bang on a Can Summer Institute (2004) and the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute (2007). Jacob’s music has been performed by several ensembles across the continent, including the jack Quartet (New York), the now Ensemble (New York), Bent Frequency (Atlanta), New Music Collective (Charleston), the Lyrus Brass Quintet (Phoenix), the Juventas Ensemble (Boston), Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the Minnesota Orchestra. His work has appeared at the Wordless Music concert series at the Miller Theater in New York, at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, at the Harold Golen Gallery in Miami, and on the popular videoblog Rocketboom.

existing music to a fraction of its speed, and as I started to write my Cello Octet, I found I was not ready to abandon this technique. For the first time, however, my own composition—a fragment of an orchestral piece—serves (selfindulgently) as the kernel that is temporally stretched. And, perhaps also for the first time, at no point does the new piece clearly sound like a slowed-down version of the original.

While composing the Octet I instead became intrigued with revolving the music around a protracted downward glissando, with the celli starting in unison and descending at different rates; and ultimately the only resemblance to the original orchestral work lies in a fleeting harmony that materializes along the way.

In 2009, Jacob provided musical direction with “emotional punch” (Village Voice) for Immediate Medium’s Chuck Chuck Chuck at the Collapsable Hole in Brooklyn. Timberbrit, Jacob’s opera about a fictional reunion between Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and runs this November on the Incubator Arts Project series at St. Mark’s Church. christopher cerrone » www.jacobcoopermusic.com notes: cello octet I’ve always thought of myself as a composer who gets too bored with any musical style to revisit it often; for a while my body of work seemed to lie somewhere between the polystylistic and the unfocused. But over the past couple years, my compositional process has nearly always started by slowing down pre-

Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) is a Brooklynbased composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, and electronic music. His music, recently described as “inventive” and “most effective” by the New York Times, is made of delicate and intricate sound worlds that often evoke the many writers who have inspired him: Italo Calvino, Louise Glück, Kurt Vonnegut, Jorge Luis Borges. His music has been heard across the US and Europe, most recently at the

Kennedy Center for Performing Arts and the Bang on a Can Festival. His violin concerto, Still Life with Violin and Orchestra, commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony, will be premiered this spring at Carnegie Hall. His music has been performed by New York City Opera, Orchestre National de Lorraine, Virginia Arts Festival, Yale Institute for Music Theatre, the Manhattan Composers’ Orchestra, and the Yale Philharmonia, among others, and he is co-artistic director and composerin-residence for the New York City-based ensemble Red Light New Music. He recently received a 2010 ASCAP Morton Gould Award, a CAP Grant from the American Music Center, and the Ezra Laderman Prize from the Yale School of Music. He is currently pursuing his doctorate at Yale University, where he also taught music composition and electronic music. » www.christophercerrone.com

robert honstein Robert Honstein (b. 1980, Syracuse, NY) is a Brooklyn-based composer. His music has been performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Yale Philharmonia, Bard College Orchestra, Simon Carrington, the Fireworks Ensemble, and the

Young New Yorkers Chorus. Recently, Robert co-founded the Correction Line Ensemble, a group of six musicians from both pop and classical backgrounds who present music spanning a wide range of styles and genres.

In November Correction Line will tour Canada playing shows in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.

Other projects include a clarinet concerto for Anthony McGill and the New York Youth Symphony to be premiered in December at Carnegie Hall, and the production of FastForwardAustin, a new one-day festival for innovative music and art in Austin, Tex. » www.roberthonstein.com notes: why are you not answering?

A couple years ago a friend of mine received about one hundred emails in error. They had been sent to a man with the same name as my friend and contained a meticulous record of every communication this person had sent or received within a popular online dating site. I found these emails to be hilarious, moving, and bizarre. Both the content and the strangeness of how they entered my life have led me to refer back to them again and again in my work. For these pieces I took the first lines of two emails – “My friend, I understand 100%, I have no girlfriend,” and “Why are you not answering? I do not wish to play games”– and composed musical responses to each statement.

As much as possible I tried to imagine the emotional impetus for each email. Ultimately these pieces became a set of songs without words, each one underscoring the moment in which this unknown man composed these lines.

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 operations Tara Deming Christopher Melillo

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN

artistic director Christopher Theofanidis managing director Krista Johnson production assistant Roberta Senatore librarian Renata Steve

piano curators Brian Daley William Harold

assistant Joseph Peters

recording studio Eugene Kimball Jason Robins

music librarians Holly Piccoli Liesl Schoenberger Elizabeth Upton Sara Wollmacher

COMING UP Sleeping Giant at LPR Oct 11 | 7 pm | Mon | $15 Yale in New York at Le Poisson Rouge. Music by Timothy Andres, Ted Hearne, Christopher Cerrone, Robert Honstein, & Jacob Cooper.

Tickets at lepoissonrouge.com.

New Music New Haven Nov 4 | 8 pm | Thu | Free Featuring two works by guest composer David Felder.

stage crew Landres Bryant Paul Futer Brian Reese Ruben Rodriguez Andreas Stoltzfus Craig Watson David Wharton