Michael Compitello, percussion

michael compitello percussion

doctor of musical arts recital Morse Recital Hall September 17, 2015 • Thursday at 7:30 pm

Robert Blocker, Dean

Yale School of Music

michael compitello · percussion Thursday, September 17, 2015 • 7:30 pm • Morse Recital Hall

Tonia Ko b. 1988

Blue Skin of the Sea (2014) I. II. III. IV.

V.

Georges Aperghis b. 1945 translated by Michael Compitello

Les Corps à Corps (1978) I. Ouverture II. Le Récit III. La Lutte

intermission

Ko

Hush (2012) I. The Tongue is but a Clapper II. How—Hush!

III. Simplicity Itself New Morse Code Hannah Collins, cello

This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree.

Doctor of Musical Arts Recital

Osvaldo Golijov b. 1960

Mariel (1999) New Morse Code Hannah Collins, cello

Nick Didkovsky b. 1958

Caught by the Sky with Wire (1996) I. The Dance II. Hugging Himself for Days, and Never Getting an Answer III. Those with the Longest Shadows IV. Tied Together with This V. Again, the Little Girl with her Bird VI. His Heart, Exploded with Wire VII. In a Year, When She Can Speak Again New Morse Code Hannah Collins, cello

Iannis Xenakis 1922–2001

Psappha (1975)

As a courtesy to the performers and audience, please silence all electronic devices.

Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.

Artist Profile

Michael Compitello is a dynamic, “fast rising” (WQXR) percussionist active as a chamber musician, soloist, and teaching artist.

Michael is dedicated to both honoring his instrument’s most important repertoire and creating dynamic new art through collaborations with composers, performers, actors, and artists in all mediums. He has performed with Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Signal, Ensemble ACJW, and with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Eighth Blackbird, and So Percussion, while appearing in diverse locations such as the Darmstadt Summer Course, the L.A. Phil’s Green Umbrella Series, June in Buffalo, Mostly Mozart, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas.

Michael has worked with composers Helmut Lachenmann, Nicolaus A. Huber, David Lang, John Luther Adams, Alejandro Viñao, Marc Applebaum, and Martin Bresnick on premieres and performances of new chamber works. He also champions new and recent works for solo percussion in the U.S. and abroad, organizing and participating in consortium commissions for works for solo percussion from composers such as Christopher Cerrone, Tonia Ko, Amy Beth Kirsten, James Wood, and David Crowell.

With cellist Hannah Collins as New Morse Code, Michael works to catalyze and champion the compelling works of young composers. Through long-term collaboration with colleagues such as Christopher Stark, Robert Honstein, Andy Akiho, Matthew Barnson, Tonia Ko, Paul Kerekes, and Caroline Shaw, New Morse Code has created a singular and personal repertoire that reflects both their friends’ creative voices and their own perspectives. In addition to performing,

New Morse Code has worked with composers and performers at the University of Kansas, Austin Peay State University, The Catholic University of America, and Cornell University, in addition to leading interactive performances at Community MusicWorks in Providence, the Geneva Music Festival, and Greenwood Music Camp. During the 2015–2016 season, New Morse Code will visit Washington University in St. Louis, Furman University, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and Michigan State University, performing new music for cello and percussion alongside workshops with composers, instrumental masterclasses, and other residency activities. New Morse Code were finalists in Concert Artists Guild’s 2014 competition, and coordinates Avaloch Farm’s New Music Initiative — a residency program in New Hampshire for performer/ composer collaboration.

As an orchestral musician, Michael has performed with the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, and the Aspen Festival Orchestra, and with conductors Pierre Boulez, Marin Alsop, Reinbert de Leeuw, David Zinman, James Conlon, Brad Lubman and Gustav Meier.

Michael is Assistant Professor of Percussion at the University of Kansas. He previously taught at Cornell University and Mount Holyoke College, and was Interim Lecturer in Percussion at UMass Amherst in the fall of 2012. Michael earned M.M. and M.M.A. degrees from the Yale School of Music, and a B.M. from the Peabody Conservatory where he studied with renowned percussionist Robert van Sice. From 2009 to 2010, Michael performed and studied contemporary chamber music with the Ensemble

Artist Profile

Modern and the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt, Germany on a Fulbright Grant from the U.S. Department of State. Michael is an Educational Endorser for Vic Firth Drumsticks and Zildjian Cymbals.

Cellist Hannah Collins, winner of De Linkprijs 2010 for contemporary interpretation, is a dynamic performer and collaborator devoted to diverse forms of musical and multimedia expression. With support from the Presser Foundation, Hannah spent 2009–2011 in France and the Netherlands researching and performing contemporary solo cello repertoire. While living abroad, she commissioned and premiered several unconventional works, including Monologue (2011), a 20-minute piece for speaking, singing and acting cellist

by Dutch composer Patrick van Deurzen.

With New Morse Code, her duo with percussionist Michael Compitello, Hannah continues to premiere new works and collaborate with composers, singers, dancers, writers, and actors in interdisciplinary performances. Hannah and Michael are coprogram directors of the New Music Initative at Avaloch Farm Music Institute, a summer residency program in Boscawen, New Hampshire designed to provide resources and support for performers and composers collaborating on new works.

Hannah currently performs and teaches in New York City, where she appears regularly with Exponential Ensemble, Cantata Profana, and NOVUS NY. She also recently completed a two-year teaching and performing tenure with Ensemble ACJW as a fellow of The Academy, a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the NYC

Department of Education. She also serves as co-director of KHBH: Together in Music, a recurring creative outreach residency which connects the Kneisel Hall Music Festival and the community of Blue Hill, Maine.

Hannah is an active player of early music, appearing frequently as a Baroque cellist with New York Baroque Incorporated, the Quodlibet Ensemble, the Sebastian Chamber Players, and the Trinity Baroque Orchestra.

She served as the lead continuo player on the 2009 Naxos recording of the Bach and Mendelssohn Magnificats with Yale Schola Cantorum, conducted by Simon Carrington, and in 2011–2012 she was a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Music, studying 17 thand 18 th-century chamber music with Baroque violinist Robert Mealy.

Hannah has been invited to give solo and chamber music performances at festivals throughout Europe and North America, including Orford Centre d'arts (Canada), Kneisel Hall (U.S.), NJO (The Netherlands), Aldeburgh Festival (U.K.), and Musique de Chambre à Giverny (France). She received a master's degree with highest honors from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and also holds degrees in biomedical engineering and music from Yale University. Her teachers have included Stefan Reuss, Ole Akahoshi, Aldo Parisot, and Michel Strauss.

Notes on the Program georges aperghis Le Corps à Corps (translated by Michael Compitello) Before ten o’clock, surrounding the body, already once around the track, the two sides, neck and neck (des deux côtés au corps à corps).

The only movement occurs at the starting line, from time to time a chariot surged, gripping the gleaming helmet, bounding forward, slashing open his arm, with each cloud of dust he staggered from his wheel that they rushed to refuel, from his wound the blood flows, the crowd roars.

The bronze digging into the crack of the breastplate plunges into the guts, for another eighty kilometers of track, for another hour of brutal madness. The encasing bronze makes a terrifying resonance, oozing out black blood that they wash with tepid water.

This program embodies both my percussive personality and the spirit of avantgardism within percussion music of the recent past.

If percussion has a tradition or canon, it exists more as a set of practices than as a literal repertoire: a mindset of envelopepushing, taking stage within a theater — both literal and imagined — of instruments, techniques, and aesthetics modalities.

While the three solo works heard tonight (Tonia Ko’s Blue Skin of the Sea, Georges Aperghis’ Le Corps à Corps, and Iannis Xenakis’ Psappha) vary widely in sound world, they demonstrate a familial resemblance with respect to the extent percussion literature. In each, there exists a unity of inspiration and content, of theme and material. At the same time, these works actively subvert norms of narrative and instrumental idiom. Lastly, they articulate compositional ideas that could only be realized on percussion instruments, a forceful assertion of percussion as a legitimate expressive entity.

Tonia Ko’s Blue Skin of the Sea (commissioned in 2014 by a consortium of percussionists organized by myself ) takes a closer look at the “skin” of the marimba by exploring the “intimate, horizontal world of marimba bars” and the way the instrument’s sound seems to float several feet above the instrument. At the same time, Ko uses the distinctive way the marimba’s sound is created to steer the work’s large-scale structure, creating a gradual timbral transformation from soft/ resonant to dry/brittle and back again. The first and last movements emerge from the fifth partial above the marimba’s lowest C with a squirmy grace, while the fourth is a combination of the the Hawaiian lullaby “Pupu Hinuhinu” (“Shiny Shells”), ragtime

Notes on the Program xylophone, and a tuning ditty used by “a classroom full of fourth graders strumming tiny toy ukuleles in not quite unison.” The third movement (“Curiouser”) is a rustling interlude, while the second movement—Blue Skin of the Sea’s musical center—is a flabbergastingly unique world of scrapes and dots.

Xenakis’ Psappha is an outlier in a world of drumsets and marimbas: a coalescence of ancient Greek scansion, layered counterpoint, and modernist brutality, alternately jagged and suave. It’s a hardcover novel in a world of pulp fictions, and shows Xenakis as a dispassionate shaper of acerbic gestures.

Georges Aperghis’ Le Corps à Corps is also gruesome, a grim motorcycle crash alternately reacted to, acted out, and narrated. The percussionist and his zarb (a Persian hand drum with a cultural proclivity towards musical storytelling) alternately experience and remember an event. Aperghis fragments the spoken and musical texts, pushing them towards a collision punctured by jagged silences—a riff on Psappha’s almost ritualistic zones of emptiness. “Ouverture” exposes the primary percussive language of the piece; “Le Récit” unfolds the spoken text; and “La Lutte” (the Struggle) sets drum against voice.

Le Corps à Corps toes the line between theater and concert hall, a boundary more transparent in percussion than any other instrument.

While I am stubborn in my devotion to Xenakis’ drumming and Aperghis’ storytelling, the lesson I take from their music is one of dynamic performer/composer collaboration. Xenakis’ work with Sylvio Gualda and Les Percussion de Strasbourg and Aperghis’ work with Jean-Pierre Drouet and Trio Le Cercle are inspiring more as future model than as musical past. Since leaving

Yale, my most important creative work has taken place with Hannah Collins as New Morse Code. Together we have begun to articulate our own vision for what a chamber ensemble can and should be while forging a unique body of repertoire.

Tonight we will share two works that initially inspired our collaboration: Nick Didkovsky’s alternately volatile and static Caught by the Sky with Wire, and Osvaldo Golijov’s tragic ballad Mariel. Both were written for Steve Schick and Maya Beiser, and their dedication to commissioning vital new works was a source of confidence for Hannah and me.

Tonia Ko’s Hush was the first piece that we felt was written for us, rather than simply cello and percussion. Inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s short story “The String Quartet,” Hannah and I play, sing, and ruminate on the ways in which the written word can inspire musical gesture, and the way in which friendship can drive musical collaboration.

Thank you to Hannah Collins for her musical partnership, to Tonia Ko for the great pieces, and to Robert van Sice for (seemingly) infinite years of patient guidance.

— Michael Compitello

Upcoming Events

José Serebrier, guest conductor

Christian McBride Trio

september 25 Yale Philharmonia Woolsey Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Rachmaninoff-Serebrier: Vocalise; Serebrier: Symphony No. 2, “Partita”; Mussorgsky/ Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition Tickets start at $10 • Students $5 $3 surcharge for purchases at the door

october 2 Ellington Jazz Series Morse Recital Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm The acclaimed bassist and composer Christian McBride plays with Christian Sands, piano, and Jerome Jennings, drums Tickets start at $25 • Students $15

Boris Berman, piano Brentano String Quartet september 29 Oneppo Chamber Music Series Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm Bach: Selections from The Art of the Fugue; Britten: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 94; Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 12 Tickets start at $25 • Students $12

october 7 Horowitz Piano Series Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 7:30 pm Chopin: Barcarolle; Brahms: Piano Pieces, Op. 76; Debussy: La boîte à joujoux (The Toy Box), with narrator John Taylor Ward and projected images by André Hellé Tickets start at $13 • Students $7

Martin Bresnick & Hannah Lash Music for Flute, Viola, and Harp october 1 Faculty Artist Series Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm Ransom Wilson, flute; Ettore Causa, viola; and June Han, harp Free admission

october 8 New Music New Haven Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm Featuring music by faculty composers Martin Bresnick and Hannah Lash, along with new works by YSM student composers Free admission

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Robert Blocker, Dean