NEWMUSIC NEWHAVEN hannah lash & christopher theofanidis 路 artistic directors
featuring music by
DAVID LANG & AARON JAY KERNIS and music by Yale graduate composers
April 14, 2016 路 Thursday at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall
Robert Blocker, Dean
Hannah Lash & Christopher Theofanidis, Artistic Directors
Hilary Purrington b. 1990
A Sound Soul in a Sound Body (2015) Benjamin Wallace, harpsichord Matthew Keown, Kramer Milan, Jeffrey Stern, Se Um, percussion
Molly Joyce b. 1992
Rave (2015) Robert Fleitz, piano g Molly Joyce, electronics
Matthew Bridgham b. 1989
Sonata for violin and piano (2016) I. Allegro molto Elly Toyoda, violin Matthew Bridgham, piano
Benjamin Wallace b. 1989
Troubleshooting and Maintenance (2016) Invisible Anatomy Ian Gottlieb, cello a Benjamin Wallace, percussion Paul Kerekes a, Daniel Schlosberg a, piano Brendon Randall-Myers, electric guitar a Fay Wang, soprano a intermission
Aaron Jay Kernis b. 1960
On Distant Shores (2011) Ole Akahoshi, solo cello Timothy Feil, oboe Benjamin Hoffman, Yefim Romanov, violin Danielle Wiebe, viola Jiyoung Choi, cello Liliya Ugay, piano Heejung Park, conductor
David Lang b. 1957
pierced (2007) Zhilin Wang, solo cello Liliya Ugay, piano Marie Oka, Jiwon Sun, Benjamin Hoffman, Bora Kim, Hyunjae Bae, Yefim Romanov, violin Ryan Davis, Joyce Huang, Danielle Wiebe, viola Chang Pan, Jiyoung Choi, cello Levi Jones, double bass Jeffrey Stern, percussion Heejung Park, conductor a g
Yale School of Music alumni Guest performer
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence all electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
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biography Hilary Purrington Hilary Purrington is a New England-based composer of contemporary classical music. Her work has received recognition from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC), the Massachusetts Music Educators’ Association (MMEA), Houston Grand Opera’s Home and Place, and Voices of Change/Dallas Symphony Orchestra, among others. In the summer of 2012, Purrington received funding through a Wagoner Foreign Study Grant to study Music Composition and German Language at the Freie Universität Berlin, and in the summer of 2013, she participated as a Fellow at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival’s New Music Workshop. Her music has been performed by many notable ensembles, including Voices of Change, the NOVUS Trombone Quartet, and the Musical Chairs Chamber Ensemble. Recent projects include commissions from the Chicago Harp Quartet and the Melodia Women’s Choir of NYC. Purrington holds degrees from The Juilliard School and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. She is currently pursuing a Master of Musical Arts at the Yale School of Music. » www.hilarypurrington.com program note A Sound Soul in a Sound Body I composed A Sound Soul in a Sound Body for Robert Fleitz during the summer of
2015. The harpsichord has a very distinct legacy and body of repertoire, and I wanted to allude to its history through the use of idiomatic textures and figures. Personally, however, the harpsichord’s sound also reminds me of old, 8-bit video game soundtracks, and I couldn’t ignore this whimsical association. Many different characters and musical influences come and go throughout the work’s duration, all united by fairly consistent colors and timbres. A Sound Soul in a Sound Body isn’t programmatic in any strict sense, but I imagine that the different and often contrasting personalities could represent the multiple facets of a single individual. The title, derived from a common Latin phrase, relates this notion. biography Molly Joyce Molly Joyce is a composer originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been described as written to “superb effect” (The Wire) in an “emotionally appealing twenty-first century style” (Fanfare Magazine), and “vibrant, inventive music that communicates straight from the heart” (Prufrock’s Dilemma). Her works have been commissioned and/or performed by several distinguished ensembles such as the New World Symphony, New York Youth Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the New Juilliard, Decoda, and Contemporaneous ensembles, and her music has been performed on the Bang on a Can Marathon.
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As a performer, Molly often performs on her vintage Magnus electric chord organ, an instrument she bought on eBay five years ago and has since performed on in multiple capacities, including solo, with toy piano, and with a beatboxer. Also an active participant in other aspects of the music industry, Molly is currently the Digital Content Manager for New Amsterdam Presents/Records and serves as an assistant to singer/songwriter Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond. Molly has studied at The Juilliard School, the Koninklijk Conservatorium, and the Yale School of Music. » www.mollyjoycemusic.com program note Rave Originally written for pianist Vicky Chow, Rave incorporates an inverse relationship between live piano and pre-recorded electronics, exploring the sonic possibilities of this complex relationship as it evolves over the course of the piece. Scored for live piano and pre-recorded electronics, the work utilizes an “inverse” interaction between the live piano and the electronics. As the piece progresses, these separate and unusual inverse roles of the live piano and electronics gradually cross to ultimately supplant each other by assuming their more anticipated roles. Rave was made possible by a grant from the American Composers Forum with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation.
biography Matthew Bridgham Matthew is in the first year of his DMA. program note Sonata for violin and piano This is the first movement of a larger work. biography Benjamin Wallace Described as “brilliant, humorous, and rhythmically complex,” (Tacoma Symphony Blog) Ben Wallace is a composer, percussionist, and keyboard player hailing from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ben’s music spans a wide range of styles from chamber and orchestral, to disco and samba, and occasionally into the video game remix world. He has worked with organizations such as Musical Theatre Southwest, The Amadeus Chamber Orchestra, Grand Band, and The Shanghai Philharmonic, hearing his works performed in New York, Tacoma, Utah, New Mexico, New Haven, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Liverpool, Switzerland, Shanghai, and Beijing. He is a founding member of DiscoCactus, a VGM remix band, and INVISIBLE ANATOMY, an ensemble of hybrid composer/performers. He received his Bachelor of Music from the CollegeConservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati in both Composition and Percussion, studying primarily with Allen Otte and Joel Hoffman. He then received his Master of Music from the Yale School of Music in Composition, where he studied
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with David Lang, Chris Theofanidis, Martin Bresnick, and Aaron Kernis. He is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition at the Yale School of Music. program note Troubleshooting and Maintenance If at any time, the ensemble is malfunctioning, input the following codes into the panel located at the back of the console to access debug mode: Ring # TLZ Ground # BLP Serial # UQLY TMDO ARJO M If problems persist, contact our live hotline during holidays and non-business hours. (Operators are not available during holidays, weekends, or peak call periods between 8-12:30 and 1-close.) biography Aaron Jay Kernis Winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and 2011 Nemmers Award, Aaron Jay Kernis is one of America’s most honored composers. His music appears prominently on concert programs worldwide, and he has been commissioned by America’s preeminent performing organizations and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Joshua Bell,
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and Sharon Isbin. Recent and upcoming commissions include works for the San Antonio Symphony, a violin concerto for James Ehnes, a cello concerto for Joshua Roman, a viola concerto for Paul Neubauer, and a flute concerto for Marina Piccinini, along with his third string quartet for the Jasper Quartet, all with international consortiums of commissioners. His works have been recorded on Virgin, Dorian, Arabesque, Phoenix, Argo, Signum, Cedille, and many other labels. His newest release appears on Naxos and features pianist Andrew Russo, violinist James Ehnes, and the Albany Symphony under David Alan Miller’s direction. Kernis’s conducting engagements include appearances with the Pascal Rioult Dance Company, at major chamber music festivals in Chicago and Portland, and with members of the San Francisco and Minnesota Orchestras and New York Philharmonic. For ten years he was New Music Advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra and CoFounder and Artistic Director of that orchestra’s Composer Institute for 15 years. He recently helped the Nashville Symphony launch its Composer’s Lab and Workshop, which he directs. Kernis was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Classical Music Hall of Fame. Leta Miller’s book-length portrait of Kernis and his work was published in 2014 by University of Illinois Press as part of its American Composer series.
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program note On Distant Shores (2011) On Distant Shores was written in collaboration with choreographer Pascal Rioult, for his company, Rioult, which premiered the work at the Joyce Theater in New York City. The music combines old and new, incorporating an arrangement of the composer’s popular Air for cello (1995) with new, alternately dreamy and turbulent music inspired by the ballet’s focus on the character of Helen of Troy. As she is the central character in the ballet, so is the cello the primary voice in the music. In the ballet, Pascal Rioult imagines that Helen is brought to Troy against her will. Four men from her past appear, first dancing as a group of warriors then partnering one by one with Helen in fleeting, expressive duets. As her memories of the heroes fade into a dream, she continues to walk her path forward into history. A video of the collaboration can be viewed at On Distant Shores: » https://youtu.be/5qiMROuMJcE biography David Lang David Lang received the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his piece the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the vocal ensemble Theater of Voices, directed by Paul Hillier. His work is regularly performed by major music, dance, opera and theatrical organizations throughout the world. Recent works include the concerto man made for the ensemble Sō Percussion and a consortium of orchestras, including the BBC Symphony and the Los Angeles Phil-
harmonic; mountain for the Cincinnati Symphony; and death speaks, for Shara Worden, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and Owen Pallett, at Carnegie Hall. In 2015 Lang composed the music for Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth, for which he received Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Critics Choice nominations, among others. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music festival Bang on a Can. Born in Los Angeles in 1957, Lang holds degrees from Stanford University and the University of Iowa, and received the D.M.A. from the Yale School of Music in 1989. He studied with Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner Henze, and Martin Bresnick. David Lang joined the Yale faculty in 2008. program note pierced (2007) 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 not be oldfashioned. I liked the idea of an opposition between them but I didn’t want the kind of competition that traditional concerti generate, where the soloists try to struggle with the orchestra for the supremacy of their ideas. What would it be like to make two almost completely separate musical worlds, in which the musical material from one world was needed in order to decode the meaning of the material of the
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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.) 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 moves from one musical grouping to the other. pierced was premiered 12 June 2007 by Real Quiet and the Munich Chamber Orchestra, with Christoph Altstaedt, conductor. The version for solo strings was premiered by Real Quiet and the Flux Quartet, conducted by Alan Pierson.
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Artistic Directors Christopher Theofanidis Hannah Lash Assistant Manager Roberta Senatore Conducting Fellow Heejung Park Assistants Andrew Robson Valerie Sly Music Librarians Krists Auznieks Bora Kim Yefim Romanov Stage Crew Eric Braley Maria Chlebus Lydia Consilvio Julia Dina Reese Farnell Matthew Keown John Kossler Richard Liverano NoĂŤl Wan
UPCOMING EVENTS Lunchtime Chamber Music
Competition Winners
april 20 YSM Student Ensembles Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 12:30 pm Music for a variety of chamber ensembles Wendy Sharp, director Free admission
may 10 Oneppo Chamber Music Series Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm Featuring the winners of the School of Music’s annual chamber music competition Wendy Sharp, director Tickets start at $10 • Students $5
The Planets april 29 Yale Philharmonia Woolsey Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Peter Oundjian, principal conductor Mozart: Symphony No. 41 in C major, “Jupiter”; Holst: The Planets Tickets start at $10 • Students from $5 Yale employees from $8 $3 surcharge for purchases at the door
Robert Blocker, piano may 11 Horowitz Piano Series Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 7:30 pm Mozart: Sonata in A minor, K. 310; Ravel: Valses Nobles et Sentimentales; Bach-Busoni: Chaconne; and new pieces by David Lang, Hannah Lash, Fay Wang, Warren Lee, and Christopher Theofanidis Tickets start at $13 • Students $7
Don Quichotte may 6 & 7 Yale Opera Morse Recital Hall | Fri & Sat, 7:30 pm Yale Opera presents a new production of Massenet’s opera Don Quichotte Linda Brovsky, stage director Timothy Shaindlin, music director Tickets start at $10 • Students $5
Guitar Chamber Music may 12 YSM Student Ensembles Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm Chamber music featuring the guitar in a variety of ensembles Benjamin Verdery, director Free admission
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Robert Blocker, Dean