Hannah Lash, harp/composition, Feb 15, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

faculty artist series

Hannah Lash harp/composition

Morse Recital Hall February 15, 2017 • Wednesday at 7:30 pm

Faculty Artist Series

Hannah Lash harp/composition February 15, 2017 • Morse Recital Hall

Hannah Lash b. 1981

Three Shades Without Angles (2014) Elise Blatchford, flute Julia Clancy, viola

Marti Epstein b. 1959

The Wonders of the Invisible World (2017) World premiere

Lash

Stalk (2008) intermission

Lash

Sonata for harp (2015) I. II. III.

Lash

Tree Suite (2017) I. II. III.

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

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

Artist Profiles

Hannah Lash, harpist/composer Hailed by The New York Times as “striking and resourceful …handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, the Times Center in Manhattan, the Chicago Art Institute, Tanglewood Music Center, Harvard University, The Chelsea Art Museum, and on the American Opera Project’s stage in New York City. Commissions include The Fromm Foundation, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, American Composers Orchestra, Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, The Naumburg Foundation, The Orpheus Duo, The Howard Hanson Foundation’s Commissioning Fund, Case Western Reserve’s University Circle Wind Ensemble, MAYA, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Arditti Quartet, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival “Click!” Commission Program, and the Aspen Music Festival and School, among many others.

Lash has received numerous honors and prizes, including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship (2011) and Fellowship (2016) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fromm Foundation Commission, a Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant, a fellowship from the Yaddo Artist Colony, the Naumburg Prize in Composition, the Barnard Rogers Prize in Composition, the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize in Composition, and

numerous academic awards. Her orchestral work Furthermore was selected by the American Composers Orchestra for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings. Her chamber opera, Blood Rose, was presented by New York City Opera’s VOX in the spring of 2011.

The New York Times music critic Steve Smith praised Lash’s work for the JACK Quartet, Frayed: “Ms. Lash’s compact sequence of pale brush strokes, ghostly keening and punchy outbursts was striking and resourceful; you hoped to hear it again …” Esteemed music critic Bruce Hodges lauded Lash’s piece Stalk for solo harp as being “appealing … florid, and introspective.”

In addition to performances of her music in the United States, Lash’s music is well known internationally. In April of 2008, her string quartet Four Still was performed in Kiev in the Ukraine’s largest international new music festival, “Musical Premieres of the Season,” curated by Carson Cooman. In the summer of 2010, her piece Unclose was premiered by members of Eighth Blackbird at the MusicX festival in Blonay, Switzerland.

In 2016, her chamber orchestra work This Ease was selected as “audience favorite” in performances by the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Mainz, conducted by Hermann Bäumer.

Recent premieres include Three Shades Without Angles, for flute, viola and harp, by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players; Two Movements for violin and piano, commissioned by the Library of Congress for Ensemble Intercontemporain; and a new chamber opera, Beowulf, for

Artist Profiles

Guerilla Opera; as well as several new orchestral works: Eating Flowers, for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music; Nymphs, for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra; and This Ease, for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; as well as two concerti for harp premiered by the American Composers Orchestra (Concerto No. 1 for Harp and Chamber Orchestra) and the Colorado Music Festival (Concerto No. 2 for Harp and Orchestra), both with Lash as soloist.

Other recent premieres include God Music Bug Music (2011) with the Minnesota Orchestra, the monodrama Stoned Prince (2013) by loadbang, Subtilior Lamento (2012) with the Da Capo Chamber Players at Carnegie Hall, and Glockenliebe (2012), for three glockenspiels, with Talujon Percussion.

Her 2011 orchestral work Hush was featured in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2013 Brooklyn Festival. In 2016, Lash was honored with a Composer Portraits Concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, which included newly commissioned works for pianist Lisa Moore (Six Etudes and a Dream) and loadbang (Music for Eight Lungs).

The 2016–2017 season includes the premieres of Lash’s Requiem with the Yale Choral Artists (2016) as well as the debut of The Voynich Symphony, a major large-scale orchestral work, with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (2017).

Lash earned her Ph.D in composition from Harvard University in 2010. She has held teaching positions at Harvard University (teaching fellow), at Alfred University (guest professor of composition), and currently serves on the

composition faculty at the Yale School of Music.

Elise Blatchford, flute Elise Blatchford is the flutist with the City of Tomorrow, a wind quintet that took first prize at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition in 2011.

Her involvement in multidisciplinary arts has taken her to the BAM Next Wave Festival, Seattle’s On the Boards, and the Museum of Contemporary Art — Chicago. Ms. Blatchford is a frequent recitalist and chamber collaborator. She is the assistant professor of flute at the University of Memphis in Tennessee.

Julia Clancy, viola Violist Julia Clancy studies with Ettore Causa at the Yale Schol of Music. She recently completed a Bachelor of Music degree with honors at the Cleveland Institute of Music with Jeffrey Irvine, Lynne Ramsey, and Robert Vernon, and a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in medical anthropology from Case Western Reserve University.

As a member of Aldeburgh Strings, she has performed concerts in London and Snape, England, recordings of which were released in early 2016 by Signum Classics. She has performed frequently at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and at Carnegie Hall with the New York String Orchestra Seminar, the Yale Philharmonia, and the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra. Julia has served as principal violist in the Britten-Pears Orchestra, Yale Philharmonia, Sarasota Festival Orchestra, Moritzburg Festival

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

Orchestra, and Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Orchestra. As a soloist, she performed with the CIM orchestra as winner of the institute’s 2013 concerto competition as well as the Sound Symphony in 2010. hannah lash Three Shades Without Angles (2014) Three Shades Without Angles was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra chamber players in 2014. I was asked to write a trio for the Debussy Trio instrumentation, which was both a challenge and a natural fit for me as a harpist. I wanted to compose a piece that didn’t necessarily build upon the Debussy in any way, but that also acknowledged it as kind of the cornerstone of the repertoire for that particular combination of instruments. My piece is a kind of perpetual motion in the harp, while the flute and viola play lines derived from the perpetual motion figure: sometimes they are tied to the harp entirely, while other times they form a kind of heterophony, and at other times a freer counterpoint. The title reflects my love of the sculptor August Rodin, and in particular his work Three Shades, which is dark, muscular, visceral, and which depicts three figures who are connected and yet discrete.

– Hannah Lash marti epstein The Wonders of the Invisible World (2017) The Wonders of the Invisible World is meant to illuminate the beauty of the barely audible. When Hannah asked me to write this piece for her, the sound

world came to me almost immediately.

I am very grateful to her for asking for the piece, and for playing it.

– Marti Epstein hannah lash Stalk (2008) Stalk was composed in 2008 while I was still pursuing my graduate degree in harp at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

I remember writing it just for fun, and not immediately having occasion to play it. It was actually premiered by another harpist a couple of years later. I built the piece on a melodic fragment, which becomes generative of the entire piece.

I found that this way of working allowed me an enormous amount of freedom to build a form that feels rather free but yet is able to hang together because of its common seed. The fragment was inspired by a tune I remember my mother singing to me as a child: ‘White coral bells, upon a slender stalk….’ Because my piece branches out in an almost plant-like way from a single stalk of material, Stalk seemed a fitting title. hannah lash Sonata for harp (2015) My Sonata for harp is an adaptation of my Second Harp Concerto. As I was writing the concerto, I had in the back of my mind the idea that I’d like to make a solo version of the piece, because the material seemed to lend itself to being fleshed out for harp alone. The outer movements are both based upon the idea of a descending chromatic line that can be presented triadically in any number of different ways, implying various

Notes on the Program

tonal directions. The middle movement is a kind of memory – a strange and lonely waltz into which the chromatic line also finds its way at times, but now as a secondary character. hannah lash Tree Suite (2017) Tree Suite is a very new piece, and one with a very personal back story. It is a tribute to my dear friend, teacher, guru, inspiration, my aunt Patrice Lockhart, who is the reason I play the harp. – Hannah Lash

PETER OUNDJIAN

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Upcoming Events Ettore Causa, viola & Boris Berman, piano february 16 Faculty Artist Series Faculty violist Ettore Causa and faculty pianist Boris Berman perform works

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