New Music New Haven: Kurt Rohde, guest composer, Mar 9, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

new music new haven

featuring music by guest composer

Kurt Rohde and works by Yale School of Music graduate-student composers

Hannah Lash, Artistic Director March 9, 2017 • Thursday at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

Yale School of Music

New Music New Haven March 9, 2017 โ ข Morse Recital Hall

Matthew Bridgham b. 1989

Fantasy Doug Perry, marimba

Eli Greenhoe b. 1994

Rhapsody (after Forsythe) Graeme Johnson, clarinet Seolyeong Jeong, piano

Fjรณla Evans b. 1987

Spun David Yi, conductor Meera Gudipati, flute Jesse McCandless, bass clarinet Eliud Garcia, trombone Thomas Duboski, Alexandra Simpson, viola Pall Quinn Kalmansson, Ji Young Choi, cello Kaden Hall Henderson, Will Robbins, double bass Georgi Videnov, Sam Seyong Um, percussion intermission

Kurt Rohde b. 1967

Concertino for violin and small ensemble (2010) I. moto II. sotto III. rotto David Yi, conductor Elliot Lee, violin Felice Doynov, flute Jesse McCandless, bass clarinet YoungKyong Lee, Dmitri Nilov, percussion Joshua Newburger, viola Eric Adamshick, cello Mariya-Andoniya Andonova, double bass Liliya Ugay, piano

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 • Notes on the Program

biography Matthew Bridgham

biography Eli Greenhoe

Matthew Bridgham’s music embraces the union of his own individual perspective and the profound impact on his ears of the music he loves. His music interacts with classical and romantic aspects of form and tonality, refracted through a lens wholly his own.

He has worked with YSM faculty composers Martin Bresnick and Hannah Lash, as well as William Bolcom, Gabriela Lena Frank, Derek Bermel, Joan Tower, and Libby Larsen. His music has been performed at the American Music Festival, Colorado Music Festival, New York Festival of Song, Shandelee Music Festival, and the Midwest Composers Symposium. He currently lives with his wife and his cat in New Haven, where he is a DMA candidate at the Yale School of Music studying composition with Aaron Jay Kernis.

Eli Greenhoe is a composer from Brooklyn, New York. His music has been performed by such groups as the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, Manhattan School of Music Symphony, and the S.E.M. Ensemble, among others. Recent performances include orchestral premieres conducted by George Manahan and Nicholas DeMaison, and solo works commissioned and premiered

by William Lang (of loadbang) and Carrie Frey (of Chartreuse). Upcoming commissions include a new work for loadbang, as well as commissions from the violin/viola duo andPlay and a new work for percussionist Eric Goldberg. Eli has twice (2013, 2016) been a finalist at the ASCAP Morton Gould Competition and has received honorable mention recognition from the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and loadbang in their respective calls for scores.

Upon graduating from the Manhattan School of Music, Mr. Greenhoe was awarded both the Nicholas Flagello Award for excellence in composition and the Carl Kanter Prize for orchestral music. From 2013 to 2015, Mr. Greenhoe was a composition fellow at the Yellow Barn Young Artists Program in Putney, Vermont. He has also been in residence at the Ostrava Days composer workshop in Ostrava, Czech Republic (2015) and the Hotel Pupik artists colony in St. Lorenzen bei Schefling, Austria (2014).

Eli Greenhoe received his bachelor of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 2016, where he studied with Reiko Füting.

He is currently pursuing his master of music degree at the Yale School of Music, where he studies with Martin Bresnick.

program note Fantasy Fantasy is a work presented in six interconnected sections, beginning with an “Air,” or theme, and followed by five “Divisions,” or variations. The work comprises a four-chord harmonic structure that continually rotates (transposes) and overlaps on itself. The work threads through multiple musical topics, from a lonely soliloquy to a lamenting choir, from a barcarolle to a chaotic mechanism, concluding in song.

—Matthew Bridgham

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

program note Rhapsody (After Forsythe) Rhapsody (After Forsythe) was composed in the winter of 2016–2017. It is written as a response, albeit very loosely, to the work of dancer/choreographer William Forsythe – an artist whose searingly honest work hit me like a freight train when I first saw it danced. Forsythe’s work makes porous the boundary between architecture and content and evolves simultaneously along the lines of larger spans of formal logic and in moments of blazing, serendipitous inspiration.

I wanted to write a piece with this same sort of “tight-but-loose” structure – where the large-scale trajectory of the music was not so rigid as to disallow it from having holes poked in it by tender and impetuous flashes of in-the-moment insight. So, while not an homage in any literal sense, Rhapsody owes itself to William Forsythe in that within its scope, two time frames – the now and the future – meet, bow, and waltz in each other’s embrace toward the piece’s culmination.

–Eli Greenhoe biography Fjóla Evans Fjóla Evans is a Canadian/Icelandic composer and cellist. Her work draws inspiration from the behavioral patterns of natural phenomena, the droning lilt of Icelandic folk music, and the experience of ascribing significance to happenstance. Autocorrect describes her work as a “texturing fog.”

Commissions and performances have come from ensembles such as the JACK Quartet,

Bang on a Can All-Stars pianist Vicky Chow, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Reconsil, and Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. Her work has been featured at the MATA Festival, Ung Nordisk Musik, and the SONiC Festival. Upcoming projects include a commission from the Thin Edge New Music Collective and the commercial release of Bearthoven’s recording of Shoaling on Cantaloupe Music.

As a performer, she has presented her work at the Cluster Festival of New Music, núna (now), and at Toronto’s Music Gallery. She has performed with ensembles such as Hotel Elefant, singer/producer Lydia Ainsworth, and Bing & Ruth. She was the winner of GroundSwell’s Emerging Canadian Composers Competition and collaborated with instrument-maker Merche Blasco on a piece for three sopranos and theremin orchestra. Fjóla has participated in the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival as a composer and as a cellist; at Soundstreams’ 2016 Emerging Composer Workshop studying with composer and mentor Steve Reich; and in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, KulturKontakt Austria, and the Old School Arthouse in Hrísey, Iceland. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the SOCAN Foundation. A graduate of McGill University where she studied with cellist Matt Haimovitz, Fjóla recently completed her master of music degree in composition with Julia Wolfe at NYU Steinhardt. Fjóla is currently pursuing graduate studies in composition at the Yale School of Music as a student of Martin Bresnick and Christopher Theofanidis.

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

program note Spun Spun is the fourth in a series of pieces inspired by textiles. I imagined the musical lines as threads in the fabric. The performers lean on one another, building and stretching the texture, each inhabiting an equal role in the fabric of the music. Every gesture has the same basic shape: a swell from a quiet dynamic to loud, and back to quiet. The music builds in a way similar to weaving a piece of cloth – every thread has a moment where it emerges out of the texture, but none of them can really function on its own.

—­Fjóla Evans biography Kurt Rohde The music of composer and violist Kurt Rohde has been described as being “filled with exhilaration and dread. It’s a mirror of our times. It’s dark music, lit up by peckings, clackings, snaps and slides. It sounds eerie, but lyrical; sustained, but skittish; free-form, yet dancing” (Richard Scheinin, San Jose Mercury News).

Kurt Rohde is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize, and a 2015 Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received commission awards from New Music USA – Commissioning Music USA, the NEA, and the Barlow, Fromm, Hanson, and Koussevitzky foundations. Mr. Rohde recently completed new works for the Lyris Quartet, ZOFO Duet, the Lydian String Quartet, eighth blackbird, the St. Louis

Symphony Orchestra, the Scharoun Ensemble, pianist Genevieve Lee, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. His opera Death With Interruptions, based on the novel by José Saramago, was premiered in March 2015 by soprano Nikki Einfeld, tenor Joe Dan Harper, baritone Daniel Cilli, the San Francisco-based chorus Volti, conductor Matilda Hofman, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Kurt is currently working on two additional opera projects: one with writer Dana Spiotta and artist David Humphrey, and another with artist Jennifer Coates for tenor Joe Dan Harper based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Mr. Rohde is also collaborating with artist/filmmaker Shelley Jordon on a new project following their highly successful and recently completed installation work [Lost] In The Woods. His 2012 CD, ONE: Chamber Music of Kurt Rohde, was released

by Innova Recordings, and his 2005 CD, Oculus – music for strings with the New Century Chamber Orchestra, was released on the Mondovibe label.

Kurt was in residence at Copland House in the summer of 2014. Beginning in the fall of 2016, several new works of his will be premiered: a pick-pocket cello concerto commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition for cellist Michelle Kesler, a solo work for cellist Rhonda Rider, an ensemble piece for the New York-based ensemble mise-en, and a new work for pianist Genevieve Lee for speaker, toy piano, and harpsichord commissioned by the Fromm Foundation. Kurt was guest composer in residence at the Bennington Chamber Music Conference in Vermont and the Cappadocia Music Festival in Turkey during summer 2015 and was the keynote speaker at the 2015 Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University.

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

A professor of music composition and theory at the University of California, Davis department of music, where he was codirector of the Empyrean Ensemble until 2015, Kurt is a violist with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and was a member of The New Century Chamber Orchestra from 1994 to 2014. Mr. Rohde was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2012–13. Mr. Rohde is a graduate of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and SUNY Stony Brook and has attended the Willapa Bay, Montalvo, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Djerassi resident-artist programs. A native of the Hudson Valley, Kurt Rohde lives in San Francisco with his husband, Timothy Allen, and their labradoodle, Ripley. program note Concertino for violin and small ensemble (2010) My Concertino for violin and small ensemble is an odd piece – it contains a virtuosic solo violin part, and the ensemble writing is highly intricate and interrelated throughout. While not a full-fledged violin concerto, there is no doubt that without the solo violin, the “heart” of the piece would be missing. I am pretty sure that if any other instruments were removed from the mix, the piece would still operate with its “missing limb” (say the flute or viola). The “heart” (solo violin), though, must remain.

Cast in three movements, my Concertino is modeled on an augmentation of the Baroque concerto grosso concertino technique. In these early ensemble works, the concertino was a subset of solo instruments drawn from the larger, full ensemble. They would

play extended passages in their concertino roles as soloists, playing elaborate versions of the full ensemble’s tutti music. In practice, these ripieno (tutti) passages would alternate with the concertino (small group of soloists) passages, giving an impression of the grandiose and “public” (ripieno) alternating with the intimate and “private” (concertino). In my piece, there are never any ripieno passages: it is all concertino.

The work is in three movements: moto, sotto and rotto. moto (motion) casts the solo violin as the force behind the momentum of music. This is realized in the shorter, repeated rhythmic riffs, long lyrical lines, and abrupt chords. sotto (under) has the solo violin play a simple, long melody that emerges from underneath or inside the ensemble. I was also attempting to create the impression of a passacaglia without actually composing one: the affect of a series of variations over a repeated bass contributes to the idea of the music being generated from “underneath.” rotto (broken) has the violin soloist snap to attention, becoming a relentless, implacable force, carrying the ensemble along. The violin acts as if it is unable to stop for anything, its brakes are broken, and its purpose is singular: play on to the end, and drag the rest of the ensemble along, kicking and screaming if need be.

The Concertino for violin and small ensemble was composed in Rome and San Francisco during 2009–2010, was composed with support from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, and is dedicated to Axel Strauss.

—Kurt Rohde

New Music New Haven Staff

Artistic Director Hannah Lash Manager Jeffrey M. Mistri Assistant Manager Samuel Bobinski Conducting Fellow David Yi Office Assistant Valerie Sly Library Emily Brandenburg Bora Kim Sophie Cash-Goldwasser Laura Park Lauren Williams Allan Hon Antonia Chandler Stage Crew Cheuk Yin Clement Luu Thomas Duboski Ashley Hale Young Kyoung Lee Margaret Davis Hillary Simms Andrew Stadler Georgi Videnov Reese Farnell Sam Seyong Um Matthew Keown Lydia Consilvio Nozomi Imamura Pall Quinn Kalmansson

Upcoming Events Jerusalem String Quartet march 28 Oneppo Chamber Music Series The Jerusalem String Quartet performs Haydn String Quartet in D major, Op. 64, No. 5, “Lark;” Prokofiev String Quartet No. 1 in B minor, Op. 50; and Beethoven String Quartet No. 7 in F major, Op. 59, No. 1, “Razumovsky” Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $26 • Students $13 Joan Tower, guest composer march 30 New Music New Haven A program of works, including White Granite and Second String Force, by guest composer Joan Tower, “a composer whose directness and eclecticism make her music instantly accessible,” according to The New York Times Sudler Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm Free Admission Bresnick, Brahms, and Prokofiev march 31 Yale Philharmonia Bresnick: The Way It Goes; Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16, with Yang Liu, piano; Brahms: Symphony No. 4 Peter Oundjian, principal conductor Woolsey Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $10 • Yale Faculty/Staff $8 Students $5 • $3 surcharge for purchases at the door

Lunchtime Chamber Music april 5 School of Music students perform chamber music concert at the Yale Center for British Art Wendy Sharp, director 1080 Chapel St. | Wednesday | 12:30 pm Free Admission Melvin Chen, piano april 5 Horowitz Piano Series Faculty pianist and YSM Deputy Dean Melvin Chen performs a program of works by Couperin, Ravel, and Chausson with violinist Juliette Kang and the Argus Quartet Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $13 • Students $7 Clarinet Studio Recital april 6 Yale School of Music Ensembles A program featuring students from YSM faculty clarinetist David Shifrin’s studio Sudler Recital Hall | Thursday | 4:30 pm free admission Woolsey Concerto Competition april 8 Graduate students in performance compete to perform with the Yale Philharmonia in the 2017–2018 season Morse Recital Hall | Saturday | 9 am free admission

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Robert Blocker, Dean