New Music New Haven, Apr 13, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

new music new haven

featuring music by

David Lang & Jack Vees and works by Yale School of Music graduate-student composers

Hannah Lash, Artistic Director April 13, 2017 • Thursday at 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

Yale School of Music

New Music New Haven April 13, 2017 • Morse Recital Hall

Ethan Braun b. 1994

Prelude Fay Wang, voice Brendon Randall-Myers, guitar

Sophie CashGoldwasser b. 1986

W. S.31.

Matthew Bridgham b. 1989

Sonata for violin and piano II. Intermezzo. Adagio con moto

Sophie Cash-Goldwasser, violin Ethan Braun, timpani Gulli Bjornsson, balalaika

Elly Toyoda, violin Matthew Bridgham, piano Liliya Ugay b. 1990

A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.

I. in search of the beautiful blankness …

II. … finding peace Julia Clancy, viola Liliya Ugay, piano

New Music New Haven

Krists Auznieks b. 1992

Light Stills Bora Kim, violin Andrew Stadler, trumpet Kramer Milan, percussion Dmitri Nilov, percussion Hanna Yukho, piano intermission

Jack Vees b. 1955

The Restaurant Behind the Pier Short Wave Jack Vees, bass guitar

David Lang b. 1957

the so-called laws of nature II. Matthew Keown, percussion Georgi Videnov, percussion Sam Seyong Um, percussion YoungKyung Lee, percussion

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 Ethan Braun Hailing from Los Angeles, California, Ethan Braun embraces transient, neglected sounds of the Classical canon, exhibiting a range from improvisatory to rigorously notated, from songful to textural.

Braun is pursuing a doctor of musical arts degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, where he is a teaching fellow for undergraduates and instructor for graduate non-majors in composition. He has also been a teaching artist in New Haven Public Schools working with students in grades five through eight. Braun actively promotes the work of his colleagues as event director for the Permutations concert series in San Francisco and New York City. His scholarship includes theses on Mysticism and the music of John Coltrane, and on the influence of radio, machines, and the extraterrestrial in Karlheinz Stockhausen. program note Prelude Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Writing of the God” follows the thought, the seeming inner monologue of a priestly or shamantype who, imprisoned by conquistadors, is among the last of their culture. The character spends the imprisonment recalling their lost culture’s knowledge, documenting in memory alone, without writing it down.

As seems reasonable, I have a strong reaction to it. The story evokes a striking mise-en-scène, deals with lofty themes in a brevity characteristic of Borges, and also points in a way to his blindness, his love

of reading, and his disposition towards his native Argentina.

– Ethan Braun biography Sophie Cash-Goldwasser A native of West Virginia, Sophie Cash-Goldwasser is currently pursuing her master of music degree at the Yale School of Music, where she has worked with Hannah Lash and Christopher Theofanidis. She is a violinist and a very occasional accordionist. program note W.S.31.

WS.31. is a piece that I wrote as part of a series of pieces that employ strings, voices, and electroacoustic effects. I especially like writing short songs and recording all of the different parts. This particular piece mixes onstage musicians – a violinist, balalaika player, and timpanist – with pre-recorded instruments. I am pleased to have live musicians this time around.

– Sophie Cash-Goldwasser biography Matthew Bridgham Matthew Bridgham’s music embraces a union of his own individual perspective with 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 William Bolcom, Martin Bresnick, Hannah Lash, Gabriela Lena Frank, Derek Bermel,

New Music New Haven

Joan Tower, and Libby Larsen, and his music has been performed at the American Music Festival, Colorado Music Festival, New York Festival of Song, the Shandelee Music Festival, and the Midwest Composers Symposium. He currently lives in New Haven with his wife and his cat where he studies composition (toward a doctor of musical arts degree) privately with Aaron Jay Kernis at the Yale School of Music. program note Sonata for violin and piano The Intermezzo is the much anticipated continuation of my first violin sonata. This intimate character piece serves as a transitionary space between the Allegro first movement and the Rondo third movement. It is a brief work that comprises a significant amount of self-referential elements; rhythm and harmony from the first movement are evaluated from a new perspective.

– Matthew Bridgham biography Liliya Ugay Liliya Ugay (born in 1990, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan) is an award-winning composer and pianist whose music has been performed in many countries across the globe.

A recipient of the 2016 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, her music has been described both as “assertive, steely” and “lovely, supple writing” by The Wall Street Journal. Among her competition prizes are the Molinari Quartet international composition competition (Montreal, Canada), Pre-Art Competition for Composition (Zurich, Switzerland), Edward Grieg International

composition competition (Oslo, Norway), International competition for young composers—Crystal Camerton (Moscow Conservatory/Union of Composers, Russia), and the MTNA National Young Artist Composition competition.

Ugay’s music has been featured at many festivals including the Darmstadt International Courses of New Music, New York International Electroacoustic Music Festival, American Music Festival, June in Buffalo, Boston New Music Initiative, and the Venice Biennale. Her music has been commissioned and performed by Albany Symphony, Yale Philharmonia, New England Philharmonic, Raleigh Civic Symphony, Columbus State University Philharmonic, and ensembles Molinari, Antico Moderno, and Omnibus. Her compositions range from traditional ensembles to musical theater and electroacoustic music.

As a pianist, Liliya is particularly interested in exploring and promoting unknown music of Soviet composers who were victims of political persecutions: her last project was a lecture-recital entitled “Silenced Voices: Music of Soviet Russia,” on which she worked under the guidance of Boris Berman.

Liliya is a prizewinner of several piano competitions, including the second prize at the International competition Verfemte Musik (Germany) and fourth prize at the fourteenth International Beethoven Piano Sonatas competition. Liliya received her master of music degree from the Yale School of Music studying with Aaron Kernis, Martin Bresnick, and Christopher Theofanidis.

Liliya will start working on her doctor of musical arts degree at Yale this fall.

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

program note A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.

A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud. was commissioned by the Carson McCullers Center for the event celebrating the hundredth anniversary of her birth. It was premiered by me and Paul Neubauer in Nyack, New York — the place where the writer lived most of her life. The piece is inspired by McCullers’ famous short story of the same name, which, in my opinion, exposes not just a different perspective on love but rather on loneliness and hope, powerfully expressed through humble characters and a simple setting.

The piece reflects a narrative of the emotional unfolding of this beautiful story.

– Liliya Ugay biography Krists Auznieks Auznieks’s music has been performed at the Beijing National Arts Centre, Shanghai City Theatre and Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, and has been featured at Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Holland), the American Music Festival (Albany, New York), MATA 2017, The NEXT Festival of Emerging Artists (New York City), the American Academy of Fontainebleau (France), and the Bennington Chamber Music Conference (Vermont). Commissions include works for the Latvian Radio Choir, Albany Symphony (New York), Latvian Radio Big Band, Yale Percussion Group, and two concert-length works for Contemporaneous (New York City) and Sinfonietta Riga (Latvia).

His music has been performed by Sandbox Percussion (New York City), the David

Kweksilber Big Band (Holland), Antico Moderno (Boston), the Yale Philharmonia, Slagwerk Den Haag (Holland), and Orkest de Ereprijs (Holland). Auznieks’s work I Exist As I Am was a Selected Work (under 30) at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Finland and was broadcast on classical music radios worldwide. Having received his bachelor of arts degree from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and having studied at The Hague Institute of Sonology, he was awarded an master of music degree and Frances E. Osborne Kellogg Memorial Prize from the Yale School of Music, where he is currently pursuing a doctor of musical arts degree. Auznieks’s latest opera, NeoArctic, was performed at the Riga Russian Theatre (Latvia) and Royal Danish Theatre (Denmark) in the fall of 2016 and is nominated for the Grand Music Award of Latvia as the show of the year. biography Jack Vees Jack Vees’ early musical training was in piano and tuba, but he soon switched to the electric bass guitar. He attended Glassboro State College and went on to receive his master of fine arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied music composition with Louis Andriessen, Vinko Globokar, and Morton Subotnick. His works have been performed by numerous ensembles and soloists, including Ensemble Modern, the California Ear Unit, Zeitgeist, Hemispheres, oboist Libby Van Cleve, cellists Jeffrey Krieger and Ashley Bathgate, guitarist Benjamin Verdery, and electronic percussionist Amy Knoles. His music has been heard at New Music America, Neue Musik New York/ Cologne, Bang On A Can, and Soundings.

New Music New Haven

program note The Restaurant Behind The Pier The Restaurant Behind the Pier is comprised, to a large part, of arpeggios on C and G chords. However, the strings are tapped to bring out higher harmonics along with the simple underpinning of the chords.

These two layers interact to present a composite that is familiar, yet at the same time filled with surprising shifts of focus. program note Short Wave When I was a child, my father had a short wave radio in his workshop. I would go visit it often and give the tuning dial a spin. Some evenings there would be jazz and other pop music from around the world. Sometimes there would be interjections of languages completely foreign to me. Some nights there would be lots of static white noise. This piece is a spinning of my own internal tuner, collecting and juxtaposing bits of music I have composed or remembered.

– Jack Vees biography David Lang In the words of The New Yorker, “With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” Commissioned by Carnegie Hall and based on a fable by Hans Christian Andersen and Lang’s own rewriting of the libretto to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the recording

of the piece was awarded a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. Lang has also been the recipient of the Rome Prize, Le Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and Musical America’s 2013 Composer of the Year, and was Carnegie Hall’s 2013–2014 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair.

Lang’s score for Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth received a 2016 Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, among others.

Recent premieres include his opera the loser, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and for which Lang served as composer, librettist, and stage director; the public domain for one thousand singers at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; his chamber opera anatomy theater at the Los Angeles Opera and at the Prototype Festival in New York; and the concerto man made for the ensemble Sō Percussion and a consortium of orchestras, including the BBC Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Lang is a professor of music composition at the Yale School of Music and is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music festival Bang on a Can. program note the so-called laws of nature I went to college to study science. I was expected to become a doctor, or at the very least a medical researcher, and I spent much of my undergraduate years studying math and chemistry and physics, hanging out with future scientists, going to their parties, sharing their apartments, eavesdropping on their conversations. I remember a particularly heated discussion about a quote

Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program

from Wittgenstein: “At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanation of natural phenomena.”

This quote rankled all of us future scientists, as it implied that science can’t explain the universe but can only offer mere descriptions of things observed. Over the years it occurred to me that this could be rephrased as a musical problem.

Because music is made of proportions and numbers and formulas and patterns, I always wonder what these numbers actually mean.

Do the numbers themselves generate a certain structure, creating the context and the meaning and the form, or are they just the incidental byproducts of other, deeper, more mysterious processes? My piece the so-called laws of nature tries to explore the “meaning” of various processes and formulas. The individual parts are virtually identical—the percussionists play identical patterns throughout, playing unison rhythms on subtly different instruments.

Most of these instruments the performers are required to build themselves. Some of the patterns between the players are displaced in time. Some are on instruments that have a kind of incoherence built into their sounds. Does the music come out of the patterns or in spite of them? I am not sure which, but I know that this piece is as close to becoming a scientist as I will ever get. the so-called laws of nature was commissioned by the ensemble Sō Percussion and was premiered by them at the Miller Theater in New York City on October 19, 2002.

— David Lang

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 Sophie Cash-Goldwasser Antonia Chandler Allan Hon Bora Kim Laura Park Lauren Williams Stage Crew Lydia Consilvio Margaret Davis Thomas Duboski Reese Farnell Christopher Garwood Ashley Hale Nozomi Imamura Pall Quinn Kalmansson Matthew Keown Young Kyoung Lee Cheuk-Yin Clement Luu Hillary Simms Andrew Stadler Sam Seyong Um Georgi Videnov

PETER OUNDJIAN

BRENTANO STRING QUARTET

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Robert Blocker, Dean

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Upcoming Events Argus Quartet april 20 YSM Ensembles

Yale Cellos april 26

YSM’s fellowship quartet-in-residence performs a program of music by Haydn, Janacek, Garth Knox, and YSM alumni composers Ted Hearne and Andrew Norman Sudler Recital Hall | Thursday | 4:30 pm Free Admission

Peter Oundjian, principal conductor april 21 Yale Philharmonia

Principal conductor Peter Oundjian leads the Yale Philharmonia and soprano Jin-Xiang Yu, a winner of the 2016 Woolsey Hall Concerto Competition, in performances of works by Beethoven, Messiaen, and Adams Woolsey Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $10 • Yale Faculty/Staff $8 Students $5 • $3 surcharge for purchases at the door

YSM Ensembles Aldo Parisot, director

Featuring music by Bach, Rachmaninoff, Schumann, and more Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $10 • Students $5

The Bear & Le pauvre matelot may 5 & 6

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Doris Yarick Cross, artistic director Yale Opera presents a new double bill of Walton’s The Bear and Milhaud’s Le pauvre matelot (The Poor Sailor) with music direction by Doug Dickson and Timothy Shaindlin Morse Recital Hall Friday & Saturday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $10 • Students $5

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april 26 YSM Ensembles Wendy Sharp, director School of Music students perform a midday chamber music program Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 12:30 pm Free Admission

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