Yale Percussion Group, November 12, 2017

Robert Blocker, Dean

ysm ensembles

Yale Percussion Group

Robert van Sice, Director Sunday, November 12, 2017 • 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

YSM Ensembles

Yale Percussion Group November 12, 2017 · Morse Recital Hall

Leonardo Gorosito & Rafael Alberto

Seeds Matt Keown, Adrian Lin

Andy Akiho b. 1978

Pillar IV Matt Keown, YoungKyoung Lee, Dmitrii Nilov, Shiqi Zhong

Philippe Manoury b. 1952

Le Livre des Claviers (1988) II. Duo de marimbas Sam Seyong Um, Ji Su Jung

Matt Keown b. 1991

Mélange (2017) world premiere Shiqi Zhong, YoungKyoung Lee, Matt Keown, Sam Um, Ji Su Jung, Dmitrii Nilov intermission

Alejandro Viñao b. 1951

Water (2013) I. Edge of a Tide (Filo de Marea) II. Through the Wild Rain

(a travéz de la lluvia salvaje) III. Todos los ríos El río (All the rivers The river) Shiqi Zhong, YoungKyoung Lee, Matt Keown, Sam Um, Ji Su Jung, Dmitrii Nilov

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

Yale Percussion Group Founded in 1997 by Robert van Sice, the Yale Percussion Group has been called “something truly extraordinary” by composer Steve Reich. It is composed of talented and dedicated young artists who have come from around the world for graduate study at the Yale School of Music. Members of the YPG have gone on to perform as concerto soloists with the Berlin Philharmonic, to form the acclaimed quartet Sō Percussion, and to perform with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Oslo and Auckland philharmonics. Former members are percussionists in America’s great chamber music ensembles, including Chamber Music at Lincoln Center, Ensemble Connect (formerly Ensemble ACJW) at Carnegie Hall, and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Currently, alumni of YPG teach at the University of Miami, Michigan State University, Princeton University, Baylor University, Bard College, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Cornell, University of Alabama, Notre Dame, Dartmouth College, the University of Kansas, and the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University. The Yale Percussion Group has twice won the Percussive Arts Society’s International Percussion Ensemble Competition. The ensemble released its first CD on NMC Records (London) in 2016.

Robert van Sice, director Percussionist Robert van Sice has premiered more than one hundred works, including concertos, chamber music, and solo pieces.

He has made solo appearances with symphony orchestras and given recitals in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. In 1989 he gave the first full-length marimba recital at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and has since played in most of Europe’s major concert halls, many of which have been broadcast by the BBC, Swedish Radio, Norwegian Radio, WDR, and Radio France. He is frequently invited to be a soloist with Europe’s leading contemporary music ensembles and festivals, including the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Contrechamps, the Archipel, L’Itinéraire, Darmstadt, and North American new music festivals. From 1988 to 1997 he headed Europe’s very first diploma program for solo marimbists at the Rotterdam Conservatorium. Mr. van Sice has given master classes in more than twenty countries and frequently visits the major conservatories in Europe and Asia as a guest lecturer. He joined the Yale School of Music faculty in the fall of 1997.

notes on the program

Leonardo Gorosito & Rafael Alberto Seeds

Part II: Duo de marimbas (one player per instrument)

The inspiration to compose a piece thoroughly dedicated to shakers came from the caxixi, a folk instrument capable of producing two very distinct sounds. To them, several other shakers were added to enrich the palette of sounds, including the unusual tunable shaker and the autosufficient shaker. Seeds corroborates the theory of “less is more,” since it is all played using the same sound principle: shaking.

This piece is comprised of twenty-six sequences ranging from amorphous structures (simple glissandi) through intermediate states (broken lines but directional) to sequences completely polarized around the center. I focused on the music, made of dots connected by lines; a game “cast” can simulate legato phrasing by the high speed with which certain features are to be played.

—Philippe Manoury

philippe manoury Le Livre des Claviers (1988)

matt keown Mélange

The book includes six relatively short pieces for the various sets of percussion keyboards.

Techniques related to keyboards were quite widely developed during the twentieth century. If we compare the use of the xylophone in Debussy to that in Messiaen and Boulez, there is a breakthrough in front, bringing it (marimba and xylomarimba included) to a true solo role. However, in recent years, techniques for continuous playing with four mallets has led to more opportunities — not to develop a technique, but to create musical patterns that were impossible even a few years ago: polyphony, and the succession of agreements of different kinds at a certain speed. This greatly motivated my choice for keyboards. On the other hand, the construction of new acoustic instruments like sixxens allowed me to address cases of new figures in the sense that the notion of height is no longer dominant, but rather, becomes more complex.

Mélange is a snare drum sextet that was commissioned by Robert van Sice and the Yale Percussion Group in 2017. This piece serves as an homage to my four years at Yale and incorporates diverse aspects of my own musical background.

The traditions of classical, rudimental, and theatrical percussion are utilized to varying degrees and combined freely in search of percussive fusion. I view this piece as a microcosm of the various projects I participated in as a member of the Yale Percussion Group. The title itself refers to the final movement of Iannis Xenakis’ Pléïades, and musically I intended it to be an assortment of short episodes that form a patchwork, with each being highly profiled both visually and musically. At its core, as well as mine, the work is steeped in the modern drum-line tradition.

—Matt Keown

notes on the program

alejandro viñao Water (2013) In the first movement, I wanted to work with rhythmic “grooves” that would create waves of sound that may be listened to as color and texture. I wanted to give the audience the possibility of listening to this movement in a relaxed, “easy” way.

Accordingly, I imagined that it would be possible to follow this music as if one were listening to advancing and retreating waves of sound that bounce and rebound as they approach or retreat from us like a tide. But I also wanted to give the listener the option to explore the detailed musical lines that create the color and texture at the surface of this music, and allow him/ her to delve more deeply into the multilayered construction that underpins the musical discourse. The challenge for me was to make both listening modes possible and, preferably, equally interesting.

The second movement consists of a simple theme that undergoes stylistic transformations while remaining, for the most part, melodically unchanged. From a very soft beginning, the movement progresses into a slow groove that eventually turns into a dance with perhaps the swagger of a tango or some other Latin-American dance.

The title of the third movement (“Todos los ríos El río [All the rivers The river]”) paraphrases the title of a short story by Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar (“All the fires The fire”), in which various characters in two different historical periods appear to relate to each other through time and space as their two stories follow

similar trajectories. In this music, the various melodic lines, cells, and phrases that are first presented to the listener, the various “rivers,” appear to follow their own course, their own independent trajectory. At times, they even seem to be running away from each other as if heading in opposite directions. As the music progresses, the perception changes, giving the impression that all these musical strands are homing into the same pivotal point, sharing perhaps one single path.

The music explores this duality, where all these rivers appear to be, or perhaps indeed are, just the one river.

—Alejandro Viñao

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