Composition Faculty, March 1, 2018

Robert Blocker, Dean

faculty artist series

Composition Faculty works by Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis,

David Lang, Hannah Lash, and Christopher Theofanidis

Thursday, March 1, 2018 • 7:30 pm Morse Recital Hall

Faculty Artist Series

Composition Faculty March 1, 2018 • Morse Recital Hall

Christopher Theofanidis b. 1967

One thing at a time: Six Etude-Miniatures for solo flute (2016) Felice Doynov, flute

Hannah Lash b. 1981

Tree Suite (2016) I. II. III. Hannah Lash, harp

Aaron Jay Kernis b. 1960

Selections from First Club Date (2017) III. Matt’s Monkish Machinations IV. Elevating the (Jazz) Standard V. Jonah’s Jive Jump Jonah Kernis, cello Aaron Kernis, piano intermission

yale school of music

Martin Bresnick b. 1946

Parisot (2016) for cello and digital playback Paradox Parallels Paragon Ashley Bathgate, cello

David Lang b. 1957

Selections from death speaks (2012) Addy Sterrett, soprano Bora Kim, violin Liz Faure, guitar Alishan Gezgin, 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

Ashley Bathgate, cello American cellist Ashley Bathgate has been described as an “eloquent new music interpreter” (New York Times) and “a glorious cellist” (The Washington Post) who combines “bittersweet lyricism along with ferocious chops” (New York Magazine). Her “impish ferocity”, “rich tone,” and “imaginative phrasing” (New York Times) have made her one of the most sought-after performers of her time. The desire to create a dynamic energy exchange with her audience and build upon the ensuing chemistry is a pillar of Bathgate’s philosophy as a performer.

Her affinity to dynamism drives Bathgate to venture into previously uncharted areas of ground-breaking sounds and techniques, breaking the mold of a cello’s traditionally perceived voice. Collaborators and fans alike describe her vitality as nothing short of remarkable and magical for all who are involved. She is a member of the award winning, internationally acclaimed sextet Bang on a Can All-Stars, the chamber music group HOWL, as well as two chamber groups of which she is a founding member: TwoSense and Bonjour.

often with a very real political import.

But his compositions never descend into agitprop; one gains their meaning by the way the music itself unfolds, and always on its own terms.

Besides having received many prizes and commissions — including the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Commission, among many others — Martin Bresnick is also recognized as an influential teacher of composition. Students from every part of the globe and of virtually every musical inclination have been inspired by his critical encouragement.

Martin Bresnick’s compositions are published by Carl Fischer Music Publishers, New York; Bote & Bock, Berlin; CommonMuse Music Publishers, New Haven; and have been recorded by Cantaloupe Records, New World Records, Albany Records, Bridge Records, Composers Recordings Incorporated, Centaur, Starkland Records, and Artifact Music.

Martin Bresnick

Felice Doynov, flute

Martin Bresnick’s compositions — from opera, chamber and symphonic music to film scores and computer music — are performed throughout the world. Bresnick delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies and a raw power reminiscent of rock. At times his musical ideas spring from hardscrabble sources,

Felice Doynov is a flutist, activist, amateur chess fanatic, and Shakespeare enthusiast currently living in New Haven, CT. Felice has been a scholarship recipient at multiple music festivals including the Sarasota Music Festival (2013), the Aspen Music Festival (2014), the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival (2016), and the Norfolk New Music Festival (2017). As a chamber musician, Felice performed in the New York Philharmonic’s 2016 Biennial of new music, was a semifinalist at the 2016 Fischoff National

Artist Profiles

Chamber Music Competition, performed a recital at the Kennedy Center in February 2016, and won the 2016 Yale Chamber Music Society Competition. She completed her Master of Music Degree at the Yale School of Music, where she received the Alumni Association Prize. She completed her undergraduate studies at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where she received the prestigious Barbara and David Jacobs Scholarship and a Performer’s Certificate. Her instructors include Ransom Wilson, Thomas Robertello, and Michael Gordon.

Felice has worked for the Music in Schools Initiative as a teaching fellow for three years, and also tutors each week at New Haven Reads. Felice recently co-organized a benefit concert supporting refugees and immigrants, has been published in Yale’s Architecture magazine, Paprika, and this year’s Yale Israel Journal.

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.

Jonah Kernis, cello Cellist Jonah Kernis has been studying with Yari Bond for nine years, and currently attends the Professional Children’s School in ninth grade. He has performed at major

Artist Profiles

venues in New York City, including Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, and Carnegie Hall with the Kronos Quartet. Jonah was chosen to play in a master class given by renowned cellist Steven Isserlis and most recently he won the Kauffman Center Young Artists Concerto Competition, First Place in his age category at the 2017–2018 Vivo International Music Competition and was a finalist in the Washington Heights Orchestra Concerto Competition. In January 2017, Jonah premiered a new solo composition by Mario Davidovsky at Greenwich House.

He has been a member of the New York Youth Symphony since 2016 and also participates in the NYYS Chamber Music program as cellist of the HaWK Piano Trio.

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. Hannah Lash Hailed by The New York Times as “striking and resourceful … handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, the Naumburg Foundation, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as the Colorado and Aspen Music Festivals, 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,

Artist Profiles

the Naumburg Prize in Composition, the Barnard Rogers Prize in Composition, and the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize in Composition, among others.

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, a new chamber opera, Beowulf, for Guerilla Opera, and new orchestral works for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as two concerti for harp premiered by the American Composers Orchestra and the Colorado Music Festival, both with Lash as soloist. In 2016, Lash was honored with a Composer Portraits Concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. In the 2016–2017 season, Lash’s major, large-scale orchestral work, The Voynich Symphony, will be premiered by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

Lash obtained 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.

Christopher Theofanidis Christopher Theofanidis has had his works performed by the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Atlanta, National, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit sympho-

nies, among many others. He also served as composer of the year for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra during its 2006–07 season, for which he wrote a violin concerto for Sarah Chang.

Mr. Theofanidis holds degrees from the Yale School of Music, Eastman, and the University of Houston, and has been the recipient of the International Masterprize, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship to France, and two fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition for his work The Here and Now, based on the poetry of Rumi. His orchestral work Rainbow Body has been one of the most performed new works of the new millennium, having been performed by over 150 orchestras internationally. Dreamtime Ancestors, a consortium work for New Music for America, is being played by 58 different orchestras over the past season and the current one.

Mr. Theofanidis has written widely for the stage, including works for the San Francisco and Houston Grand Opera companies, as well as the American Ballet Theatre. He is a former faculty member of the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University as well as The Juilliard School. Mr. Theofanidis is currently a professor at the Yale School of Music and a composer-in-residence at the Aspen Music Festival.

Upcoming Events Harp vs. Harp: Edmar Castaneda & Grégoire Maret march 2 Ellington Jazz Series A concert showcasing the musical range and imagination of harpist Edmar Castaneda and harmonicist Grégoire Maret.

Morse Recital Hall | Friday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $20 • Students free Robert van Sice & Friends march 3 Faculty Artist Series Celebrating 20 years at the School of Music, Yale Percussion Group Director Robert van Sice is joined by students and alumni for the premiere of a new piece by YSM alumnus Garth Neustadter, a performance of Steve Reich’s pioneering Sextet, and more.

Morse Recital Hall | Saturday | 7:30 pm free admission Kyung Yu, violin march 4 Faculty Artist Series Faculty violinist Kyung Yu performs a recital with pianist Melissa Rose.

Morse Recital Hall | Sunday | 3 pm free admission

Vista: Chamber Music march 6 YSM Ensembles Student chamber ensembles perform and provide insight into the repertoire.

Morse Recital Hall | Tuesday | 7:30 pm free admission Robert Blocker, piano march 7 Horowitz Piano Series Faculty pianist and School of Music Dean Robert Blocker is joined by piano faculty colleagues and members of the Yale Philharmonia for an all-Mozart program.

Morse Recital Hall | Wednesday | 7:30 pm Tickets start at $13 • Students free Stephen Hartke, guest composer march 8 New Music New Haven A program of works by the School’s graduatestudent composers and music by Grammy Award-winning composer Stephen Hartke including The Fifth Book, performed by the Brentano String Quartet, YSM’s ensemble-in-residence.

Morse Recital Hall | Thursday | 7:30 pm free admission

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Robert Blocker, Dean