Robert Blocker, Dean
ysm ensembles
Yale Percussion Group Robert van Sice, director Saturday, December 14, 2019 | 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Steven Mackey b. 1956
It Is Time (2010) Russell Fisher, percussion Zach Gutierrez, percussion
Ji Su Jung, percussion Arlo Shultis, percussion
intermission
Krists Auznieks b. 1992
Prelude and Ether (2019) World premiere Ji Su Jung, percussion Arlo Shultis, percussion Russell Fisher, percussion
John Cage 1912–1992
Kevin Zetina, percussion Shiqi Zhong, percussion
In a Landscape (1948) Ji Su Jung, marimba
Miles Walter b. 1994
Blues voor Maurits Cornelis (2019) World premiere Russell Fisher, percussion Kevin Zetina, percussion
Shiqi Zhong, percussion Zach Gutierrez, percussion
As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
Artist Profiles Yale Percussion Group
Robert van Sice, director
Founded in 1997 by Robert van Sice, the Yale Percussion Group has been called “something truly extraordinary” by composer Steve Reich. The ensemble is composed of talented and dedicated young artists who have come from around the world for graduate study at the Yale School of Music.
Robert van Sice, one of the world’s foremost performers of contemporary music for marimba, has premiered more than one hundred works throughout the world. He has appeared as a soloist with many major symphony orchestras as well as Europe’s leading contemporary music ensembles, including the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Contrechamps in Geneva, and L’Itineraire in Paris. He has given recitals throughout Europe, North America, Africa, and the Far East, and has appeared as a soloist with renowned percussion ensembles Amadinda, Kroumata, Tambuco, Percussive Rotterdam, and Sō Percussion.
In recent seasons, the YPG has performed in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Galapagos Art Space, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The ensemble won the Percussive Arts Society competition in 2009 and 2014. A concert in 2012 called “75/100” celebrated the birthdays of Steve Reich and John Cage. The Zankel Hall concert was part of the Yale in New York concert series. Members of the YPG have gone on to form such acclaimed ensembles as Sō Percussion and Sandbox. YPG alumni have also performed with such ensembles as Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Two, Ensemble Connect, the Oslo Philharmonic, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
Van Sice has performed at such festivals as Ars Musica, Blossom, Darmstadt Course for New Music, Archipel, London Meltdown, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and others. He has given more than four hundred master classes in twenty-five countries and has released six CDs on the Etcetera, Mode, and New World labels. Van Sice is Lecturer in Percussion and Director of the Yale Percussion Group at the Yale School of Music, and is also on the faculties of the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University and the Curtis Institute of Music. For the past fifteen years, van Sice has collaborated with the Adams Corporation in the Netherlands in the design of a series of marimbas bearing his name.
Program Notes by the composers Prelude and Ether Krists auznieks It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. – Wallace Stevens, from The Idea of Order in Key West
Blues voor Maurits Cornelis miles walter Blues is an Afro-American musical form (and art form) which emerged from oral tradition around the dawn of the 20th century and which remains very much alive today. Blues celebrates human pain, joy, struggle, and hope. Maurits Cornelis Escher, meanwhile, was a Dutch visual artist who lived from 1898 to 1972. He left behind a wealth of mad, fantastical, mathematical, occasionally paradoxical visions of the real and imagined universe. Escher is famous for his tessellations: saturations of two-dimensional space made by interlocking many iterations of the same figure, or the same handful of figures. A chessboard, tiled by squares, is a trivial example; another simple tessellation
can be made by combining hexagons and triangles. Escher’s tessellations often contain figures from life (animals, objects, fantastical beasts), rendering them masterful hybrids of abstract and representational art. In this blues, for four mallet percussionists, pitch/time space is gradually tessellated using a single, simple pattern, coiled upon itself in many ways, until it forms blues shapes on at least three different timescales (short, medium, long). Of course: a true tessellation really goes on to infinity — the paper ends, but the music doesn’t stop. To me, blues also just wants to roll on forever and ever, tessellating time. Blues is durable on many timescales: at the end of each 12-bar chorus, you want to hear another one; meanwhile, the form is more than a hundred years old, and I’m sure a longer future lies ahead. In his 2012 memoirs, blues great Buddy Guy writes: “Funny thing about the blues: you play ’em cause you got ’em. But when you play ’em, you lose ’em. If you hear ’em — if you let the music get into your soul — you also lose ’em. The blues chase the blues away.” If that’s not an Escherian paradox, I don’t know what is. Blues voor Maurits Cornelis was written for Robert van Sice and the Yale Percussion Group, with immense admiration, affection, and gratitude.
Upcoming Events dec 15
David Shifrin & Friends Faculty Artist Series Works by Mendelssohn, Enescu, Poulenc, and Paganini, with faculty pianist Robert Blocker, and students and alumni from the clarinet studio. 3:00 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall free
dec 16 Bassoonarama YSM Ensembles A performance by students from faculty bassoonist Frank Morelli’s studio. 7:30 p.m. | Sudler Recital Hall free Catherine Russell Ellington Jazz Series “One of jazz’s most celebrated vocalists, an incandescent performer who can make a century-old blues song as fresh and bracing as tomorrow’s bad news.” — San Francisco Chronicle 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $22, students $10 jan 17
Melvin Chen Horowitz Piano Series A performance of Janaček’s In the Mists, faculty composer Hannah Lash’s Six Etudes and a Dream, and Shostakovich’s infrequently performed Piano Sonata No. 2 in B minor. 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $15, students $7
jan 22
Peter Oundjian, principal conductor Yale Philharmonia The 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth is celebrated with a performance of the composer’s Choral Fantasy, with the Yale Glee Club and faculty pianist Boris Berman; the Triple Concerto, with violinist and YSM alumna Sunmi Chang, faculty cellist Paul Watkins, and faculty pianist Melvin Chen; and the revolutionary Third Symphony, “Eroica.” 7:30 pm | Woolsey Hall Tickets start at $12, Yale faculty/ staff $8, students free $3 surcharge at the door jan 24
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