Robert Blocker, Dean
new music new haven
Aaron Jay Kernis, Artistic Director
Katherine Balch
faculty composer
Thursday, October 6, 2022 | 7:30 p.m.
Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Program
Aaron Israel Levin
b. 1995
Harriet Steinke
b. 1994
Lila Meretzky b. 1998
Hand Bones (2022)
I. Body Aria
II. Broken Hands
III. Body Language
IV. Broken Bone
Arseniy Gusev, harpsichord Aaron Israel Levin, electronics
The Shapes You Take (2019–2022)
Jasmine Pai, cello Anthony Ratinov, piano
Quartet (2022)
Herdís Guðmundsdóttir, violin
Benjamin Webster b. 1997
Cassia Drake, viola Ben Lanners, cello Nicholas Hernandez, double bass Michael Yeung, percussion Piano Trio (2022)
Tristan Siegel, violin William Suh, cello Derek Hartman, piano intermission
Katherine Balch
b. 1991
estrangement (2020)
I. Only once (a)
II. Why, she sees, it didn’t occur to her
III. Only once (b)
IV. rejection possible
V. It was then she realized
VIII. She rarely recalled
IX. She left them (the wall she had to make)
X. Only the song
XI. The labor of forgetting XII. a novel by a writer from another continent / when she read the novel XIII. in a jar
Sea Han, soprano Alexa Stier, piano
Matīss Čudars
b. 1991
Julián Fueyo
b. 1996
Duo for violin & cello (2022)
1. I 2. II
3. III
Andrew Samarasekara, violin Jenny Bahk, cello
Hurakán (2022)
I. Ascension
II. Color crystallization
III. Prismatic precipitation
Charlie Lovell Jones, violin 1 Ilana Zaks, violin 2
Emily Rekrut-Pressey, viola Kyeong Eun Kim, cello
Hyeonjeong Choi, flute Amer Hasan, clarinet
Yukiko Nakamura, vibraphone
Hyojin Shin, piano Samuel Hollister, conductor
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.
Texts
estrangement
katherine balchOnly once did she feel loved by a man on what we might call the wash of the cellular level
No—; twice—; the second only occurring to her now in the act of counting and revision of that count.
Why, she sees, it didn’t occur to her from the start is she could not receive it;
and, as much as she tried, as prudent as it would have been, as full of his warmth her night still would be, she could not return it.
And so she returned a lesser form, striving for increase, for a participation that did not feel partial—.
But, for all of her trying, each time she left him she returned home knowing alienation from intimate place more keenly than what she had felt prior to the hours spent with him.
Only once did she feel loved by a man on what we might call the wash of the cellular level and return it the same, rejection possible only in practice, not in spirit, which is why other women were of no true threat;
even if he seduced them or they, him—
which she knew had happened, which was likely happening right now—
it would be of no consequence to his love for her.
Didn’t he tell her last season, transparent in his wish simply to get by on the daily level, that he did love her, but in a tone she hadn’t heard from him before, a tone of finality without its attendant promise, a tone of the problematic. It was then she realized she could not, amongst all that shook him, shake him toward her.
One night she played out, in her mind, a life with him in practice, and before her loomed a succession of lit frames under which she could barely make out the director’s notes:
It is the closing down of human estrangement and
Life with him quickly becomes intolerable
These are the only two notes. Yet they repeat successively: It is the closing down of human estrangement
Life with him quickly becomes intolerable
It is the closing down of human estrangement Life, etc., etc., . . .
How the film ends can’t be anything other than arbitrary; it seems like someone took a knife to the reel.
Cut here, why not, what does it matter, it’s eternal.
She rarely recalled other men— they offered only a wick of predetermined length, none need even blow it out.
She left them easily, rapidly, maybe it hurt some of them
Unless they were truly kind to her, she didn’t think long on their hurt, and few were truly kind to her.
Most took great joy listening to their own insults hurl against the wall she, for such occasions, had to make of her mind.
Since some men enjoy the luxury of large audience, their insults had significant reach. Other men then lengthened that reach: an editor, a composer, a gallery owner. Once in print, once in verse, once in paint was she rendered, yet with mediocrity, since none possessed temperance.
Only the song took formidable work to forget.
The composer was a giant talent— though the verse, at times, was a coffin of slur,
the composition was a thing of beauty, and the circumference of beauty can be useful in hiding the circumference of hatred.
And so it was now hers, the labor of forgetting—.
Forgetting doesn’t just happen, it takes practice. And, like any other practice, it begins in loathing.
She decided to read novels again, which was difficult— attending to a story, if it faltered, was an impossible practice for her. She discarded books as one might toss dirt dug for a grave; until, that is, one book halted her—.
It was a novel by a writer from another continent: Upon that soil two characters find in each other the context wherein they want, finally, their lives to be understood.
It’s that they each bring to the other the sense of a whole life’s arrangement and distress taken in and, as if now washed together into one unlit shell, they undergo recognition, the certain pull that knows nothing less than the other will ever be acceptable.
, cont.
The characters, as it happens, are teenagers, which the novelist must know is a considerable risk. Some forms of love are reduced by onlookers, not to be taken seriously. The onlookers in the book, it seems crucial to note, reduce many things, even the ashes belonging to a prior tenant’s fire: it’s filth, for instance, not the means by which someone may have survived December.
When she read the novel, she saw herself see them see it, the closing down of their human estrangement.
How could she degrade it?
Yet there’s only so long two are allowed the unlit shell.
then she cast it out again— she would not allow beauty to choke out her own heart’s gore.
There is no gore like the gore of actual heart,
the aftermath of having known, once, and still—he must be somewhere—
the end of human estrangement.
(Sometimes she thought of her own love like a heart preserved in a jar:
in a jar on a shelf lit once per day as the sun shone down the lab’s abandoned window. Then prisms on the jar, a specimen lit and lit and lit and then it’s over.)
Beauty at times took its turn in her. She watched it arrive, she allowed it in,
Texts
Artist Profile
Katherine Balch, faculty composerDescribed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “some kind of musical Thomas Edison— you can just hear her tinkering around in her workshop, putting together new sounds and textural ideas,” composer Katherine Balch is interested in the intimacy of quotidian objects, intricate textural lyricism, and natural processes. A collector of aural delights, found sounds are often at the heart of her work, which ranges from acoustic to mixed media and installation.
Balch’s work has been commissioned and performed by such celebrated ensembles as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Talea, and the symphony orchestras of Tokyo, Darmstadt, Minnesota, Oregon, Albany, Indianapolis, and Dallas. Her music has been featured at IRCAM’s ManiFeste, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in England, Festival MANCA in France, the Suntory Foundation for the Arts Summer Festival and Takefu International Music Festival in Japan, and the Aspen, Norfolk, Santa Fe, and Tanglewood music festivals in the United States.
The recipient of the 2020–2021 Elliott Carter Rome Prize, Balch was the California Symphony’s 2017–2020 composer-inresidence and held the 2017–2019 William B. Butz Composition Chair at Young Concert Artists. Other recognitions include awards and grants from Wigmore Hall, ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chamber Music America, the Barlow Foundation, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and Wigmore Hall. Her music is published
exclusively worldwide by Schott Music.
Balch is Assistant Professor of Composition at the Yale School of Music. She served previously on the faculties of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, The New School, the Preparatory Division of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and the Walden School.
Balch earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Columbia University, a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, and a dual Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Music degree from Tufts University and the New England Conservatory.
Student Profiles
Program Notes
by the composers
Aaron Israel Levin ’19MM ’27DMA
Student of Katherine Balch » aaronisraellevin.com
Harriet Steinke ’22MM
Student of David Lang » harrietsteinke.com
Lila Meretzky ’22MM
Student of Christopher Theofanidis » lilameretzky.com
Benjamin Webster ’23MMA Student of Aaron Jay Kernis » benwebstermusic.com
Matīss Čudars ’23MM Student of David Lang » matisscudars.com
Julián Fueyo Gonzales ’23MM Student of David Lang & Aaron Jay Kernis
» julianfueyo.com
Staff
manager
Jeffrey M. Mistri
music librarian
Samuel Bobinski
office assistant
Marty Tung
Hand Bones aaron israel levin
When I was asked to write a piece for solo harpsichord, I was both excited and overwhelmed by the vast historical contexts associated with an instrument more than a few centuries old. Rather than choose only one of those contexts to engage with, I challenged myself to engage with as many as possible. Each of the four movements is an etude that deals with a different performance and compositional technique, recalling the harpsichord’s role as a pedagogical instrument. The piece also incorporates electronics derived from the manipulated voice of a friend reading a poem. The inclusion of this voice evokes the harpsichord’s capacity as an accompaniment for recitative in opera. Finally, each movement also becomes progressively more virtuosic, harkening back to the many concerti written for the instrument. This is how I thought of the title Hand Bones, which points to the physicality and endurance required by the performer, for this piece, as well as thousands of virtuosic pieces written for harpsichordists throughout history.
The Shapes You Take harriet steinke
The Shapes You Take is a single movement work for cello and piano, running roughly ten minutes in length. The work was commissioned in 2019 by the Tanglewood Music Center and although it was supposed to premiere in 2020, the piece was left unfinished and unperformed for over two years. The process of returning to a piece that I started in 2019 was extremely uncomfortable. In the midst of feeling
awful, I was calmed by Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” which says:
Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark… Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed. Stevens’ lines inspired a piece that is, more than anything else, a patient meditation that allowed a peaceful coexistence of my musical ideas — or, a peaceful coexistence of all of my “shapes.”
Quartet
lila meretzky
Quartet was originally composed for a subset of the Warp Trio, a quartet that composes and improvises as a group. It was written this summer for the faculty commissions at The Walden School, a camp for creative musicians where I have taught. As I wrote the piece, I played with the simplest possible operations to discover how they could be combined to yield the greatest changes to the sound. What could altering one note of a chord progression, changing the strings’ bow speed, or striking the hi-hat one centimeter closer to its center do to the world of the piece? What happens when all of these variables change continuously and simultaneously? I make visual art as well as music, and while reworking the music for this performance I thought about the way colors interact and how our experience of them shifts depending on their context. A medium green may appear dull on a background of a slightly lighter shade of green, while the same green may pop and glare if layered on top of purple. Likewise, subtle mechanical shifts in instrumental
playing can render drastic expressive changes. I hope that while listening you can freely follow wherever your ear takes you!
Piano Trio benjamin webster
Piano Trio is an extended paraphrase of François Couperin’s piano work Les Amusements. The music in the trio engages with the source material in a fashion both hidden and clear. At some points the original tune can be heard quite clearly, but often it is working far in the background to realize new material. The intended drama in this work is a continuous journey by the members of the trio to “work out” Couperin’s original music and discover the essence off of which everything in the piece has been constructed. estrangement katherine balch
Commissioned as a response to Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, and written with poet Katie Ford, estrangement is interleaved with and comments on the Schumann, asking us to reconsider the very act of human connection.
The 13-movement cycle may be performed as a full set or as selections, and may be intertwined with Dichterliebe.
Duo for violin and cello matīss Čudars
My Duo for violin and cello celebrates the similarities and differences of its respective instruments, at times merging into homogenous sound-worlds and at others crashing
Program Notes, cont.
into and racing against or away from each other. Initially composed for a chamber music concert in Mazā Mežotnes Pils—a lush yet small and cute manor in Latvia’s countryside—Duo for violin and cello draws in some elements from folk music, baroque dance, and the soundscape of Latvia’s modest yet sublime nature.
Hurakán julián fueyo
Hurakán is a triptych inspired by the preHispanic god of hurricanes called Hurakán, and it explores the three main stages that storms undergo, namely evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. I was particularly interested in exploring both the symbolic associations of each stage — as depicted in pre-Hispanic myth and visual art (ex. image on the cover) —as well as the environmental processes explained by science, hence the titles of the movements: I. Ascension, II. Color crystallization, III. Prismatic precipitation. To this end, the first movement features a series of ascending motives. The second movement showcases a vibraphone solo and a series of riffs clashing into each other. Lastly, the third movement explores color and mechanics in an elusive texture akin to liquid crystals.
oct 9 Arthur Haas & Friends
Faculty Artist Series
3:00 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Free admission
oct 11 Brentano String Quartet
Oneppo Chamber Music Series
7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Tickets start at $28, Students start at $13
oct 12 Lunchtime Chamber Music
12:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Free admission
oct 16 Yale Choral Artists
YSM Ensembles
4:00 p.m. | Christ Church
Free admission
oct 19 Lunchtime Chamber Music
12:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Free admission
oct 20 Jonathan Salamon, harpsichord
Doctor of Musical Arts Degree Recital
7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Free admission
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