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Still Life with Avalanche (2008)
Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980)
Missy Mazzoli's music has been heard all over the world in performances by the Minnesota Orchestra, the South Carolina Philharmonic, the Spokane Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, NOW Ensemble, the Da Capo Chamber Players and many others. Recent works have been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the Whitney Museum and Carnegie Hall.
Mazzoli was born in Pennsylvania and has studied composition at the Yale School of Music, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and Boston University. Her work was recently performed as part of the Bang-on-a-Can New Music Marathon and the 2007 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. In 2006 Mazzoli was a featured composer at Merkin Hall in New York City and at the Gaudeamus New Music Festival in Amsterdam. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, the 2007 and 2008 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and grants from the American Music Center and the Jerome Foundation. In 2006 she taught beginning composition at Yale University, and is now Executive Director of the MATA Festival of New Music in New York City, an organization founded by Philip Glass dedicated to commissioning and promoting new works by young composers. Mazzoli is also an active pianist, and often performs with Victoire, an "all-star, all-female quintet" (Time Out New York) dedicated exclusively to her own compositions. Victoire has been performing in venues throughout New York City since 2008.
Recent projects included the premiere of Sound of the Light, a new work commissioned by Carnegie Hall, and two performances of These Worlds In Us by the Minnesota Orchestra. Recent performances include the premieres of new works commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the Whitney Museum of Art and the Santa Fe New Music Ensemble. She also recently received a Jerome Foundation Grant to support the creation of Song from the Uproar, a large-scale multimedia work featuring NOW Ensemble and filmmaker Stephen Taylor that premiered in May 2009.
Still Life with Avalanche was commissioned by eighth blackbird through the generous support of Frederica and James R. Rosenfield, Kathleen Johnson and Paul Browning, Kirk Johnson, and William Johnson. The composer writes:
Still Life with Avalanche is a pile of melodies collapsing in a chaotic free fall. The players layer bursts of sound over the static drones of harmonicas, sketching out a strange and evocative sonic landscape. I wrote this piece while in residence at Blue Mountain Center, a beautiful artist colony in upstate New York. Halfway through my stay there I received a phone call telling me my cousin had passed away very suddenly. There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior. This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose.
Not recorded
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Catch, Op. 4 (1991)
Thomas Adès (b. 1971)
Renowned as a composer, conductor and pianist, London-born Thomas Adès works regularly with the world’s leading orchestras, opera companies and festivals. Adès’ most recent works include a 'Piano concerto with moving image' entitled In Seven Days, a collaboration with video artist Tal Rosner, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and London’s Southbank Centre. Tevot (2007) was commissioned by the Berliner Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. Adès’ music has attracted numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Grawemeyer Award (in 2000, for Asyla), of which he is the youngest ever recipient.
Appointed to the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer Chair at Carnegie Hall for 2007/8, Adès was featured as composer, conductor and pianist throughout that season. From 1999-2008 he was Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival.
Engagements in 2009/10 included a major composer and artist focus with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; a return to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with which he has developed a particularly close relationship; piano recitals in Vancouver and at Carnegie Hall and the Barbican where Adès will perform the premieres of his new piano work Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face, and also his debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra with whom he will perform Sibelius' Tempest, Tchaikovsky's Tempest and scenes from his own opera The Tempest.
Adès works performed previously at the Cabrillo Festival include …but all shall be well (1993), Concerto Conciso (1997) and Darknesse Visible (1992) in 2003; Asyla (1997) in 2004; America: A Prophecy (1999) in 2006; and his violin concerto Concentric Paths (2005) in 2007.
Catch, written when the composer was 19 years old, takes listeners into the world of an English playground. The composer writes:
There are several games going on: at the start, the clarinet is the outsider, the other three are the unit, then, after a decoy entry, the clarinet takes the initiative. All four then play jovial pig-in-the-middle’ with each other. The clarinet is then phased out leaving a sullen piano and cello, with interjections based on the clarinet’s original tune. This slower passage gradually mutates back into fast music, and this time the game is in earnest: the piano is squeezed out, only to lure the clarinet finally into the snare of its own music.
Suggested recording:
Thomas Adès: Life Story
Angel Records B000002SFB
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Meanwhile: Incidental music to imaginary puppet plays (2007)
Stephen Hartke (b. 1952)
Stephen Hartke has been hailed by the New York Times as one of America's "Young Lions." His music reflects the diversity of his musical background, from medieval and renaissance polyphony, of which he was once quite an active performer, to very personal syntheses of diverse elements from non-Western and popular music. He has enjoyed commissions and performances from numerous groups throughout the world, including the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, and the Moscow State Philharmonic Orchestra, among many others. He recently completed a full-length opera, The Greater Good, or the Passion of Boule de Suif, for Glimmerglass Opera. In 2004, he was awarded the Charles Ives Living Composers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the purpose of which is to free him from the need to devote his time to any employment other than music composition. Hartke's music is available on CD on CRI, ECM New Series, EMI Classics, Naxos American Classics, and New World Records. He lives in Glendale, California, and is Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California. The composer writes:
Meanwhile was composed on a commission from eighth blackbird and the Barlow Foundation, and it was nominated for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music. It is one of several works of mine that has grown from a long-standing fascination I have had for various forms of Asian court and theater music, and in preparing to write this piece, I studied video clips of quite a number of puppet theater forms, ranging from the elegant and elaborate, nearly-life-sized puppets of Japanese Bunraku, to Vietnamese water puppets, both Indonesian and Turkish shadow puppets, and to classic Burmese court theater that mixes marionettes with dancers who look and act like marionettes.
This piece is a set of incidental pieces to no puppet plays in particular, but one in which the ensemble has been reinvented along lines that clearly have roots in these diverse Asian models. The piano, for instance, is prepared for much of the piece with large soft mutes to resemble a Vietnamese hammered dulcimer. The viola is tuned a half-step lower in order to both change its timbre and to open the way for a new set of natural harmonics to interact sometimes even microtonally with those of the cello. The percussion array includes eighteen wood sounds, plus four cowbells, two small cymbals, a water gong, and a set of bongos. Finally, there is a set of three Flexatones, whose tone is rather like that of small Javanese gongs, and so I have given this new instrument the name of Flexatone Gamelan.
Meanwhile is played as a single movement, with six distinct sections: Procession, which features the Flexatone Gamelan; Fanfares, with the piccolo and bass clarinet linked together much as a puppeteer and his marionette; Narration, in which the bass clarinet recites the ‘story’ of the scene in an extravagant and flamboyant solo reminiscent of the reciter in Japanese Bunraku; Spikefiddlers, which requires a playing technique for the viola and later the cello that stems from Central Asian classical music; Cradlesongs, the outer parts of which feature natural harmonics in the viola and cello combined with bell-like ninth-partial harmonics from the piano; and Celebration, where the flute and clarinet take up Flexatones to play the closing melody.
Not recorded
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Aheym (2009)
Bryce Dessner (b. 1976)
Bryce Dessner is a composer/guitarist/curator based in New York City, best known as the guitarist for the rock band The National. Their albums Alligator (2005) and Boxer (2007) were named albums of the year in publications throughout the world. Dessner has received widespread acclaim as a composer and guitarist for the improvising quartet Clogs. He has performed and/or recorded with Sufjan Stevens, Antony Hegarty, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, the Bang-on-a-Can All Stars, and visual artist Matthew Ritchie, among others. He introduced and recorded a new work by Steve Reich in 2009.
As a composer, he is the recipient of a Jerome Grant from the American Composers Forum and The Kitchen (New York), for a full concert of his music in 2007, and a commission from Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) to create a 40-minute spatial sound work for the Morning Line, an outdoor sound pavilion by Matthew Ritchie. He has also received commissions from the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia in honor of Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial, and BAM’s Next Wave Festival, for an evening-length work with his brother Aaron Dessner. He composed the score for Turn the River, a film written and directed by Chris Eigman.
Dessner is the creator and artistic director of the Music Now Festival in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the co-founder and owner of the Brassland record label. He and Aaron Dessner recently produced an AIDS charity compilation, Dark Was the Night, for the Red Hot Organization. Dessner serves on the board of The Kitchen, and is a graduate of Yale College and the Yale School of Music. About Aheym, Dessner writes:
David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love about New York, especially the stunning diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and communities. My father’s family, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, also lived near the park for many years in the 1940s and ’50s before moving to Queens. In discussing the new piece, David proposed to perform the work in Brooklyn, and then to retrace the journey of my grandparents and perform it in Lodz, Poland, a city where my great-grandparents lived and through which my grandmother passed on her voyage to America.
“Aheym” means “homeward” in Yiddish, and this piece is written as musical evocation of the idea of flight and passage. As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past. In her poem “Di rayze aheym,” the American-Yiddish poet Irena Klepfisz, a professor at Barnard College in New York and one of the few child survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, writes: “Among strangers is her home. Here right here she must live. Her memories will become monuments.”
Aheym is dedicated to my grandmother, Sarah Dessner, and was written for the Kronos Quartet.
Not recorded
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Raga Mishra Bhairavi: Alap
Ram Narayan (b. 1927)
Arranged by Kronos Quartet, transcribed by Ljova
Ram Narayan is one of the world's most revered masters of the sarangi, the bowed string instrument from northern India renowned for its vocal expressiveness. Over the course of his long career, Narayan has been the person most responsible for bringing this ancient chordophone into the foreground of classical Hindustani music. Born in Udaipur, Rajasthan, Narayan grew up in a family of musicians, and began playing the sarangi as a child under his father's tutelage. He began his career as a music teacher in Udaipur at age 15, then moved to Delhi in 1947 to work as a staff player at All India Radio. Like most sarangi players of the era, he played as a vocal accompanist only; however, he soon realized the potential of the sarangi as a solo instrument and pushed to bring his performances into the spotlight—a practice that was unheard of at the time. He moved to Bombay two years later to play in the burgeoning film industry and slowly pave the way for a solo career. In the early 1950s his ragas were some of the first to be recorded on LPs produced in India, and by the end of the decade Narayan became widely acknowledged as a soloist. Since then, he has received numerous awards, including the Sangeet Natak Academy Award, the highest honor issued in India for dance, music, and theater. Many innovations made by Narayan to bowing and fingering techniques on the sarangi have now become standard.
Ram Narayan is known for his vivid interpretations of traditional Indian ragas. A specified combination of notes played and embellished within a parent framework called a thaat, each different raga has the power to evoke a unique emotional transcendence. This esthetic feeling was termed by music scholars as Rasavadhana: a mystic state completely unrelated to desire, which is purely compounded of joy and consciousness. This arrangement of Raga Mishra Bhairavi is based on a performance by Narayan, recorded in 1989.
Ljova (Lev Zhurbin) is a composer, arranger and violist. Born in Moscow, he now works out of New York City. Ljova’s arrangements have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, Lara St. John, and many others. He has composed more than seventy works, including compositions for orchestras, chamber ensembles, jazz and Latin bands, as well as over a dozen scores for film and theatre projects. Recent commissions include orchestral works for the Staten Island Symphony, the Wild Ginger Philharmonic and the New York Symphonic Arts Ensemble, as well as a chamber music commission from the American Composers Forum.
The Kronos Quartet's arrangement of Raga Mishra Bhairavi by Ram Narayan was commissioned for Kronos by Deborah and Creig Hoyt in memory of Raymond Frase.
Suggested recording:
Kronos Quartet: Floodplain
Nonesuch B001XJBDNA
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…hold me, neighbor, in this storm… (2007)
Aleksandra Vrebalov (b. 1970)
Aleksandra Vrebalov, a native of the former Yugoslavia, left Serbia in 1995 and continued her education in the United States. She holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Evan Chambers and Michael Daugherty, and a master’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory, where her teacher was Elinor Armer. She has participated in numerous master classes and workshops, such as the New York University Summer Composition Workshop, Music Courses in Darmstadt (Germany), Szombathely (Hungary) and Kazimierz Dolny (Poland) in collaboration with IRCAM, and the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz, California. She now teaches at the City College of New York.
Vrebalov’s works have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Jorge Caballero, the Sausalito Quartet, Dusan Tynek Dance Company, Ijsbreker, and the Moravian Philharmonic, among others. Her music has been recorded for Nonesuch and Vienna Modern Masters.
In 2005, Lila was premiered in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall by violinist Ana Milosavljevic. The premiere of the orchestral work Orbits opened the 30th Novi Sad Music Festivities and was broadcast live on national television on the NS Channel. The same channel produced a thirty-minute television biography of Vrebalov. That year she also worked on the score for Sleeping Beauty, an experimental film introduced at New York City’s Anthology Film Archives. About …hold me, neighbor, in this storm… Vrebalov writes:
The Balkans, with its multitude of cultural and religious identities, has had a troubled history of ethnic intolerance. For my generation of Tito’s pioneers and children of Communists, growing up in the former Yugoslavia meant learning about and carrying in our minds the battles and numberless ethnic and religious conflicts dating back half a millennium, and honoring ancestors who died in them. By then, that distant history had merged with the nearer past, so those we remember from World War II are our grandparents. Their stories we heard firsthand. After several devastating ethnic wars in the 1990s we entered a new century, this time each of us knowing in person someone who perished. As I write this in November 2007, on YouTube a new generation of Albanians and Serbs post their war-songs bracing for another conflict, claiming their separate entitlements to the land and history, rather than a different kind of future together.
Strangely, the cultural and religious differences that led to enmity in everyday life produced—after centuries of turbulently living together—most incredible fusions in music. It is almost as if what we weren’t able to achieve through words and deeds—to fuse, and mix, and become something better and richer together—our music so famously accomplished instead.
…hold me, neighbor, in this storm… is inspired by folk and religious music from the region, whose insistent rhythms and harmonies create a sense of inevitability, a ritual trance with an obsessive, dark energy. Peaceful passages of the work grew out of the delicately curved, elusive, often microtonal melodies of prayers, as well as escapist tavern songs from the region, as my grandmother remembers them.
Not recorded
Photos, left to right: eighth blackbird (Luke Ratray), Kronos Quartet (Jay Blakesberg)
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