[two_third]New Music in the Chapel
What’s Next? Ensemble and Ian Rosenbaum
These two concerts are ticketed together.
Saturday, September 21
St. Michael’s Chapel (map)
1:45-2:30: Ian Rosenbaum, percussion
Performers’ Names:
Ian Rosenbaum, percussion
Program:
Chris Cerrone (b.1984) … Memory Palace (2012)
John Cage (1912-1992) … In a Landscape (1948)
Alejandro Viñao (b.1951) … Kahn Variations (2001)
Notes:
Memory Palace
Almost every object struck, plucked, or blown in Memory Palace, a 22-minute work for amplified percussion and electronics, has to be made by the percussionist. The rest—a few bars from a glockenspiel, three high-pitched crotales, and the kick from a drum set—have been disembodied from their original context.
In the first movement, “Harriman,” the performer plucks a re-strung guitar lying on its back—a kind of makeshift dulcimer. The second movement, “Power Lines” is scored for seven slats of wood, carefully tuned by sawing them to the correct length. The third, Foxhurst, is a forest of bells: tuned metal pipes alongside the aforementioned glockenspiel bars and crotales. The fourth movement, “L.I.E.”, adds even more wooden slats, creating polyphony from the homophony of “Power Lines”. The last movement, “Claremont”, features six blown bottles, tuned to different pitches with varying amounts of water. In each movement, the percussionist also triggers a series of electronic drones using an foot pedal, a resonant background aura that enhances the live music throughout.
Each movement is titled for a personally important place. Harriman, NY is where I spent a week camping with two of the musicians who have most influenced me. Against the crickets of the woods, I imaged music of simplicity and familiarity. “Power Lines” is a hard grid of glowing high-voltage wires, their intersecting patterns seen from a moving car. “Foxhurst” is named for the street I grew up on, and uses the wind chimes which rang throughout my childhood. “L.I.E” (Long Island Expressway) is another automotive movement, evoking the rumble strips on the side of a highway, their rhythmic pulsing playing against steady drone of the car’s motor. “Claremont” is the street of my college—with a close friend, I had tuned two full octaves of beer bottles where we kept them as a household instrument.
– Chris Cerrone
Kahn Variations
For some years I have listened to the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He was perhaps the greatest exponent of Qawwali, the music of the sufi mystics. This music in general, and Ali Khan’s singing in particular, are characterized by remarkable rhythmic and melismatic subtlety.
The Khan variations are a set of 8 rhythmic variations based on a traditional theme from Qawwali music as sung by Ali Kahn. The basic pulse and “feel” of the music has lingered in my mind ever since I first heard the recording in the early 90’s. I developed each of the 8 variations (which are played as a continuous piece) exploring a different rhythmic and melodic aspect of the original theme. However, from the harmonic point of view the piece is rather static, respecting the lack or harmony (in the western sense) of the original traditional theme.
As I look at the score now, I can recognize a range of influences from Conlon Nancarrow, Tango music, and my own previous pieces for marimba. All these influences have one thing in common: the articulation of pulse, or multiple simultaneous pulses to create a dramatic musical discourse.
– Alejandro Viñao
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Saturday, September 21
St. Michael’s Chapel (map)
3:30-4:15: What’s Next? Ensemble
Performer’s Names:
Jodn Stulz, viola
Ben Phelps, percussion
Alexander Elliott Miller, electric guitar
Rafael Liebich, keyboards
Program:
Alexander Elliott Miller (b.1982) … The Galvanized Natural Electric (2013)
Luciano Berio (1925-2003) … Naturale (1985)
Ben Phelps (b.1980) … Concerto for Viola, Percussion, and Casio Keyboard (2012)
Notes:
Galvanized Natural Electric
The Galvanized Natural Electric is a trio for viola, electric guitar and percussion composed for myself and my colleagues in the What’s Next? Ensemble. It was first composed for our Naturale concert program in the summer of 2013, featuring compositions exploring the juxtaposition of things natural and artificial.
I had been experimenting with programming my own new effects for the electric guitar, and the results inspired me to search for new sounds with which to complement the guitar effects. One of the frequent guitar effects is a metallic bell like sound where the pitch and timbre of the guitar is significantly disfigured; this sound is complemented in the percussion by the use of an assortment of mounted automobile tail pipes. Other elements of the guitar writing influenced the style of the viola writing as well, where I searched for more percussive and harmonic effects to mirror the guitar sounds.
The result is a work in two parts, the first tense and lyrical, the second mechanistic and rocking, in which a wide collection of sounds, some familiar and some unearthly, are blended.
– Alexander Elliott Miller
Concerto for Viola
On Process. Neither wholly natural nor rigorous.
Rudimentary development,
Moment form.
The old and the new, the polished and the amateur. The digital and the acoustic.
Ironic and serious, both.
– Ben Phelps
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