10TH ANNUAL FESTIVAL
FESTIVAL SCHEDULE 7/22-7/27 Schedule subject to change. For an updated schedule, please visit composersfestival.missouri.edu ALL EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
MONDAY, JULY 22, 2019
THURSDAY, JULY 25, 2019 1:00 PM
Pop-Up Concert #1: Khemia Outside of Sparky’s Homemade Ice Cream (21 S. 9th St.)
5:00 PM – 7:30 PM
050719 by reference 8-channel multimedia installation Missouri Theatre, 2nd floor lobby
7:30 PM
Alarm Will Sound: Opening Concert Missouri Theatre
9:30 PM
Bels Lontano Café Berlin (220 N. 10th St.)
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Resident Composer Presentations Fine Arts Building Room 145 (MU Campus)
FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2019
1:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Alarm Will Sound Open Rehearsal Missouri Theatre (203 S. 9th St.)
10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Alarm Will Sound Open Rehearsal Loeb Hall 201 (MU Campus)
TUESDAY, JULY 23, 2019 9:30 AM – 11:00 AM
Resident Composer Presentations Fine Arts Building Room 145 (MU Campus)
5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
050719 by reference 8-channel multimedia installation Missouri Theatre, 2nd floor lobby
7:00 PM
Daniel Neumann, Guest Artist Presentation Missouri Theatre, 2nd floor lobby
WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 2019 2:10 PM – 5:30 PM
Alarm Will Sound Open Rehearsal Missouri Theatre
5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
050719 by reference 8-channel multimedia installation Missouri Theatre, 2nd floor lobby
7:00 PM
Amy Beth Kirsten, Guest Composer Presentation Fine Arts Building Room 145 (MU Campus)
8:15 PM
Donnacha Dennehy, Composer Presentation Fine Arts Building Room 145 (MU Campus)
1:00 PM
Pop-Up Concert #2: Khemia Uprise Bakery (10 Hitt St.)
1:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Alarm Will Sound Open Rehearsal Loeb Hall 201 (MU Campus)
5:00 PM – 7:30 PM
050719 by reference 8-channel multimedia installation Missouri Theatre, 2nd floor lobby
7:30 PM
Mizzou New Music Missouri Theatre
9:30 PM
Dismal Niche Presents: Eli Keszler Firestone Baars Chapel (1306 E. Walnut St.)
SATURDAY, JULY 27, 2019 11:00 AM
Khemia Ensemble Whitmore Recital Hall (MU Campus)
5:00 PM – 7:30 PM
050719 by reference 8-channel multimedia installation Missouri Theatre, 2nd floor lobby
7:30 PM
Alarm Will Sound: Eight World Premieres Missouri Theatre
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE MIZZOU INTERNATIONAL COMPOSERS FESTIVAL ON TEN YEARS! Wow – it doesn’t seem that long ago when we were wondering if we could put on a summer festival for new music in Columbia. We found out we can, we did, and now we are celebrating the 10th annual Mizzou International Composers Festival! This festival serves as one of the cornerstones of the Mizzou New Music Initiative (MNMI), which includes a variety of programs establishing the University of Missouri School of Music as a center for composition and performance of new music. We are joined, as we have been for ten years now, by the impeccable talent of Alarm Will Sound, described by the New York Times as “one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene.” To celebrate, we are expanding the festival a bit this year by adding two special guests. We are thrilled to continue our ongoing collaborations with the Khemia Ensemble, who will be performing several events throughout the week ranging from pop-up concerts in downtown Columbia to full ensemble performances. We are also excited to partner this year with Columbia-based experimental music presenters Dismal Niche, who have invited renowned percussionist, improvisor, and composer Eli Keszler to perform at the Firestone Baars Chapel on Stephens College’s campus on Friday night, July 26th. Congratulations are in order for directors Stefan Freund, Bret Bohman, Carolina Heredia, and Jacob Gotlib for their outstanding work with this year’s celebratory festival. I’m also excited to welcome back the 2019 guest composers and MICF alums Donnacha Dennehy and Amy Beth Kirsten: Dennehy was previously a guest composer in 2012, and this year, we’re excited to present the world premiere of the concert version of his opera The Hunger, which was first previewed here. In 2010, Kirsten was selected as a resident composer for the very first MICF. Nine years later, we are honored to invite her to serve as a guest composer and mentor, as well as present a preview of scenes from her new opera, Jacob in
Chains. Finally, I’m excited to be returning as a performer with my percussion colleague, Dr. Megan Arns, and recent Mizzou alums for the Friday night concert. We will be celebrating women in percussion with an all-female ensemble playing new music written by underrepresented composers. None of this would be possible without the vision and resources of Dr. Jeanne and Mr. Rex Sinquefield and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation. The Sinquefields began their support of new music at Mizzou in 2006 with the Creating Original Music Project (COMP), which provides opportunities for composers in grades K-12. Since this initial support, the Sinquefields have broadened their support four times for MNMI at Mizzou by donating $1-2+ million-dollar gifts in 2009, 2013, 2016, and most recently this past spring. In addition, they have contributed $10 million toward Phase 1 of our new School of Music building which will open for classes January 2020. No matter if you’ve come from near or far, we appreciate your presence at this year’s festival. Welcome to MU and Columbia and enjoy the new music.
Julia Gaines Director, School of Music University of Missouri
DIRECTORS Stefan Freund received a BM with High Distinction from the Indiana University School of Music and an MM and DMA from the Eastman School of Music. His primary composition teachers included Pulitzer Prize winners Christopher Rouse and Joseph Schwantner as well as Augusta Read Thomas, Frederick Fox, and Don Freund, his father. He studied cello with Steven Doane, Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, and Peter Spurbeck, among others. He is presently Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri. Previously he was Assistant Professor of Composition at the Eastman School of Music.
STEFAN FREUND, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Freund is the recipient of two William Schuman Prizes and the Boudleaux Bryant Prize from BMI, five ASCAP Morton Gould Grants, twelve ASCAP Plus Awards, a Music Merit Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters, and the Howard Hanson Prize. He was selected as the 2004 Music Teachers National Association-Shepherd Distinguished Composer of the Year. In 2006 and 2013 he was awarded Outstanding Faculty Research and Creative Activity Awards from MU. Freund has received commissions from the New Spectrum Foundation, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, the Lincoln Center Festival, the New York Youth Symphony, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Verdehr Trio, Town Hall Seattle, Sheldon Concert Hall, and SCI/ASCAP. His music has been performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, and the Kennedy Center as well as by ensembles such as the Copenhagen Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Phoenix Symphony. International performances include the Berliner Philharmonie, the Moscow International Performing Arts Center, Glinka Hall (St. Petersburg), Queen’s Hall (Copenhagen), the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, and concert halls in seven other European countries, Canada, and Mexico. His works have been recorded on the Albany, Innova, Crystal, and Centaur labels. Active as a performer, conductor, and producer of new music, Freund is the founding cellist of the new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound. His cello performances include Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Met Museum, Merkin Hall, Millennium Park, Disney Hall, the Barbican (UK), the Hermitage Theatre (RU), the Muzikgebouw (ND), the World Financial Center, Culture Station Seoul (Korea), and the Beijing Modern Music Festival. He has recorded on the Nonesuch, Cantaloupe, Tzadik, and I Virtuosi labels as well as Sweetspot Music DVD. In addition, Freund is the Artistic Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative and the Music Director of the Columbia Civic Orchestra.
Jacob Gotlib is a composer, musician, educator, and administrator who is dedicated to the creation and promotion of contemporary music. As a composer, his works explore patterning, repetition, and concepts informed by electroacoustic music. He has written works for instrumental ensembles, electronics, and multimedia that have been performed throughout the United States in Europe by Ensemble Surplus, Ensemble Linea, Schlagwerk Den Haag, and others. His works have been recognized with grants and awards by the Acht Brücken Festival, ASCAP/SEAMUS, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Ossia, and the Kentucky Arts Council.
JACOB GOTLIB, MANAGING DIRECTOR
As an administrator, Jacob has worked to build communities for new music in the cities where he’s lived. In 2007, he was a co-founder of the Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA), whose mission was to promote experimental music of all types across the Kansas City area. Jacob was also a member of the Buffalo, NY-based new music collective Wooden Cities and was a co-artistic director of the Louisville, KY-based Mothership Ensemble. In addition, he was the host of Muddle Instead of Music, a weekly radio program dedicated to contemporary music on Louisville’s ARTxFM station. Currently, he is the Managing Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri. Jacob received his BM from the Oberlin Conservatory, an MM from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and a PhD from the University at Buffalo.
CAROLINA HEREDIA, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
By exploring the merging of music and visuals, Argentinian composer Carolina Heredia’s current research is focused on the production of interactive audiovisual works. Her compositions have been commissioned and performed in the United States and South America by several esteemed musicians and ensembles including JACK Quartet, Derek Bermel, Alarm Will Sound, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Duo Cortona, Alex Fiterstein, Tesla Quartet, Chiara Quartet, and Khemia Ensemble. Her music has been featured at the SONIC Festival NYC, Aspen Music Festival and School, Bowling Green New Music Festival, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, SEAMUS, Strange Beautiful Music, New Music Gathering, Crested Butte Music Festival, Bowdoin Music Festival, and the TIES Toronto International Electroacoustic Festival, among others. In 2017-18, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri School of Music. She is currently Assistant Professor in Music Composition and Assistant Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri. Heredia’s 2015 Harvard University Fromm Music Foundation Commission supported the creation of her work Ausencias/Ausências/Absences for string quartet and fixed media, which was premiered by the JACK Quartet in March, 2016. For her work Ausencias, Heredia became the inaugural recipient of the 2018 International New Music Competition John Corigliano Grand Prize and the 2019 winner of the Lake George Music Festival Composition Competition, where she will be a composer-in-residence. Heredia founded Khemia Ensemble in 2015 as a contemporary music ensemble that strives to create innovative audiovisual concert experiences involving interactive technology. The ensemble has presented at several venues across the Americas, including National Sawdust (NYC), Trinosophes (Detroit), Radio Nacional and Facultad de Música (Argentina), and Facultad de Artes (Colombia). Khemia has received support from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the Eastman School of Music Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research, the University of Michigan, and the Mizzou New Music Initiative.
Bret Bohman is a composer of acoustic and electronic music. With a background in dance music production and jazz guitar improvisation, his concert works meet somewhere in the cross-section of these influences and the modernist and postmodernist traditions of Western concert music. Themes of therapy, liminal spaces, and art as a vehicle for healing are all central ideas to his recent work.
BRET BOHMAN, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Mr. Bohman’s compositions have been heard throughout the United States at various venues and festivals including National Sawdust, New Music Festival at Bowling Green State University, Strange Beautiful Music X in Detroit, New Music Gathering 3, Aspen Music Festival, New York City Electronic Music Festival at Abrons Playhouse, 73rd Wellesley Composers Conference, Trinosophes, Toronto International Electronic Symposium, SCI National Conference, SEAMUS National Conference, Electronic Music Midwest, Atlantic Music Festival, Society for New Music, 3rd Annual TUTTI Festival, and more. His music has received awards and recognition from the Society of New Music (Brian Israel Award), the RED NOTE New Music Festival Composition Competition, Robert Avalon Composition Prize, ASCAP, and the Michigan Music Teachers Association. In 2015 he co-founded the Khemia Ensemble, a chamber music group dedicated to commissioning and presenting diverse selections of contemporary voices in innovative ways. The ensemble will perform at Strange Beautiful Music X in Detroit in September. The ensemble has performed at New Music Gathering at Bowling Green State University and the Latin IS America Festival at Michigan State University. They have held residencies at the University of Michigan, the National University of Bogota, Colombia, and the National University of Cordoba, Argentina. In the summer of 2017, they were in residence at Avaloch Farms for the second year in a row. Mr. Bohman teaches in the composition area at the University of Missouri. He also recently held lecture positions at the University of Michigan in the Comparative Literature Department and taught Electronic Music Seminar as a Graduate Student Instructor. He received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2014. His primary teachers and mentors have been Michael Daugherty, Evan Chambers, Bright Sheng, Paul Schoenfeld, and Brian Bevelander.
GUEST COMPOSERS NPR named it one of its “50 favorite albums’’ (in any genre) of 2011. In October 2014, RTE Lyric FM released a portrait CD of Dennehy’s orchestral music. Other releases include a number by NMC Records in London, Bedroom Community in Reykjavik, and Cantaloupe in New York. Previously a tenured lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, Donnacha was appointed a Global Scholar at Princeton University in the Autumn of 2012. He was also appointed composer-in-residence for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in Texas (2013-14). He joined the music faculty at Princeton University in 2014.
DONNACHA DENNEHY Donnacha Dennehy’s music has been featured in festivals and venues around the world, such as the Edinburgh International Festival, Carnegie Hall New York, Barbican London, Wigmore Hall London, Linbury at the Royal Opera House London, BAM New York, Tanglewood Festival, the Holland Festival, the Kennedy Center, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK (which opened its 2012 Festival with a portrait concert devoted to Dennehy’s music), Dublin Theatre Festival, ISCM World Music Days, Bang On A Can, Ultima Festival in Oslo, Musica Viva Lisbon, the Saarbrucken Festival, and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. Dennehy has received commissions from, among others, Alarm Will Sound, Bang On A Can, Contact (Toronto), Dawn Upshaw, Doric String Quartet (London), Fidelio Trio, Joanna MacGregor, Kronos Quartet, Icebreaker, Nadia Sirota, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Orkest de Volharding (Amsterdam), Percussion Group of the Hague, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, So Percussion, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (Minnesota), Third Coast Percussion, Ulster Orchestra, United Instruments of Lucilin (Luxembourg), and Wide Open Opera (Dublin). Collaborations include pieces with the writers Colm Tóibín (The Dark Places), Paul Muldoon (in progress), and Enda Walsh (including the two operas The Last Hotel and The Second Violinist). In 2010 his single-movement orchestral piece Crane was ‘recommended’ by the International Rostrum of Composers. Returning to Ireland after studies abroad, principally at the University of Illinois in the US, Dennehy founded Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s now-renowned new music group, in 1997. Alongside the singers Dawn Upshaw and Iarla O’Lionáird, Crash Ensemble features on the 2011 Nonesuch release of Dennehy’s music, entitled Grá agus Bás.
In recent years, Dennehy has concentrated especially on largescale musico-dramatic works. His first opera The Last Hotel (2015), with a libretto by Enda Walsh, was met with critical acclaim in the UK when it premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2015. His second opera with Enda Walsh, The Second Violinist (2017) won the 2017 Fedora Prize for Opera (Salzburg/ Paris) and was premiered in July 2017 at the Galway International Arts Festival. It is scheduled for a run at the Barbican in London in September 2018. Other recent pieces include the docu-opera The Hunger (2012-16), co-produced by Alarm Will Sound and Opera Theatre St. Louis, and presented at BAM, New York; Surface Tension, premiered by Third Coast Percussion in February 2016, and The Weather of it for the Doric Quartet co-commissioned by the Wigmore Hall and Carnegie Hall, premiered at the Wigmore Hall in July 2016. Forthcoming projects include a piece for the members of the LA Philharmonic (for their Green Umbrella Series), and Broken Unison for So Percussion, co-commissioned by the Cork Opera House and Carnegie Hall. A recording of his piece for Nadia Sirota and viol consort, Tessellatum, was released by Bedroom Community in August 2017. His music is published by G. Schirmer in New York, part of the Music Sales Group.
AMY BETH KIRSTEN Recognized with artist fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, Amy Beth Kirsten’s musical and conceptual language is characterized by an abiding interest in exploring theatrical elements of creation, performance, and presentation. Her body of work fuses music, language, voice, and theatre and often considers musicians’ instruments, bodies, and voices as equal vehicles of expression. Ms. Kirsten has composed evening- length, fully-staged theatrical works as well as traditional concert works for her own ensemble HOWL, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New World Symphony, Peak Performances, the multi-Grammy-winning eighth blackbird, and American Composers Orchestra, among many others.
ENSEMBLES IN RESIDENCE ALARM WILL SOUND
A composer, librettist, and vocalist, Ms. Kirsten begins the 2017-18 season in collaboration with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series to create Savior, an evening-length work of composed theatre for pre-recorded voice, two sopranos, mezzosoprano, flute, cello, percussion, lighting, and sound design. With libretto, music, and direction by Ms. Kirsten, Savior is a mystical re-telling of the life and death of Joan of Arc, and brings together vocalists and stage designers from HOWL and players and production team from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. Savior premiered April 2, 2018 at the Harris Theatre in Chicago.
Alarm Will Sound is a 20-member band committed to innovative performances and recordings of today’s music. They have established a reputation for performing demanding music with energetic skill. Their performances have been described as “equal parts exuberance, nonchalance, and virtuosity” by the Financial Times of London and as “a triumph of ensemble playing” by the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times says that Alarm Will Sound is “one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene.”
Colombine’s Paradise Theatre, commissioned and produced by the multi-Grammy-winning eighth blackbird, opened the 2014-15 seasons of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s Miller Theatre selling out both venues. The Washington Post called it a “tour de force” and said it has “a beguiling element of the grotesque throughout, and the music is complex and multilayered, rich in allusions, and often extraordinarily beautiful.” Anthony Tommasini at The New York Times found it “dark, wild and engrossing” with a “wondrously eclectic score, which combines spiky modernism, breezy pop, hints of Indian music, percussion wildness and more.”
Recent and upcoming guest composer seminars include those at Yale University, Princeton University, Curtis Institute, Cornell University, and the Royal Academy of Music in London.
With classical skill and unlimited curiosity, Alarm Will Sound takes on music from a wide variety of styles. Its repertoire ranges from European to American works, from the arch-modernist to the pop-influenced. Alarm Will Sound has been associated since its inception with composers at the forefront of contemporary music, premiering pieces by John Adams, Steve Reich, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Aaron Jay Kernis, Augusta Read Thomas, Derek Bermel, Benedict Mason, and Wolfgang Rihm, among others. The group itself includes many composer-performers, which allows for an unusual degree of insight into the creation and performance of new work.
Educated at Roosevelt University (MM) and the Peabody Institute (DMA), Ms. Kirsten grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City and Chicago. After living for seven years in Baltimore she now lives with her husband, Christopher Theofanidis (also a composer), in New Haven, Connecticut and teaches music composition privately and, for the past eight years, at the HighSCORE summer festival in Pavia, Italy. She also served on the Music Composition faculty at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University during the 201517 academic years before joining the Composition Faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College in the Fall of 2017.
Alarm Will Sound may be heard on thirteen recordings, including their most recent, Omnisphere, with jazz trio Medeski, Martin & Wood; a collaboration with Peabody Award-winning podcast Meet the Composer titled Splitting Adams; and the premiere recording of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite. Their genre-bending, critically acclaimed Acoustica features live-performance arrangements of music by electronica guru Aphex Twin. This unique project taps the diverse talents within the group, from the many composers who made arrangements of the original tracks, to the experimental approaches developed by the performers.
Ms. Kirsten made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2014 with strange pilgrims, a concert work for chorus, orchestra, and film commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra. That season, she was also the inaugural Composer-in- Residence for London’s Riot Ensemble who commissioned she is a myth and gave the U.K. premieres of several of her chamber works.
In 2016, Alarm Will Sound in a co-production with Opera Theatre of St. Louis, presented the world premiere of the staged version of Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger at the BAM Next Wave Festival and the Touhill Performing Arts Center. Featuring Iarla O’Lionárd (traditional Irish singer) and Katherine Manley (soprano) with direction by Tom Creed, The Hunger is punctuated by video commentary and profound early recordings of traditional Irish folk ballads mined from various archives including those of Alan Lomax. In 2013-14, Alarm Will Sound served as artists-in-residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. During that season, the ensemble presented four large ensemble performances at the Met, including two site-specific productions staged in museum galleries (Twinned, a collaboration with Dance Heginbotham and I Was Here I Was I, a new theatrical work by Kate Soper and Nigel Maister), as well as several smaller events in collaboration with the Museum’s educational programs. In 2011, at Carnegie Hall, the group presented 1969, a multimedia event that uses music, images, text, and staging to tell the compelling story of great musicians—John Lennon, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Paul McCartney, Luciano Berio, Yoko Ono, and Leonard Bernstein—striving for a new music and a new world amidst the turmoil of the late 1960s. 1969’s unconventional approach combining music, history, and ideas has been critically praised by the New York Times (“...a swirling, heady meditation on the intersection of experimental and commercial spheres, and of social and aesthetic agendas.”) Alarm Will Sound has been presented by Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, (le) Poisson Rouge, Miller Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kitchen, the Bang on a Can Marathon, Disney Hall, Kimmel Center, Library of Congress, the Walker Arts Center, Cal Performances, Stanford Lively Arts, Duke Performances, and the Warhol Museum. International tours include the Holland Festival, Sacrum Profanum, Moscow’s Art November, St. Petersburg’s Pro Arte Festival, and the Barbican.
ALAN PIERSON,
Artistic Director and Conductor Alan Pierson has been praised as “a dynamic conductor and musical visionary” by the New York Times, “a young conductor of monstrous skill” by Newsday, “gifted and electrifying” by the Boston Globe, and “one of the most exciting figures in new music today” by Fanfare. In addition to his work as artistic director of Alarm Will Sound, he is Principal Conductor of the Dublinbased Crash Ensemble, has served as Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and has guest conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the London Sinfonietta, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Steve Reich Ensemble, Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble ACJW, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, the New World Symphony, and the Silk Road Project, among other ensembles. He is co-director of the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, and has been a visiting faculty conductor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and the Eastman School of Music. Mr. Pierson has collaborated with major composers and performers, including Yo Yo Ma, Steve Reich, Dawn Upshaw, Osvaldo Golijov, John Adams, Augusta Read Thomas, David Lang, Michael Gordon, La Monte Young, and choreographers Christopher Wheeldon, Akram Khan and Elliot Feld. Mr. Pierson received bachelor degrees in physics and music from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in conducting from the Eastman School of Music. He has recorded for Nonesuch Records, Cantaloupe Music, Sony Classical, and Sweetspot DVD.
PERSONNEL Erin Lesser, flute Christa Robinson, oboe Bill Kalinkos, clarinets and saxophone
The members of the ensemble have also demonstrated our commitment to the education of young performers and composers through residency performances and activities at the Community Music School of Webster University, Cleveland State University, University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Missouri, Eastman School of Music, Dickinson College, Duke University, the Manhattan School of Music, Harvard University, New York University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Elisabeth Stimpert, clarinet
For more information and to join the mailing list, visit Alarm Will Sound’s website at www.alarmwillsound.com
Yuri Yamashita, percussion
Michael Harley, bassoon and contrabassoon Nathan Koci, horn Tim Leopold, trumpet Michael Clayville, trombone Chris Thompson, percussion John Orfe, piano Courtney Orlando, violin Patti Kilroy, violin Beth Meyers, viola Stefan Freund, cello Miles Brown, double bass and electric bass Alan Pierson, conductor and Artistic Director Daniel Neumann, Audio Engineer Gavin Chuck, Executive Director Jason Varvaro, Production Manager Peter Ferry, Assistant Director of Artistic Planning Chihiro Shibayama, Librarian
Acknowledgments The Hunger was commissioned by Alarm Will Sound with additional funding from the Arts Council of Ireland, the MAP Fund, the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, and New Music USA. Commissioned by Alarm Will Sound, the development and performance of Jacob in Chains is supported in part by the Cheswatyr Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Alarm Will Sound’s residency at the Mizzou International Composers Festival is generously supported in part by the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation. Alarm Will Sound gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our individual donors and the following foundations for their support of our 2018-19 Season: Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Amphion Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, BMI Foundation, Cheswatyr Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, Pacific Harmony Foundation, and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation. Additional Support provided by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo; and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Khemia Ensemble is a 10-member music ensemble dedicated to new music. Formed by eight performers (sop., fl., cl., pno., 2 perc., vn, vc.) and two resident composers, Khemia fosters collaborations among the arts by working closely with designers, visual artists, and writers while incorporating poetic, visual, and interactive technology into its shows. Each concert is an experience responding to a concept, presented in a continuous flow with thematic interludes composed by Khemia’s composers and visual artists in residence. Its signature lights, a collaboration between composer Bret Bohman and the Cincinnati-based visual design group, Intermedio, interact with live music, responding to different parameters with custom designed patterns and live processing. Khemia has performed in Latin America and the United States at notable festivals and venues such as National Sawdust 2018, Strange Beautiful Music X Detroit 2017, New Music Gathering 2016, the University of Michigan’s En Español: Sounds from the Hispanosphere 2017, Michigan State University’s Latin IS America 2017, and National University of Cordoba’s III Biennial of Composition 2015, among others. Khemia has held residencies at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Missouri, Tufts University, University of Tennessee at Martin, and the National Universities of Bogota, Colombia, and Cordoba, Argentina, which in addition to concert performances, have included ensemble coachings, master classes, lectures, and reading sessions of student composers. Members of the ensemble hold faculty and staff positions at the University of Missouri, University of Tennessee at Martin, Tennessee Tech, University of Michigan, Bowling Green University, Baylor University, University of Iowa, and Jackson College. Khemia Ensemble has received funding support from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the Eastman School of Music Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research, the University of Michigan EXCEL Fund, and the Mizzou New Music Initiative. Khemia’s interactive lighting installation was co-sponsored by a grant from the University of Michigan School of Engineer Arts Engine program and the School of Music, Theater, and Dance EXCEL program.
PERSONNEL Amy Petrongelli, soprano Elizabeth Robinson, flute Thiago Ancelmo, clarinet Cole Anderson, piano Er-Gene Kahng, violin Eli Lara, cello Cheslea Tinsler Jones, percussion
KHEMIA ENSEMBLE /’kemēa/ n. 1. derived from the Ancient Greek word χημεία (khēmeia) meaning “cast together” 2. a contemporary concert music ensemble based in the United States
Shane Jones, percussion Bret Bohman, composer-in-residence and intermedia Carolina Heredia, composer-in-residence and intermedia
0150719 BY REFERENCE 8-CHANNEL SOUND INSTALLATION BY DANIEL NEUMANN AND KENNETH KIRSCHNER Tuesday, July 23 - Wednesday, July 24, 2019: 5:30 PM-7:00 PM Thursday, July 25 - Saturday, July 27, 2019: 5:00 PM-7:30 PM Missouri Theatre, 2nd floor lobby
050719 BY REFERENCE (2019) 050719 by reference is a generative 8-channel sound installation by Kenneth Kirschner and Daniel Neumann that uses recordings of instrumental sounds from an unreleased Alarm Will Sound sample library.
in hybrid installation-performance formats. He understands sound as an intersubjective field, enabled and expanded by audio procedures. His works have been presented at Fridman Gallery, TEA Tenerife, Moss Arts Center VA, Sinne Gallery Helsinki, Pinacoteca Bellas Artes Manizales Colombia, AMEE Madrid/Valencia, Loop Barcelona; Fergus McCaffrey, MoMA PS1, MoMI, Knockdown Center, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Pratt Institute, Eyebeam, Diapason Gallery, Sculpture Center, Hunter College in New York; Eigen & Art Gallery Leipzig, Skolska28 Prague, Lothringer13 Munich, and more. Curatorially he runs an event series in New York City [CT::SWaM] that engages in spatial sound works and focused listening. As an audio engineer he has worked for Stockhausen’s Oktophonie performances at the Park Avenue Armory (2012); at MoMA PS1 (2013-2016), David Guetta (2014-2018), and acoustic designer of The World Is Sound at the Rubin Museum (2017). He currently works for Diamanda Galás, Oneohtrix Point Never, Alarm Will Sound, and is sound projectionist for Maryanne Amacher’s Adjacencies.
In a truly collaborative fashion, Kirschner & Neumann developed an approach to create new musical material from a massive, unfinished, and abandoned collection of extended technique recordings created by Alarm Will Sound. Kirschner first produced an underlying harmonic structure that both artists used as a reference in creating their individual sounds for the piece. The reference track was then removed and both sound pools were joined. Neumann then developed an algorithmic software player to mix and spatialize the sounds, using chance procedures to create an unpredictable and continuously evolving generative composition.
Kenneth Kirschner
Daniel Neumann Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer, and audio engineer originally from Germany. A main focus throughout these different occupations is how sound interacts with space and how spatial perception can be shaped by sound. He holds a master’s degree in media art from the HGB Leipzig and also studied electronic music composition. In his artistic practice he is working
The music of Kenneth Kirschner is situated at the intersection of contemporary classical composition and experimental electronic music. His work is characterized by a close integration of acoustic and electronic sound sources; a strong focus on harmony, pattern, and long-form development; and experimentation with techniques such as chance procedures, indeterminacy, and microtonality within a digital context. An advocate of open source music, Kirschner releases all of his work freely online through his website, kennethkirschner.com, which represents a complete archive of all his published music from the 1980s to present. His work has also been released by labels such as Sub Rosa, 12k, Line, Sirr, Leerraum, and/OAR, Room40, and SaD, as well as online through a wide variety of netlabels. Recent projects include Compressions & Rarefactions, a nearly 7-hour album of recent compositions released by 12k; Variant, a new series of interactive audiovisual iPad/iPhone apps created in collaboration with visualist Joshue Ott; and Imperfect Forms: The Music of Kenneth Kirschner, a multimedia retrospective from Berlin-based publisher Tokafi that includes essays, interviews, and artistic contributions from over two dozen journalists, musicians, and visual artists from around the world. Kirschner was a 2015 artist in residence at Eyebeam and a 2016 artist in residence in Times Square. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
KHEMIA ENSEMBLE POP-UP CONCERT 1 Thursday, July 25, 2019 • 1:00 PM Outside of Sparky’s Homemade Ice Cream 21 South 9th Street
It’s a Paradoxical Thing (2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lembit Beecher (b. 1980) Amy Petrongelli, soprano
to well, about the aging process. I was particularly interested in the way that rituals in life emerge as we age, but Liza, who conducted these interviews in her hometown of Toronto as well as in Warren, Vermont, was totally open. She would start with two simple questions: “How old are you?” and “What is that like?” and then listen. And in most cases, this was enough for the stories and conversation to flow. From long recordings, Liza pulled out poetic passages that seemed to express the core of what a person was saying. A few of the fifteen texts that we chose ended up as multipage poems, and one was just one line: a woman with an early stage of dementia who said that things would be ok “as long as I remember my children.” Running through these texts, despite their immense variety, was a thoughtfulness, a sense of priorities, and an understanding of perspective that I found illuminating and touching. It was a joy to work with words that were so present (something which surprised me), filled with vibrant details, and the poetry of small things. - Lembit Beecher
Chorôs No. 2 (1924). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) Colleen White, flute Thiago Ancelmo, clarinet All One Can Imagine (2014). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ellen Harrison (b. 1956) I. Sefiros II. Bone-frame Amy Petrongelli, soprano Er-Gene Kahng, violin Bug (1999). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bruno Mantovani (b. 1974) Trollkvenna (1932). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bjarne Brustad (1895-1978) Er-Gene Kahng, violin
IT’S A PARADOXICAL THING (2016) It’s a Paradoxical Thing is the 13th movement of my cycle Looking at Spring: Meditations on Aging. It was commissioned in 2014 by Scrag Mountain Music, whose artistic directors, soprano Mary Bonhag and double bassist Evan Premo, are musicians I deeply respect, in addition to being longtime friends. At Scrag, a concert series in central Vermont, Mary and Evan have built a powerful and unusual sense of community around their adventurous concerts, and it was community that I first thought about as I began to work on this piece. I knew I wanted to work on this project with another close friend, the librettist, actress and director Liza Balkan. We shared an interest in creating art through documentary processes, and an interest in the stories of older people—I had previously written several pieces based on interviews with my grandmother. We decided to begin by conducting a series of interviews with senior citizens, a group of people that, as Liza says, are often not listened
Lembit Beecher Praised by The San Francisco Chronicle as “hauntingly lovely and deeply personal,” Lembit Beecher’s music combines “alluring” textures (The New York Times) and vividly imaginative colors with striking emotional immediacy. Noted for his collaborative spirit and “ingenious” interdisciplinary projects (The Wall Street Journal), Lembit is currently the composer-in-residence of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, having previously served a three-year term as the inaugural composer-in-residence of Opera Philadelphia. Born to Estonian and American parents, Lembit grew up under the redwoods in Santa Cruz, California, a few miles from the wild Pacific. Since then, he has lived in Boston, Houston, Ann Arbor, Berlin, New York, and Philadelphia, earning degrees from Harvard, Rice, and the University of Michigan. This varied background has made him particularly sensitive to place, ecology, memory, and the multitude of ways in which people tell stories. Recent premieres include Say Home for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Conference of the Birds for A Far Cry, 100 Years Grows Shorter Over Time for the Juilliard String Quartet, and Sky on Swings, a chamber opera for Opera Philadelphia starring Frederica von Stade and Marietta Simpson. “[Beecher] and librettist Hannah Moscovitch have created a shattering musical and theatrical evocation of what it feels like to have Alzheimer’s disease,” wrote Heidi Waleson in the The Wall Street Journal. Many of Lembit’s latest projects involve the incorporation of nontraditional elements into opera, symphonic works and chamber music, including baroque instruments, sampled interviews, animation, and electronicallycontrolled sound sculptures.
CHORÔS NO. 2 (1924)
ALL ONE CAN IMAGINE (2014)
Chorôs No. 2, a duet for flute and clarinet, comes from a collection of fourteen compositions by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. The piece was dedicated to Brazilian poet Mário de Andrade and premiered in São Paulo on February 18, 1925 by flutist Spartaco Rossi and clarinetist Antenor Driussi.
All One Can Imagine is a haunting duet for soprano and violin based off poetry by Jakob Stein. The composer writes, “I wish to thank Jakob Stein for giving me permission to set these evocative poems. Their striking imagery resonates deeply with me. Although the music has a mournful quality to it, as does much of my work, it is tinged with longing as well. And with longing comes hope for All One Can Imagine.
Heitor Villa-Lobos “I learned music from a bird in the jungles of Brazil, not from academies.” Primarily self-taught, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos spent his early years absorbing the styles of Brazilian popular music as a guitarist in street “choros,” or village bands. During an expedition along the Amazon to the interior of Brazil, he pursued an interest in native chant, rites, and music. Later, established as an educator and prolific composer, he traveled widely and lived in both New York and Paris, though he remained immersed in the spirit and culture of Brazil. His love of Bach and of Brazilian folk music are manifest in several works, particularly his works for cello orchestra, Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1 and Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5
Ellen Harrison Ellen Harrison has won two commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation and four Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. Her works have been widely performed both in the United States and abroad by a diverse range of performers such as A/tonal, Cincinnati Soundbox, the Cincinnati Symphony Chamber Players, concert:nova, Earplay, the Empyrean Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Linton Chamber Music Series, the Lydian String Quartet, Octagon, Parnassus, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Society for New Music, Voices of Change, and Zafe Collective. Her music has been described as “stunning” and full of “sophisticated ensemble writing“ (The San Francisco Chronicle). Her chamber music often has “a very, very quick series of contrasting moods and atmospheres, which gives it a lot of texture and beauty, and it has a deep sonic realm.” (Boston Globe). Penned for instrumental and vocal ensembles of various sizes, Harrison’s compositions are inspired by diverse experiences and circumstances. Echoing her evocatively titled movements, her music at times seems to dip into distant and antique sonic realms to portray a series of contrasting moods and atmospheres. At other times the tone is more jocular as she juxtaposes impetuous activity with infernal calm at multiple levels, presenting an extraordinary variety of textures, melodic materials, and expressive gestures.
BUG (1999)
TROLLKVENNA (1932)
The highly virtuosic yet unstable work Bug was given its first performance on February 6, 1999 during the Mériel festival by its dedicatee Philippe Soured. It is a musical metaphor for the disarray caused by an imaginary computer breakdown (fortunately, not predicting what might have happened on December 31, 1999). Although at the outset, most of the rhythmic formulas are multiples of a common unity (the semiquaver), the music becomes less regular with the appearance of specific dynamics which often contradict the melodic profile. Similarly, the numerous trills, bisbigliandi, and varied articulations all contribute to give a feeling of extreme density to these opening bars.
Bjarne Brustad was a Norwegian composer and violinist/violist whose works are largely unknown. Trollkvenna (Troll’s Watermill) is the final movement from his work inspired by folk music entitled Eventyrsuite (Fairytale Suite).
Progressively, the music seems to escape from the performer, and rapid passages replace the regular beat of the start of the work. Following a brief moment of calm, virtuosity comes to the fore, leading to a point of no return: a high note played ffff. Everything seems to disintegrate at this point, with disorientating quarter-tones, as if the pitches were melting into one another. The piece concludes with sustained notes, the sole survivors of the microtonal melodies.
Bruno Mantovani
Bjarne Brustad
Bruno Mantovani was born on October 8, 1974. After receiving five first prizes from the Paris Conservatory (analysis, aesthetics, orchestration, composition, music history) and attending the computer music Cursus at IRCAM, he began an international career. His works have been performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Philharmonie in Cologne, the KKL in Lucerne, La Scala in Milan, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, the Cité de la Musique, and the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Faithful to his preferred performers, he collaborates with prestigious soloists (Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Alain Billard, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Antoine Tamestit, Tabea Zimmermann), conductors (Pierre Boulez, Sir Andrew Davis, Peter Eötvös, Laurence Equilbey, Gunter Herbig, Emmanuel Krivine, Susanna Mälkki, Jonathan Nott, Pascal Rophé, François-Xavier Roth), ensembles (Accentus, Intercontemporain, TM+), and orchestras (Bamberg Symphony, BBC Cardiff, Chicago Symphony, WDR Cologne, La Chambre Philharmonique, Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Liège Philharmonic, BBC London, Lucerne Academy, Orchestre de Paris, Paris Opera Orchestra, Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France, Sarrebrücken Radio Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, NHK Tokyo, RAI Turin, Sinfonia Varsovia, RSO Vienna).
Bjarne Brustad was a Norwegian composer, violinist, and violist. He played with symphonic orchestras in Stavanger and Oslo. In the 1920s he travelled to European cities such as Paris, Munich, and Berlin, where he received musical inspiration and contacts. From 1928 to 1943, Brustad was viola soloist with the Philharmonic Society Orchestra in Oslo. He wrote symphonies, compositions for violin and orchestra, chamber music, and opera. His opera Atlantis was finished in 1945..
He is the headmaster of the Paris Conservatory since September 2010.
As a teacher at the Oslo Conservatory of Music, his students included Bjørn Fongaard and Trond Øyen.
ALARM WILL SOUND
understands, and that will be translated for the audience via supertitles in rhythm. I’m thoroughly excited about the possibilities this presents dramatically and musically. Additionally, Jacob’s landscape is haunted by periodic visitations (another reference to the Dickens): sounds and sights of his paramour, “Bird,” which shatter his peace. These hauntings prove too powerful to deny, or to escape. “Bird” will be played by a mezzo-soprano – although she will never actually appear physically on the stage, she is a 3D film character and will be projected into the stage space...much like a ghost.
OPENING CONCERT Thursday, July 25, 2019 7:30 PM, Missouri Theatre
Jacob in Chains (2019)* . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amy Beth Kirsten
(b. 1972)
In tonight’s scene, Jacob struggles to remember what happened the night he died – the memories are fragmented, but he obsessively tries to make sense of images of “Bird” running. A heartfelt thank you to this incredible band for dreaming with me.
Richard Crawford, Jacob
- Amy Beth Kirsten con/influences (2014) ���������������������������������������������������������Stefan Freund (b. 1974) INTERMISSION
Commissioned by Alarm Will Sound and the Mizzou International Composers Festival
CON/INFLUENCES (2014)
The Hunger (2016) ������������������������������������������������������Donnacha Dennehy (b. 1970) Katherine Manley, Asenath Nicholson Iarla Ó Lionáird, Man * world premiere
JACOB IN CHAINS (2019)
I was asked by the Sheldon Concert Hall to write a piece that would celebrate St. Louis’s contributions to music in honor of the 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis. The piece presents St. Louis traditions in three sections: a bluesy opening, a rag-inspired jaunt, and a rollicking fusion of jazz and rock. A coda brings all of these ideas together at the end, including the lumbering opening theme. The title, con/influences, refers to the influences of these genres on my music as well as the confluence of these various musical styles coming together in one piece. It also refers to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers just north of St. Louis, an important junction that resulted in an eclectic collection of styles of music coming to the area. - Stefan Freund
When Alan Pierson and I started talking about a possible new theatrical work for Alarm Will Sound, we eventually landed on a question that had been in the back of my mind for a while – the question of Jacob Marley’s chains. I’d read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and had seen several movies and adaptations, but none – not even the original text – ever really explained Jacob Marley other than to say he “wore chains in death that he forged in life.” (You may remember that Jacob Marley was Scrooge’s deceased business partner – and the first ghost to visit him warning of more visitations to come if he didn’t change his ways). The metaphor of Jacob’s chains was compelling enough for me to begin to dream about a new story – a Christmas ghost story set in the present day, one that is obliquely inspired by Dickens but that has really begun to find its own identity. Like the Dickens, our Jacob is dead. He waits alone in the darkness, and throughout the evening-length work we witness him unpacking memories of falling hard from grace, memories of loss, of despair, of his paramour “Bird.” He’s defiant, hilarious, and pitiful. I’ve been making music-driven theatre works for many years now and they have, to this point, featured smaller groups – usually 7 or 8 performers on stage. A thrilling thought, in addition to the prospect of working with Alarm Will Sound again, was the question of how to make the whole 20-piece band a character in the work. In Jacob in Chains, the band will play a character I’m calling The Resonance. This character is the orchestral embodiment of darkness that “speaks” to Jacob in music – a language that he somehow
Richard Crawford Richard Crawford studied with Jacques Lecoq, and also at Rose Bruford College, London. He is a founding member of the internationally-acclaimed New York physical theater ensemble The Flying Machine and played for two years on Broadway in War
Horse. He also played the lead in the off-Broadway hit show Slava’s Snowshow from 2004-2006 and has directed clown work for Cirque du Soleil including Dralion, MJ1 (Vegas) and the newest Cirque show Volta. He is an award-winning director whose projects have included a Commedia dell’Arte version of Petrushka at Carnegie Hall; The Bourgeois Gentlemen at the UMN/Guthrie and Comedy of Errors at TheatreWorks, Colorado Springs. He also performed in the 2002 OBIE Winning [Sic] at Soho Rep., NYC, and as the lead in La Jolla Playhouse’s groundbreaking The Adding Machine in 2007. Richard has been teaching for the past twelve years in London, Paris, Santiago, Montreal and New York. In the U.S. he has taught Neutral Mask, Commedia dell’Arte and Lecoq Technique at NYU/ Tisch, SUNY Purchase, Yale School of Drama, Sarah Lawrence College, Bard College, The Actor’s Center, Marymount Manhattan, Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute, Michael Howard Studios, The Stella Adler Studio, and the University of Minnesota. He is currently on the faculty at PACE University and Rutgers, Mason Gross School of the Arts.
London, The Return of Ulysses (the Young Vic) for English National Opera. Katherine has sung Venus, Venus & Adonis with director Netia Jones, and Belinda in After Dido, a joint venture by ENO/The Young Vic directed by Katie Mitchell. She made her US stage debut as Oriana in Handel’s Amadigi for Central City Opera, Colorado. Over the past seasons Katherine has been a popular guest artist at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, featuring in the leading roles of Eliza Doolittle in Robert Carson’s My Fair Lady and Maria in The Sound of Music, proving equally at home in high profile musical theatre productions, she also sung Maria for Central City Opera and Julie in Carousel for Opera North at the Barbican Theatre. Her concert engagements include Judith Weir’s Natural History for Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele, Max Richter’s Memoryhouse, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, Edinburgh International Festival singing The Indian Queen with The Sixteen. Aci, Galatea e Polifemo with Capriccio Barockorchester, Saul with Daniel Reuss, Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 at The Sage, Northern Sinfonia. La Statue in Rameau’s Pigmalion with the OAE. Bach’s Matthew and John Passions, Bach Cantatas with Wroclaw Baroque Orchestra & Britten Sinfonia, and Christmas Oratorios throughout Europe. She has sung Jephtha with The King’s Consort, Switzerland, Israel in Egypt on tour with Musik Podium Stuttgart. The Fairy Queen with McCreesh & Gabrieli Consort & Players, & La descente d’Orphée at the Wigmore Hall. Recordings made include Handel’s Il Pastor Fido with Harmonia Mundi, LNM, and Joshua with the London Handel Festival, Laurence Cummings. Future engagements 2019/20 include Xerses with Badisches Staatstheater, and a disk recording for the label Nonesuch with Alarm Will Sound. Katherine is currently singing Pamina with Central City Opera, Colorado in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
Katherine Manley Soprano Katherine Manley studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama, Glasgow and the Benjamin Britten International Opera School at the Royal College of Music, London. In the 2017-18 season, Katherine sang Pamina in Mozart’s Magic Flute, she featured in Michel van der Aa’s latest one-womanopera, BlankOut which she performed at the Beijing Music Festival, KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen and Musica Nova Helsinki, for Finnish National Opera. Other recent world premieres include the role of Wife in The Last Hotel by Donnacha Dennehy (music) and Enda Walsh (text) at the Edinburgh Festival, London Covent Garden and New York St Ann’s Warehouse. Katherine also performed Dennehy’s revised score of The Hunger in BAM, New York, the Kennedy Center Washington DC, and for St. Louis Opera, with contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound. She recently revisited the role of Zenna Briggs in Van der Aa’s Sunken Garden which she created at English National Opera, both the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Essen Philharmonie 2017, and most recently with Dallas Opera. In addition to her growing reputation in the contemporary operatic repertoire, Katherine is already established as an outstanding performer of baroque music. She played Creuse in David McVicar’s production of Charpentier’s Medée, ENO. A number of Monteverdi roles include the title role in Poppea, conducted by Christian Curnyn, Messaggera/Proserpina in Orfeo with Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music at the Barbican Centre
Iarla Ó Lionáird Iarla Ó Lionáird has carved a long and unique career in music both internationally and in Ireland. From his iconic early recording of the vision song “Aisling Gheal” as a young boy to his ground-breaking recordings with Dublin’s Crash Ensemble and New York’s Alarm Will Sound, he has shown a breadth of artistic ambition that sets him apart in the Irish Music fraternity. He’s a child of traditional music, born and bred in Cúil Aodha, in the belly of the West Cork Gaeltacht, with Seán Ó Riada a neighbour and indisputable early influence. His great aunt, the traditional singer Elizabeth Cronin, had forged a reputation for rich interpretation before him, paving the way for the young Ó Lionáird to still audiences with his plaintive, textured voice at Mass, and later, in parlors, front rooms, snugs, town halls, and concert halls. A twice Grammy-nominated artist, Ó Lionáird has worked with a stellar cast of composers internationally including Donnacha Dennehy, Dan Trueman, Nico Muhly, Gavin Bryars, and David Lang,
and he has performed and recorded with such luminaries as Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave, Robert Plant, and Sinead O’Connor. His unique singing style has carried him to stages and concert halls all over the world, from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the Sydney Opera House and beyond. Also an accomplished broadcaster, Ó Lionáird’s recent radio series “Vocal Chords,” on the mysteries of the human voice, for Ireland’s National Classical Music Broadcaster, RTE Lyric FM, won both Gold and Silver Awards at the “New York Radio Festival” 2017. His voice has graced the silver screen also, with film credits extending from The Gangs of New York to Hotel Rwanda, and most recently as featured singer in the film Brooklyn starring Saoirse Ronan. He is the vocalist with the critically acclaimed Irish/American band The Gloaming. He holds a Master’s Degree in Ethnomusicology from the University of Limerick, where he is currently completing a PhD. Appointed as Global Scholar 2017-20, he is Visiting Lecturer in Music and the Humanities at Princeton University.
responsibility to Ireland at this time even wrote that the “Famine had been ordained by God to teach the Irish a lesson, and therefore should not be too much interfered with.” I am grateful to the Royal Irish Academy for allowing me to use an excerpt of a recording from their Doegen Archive. The recording of the woman keening was made by Alan Lomax in the west of Ireland in the 1950s. It is part of the Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, and is used courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity. Text compiled from original sources by Donnacha Dennehy (with dramaturgical assistance by Jocelyn Clarke). Text based on Asenath’s Nicholson’s Annals of the Famine in Ireland, original sean nós songs such as “Na Prátaí Dubha (The Black Potatoes).” The Hunger was commissioned by Alarm Will Sound, and has received financial assistance from New Music USA, The MAP Fund, and the Arts Council of Ireland. The Hunger is dedicated to Courtney Orlando. - Donnacha Dennehy
THE HUNGER (2016) The Hunger concerns itself with a big topic, the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52, which transformed Irish society irrevocably. The main narrative voice in the piece is provided by the astonishing accounts of the famine by the American nonconformist Asenath Nicholson (sung here by Katherine Manley). Mrs. Nicholson spent 2 years travelling around Ireland – often on foot – helping those dying from starvation and writing about her experiences of the unfolding famine. Mrs. Nicholson’s account stands outside the norm because of her transgressive sympathy; she directly quotes from the peasants, and actually stayed in their cabins, something that no other commentator did. Nevertheless, it is still for the most part an outside viewpoint.
BELS LONTANO Thursday, July 25, 2019 • 9:30 PM Café Berlin 220 N. 10th St. Bels Lontano (Bret Bohman) curates a late-night evening of electronic works featuring resident composers of MICF, current and former students of Mizzou, and a short set of his own works.
One tragedy of our understanding of the famine is that precious little is available from those who directly suffered. There is no published account from the Gaelic-speaking majority that experienced the most. Musical culture almost shut down entirely through the period. As the great 19th century song-collector George Petrie commented, “there was a great unwonted silence.” Only one song from the sean nós (old style) tradition of unaccompanied singing deals directly with the topic, and that is Na Prátaí Dubha (Black Potatoes). Shards of that song form the basis of an extended defiant section of the piece sung by the sean nós singer, Iarla O’Lionáird. Indeed, it is to the sean nós tradition that I turn in seeking out – or maybe even inventing –an indigenous Irish thread in this multi-dimensional narrative. On a larger socio-economic level, one of the terrible ironies of the famine is that while many were dying of starvation or associated diseases, food (which the majority of the populace could not afford) continued to be exported from the large estate-farms. In fact, as the noted scholar Christine Kinealy observes in her book This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 certain food exports actually increased during the famine. This is largely due to an ideological battle at the heart of the British government in London, where an influential contingent did not want to interfere with the workings of the market, at least in Ireland. Many have defined this as the nub of the issue – the conflict between the responsibilities of compassionate governance versus a strict philosophy of not interfering with the mechanism of the market. Of course, this was further complicated by the dynamics of colonialism. Lord Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, charged with special
Bels Lontano is an experimental electronic dance music project from composer/producer Bret Bohman that embraces the notion that music is therapy in both the act of creation and the act of listening. Inspired by an eclectic range of musical and non-musical sources, the project explores concepts of liminal spaces, natural beauty, therapy, and personal growth through the creation of rich sonic tapestries and melodic beat music stemming from the traditions of IDM, house, hip-hop, contemporary classical, and ambient. Bret Bohman teaches composition, electronic music, guitar, and ear training at the University of Missouri School of Music.
KHEMIA ENSEMBLE POP-UP CONCERT 2 Friday, July 26, 2019 • 1:00 PM Uprise Bakery 10 Hitt Street Chelsea Tinsler Jones and Shane Jones, percussion
Duet for Body Percussion (2015) �������������������������������������������Tim Peterson (b. 1994) Karakurenai (2007) �����������������������������������������������������������������������Andy Akiho (b. 1979) Counting Duets (1982) ������������������������������������������������������������� Tom Johnson (b. 1939) I. II. Living Room Music (1940). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Cage (1912-1992) with Cole Anderson and Amy Petrongelli
DUET FOR BODY PERCUSSION (2015) Duet for Body Percussion, which features an original notational system, was premiered at the 2015 Sō Percussion Summer Institute. Asked to compose a work that could be performed in the close quarters of a coffee shop, I decided that there was no instrumentation more portable than body percussion. I hope that this work invites listeners to recognize the intrinsic musicality that we all share.
Timothy’s music has been performed in the US and Europe at venues ranging from art galleries, distilleries, and coffee shops to universities and concert halls such as Lincoln Center. Ensembles that have presented Timothy’s music include the New York Philharmonic (as part of its School Day Concerts), yMusic, and Sō Percussion. His Duet for Body Percussion (2015), which features an original notational system, was recently incorporated into introductory composition classes at the Mannes School of Music and the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. A frequent participant in festivals including the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, the Silk Road Ensemble’s Global Musician Workshop, and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, Timothy currently pursues a MM in Composition at the University of Southern California. He also holds a BM in Composition and a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Timothy’s previous composition teachers are Frank Ticheli, Kristin Kuster, Evan Chambers, Paul Schoenfeld, Erik Santos, Andrea Mazzariello, David Conte, Narcís Bonet, and Kyle Blaha. As a pianist, he has studied under Martin Katz, Alan Smith, Christian Matijas-Mecca, Matthew Bengtson, Amy I-Lin Cheng, and Wilma Machover. Timothy has also studied Carnatic (South Indian) singing in Mysore under Rajalakshi Kamala, Afro-Cuban batá drumming in Havana under Octavio Rodríguez Rivera, and the qanun (Arabic zither) in Tangier under Mohamed El Harzli. His studies in Morocco were generously supported by the University of Michigan Honors and Islamic Studies Programs.
Stylistically, this piece draws partial inspiration from classical Indian percussion music, which I experienced when studying Carnatic (South Indian) music in Mysore under Rajalakshmi Kamala in the summer of 2013. Specifically, this piece features thrice repeated cadential rhythmic patterns (tihai) and syncopated rhythmic dialogues, typical of North Indian tabla and South Indian mridangam drumming. The tabla and mridangam are renowned for their ability to produce multiple pitches and timbres, and I hope to evoke this array of sounds through snapping, different kinds of clapping, thigh and chest pats, and stomping.
KARAKURENAI (2007)
Tim Peterson
Described as “mold-breaking,” “alert and alive,” “dramatic,” and “vital” by The New York Times, Andy Akiho is an eclectic composer and performer of contemporary classical music. Recent engagements include commissioned premieres by the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble ACJW; a performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and three concerts at the Kennedy Center in
Driven by a constant curiosity, composer Timothy Peterson draws on a kaleidoscope of influences. Finding inspiration in sources ranging from impressionist, jazz, and classical Arabic styles to literature from the French- and Spanish-speaking worlds, he aims to welcome audiences into musical narratives of genre-crossing expressivity.
Andy Akiho’s Karakurenai (Japanese for “foreign crimson”) was originally written for solo prepared steel pan during a visit to Rochester, NY in June 2007 as part of the Synesthesia Suite. However, this piece can be performed on any combination of instruments and can include elements of improvisation if the performer desires. Andy Akiho
Washington, DC. Akiho has been recognized with awards including the 2014-15 Luciano Berio Rome Prize, the 2015 Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, a 2014 Fromm Foundation Commission from Harvard University, the 2014 American Composers Orchestra Underwood Emerging Composers Commission, a 2014 Chamber Music America (CMA) Grant with the Friction Quartet and Jenny Q Chai, a 2012 CMA Grant with Sybarite5, the 2012 Carlsbad Composer Competition Commission for the Calder Quartet, and the 2011 Finale & ensemble eighth blackbird National Composition Competition Grand Prize. Additionally, his compositions have been featured on PBS’s “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and by organizations such as Bang on a Can, American Composers Forum, and the Society for New Music. kiho was born in 1979 in Columbia, South Carolina, and is based A in New York City. He is a graduate of the University of South Carolina (BM, performance), the Manhattan School of Music (MM, contemporary performance), and the Yale School of Music (MM, composition). Akiho is currently pursuing a PhD in composition at Princeton University. He has attended the Aspen Music Festival, Heidelberg Music Festival, HKUST Intimacy of Creativity Festival, Bang on a Can Festival, Silicon Valley Music Festival, Yellow Barn Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest Festival, and Avaloch Farm Music Institute, where he is the Composer-in-Residence. Akiho’s debut CD No One To Know One, on Innova Recordings, features brilliantly crafted compositions that pose intricate rhythms and exotic timbres around his primary instrument, the steel pan.
COUNTING DUETS (1983) The many formalistic, religious, arithmetic, psychological, linguistic, and musical implications of counting have come to interest me a great deal, and since I have a special love for patterns and numbers anyway, I have focused much of my recent work in this direction. I count strings on a psaltery, count keys on a piano, count wooden blocks, count in duets, count in different languages, and keep finding new ways to do pieces about counting. There must be countless ways of counting. And come to think of it, “countlessness” is another fascinating subject. Or is it more or less the same one? - Tom Johnson
Tom Johnson Tom Johnson was born in Greeley, Colorado. He received two degrees from Yale, the BA (1961) and the MM (1967), after which he studied privately with Morton Feldman in New York. From 1971 to 1983 he was a music critic for The Village Voice, writing about new music, and an anthology of these articles was published in 1989 by Het Apollohuis under the title The Voice of New Music. During this New York period he also composed four of his best-known works: An Hour for Piano (1971), The Four-Note Opera (1972), Failing (1975) and Nine Bells (1979). After 15 years in New York, he moved to Paris where he lives with his wife, the artist Esther Ferrer. Johnson considers himself a minimalist composer, and in fact, he was the first to apply this term to music in his article “The SlowMotion Minimal Approach,” written in The Village Voice in 1972. His minimalism is of a formalist type, depending mostly on logical sequences, as in the 21 Rational Melodies (1982), where he explores procedures such as accumulation, counting, and isorhythm. Some have even said that he is the inventor of logical music. Since 2000, Johnson’s work has turned more toward musical form and mathematics. From about 2004 to 2010, he worked with what he calls “rational harmonies” in pieces like 360 Chords for orchestra (2005) and Twelve (2008) for piano. In the following years one may observe, among other things, an increasing interest for rhythm, as in Vermont Rhythms (2008), Munich Rhythms (2010), Tick-Tock Rhythms (2013), and Dutch Rhythms (2018). Johnson also wrote pieces for jugglers (Three Notes for Three Jugglers, 2011; Dropping Balls, 2011), and several more ambitious projects (Seven Septets, 2007-2017; Counting to Seven, 2013; Plucking, 2015).
LIVING ROOM MUSIC (1940) Long before there was a New York School, John Cage (1912–1992) honed his revolutionary approach to sound on the West Coast. He was born in Los Angeles, and later he studied there with Arnold Schoenberg. Cage soon abandoned the twelve-tone system and California, and it was in Seattle that he made his first significant leaps into indeterminate music, writing for all-percussion ensembles and doctored pianos that took the focus away from strictly notated pitches. It was during this period that Cage composed Living Room Music (1940) for four percussionists. He specified that “any household objects or architectural elements may be used as instruments,” suggesting a general ordering from high pitch to low pitch for the four parts: “magazines, newspaper or cardboard” for the first player; “table or other wooden furniture” for the second; “largish books” for the third; and “floor, wall, door or wooden frame
of window” for the fourth. The second movement is a departure in that the percussionists generate all the sounds vocally, repeating fragments of a Gertrude Stein line, “Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around.” The optional third movement contains the work’s only pitched melody, to be played “on any suitable instrument.” The final movement returns to the found percussion objects of the opening. - Aaron Grad
John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage’s romantic partner for most of their lives. His teachers included Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage’s major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text decision-making tool, which uses chance operations to suggest answers to questions one may pose, became Cage’s standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.”
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MIZZOU NEW MUSIC MIZZOU NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE AND MIZZOU PERCUSSION Friday, July 26, 2019 • 7:30 PM Missouri Theatre
Mizzou New Music Ensemble The Blotting (2004) ��������������������������������������������������� Donnacha Dennehy (b. 1970) World Under Glass No. 2 (2011) �������������������������������� Amy Beth Kirsten (b. 1972) City Swing (2019) ������������������������������������������������������������������Jack Snelling (b. 2000) Soledad (2018). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carolina Heredia (b. 1981) DRAX Leo Saguiguit, saxophone Megan Arns, percussion
MIZZOU NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE Sponsored by the Mizzou New Music Initiative, the NME is dedicated to promoting new music at Mizzou through performances on and off campus. The ensemble’s principal contribution is to perform and record music by MU faculty and students as well as established repertoire. Members of the ensemble are expected to support the MU Composition Program through ad hoc readings, performances, and recordings of student and Creating Original Music Project (COMP) works. In addition to its annual season of four concerts in Whitmore Recital Hall, the ensemble has appeared at a number of institutions in the St. Louis area, including the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the St. Louis Botanical Garden, the St. Louis Zoo, the St. Louis Science Center, the Cortex Innovation Community, and the World Chess Hall of Fame. Mizzou New Music Ensemble Stefan Freund, Director Yoshiaki Onishi, Assistant Conductor Ann Mozina, flute
Mizzou Percussion
Austin Wright, clarinet
Megan Arns Julia Gaines Hannah Hutchins Brianna Trainor
Pedro Ramiro, violin Tyler Hannasz, viola Cameron Tubbs, cello
To give you form and breath (2019) ���������������������������inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993)
Libby Roberts, piano Hannah Hutchins, percussion Brianna Trainor, percussion
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: ambedo (2018). . . . . . . . . Annika Socolofsky (b. 1990) They Might Be Giants (2015) �������������������������������������� Amy Beth Kirsten Erin Lesser, flute
Megan received her D.M.A. in Percussion Performance & Literature and M.A. in Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music. She was also awarded performance degrees from Florida State University (M.M.) and Truman State University (B.M.), where she was recognized as a Presser Scholar. Her primary teachers include Michael Burritt, John W. Parks IV, Michael Bump, Bill Cahn, and Nyoman Suadin. She endorses Vic Firth Sticks & Mallets, Pearl/ Adams Musical Instruments, Black Swamp Percussion, Remo Drumheads, and Zildjian Cymbals.
Megan Arns Megan Arns is a percussionist, ethnomusicologist, and educator with a diverse set of skills and a driven passion for her craft. She is a member of the music faculty at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO as the Assistant Professor of Percussion. Recent past faculty positions include Mansfield University in Pennsylvania and the National Music Conservatory in Amman, Jordan where she was also the Principal Timpanist of the Amman Symphony Orchestra. She is a section member of the New Hampshire Music Festival during the summers and has also performed with the St. Louis, Tallahassee, Sarasota, Missouri, Northwest Florida, Albany, Southern Tier and Macon Symphony Orchestras. Active as a contemporary chamber percussionist, Megan’s recent highlights include collaborative performances in Spain, France, India, Jordan, Costa Rica, Ghana, and the United States at venues such as the Kennedy Center, Millennium Park, Smithsonian Institution, and the Percussive Arts Society International Convention. She is an advocate for the creation of new music, cocommissioning and premiering works by notable composers such as John Luther Adams, Michael Burritt, Alejandro Viñao, Halim El-Dahb, Steven Snowden, Asha Srinivasan, and Ivan Trevino. Megan regularly performs with three contemporary chamber groups: Clocks in Motion – a percussion quartet based in Madison, WI, the [Switch~ Ensemble] – an electroacoustic ensemble based out of New York City, and DRAX – a saxophone and percussion duo in residence at Mizzou. She also has extensive experience in the field of marching percussion as a performing member of the Santa Clara Vanguard (Mike Laporta Percussion Award Recipient) and Colts Drum & Bugle Corps, and as a staff member with the Boston Crusaders Drum & Bugle Corps.
Julia Gaines Dr. Julia Gaines is currently the Director of the School of Music at the University of Missouri but joined the faculty in 1996 as the Director of Percussion Studies. She received her DMA from the University of Oklahoma, her Master’s as well as a Performer’s Certificate from the Eastman School of Music, and her Bachelor’s from the Lawrence Conservatory of Music in Appleton, Wisconsin. She has performed in the percussion sections of the Missouri Symphony Orchestra, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic Orchestra, the Fox Valley Symphony, and the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra. She also has a history in drum corps culminating as a member of the 1989 Santa Clara Vanguard front ensemble. As a performer, Dr. Gaines has been a soloist throughout the United States and in several countries including Brazil, China, England, and Russia. Her first solo CD, Tiger Dance, was released by Centaur Records in April 2017. As a pedagogue, she has sold books around the world. Her first pedagogical book, Sequential Studies for FourMallet Marimba – Level 1 has become quite popular throughout the US and abroad as the only beginning four-mallet marimba book of its kind. Level 2 will be published in January 2019. Dr. Gaines has been a member of the Percussive Arts Society (PAS) for over thirty years. She has been the Vice-President and President of the Missouri Chapter of PAS and hosted the MOPAS Day Of Percussion in 2003 and 2012. She served on the International Board of Directors of PAS before accepting a position as Secretary on the Executive Committee. She was also an Associate Editor for Percussive Notes, the scholarly journal of PAS, with the primary responsibility of Review Editor and served in that role until the summer of 2014. After a brief hiatus from editing, she recently accepted the position of Associate Editor for the Keyboard Percussion section of Percussive Notes.
Orchestra, the Southside Philharmonic Orchestra (Jefferson City, MO), Dalbergia clarinet/marimba duo, and the Mizzou New Music Ensemble. Previously, she performed with the Central Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra, Morton Feldman Chamber Players (Chicago), and was a member of Ayodele Drum and Dance, a Chicago-based allwomen’s West African dance troupe. Brianna has degrees in music performance from the University of Missouri (MM) and University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (BM), and her most influential teachers have been Megan Arns, Sean Connors, Ryan Korb, Troy Hall, Andrew Elbert, Jerome Balsaab, Alex Woma, and Jackson Gave.
Hannah Hutchins Hannah Hutchins graduated from the University of Missouri in 2019 with a master’s degree in Percussion Performance. Under the tutelage of Dr. Megan Arns, she studied numerous spheres of the percussive arts with special focus on marimba, world music, and new compositions. With a passion for fostering global and cultural awareness through the arts, she has studied Balinese gamelan music in Indonesia and the Ewe and Dagara musical traditions in Ghana. She advocates for the evolving genre of contemporary art music as a member of the Mizzou New Music Ensemble and other performing groups. Prior to attending the University of Missouri, Hannah received her Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Music Education degrees from the University of Montana in her beautiful hometown of Missoula. She will begin a DMA program in Percussion Performance at the University of Arizona this fall. Brianna Trainor Brianna Trainor is a passionate percussionist who stays active in a variety of classical, contemporary, and world music scenes. She currently performs with the Missouri Symphony, the Columbia Civic
DRAX DRAX is an ensemble-in-residence at the University of Missouri School of Music with faculty members Leo Saguiguit (saxophone) and Megan Arns (percussion). Formed in the fall of 2014, DRAX made its international debut at the World Saxophone Congress in Strasbourg, France in July 2015. Additionally, the duo has performed at the Mizzou International Composers Festival, the Region 4 Conference of the North American Saxophone Alliance in Oklahoma, and the Missouri Percussive Arts Society Day of Percussion. Dedicated to creating new repertoire for this unique combination of instruments, DRAX has recently commissioned and premiered works by composers José Martínez, Carolina Heredia, Aaron Mencher, Steven Snowden, and Asha Srinivasan. Leo Saguiguit Saxophonist Leo Saguiguit joined the MU faculty in 2002 after holding previous faculty positions at Northwestern University, University of the South (Sewanee), and Emory University. His degrees are from Emory University and Northwestern, where his major teachers were Stutz Wimmer and Fred Hemke, respectively. Additional teachers include Paul Bro and Jonathan Helton. He has performed throughout the US and abroad, including France, Italy, Sweden, Greece, Cuba, China, Thailand, and the Philippines. He collaborates with many ensembles and currently performs with the Athens (Greece) Saxophone Quartet, Missouri Saxophone Quartet, Chicago Saxophone Quartet, and Trio Chymera. He has performed regularly with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Milwaukee Symphony, Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra, and Missouri Symphony. He appears in over a dozen CD recordings, including six with the professional wind ensemble Philharmonia à Vent and three with the Athens Quartet.
displayed in what might be described as oversized snow globes. Far from beautiful snowscapes recalling holiday cheer, they portray dark, disturbing (even depraved), secret human moments, painstakingly arranged and preserved. From afar, the spectator initially delights in these tantalizing objects resembling a holiday toy. Carefree curiosity slowly draws us near. Upon closer inspection, delight turns to sudden horror. This emotional whiplash stunned, horrified, and eventually inspired me. I didn’t know if I should laugh at how I was fooled or cry for the little tragedies under glass that somehow felt even more extreme expressed this way. Viewing Doyle’s work made music sound in my imagination. This is that music. - Amy Beth Kirsten
CITY SWING (2019)
COMPOSER BIOS AND PROGRAM NOTES THE BLOTTING (2004) The Blotting was commissioned by the Bath International Music Festival with funds provided by the Arts Council England, and was given its first performance by the Tate Ensemble at the Hotbath Gallery in Bath, England, on June 5, 2004. It is quite rhythmically virtuosic in places, making use of manically interlocking hockets. The percussive quality of some of these sections is given extra raspy umph by the preparation of the violin with a paper-clip. - Donnacha Dennehy
WORLD UNDER GLASS NO. 2 (2011) World Under Glass No. 2 is inspired by the work of New York artist Thomas Doyle (b. 1976). His astonishing scenes-in-miniature are
City Swing is a piece of appreciation, dedicated to the first genre of music I fell in love with. Since I first started learning the language of jazz in middle school, something about it has always really resonated with me. There is always an emphasis on the skill and knowledge of the performer, just like in most genres, but more important is the aspect of communication. Rhythm sections and small combos are defined by the way they communicate (the “feel” of the group). One example of “feel” is the music of Ahmad Jamal, a very influential jazz pianist and composer. Jamal is a fantastic concert pianist who’s been playing works of Liszt since he was 10 years old. Yet when he plays with his jazz combo, he plays minimally, only adding exactly what’s required to benefit the feel of the group. He’s like a limb of a combo that functions as one cohesive body, despite each player improvising their own part. Communication and conversation were major themes in writing City Swing. A second aspect of jazz that resonates with me is its deep connection to American history. The genre blossomed in America and draws its roots from the oral traditions of spirituals and hymns. It influenced many modern styles of American popular music, including funk, hip-hop, and rap. Jazz was often less respected than traditional European classical music, especially prior to the civil rights era. However, many jazz musicians believe that jazz is made in the same fine art tradition as European classical music. For example, Jamal does not refer to himself as a jazz pianist but as a performer of “American classical music.” Legendary bandleader Duke Ellington also called his music simply “American music.” The most reputable big jazz ensembles of the early-mid 20th century were titled as orchestras, not as bands. With such a deep history in America and particularly here in Missouri, I wrote City Swing with the styles of many different jazz musicians in mind. Each of these musicians influenced the way I play, compose, and think about music. This list includes Count Basie, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Freddie Green, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Milt Jackson, Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, and many others. - Jack Snelling
was a person known for his sense of humor and his--sometimes annoying--pranks. Some people couldn’t reconcile his personality with his melancholic music and wondered who he really was or what would inspire that music. That is what made me think of our ultimate loneliness, the limits of our physicality, our individual subjectivities; so I decided to make this piece a depiction of our efforts and failures at connecting with our surroundings. - Carolina Heredia
TO GIVE YOU FORM AND BREATH (2019)
Jack Snelling St. Louis native Jack Snelling is a first-year undergraduate composition major at the University of Missouri. A 2018 graduate of Webster Groves High School in St. Louis, Jack started piano at age 8 before learning bassoon beginning his freshman year of high school. His passion for composition took flight in 8th grade, when he was first introduced to notation software and wrote a piece for his middle school band. Jack was previously a bassoonist of the St. Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra and a pianist in Jazz St. Louis’ JazzU program. Jack is currently the principal bassoonist in the Mizzou Wind Ensemble and the pianist in Mizzou’s Jazz Band. He also is a bassoonist in the Columbia Civic Orchestra and Orphean Chamber Ensemble, and is a founding member of a professional jazz quartet, Sharp the Nine. He was previously a two-time 1st prize winner of the Creating Original Music Project competition and received an Honorable Mention at the 2018 Missouri Composers Project competition. In his free time Jack is an avid NBA fan (go Spurs!) and enjoys driving and spending time with his friends.
SOLEDAD (2018) Soledad was written for the duo DRAX and premiered in November 2018 at Whitmore Hall at the University of Missouri, during the Missouri Music Teachers Association Annual conference. During the initial stages when writing this piece, I was looking for ways to connect with the sound of this particular duo of instruments; something to depart from. I realized the saxophone was not a significant part of my life as a musician since, as a violin player, I grew up performing in classical orchestras and folk and tango bands. The saxophone never had a dominant role in these ensembles, if it had any at all. Thinking about the tango, I suddenly remembered a phenomenal album by Astor Piazzolla, my greatest influence as a teenager, that I hadn’t thought of in a while. The album, by Piazzolla (composition and bandoneon) and Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophone), was recorded in Italy in the 1970s and titled Summit (Reunión Cumbre). The mix of modern tango melodies with a jazz-influenced sound and improvisatory sections was my starting point for this work. The title of this piece, Soledad, translates to English as “solitude.” This is also the title of a nostalgic work by Piazzolla, which has a sequel on the album Summit as “Year of Solitude.” I found that this second version had a tone of resignation and assimilation. Piazzolla
Inspired by the poetry of Joy Harjo, this piece centers around creation stories and their central nature to indigenous identity. Much of native belief and collective knowledge stem from oral traditions and the lens they provide is core to our understanding of the world and the spirits that live with us. To give you form and breath seeks to channel portions of that understanding through the use of “ground” objects and manipulations of rhythm as manipulations of time. The piece acts as one of these stories, perhaps to a people already long forgotten. - Inti Logan Figgis-Vizueta
THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS: AMBEDO (2018) The concept for this piece comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of words invented by John Koenig that “aims to fill a hole in the [English] language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.” The title for this piece comes from the definition for “ambedo.” This piece was premiered by Liz Karney, McKayla Philips, Nick Martinez, and Lauren Molloy at the 2018 So Percussion Summer Institute Princeton PhD Concert, and is dedicated to them. Ambedo n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela. Read more of John Koenig’s beautiful definitions at dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com - Annika Socolofsky
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS (2015)
Annika Socolofsky Annika Socolofsky is a US composer and avant-folk vocalist. Her music stems from the inflections, gestures, and resonance of the human voice and is communicated through mediums ranging from orchestral works to unaccompanied folk ballads. Projects for the 2018 – 2019 season include new works for the Albany Symphony, So Percussion, Contemporaneous, Carnegie Mellon Contemporary Ensemble, Girlnoise, and Shepherdess. She is a 2019 Stone Composer Fellow for the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival for which she will be writing a new work for the Callisto Quartet.
From 2014 - 2017 I composed a 90-minute work, QUIXOTE, for four vocalizing percussionists, vocal trio, and actor. Inspired by Cervantes’ El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, and fascinated by the idea that one character’s reality is so at odds with everyone else’s, I decided to create a musical work that converts musical instruments into objects that are contrary to their true nature. To experiment with this idea, I composed They Might Be Giants, in which tuning forks are transformed into a kind of percussion mallet, and everyday found objects are “buzzed” with the vibrating tines of the forks, while the flute stays true to its sonic nature. The percussionists also vocalize throughout to give more dimension to the sound world. Perhaps when you require musical performer and musical sound to function in ways contrary to idiom, they become untrue somehow. Perhaps the counterpoint of true and untrue sounds creates a kind of sonic enchantment reflecting the world between reality and fiction that Cervantes creates. Most of the music in this study-piece found its way into the larger work, although it was quite developed and reconfigured. - Amy Beth Kirsten
As a composer, Annika has collaborated with artists such as the Rochester Philharmonic, Albany Symphony, Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Dogs of Desire, Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, Latitude 49, Emissary Quartet, Donald Sinta Quartet, Mobius Percussion, Music from Copland House, Parhelion Trio, sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, and shakuhachi grandmaster Riley Lee, among others. As a vocalist, she has performed as soloist with the Albany Symphony, Dogs of Desire, Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Tulsa Camerata, Eighth Blackbird, and composer-vocalist Anna Pidgorna. Her works, projects, and related research have been presented at Carnegie Hall, The Italian Society of Contemporary Music, American Music Festival, Northwestern New Music Institute, Strange Beautiful Music Detroit, Listening to Ladies, and the Princeton Sound Kitchen. Annika is a recipient of the Fromm Foundation Commission, Cortona Prize, and BMI Student Composer Award, and has been awarded fellowships to the Blackbird Creative Lab, Banff Centre for the Arts, Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Cultivate at Copland House, and the Brevard Music Center. Her research focuses on physiology in contemporary vocal music, using the music of Dolly Parton to create a pedagogical approach to composition that is inclusive of many vocal styles and techniques, evading the age-old false dichotomy of straight tone vs. bel canto vocal style. She is a doctoral candidate & fellow in composition at Princeton University. Annika holds an MFA in composition from Princeton University and an MA in composition the University of Michigan. She received her BFA in composition from Carnegie Mellon University. Her primary musical mentors have been Evan Chambers, Reza Vali, Kristin Kuster, Dan Trueman, Juri Seo, and Donnacha Dennehy. Additionally, Annika studied at the Schola Cantorum de Paris through the European American Musical Alliance. Annika plays a Norwegian hardanger d’amore fiddle made by Salve Håkedal. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey with her girlfriend Jane and their two Newfoundland dogs Riggs and Minnow.
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DISMAL NICHE PRESENTS: ELI KESZLER Friday, July 26, 2019 • 9:30 PM Firestone Baars Chapel 1306 East Walnut Street
Dismal Niche is honored to be invited to expand our programming this year to work with the Mizzou International Composers Festival in presenting multimedia artist and world-renowned percussionist Eli Keszler in the gorgeous, resonant Firestone Baars Chapel. From site-specific installations – one of which includes attaching piano wires to the Manhattan bridge to create a collaborative sound installation with the bridge itself -- to performing with the sounds of passing trains on rooftops, Keszler is an exciting composer whose work centers around ideas of “socio-spatiliaty”: space and built structures not only as a containing but also shaping the nature of human relationships, behavior and life chances. His compositions reflect a playful and wandering interaction with cityscapes and public spaces. Using drums and percussion as his primary medium, Keszler has profoundly illuminated the possibilities and complexities of this seemingly primal and rudimentary instrument. Neither romantically nostalgic nor pretentiously futuristic, his playing emphasizes a Zenlike focus on the present moment. Densely-layered accelerations of click and ticks mirror the millions of minute gestures and that coalesce into a busy city’s mass of vibrations. While Keszler’s work is complex and unabashedly “experimental,” his music does not feel dogmatically opposed to harmony or melody. Though certainly more rhythmically expansive than pop music, Keszler playfully uses pleasant and accessible tones and chords on his own terms, in a way that illustrates both stress and chaos of urban life but also the glimpses of natural beauty and joy to be found in our “civilized” world. Using advanced techniques and improvised responses to the way sound moves and feels within different spaces, Keszler uses familiar forms in wildly creative and unexpected ways to remind us that order and structures of the world are a product of human imagination: elastic, chaotic, beautiful, and constantly being reinvented. - Matthew Crook / Executive Director, Dismal Niche Arts
Eli Keszler Eli Keszler is a New York-based artist, composer, and percussionist. Keszler’s music, installations, and visual works have appeared at the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, MIT List Center, 67 Ludlow, Victoria & Albert museum, Sculpture Center, The Kitchen, South London Gallery, Hessel Museum, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, LUMA-Foundation, Barbican-St. Luke’s, Walker Art Center, LAX Art, and Greater New York at MOMA PS1. He has released solo records for Shelter Press, Empty Editions, ESP-Disk’, Pan and Rel records. As a composer Keszler has received commissions from the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, ICE Ensemble, Brooklyn String Orchestra, and So Percussion. Keszler works and collaborates with Oneohtrix Point Never, Laurel Halo, Rashad Becker, and David Grubbs amongst many others.
Dismal Niche Founded in 2013 in Columbia, Missouri, Dismal Niche began as a small-batch, artist-operated tape label and community arts network committed to facilitating and archiving the expression of the more independent, esoteric, and experimental accents of the local Columbia music and arts community. Since incorporating as a non-profit in 2015, the activities of the organization have largely revolved around the programming of the annual Columbia Experimental Music Festival. The festival, now heading into its fifth year, welcomes artists from across the U.S. and from around the world to Columbia for a weekend offering residents rare opportunities to experience world class presentations of innovative and unconventional music, art, and performance that would likely otherwise not occur in Columbia. Through our programming, we aim to facilitate immersive, interactive experiences that are both cognitively and viscerally challenging and restorative while allowing for freedom of subjective interpretation and enjoyment. We believe that community experiences with adventurous music and art can help stimulate critical and creative thought not only about the ways in which music and art can be seen, heard, felt, or performed, but also the ways in which public spaces can be used, transformed, or subverted and social relationships expanded and reimagined.
KHEMIA ENSEMBLE
NEGATIVE IMAGE (2017) Negative Image draws inspiration from a text by Uruguayan poet Idea Vilariño titled Ya no that describes a future that will no longer be after a breakup. Heredia’s setting of the poem was then used as inspiration for the short film by Herrera Pacheco that accompanies the musical work.
IDENTITY Saturday, July 27, 2019 • 11:00 AM Whitmore Recital Hall
NEOTERIC AIR (2016) Khemia Ensemble presents Identity, an exploration of both our individual and collective journeys to find our voice and purpose in today’s increasingly fractured world. The works featured on the program address social justice, mental illness, divorce, and jubilant catharsis--issues that are personal to us and continue to shape our identity.
Neoteric Air is part of a series of pieces based by Daniel Fawcett on the writings of Robert Fuller Murray (1863-1894). The vocal part utilizes the words of Murray’s poem “Poets.” Over the last year I became intrigued by the poetry of this American-born, Victorian poet. What drew me to his poetry is that while written in the mid to late 1800s, it still can still speak to us in a modern context. The text reads, “Children of earth are we, Lovers of land and sea, Of hill, Of brook, Of tree, Of earth are we.”
Negative Image (2017) ������������������������������������������������������ Carolina Heredia (b. 1981) Natali Herrera Pacheco, video Idea Vilariño, text Neoteric Air (2016)* ��������������������������������������������������������������Daniel Fawcett (b. 1991) Karakurenai (2007) ���������������������������������������������������������������������� Andy Akiho (b. 1979) Openwork, knotted object // Trellis in bloom // Recipe for lightning (2019). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . inti figgis-vizuetta (b. 1993) Interlude (2018) �������������������������������������������������������������������������Bret Bohman (b. 1982) los tiempos del alma (2009) ��������������������������������������������Patricia Martinez (b. 1973) I will learn to love a person (2013) ��������������������������������������Chris Cerrone (b. 1984) III. I will learn to love a person and then I will teach you and then we will know Constellations (2018)* �����������������������������������������������������Emma O’Halloran (b. 1985) * Khemia Ensemble 2019 Call for Scores Winner
Daniel Fawcett Daniel Fawcett is a composer, cellist, visual artist, and instrument builder from the United States. He is a graduate of New York University’s Steinhardt School with a M.M. degree in music composition where he studied privately with Joan La Barbara and Morton Subotnick. Prior to this, he completed his B.M. studies at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, studying with Stacy Garrop and Kyong Mee Choi. Much of his work deals with the interaction between performer and technology as part of a focused performance. Most recent festivals and residencies include the Splice Summer Institute, the International Toy Piano Festival Residency, the Nief-Norf Summer Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the New Music on the Bayou Summer Festival. He is also a co-founding member of TATAT Ensemble, a group dedicated to the incorporation of homemade and installation-based instruments in performance.
KARAKURENAI (2007) See page 16.
OPENWORK, KNOTTED OBJECT // TRELLIS IN BLOOM // RECIPE FOR LIGHTNING (2019) Openwork, knotted object is a module-based piece, written with a reminiscence of other following-the-leading type scores such as In C, Les Moutons de Panurge, and much of Julius Eastman’s work. The focus on a single, shared, and consecutively performed line integrates an ethic of whole over parts and of independent exploration and self-actualizing. Openwork refers to “any technique that produces decoration by creating holes, piercings, or gaps through a solid material…” The patterns for creating and knotting nets, used by Coastal civilizations [indigenous communities in Ecuador], is an example of Openwork. As an indigenous composer, this is an especially relevant and fruitful line of abstract, ancestrally-focused exploration. Trellis in bloom is a modular blueprint, bringing together two different scores into its macro-focused frameworks. It’s inspired by the large interwoven patterns of wood construction and taught floral growth in many of the gardens around DC. Recipe for lightning is a collage of gestures, sounds, and transformations recalling many close friends & artists.The piece is neither particularly flashy nor loud, rather it engages primarily with instability of gesture, free choices in voice-leading, and overlapping, differently tempered tunings. It is a living work, breathing and writhing and feeling stillness as it moves along in time and space.
INTERLUDE (2018) Bret Bohman’s Interlude features excerpts from his upcoming song cycle, which explores his experiences with mental illness and therapy.
LOS TIEMPOS DEL ALMA (2009) Patricia Martinez’s los tiempos del alma (the soul’s times) is a tiny light to illuminate the miniature portions of any instant. It is a poetic microscope to listen inside of each sound.
involves a degree of risk-taking, in that the resulting music is left somewhat vulnerable in terms of its expressive identity. She thinks any sound dimension is unequivocally connected to its stage/ performance aspect and internally constructed with interdisciplinary living organic entities as inner-materials. Recently highlights include the premiered of interdisciplinary diptych Short sleep, commissioned and produced at the Experimental Center of Colón Theater (CETC, Arg.) with four sold out performances and successful press reviews; the premiere of Beyond at the Palace of Fine Arts (México DF) by Iber-dance/Music; and The frozen little girl, a chamber opera commissioned and premiered during the 48th Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, that was selected to be fully produced at the Recoleta Cultural Center in the 2017 season with ten sold out performances. Patricia is currently a professor of Composition at the National University of Quilmes (UNQ); at the Superior Conservatory of Music from Buenos Aires City “Astor Piazzolla”; and external tutor at the Doctoral program in music composition at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM- Mx). She holds a doctoral and a master’s degree in Music Composition from Stanford University, where Brian Ferneyhough was her advisor. She studied at the Municipal Conservatory of BA, National University of Quilmes and completing the Annual Course in Computer Music (IRCAM). She taught composition at Stanford University, National Conservatory of Lima, University of Costa Rica, UNQ, and FNA.
I WILL LEARN TO LOVE A PERSON: III. I WILL LEARN TO LOVE A PERSON AND THEN I WILL TEACH YOU AND THEN WE WILL KNOW (2013) In setting out to write my first large vocal piece since completing my opera Invisible Cities in 2011, I wanted to work with a different kind of text from Italo Calvino’s stylized, aphoristic prose. I hoped to find something more immediate that spoke directly to my life: that of an overeducated 29-year-old Millennial—having grown up suburban, overpraised, with the Internet a constant presence. While those circumstances are at face value unremarkable, I felt that new classical music had not yet addressed the Millennial condition in a meaningful way. It seems at times that “contemporary music” is so intently backwards-looking that it misses what is truly contemporary. Around this time, I read a fantastic essay by the poet Jennifer Moore, “‘No discernible emotion and no discernible lack of emotion’: On Tao Lin.” She discusses Lin’s poetry and the “New Sincerity” movement of which he is considered part. New Sincerity poetry is — simply-defined — autobiographical, direct, emotional, stripped down, and self-doubting.
Patricia Martinez Winner of the composition life grant from Buenos Aires City Government and The American House Prize, Patricia Martinez is a prominent Spanish/Argentinean active composer, interdisciplinary artist and performer based in Buenos Aires. Her works has emerged, in part, from an experimental process of “stripping-down,” which
What I discovered in Tao Lin’s poetry fit perfectly into my compositional style. The thematic links between the poems in his book Cognitive Behavioral Therapy allowed me to create a cycle of songs that are similarly connected. The simplicity of the texts also gave me the freedom to try many compositional strategies: sometimes supporting the subject matter with the music, at other times playing against them to highlight certain ambiguities. In writing these pieces, my hope is to create a work that reflects the strange and beautiful experience of growing up at the turn of the century—and that will continue to have meaning after that moment passes. - Chris Cerrone
CONSTELLATIONS (2018) Emma O’Halloran’s Constellations carries a personal significance: “As a largely self-taught female composer, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on my identity in relation to a tradition of music produced mostly by white male composers. Constellations draws inspiration from a National Geographic article focusing on the discovery that handprints in ancient cave art most often belonged to women. This piece is about finding your voice and making the art that you want to make.”
Christopher Cerrone Christopher Cerrone is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. In the 2018–19 season, Cerrone wrote a major new orchestral work with electronics for the LA Phil, led by Roderick Cox. Other commissions include a new sextet co-commissioned by Latitude 49, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and Sentieri selvaggi; and a new concerto for Third Coast Percussion, co-commissioned by the Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony and the Britt Festival. Cerrone also orchestrates his opera All Wounds Bleed for Chicago Fringe Opera, curates a series, “Reiterations,” for the Metropolis Ensemble, holds residencies at Chatterbird and Baylor University, and was the 2018 Conducting/Composition Fellow at the Britt Festival. An allCerrone disc recorded by Christopher Rountree and wildUp will be released on New Amsterdam Records in August 2019, and excerpts from his new opera, In a Grove (libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann), will be heard at the Morgan Library in New York in March 2019. Recent highlights include Breaks and Breaks, an acclaimed violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony, led by Peter Oundjian; a Miller Theatre Composer Portrait performed by Third Coast Percussion; Will There Be Singing, for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for Jeffrey Kahane’s final concert as LACO Music Director; Can’t and Won’t, commissioned by the Calder Quartet by the LA Phil, and new works for artists including Tim Munro, Eighth Blackbird, Vicky Chow, and Rachel Lee Priday. Cerrone’s opera Invisible Cities, based on Italo Calvino’s landmark novel, was praised by The Los Angeles Times as “A delicate and beautiful opera…[which] could be, and should be, done anywhere.” Invisible Cities received its fully-staged world premiere in a wildly popular production by The Industry, directed by Yuval Sharon in Los Angeles’ Union Station. Both the film and opera are available as CDs, DVDs, and digital downloads. Christopher Cerrone holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. He is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York and will join the composition faculty of the Peabody Conservatory for 2019–2020.
Emma O’Halloran Irish composer and doctoral candidate Emma O’Halloran is crafting a career centered around representation: creating music that makes any listener feel seen. Freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music, she has written for folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables, laptop orchestra, symphony orchestra, film, and theatre. For her efforts, O’Halloran has been praised by I Care If You Listen editor-in-chief Amanda Cook for writing “some of the most unencumbered, authentic, and joyful music that I have heard in recent years,” and has won numerous competitions, including National Sawdust’s inaugural Hildegard competition and the Next Generation award from Beth Morrison Projects. As one who came to composition later in her early twenties in part because of her own lack of exposure to female composers, O’Halloran’s work often revolves around questions of representation: who is able to draw inspiration from mentors, creators, or even fictional characters that look, dream, and think like them? More importantly, who isn’t? She currently answers this question through writing with unabashed pop music influences, such as sampling the Spice Girls in an instrumental piece or creating multi-dimensional female characters in an opera. Outside of music, many recognize her as an outspoken advocate for gender equality in new music, and is particularly known as a founding creator of the #HearAllComposers campaign, which received coverage from The New Yorker, VAN Magazine, and other classical outlets. O’Halloran is a founding member of the Kinds of Kings collective, a group of six composers described by The New Yorker as “distinguished young creators who work in diverse styles.” As part of Kinds of Kings, she not only produces immersive and inclusive work, but is developing a mentorship infrastructure for composers in underheard and underrepresented demographics. Raised in Athlone, Ireland, Emma O’Halloran spends her time between New Jersey and New York City. Currently pursuing a PhD at Princeton University, additional education comes from the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the National University of Ireland Maynooth.
ALARM WILL SOUND
FAMILIAR PUNCHLINES (2019)
EIGHT WORLD PREMIERES Saturday, July 27, 2018 • 7:30 PM Missouri Theatre Works are listed in alphabetical order by the composer’s last name. The performance order will be provided the evening of the performance.
Self-quotation and self-parody run rampant in Familiar Punchlines. Leading up to its composition, I had written a handful of pieces that took themselves very seriously. In Familiar Punchlines, I borrowed materials from these recent “serious” pieces, and reimagined how these materials would play out in comic situations. Complex harmonies are stripped down to triads in real time, glissandi infect every material of the piece, the oboe repeatedly attempts to find an appropriate accompaniment for its solo. The comic nature of the piece gave me the liberty to stretch motives to extremes, and pull the rug out from under gestures that seemed too stable. - Theo Chandler
There will be one 15-minute intermission.
Familiar Punchlines (2019) ���������������������������������������������� Theo Chandler (b. 1992) braiding on golden stoops (2019) ������������������������������� inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993) Fever Dream (2019) �������������������������������������������������������������Charles Halka (b. 1982) Hexactinellida (2019) ����������������������������������������������Chelsea Komschlies (b. 1991) Haworthia (2019) ���������������������������������������������������������������Aaron Mencher (b. 1996) Dust (2019) �������������������������������������������������������������������������� Nicole Murphy (b. 1983) dogwhistling (2019) ���������������������������������������������������������������Peter S. Shin (b. 1991) A Curation of Finds (2019) ������������������������������������������������� Kristina Wolfe (b. 1984)
All works performed tonight are world premieres composed for Alarm Will Sound and the Mizzou International Composers Festival.
Theo Chandler Theo Chandler is a Houston-based composer, currently pursuing his Doctorate of Musical Arts at the Rice University Shepherd School of Music. Chandler is the recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Graduate Music Award from the Presser Foundation, and a Morton Gould Award from ASCAP. He was selected as the winner of Juilliard’s Orchestra Competition, Juilliard’s Gena Raps Competition, the New Juilliard Ensemble Competition, the Maryland Wind Festival Call for Scores, and was runner up for the RED NOTE New Music Festival Chamber Music Competition. Chandler has received commissions from the New York Youth Symphony First Music Program, Tanglewood Music Center, Les Délices, Golden West Winds, Amir Eldan, Alexa Still, and others. During the summer, Chandler has been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, Copland House CULTIVATE, and the Aspen Music Festival, and was selected for an I-Park Composer + Musicians Collaborative Residency with Akropolis Reed Quintet. He has been the Young Artist Composer for Da Camera, Emerging Composer Fellow for Musiqa, the Composer in Residence for Les Délices, and the Young Composer in Residence for the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings. In the summer of 2019 he will be the Composer in Residence for the Maryland Wind Festival, and a fellow at the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme and the Mizzou International Composers Festival. Chandler received his previous degrees from The Juilliard School and Oberlin Conservatory. His composition teachers include Karim Al-Zand, Anthony Brandt, Melinda Wagner, Samuel Adler, Steven Stucky, Lewis Nielson, and Dan Tacke.
BRAIDING ON GOLDEN STOOPS (2019)
FEVER DREAM (2019)
Braiding on golden stoops refers to the tension between the warm feeling of nostalgia and the danger of hyper-visibility during urban summers. Growing up as the person of color with the lightest skin in my community, I was intensely aware of my responsibilities in mitigating potentially violent experiences with the police and figures of authority. The duality of sheer joy and freedom within highly regulated, policed environments left a vivid impression I both remember and continue to witness. The title comes from Danez Smith’s (they/them) poem summer, somewhere.
I was always skeptical of claims that a work of art came to its creator in a dream. Shortly after I found out I’d be writing a piece for Alarm Will Sound, I came down with probably the worst cold I’ve ever had. It was a stubborn virus that lingered in full force for more than three weeks, and I spent a significant portion of that time in bed with a fever. It would have been nice if Fever Dream had come to me clearly as a fully-developed work of music, but the dreams I had while sweating and coughing through this monster didn’t feature a fully-developed anything. Images and events swirled together in a nonsensical haze, and I was left in a constant state of restlessness. During most of the night, I never even really knew whether I was asleep or awake. There were a few consistencies, however. My constant drifts in and out of sleep were dominated by an overwhelming and oppressive feeling I was trapped in some kind of heavy, viscous ooze that minimized my every movement. The more I struggled, the more it weighted me down. When that feeling would finally subside (after what seemed to be the entire night), I would surface in a rush hour of unrelated images that fluttered by to the sound and feeling of very rapid pulsing. The chaos always ended in a train wreck-like catastrophe that jolted me awake, the fever temporarily lifting but the pulsing still persisting, like some kind of post-jackhammering phantom tremor. It was during those waking (“waking”) moments I tried in vain to piece together any specific recollection of the bewildering and disorienting night.
- inti figgis-vizueta
- Charles Halka
inti figgis-vizueta inti figgis-vizueta (she/they) is a queer Andinx experimental composer based in Brooklyn, NY. They write identity-focused musics, engaging personal history with collective memory. inti works to create transparent, self-contained musical processes through which melodic and timbreal interaction blooms and consumes itself. inti studied with Felipe Lara. inti has received numerous awards, most recently the 2019 Hildegard Competition from National Sawdust, the 2019 Underwood New Music Readings featuring the American Composer’s Orchestra, and the 2019 Mizzou International Composer’s Festival featuring Alarm Will Sound. They’ve won calls for scores for organizations & festivals such as West Cork Chamber Music Festival, Verdant Vibes, N/A Ensemble, UnTwelve, Baltimore Choral Arts, and 113 Collective. Their music has also been played by ensembles such as loadbang, PUBLIQuartet, Hypercube, RTE Contempo String Quartet, and Balance Campaign as well as the Shenandoah Valley Youth Orchestra, and SJSU Wind Ensemble. They were featured at the New Music Gathering as a panelist in 2017 and as a featured composer in 2018 as well as at the New Latin Wave Festival 2018, curated by Angélica Negrón. inti actively freelances with recent commissions including clarinetist Gleb Kanasevich, trumpeter Kate Amrine, countertenor Luke Paulino, and the duo Mazumal (Felicia Chen & Olivia J. Harris). When not composing, inti works as the Director of Inclusion at the Boulanger Initiative and as a curator for Score Follower.
Charles Halka Charles Halka writes acoustic and electronic music for concert, dance, and opera, and his works are often inspired by language, visual imagery, movement, and human experience. His music has been performed in North America, Europe, Asia, and Brazil by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra led by Marin Alsop, Mivos Quartet, the Mexican National Symphony Orchestra, counter)induction, Callithumpian Consort, Volti, and ÓNIX Ensamble, among others, and at venues and events such as The Kennedy Center, Carnegie
Hall, ISCM World Music Days, the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, and the Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong. As a 2008-09 U.S. Fulbright grantee, he spent a year in Vilnius, Lithuania researching Lithuanian music and writing an opera in collaboration with director and librettist Marija Simona Šimulynaitė. Among Halka’s recent honors are a Barlow Endowment General Commission (2019) and the Copland House Residency Award (2015), and he was in residence with Houston’s critically acclaimed Musiqa (2014-15) and the Foundation for Modern Music (2011-14). In addition, he completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the M.K. Sarbievijaus Cultural Center in Kražiai, Lithuania, where he wrote a chamber opera, And Jill Came Tumbling After (libretto by John Grimmett) for the Baltic Chamber Opera Theater that was selected for Fort Worth Opera’s 2015 Frontiers showcase. Imaginary Spaces, his dance and percussion project in collaboration with Houston dance company Frame Dance Productions, was awarded support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Halka is Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at Western Washington University. He was previously on faculty at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Stephen F. Austin State University, and has taught courses at Rice University, The Peabody Conservatory, and the University of Houston.
HEXACTINELLIDA (2019) Hexactinellida: a class of ancient, unusual deep sea sponges whose skeletons are composed of a complex lattice of six-pointed spicules made of silica, earning them the name “glass sponges.” Lacking an epidermis like other sponges, hexactinellids are wrapped in a covering of multinucleate cytoplasm which can send electrical impulses through their glass skeletons better than any fiber optics humans have created. In contrast to this lightning-fast reaction time is their extreme longevity; one currently living specimen is estimated to be 15,000 years old. The music evokes glass sponges’ structure: hard, densely-packed, buzzing lattices lit up by pulses of electricity; their texture, crunchy and spiky rather than smooth and crystalline; and their bodily shapes, which simultaneously resemble ultra-futuristic algorithmic architecture and Dr. Seussian plants. - Chelsea Komschlies
Chelsea Komschlies Chelsea Komschlies’ music springs from the spontaneous subconscious mental imagery and associations that surround some chosen thing or idea, real or imaginary. She combines musical elements from across time and tradition, from ancient to modern and from the traditional to the strange, to capture the essence of the source object and to trigger the same associations and imagery in her listeners. Ms. Komschlies recently completed an Artist Diploma at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with David Ludwig and Richard Danielpour and was awarded the Alfredo Casella Award for composition. Her music has been performed in ten countries around the globe, and she has received fellowships at programs such as the Fontainebleau School where Nadia Boulanger once taught, Copland House’s CULTIVATE, the Aspen Music Festival, and a number of other festivals in the U.S. and abroad. Collaborators include the Fifth House Ensemble, Choral Arts Philadelphia, the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, and others. Her recent projects include an oratorio premiered in the 2019 Bach Festival of Philadelphia, a piece for organ, harpsichord, and orchestra, premiered by the Curtis Institute, as well as an extended reality collaboration with game design and software engineers using the Microsoft Hololens. Chelsea will begin her PhD at McGill University this coming fall.
HAWORTHIA (2019)
DUST (2019)
Last year, my partner convinced me to buy some house plants to spruce up my drab apartment. This piece is titled after the genus of one of the small plants that has since lived on my windowsill for the last year. I was inspired by the beautiful geometry of the leaves that unfurl from the center of the plant in neat spirals. Similarly, I took small bits of musical material that then spiral out throughout the piece.
Dust takes inspiration from an excerpt of “The Captain of the Men of Death” by Australian writer Richard James Allen (The Short Story of You and I, 2019). This excerpt describes the erratic undoing of carefully-constructed lives that can occur when experiencing a serious illness. Allen describes the way in which “everything that was so deftly woven... becomes messy, unjoined, disconnected, gaps appear everywhere with no rhymes or reasons”. The form of Dust reflects the structure and pacing of the poem, as the deconstruction of the initial ideas lead to the “hideous cacophony and dreadful silence of before and after we humans pushed our cloven hooves into this dust.”
- Aaron Mencher
- Nicole Murphy
Aaron Mencher Aaron Mencher writes “sophisticated and compelling” (Boston New Music Initiative) contemporary classical music, film scores, and incidental music. This fall, clarinetist Wesley Warnhoff will be premiering Monologues for clarinet and orchestra with the University of Missouri Philharmonic. He recently worked with the St. Louis Symphony as they workshopped and premiered his piece Antrios. Additionally, Aaron has received recognition from organizations such as ASCAP, the American Modern Ensemble, the Boston New Music Initiative, NAfME, the European-American Musical Alliance, the American Prize, and the Third Millennium Ensemble. He has worked with a variety of ensembles including the St. Louis Symphony, Deviant Septet, Third Coast Percussion, International Counterpoint, the All-National Concert Band, Drax, clarinetist Wesley Warnhoff, cellists Bjorn Ranheim and Dave Eggar, and many others. He has also collaborated on a variety of dramatic projects. Aaron scored a recent documentary directed by Katie Schnell, and the short film Maggephah directed by Atlanta-based filmmaker Brad McGaughey. Previously, he worked at the Dancing Goat Theater as the composer and sound designer for many shows including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Anne of Green Gables, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest. Aaron is currently attending the Peabody Conservatory studying with Oscar Bettison. Previous teachers include Carolina Heredia, Yoshiaki Onishi, and Stefan Freund.
Nicole Murphy Nicole Murphy’s music has been described as “exquisite and sensitive” (Sydney Morning Herald,) “strong and compelling” (Loudmouth) and “full of exhilarating tension” (Arts Knoxville.) She has received commissioned from eminent arts organisations including the Australian Ballet, the Royal Academy of Dance, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Experiments in Opera/Symphony Space, Orchestra Victoria, Wild Rumpus, Chamber Sounds, and the Definiens Project. Nicole is the recipient of various awards, including the Australia Ensemble’s Layton Composer Fellowship, the Ensemble Offspring Noisy Women commission, ICEBERG International Call for Scores, Nief Norf International Call for Scores, the MAFB International Commissioning Prize, and the Theodore Front International Orchestral Prize. Her music has been programmed at numerous festivals, including the Intimacy of Creativity, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Dallas Festival of Modern Music, the Nief Norf Festival, the Risuonanze Festival, and the Vox Feminae Festival. Nicole holds a PhD from the University of Queensland and teaches composition at the Queensland Conservatorium. She is the Composer-in-Residence at the Queensland Academies: Creative Industries Campus.
DOGWHISTLING (2019)
A CURATION OF FINDS (2019)
This is the score to militiachildren, a film in the works by Scott Lyman based on the 2017 white nationalist uprising in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. I was particularly moved by video footage of a group of interfaith leaders linked arm to arm singing “This Little Light o’ Mine” which—for a brief moment of peaceful counterprotest—drowned out the hateful speech of the alt-right.
A Curation of Finds is a work for Alarm Will Sound about the acoustics of the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum— a prehistoric subterranean ‘labyrinth’ in Malta in use between 4000 BCE and 2500 BCE. The Hypogeum has unique and interesting acoustics, and the aim of this piece is to present the resonances and psychoacoustics of the site as musical material. The musical material is the immersive resonance produced by the site as heard in different chambers of the Hypogeum from alternating listener perspectives. Ambisonic5 “VR” impulse response measurements were taken during the field work and the variations in the sound field informed orchestration and structural decisions in the piece.
Recording: Lomax, John A, Ruby T Lomax, and Doris McMurray. This Little Light o’ Mine. near Huntsville, Texas, 1939. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress. - Peter S. Shin
I chose to orchestrate impulse responses because impulse responses do not technically “sound,” but these measurements— when treated as sounds—represent the shadows of past and future sounds. In this work, they represent sonic architecture and the acoustic qualities of the Hypogeum in a way that does not make assumptions regarding the types of sounds that may have occurred there. I imagine the result to be a way of inviting the listener into space and to encourage the enjoyment of listening to aural architecture. - Kristina Wolfe
Peter S. Shin Peter S. Shin is a composer whose music navigates issues of national belonging, the co-opting and intermingling of disparate musical vernaculars, and the liminality between the two halves of his second-generation Korean-American identity. The New York Times described him as “a composer to watch” and his music “entirely fresh and personal” following his premiere at Carnegie Hall. Peter’s music has been additionally performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall through the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Noon to Midnight” series, Chicago’s Symphony Center through the Civic Orchestra New Music Workshop, and the Cabrillo Festival commissioned by John Adams and Deborah O’Grady, among others. Current projects include a work for Roomful of Teeth commissioned by the American Composers Forum premiering in August, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra for the “20 for 2020” commissioning project, and the Society of Composers, Inc. national conference. Additional honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Scholarship, Fulbright Research Grant, Tanglewood Music Center Fellowship, Aspen Music Festival Fellowship, Berkeley Symphony fellowship, ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, New York Youth Symphony “First Music” Commission, Civic Orchestra of Chicago New Music Workshop with coachings by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra International Call for Scores, and SCI/ASCAP Commission Competition in the Graduate Division, among others. A native of Kansas City, Missouri and a graduate of the University of Michigan (BM) and the University of Southern California (MM), Peter is currently pursuing a Master of Musical Arts at the Yale School of Music.
Kristina Wolfe Kristina Wolfe is currently a composer and Marie SkłodowskaCurie scholar currently working in sound archaeology exhibition and composition at the University of Huddersfield. Her work has been performed at the MATA, Bang-On-A-Can, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festivals. She currently spends her leisure time hiking, fieldwalking, and field recording. In doing so, she hopes to gain a deep respect for history, to capture the resonance of objects from the past, and to develop an understanding of time. She is a Deep Listening certificate holder and an active new music community member.
MU SCHOOL OF MUSIC The University of Missouri School of Music prepares students to make meaningful contributions in the world as performers, composers, teachers, and scholars. Its notable alumni include Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter Sheryl Crow, Canadian Brass founder Eugene Watts, and opera stars Ryan MacPherson and Caroline Worra as well as members of major orchestras, arts administrators, and leaders in the field of music education. The School of Music offers professionally oriented bachelor’s and master’s degrees in performance (brass, percussion, piano, strings, voice, and woodwinds), composition, music education, music history, and music theory. Master’s degrees are also available in conducting (choral, orchestral, and wind ensemble), collaborative piano, and piano pedagogy, and the Ph.D. is offered in music education. Undergraduate music majors can further enrich their studies by pursuing a certificate in jazz studies and a graduate certificate in jazz studies is available either as an add-on or freestanding credential. The School of Music also offers the Bachelor of Arts in music, a degree program attracting numerous double majors, students who combine study in music and another field, drawing from the numerous academic options available on the Mizzou campus. Major ensembles include the University Philharmonic, Wind Ensemble, Symphonic Band, University Band, Marching Mizzou, Concert Jazz Band, University Singers, Concert Chorale, Women’s Chorale, Men’s Chorale, Choral Union, and Show-Me Opera, and these are augmented by numerous chamber and studio ensembles. The Mizzou New Music Initiative brings together a full-scholarship
undergraduate composition program; a graduate-assistantshipbased new music ensemble, serving as a laboratory for composition students; a major summer festival for composers; and the Creating Original Music Project (COMP), an outreach program directed at composers in grades K-12. Over 250 music majors and numerous music minors enjoy extensive interaction with the School of Music’s distinguished faculty, comprising 39 full-time and 10 part-time members. Hundreds of non-music majors also participate in School of Music activities—everything from courses such as “Jazz, Pop, and Rock” to Marching Mizzou. The School of Music is also home to several community programs housed within Community Music @ Mizzou: private lesson opportunities, Missouri String Project, Experiencing Piano, Esterhazy Chamber Music Seminar, and several options for community ensembles. A strong community presence is also maintained with a dedicated radio hour on Classical 90.5, KMUC – the region’s only classical music station. For more information, visit music.missouri.edu.
The programs of the Mizzou New Music Initiative have been made possible through the generous support of the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation.
MISSOURI THEATRE Robert Wells, Manager Chris Cullen, Technical Director
SINQUEFIELD CHARITABLE FOUNDATION Dr. Jeanne and Mr. Rex Sinquefield, Founders
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI SCHOOL OF MUSIC Julia Gaines, Director, School of Music Holly Tenute, Assistant to the Director Nathan Martin, Fiscal Officer and Office Manager Brooke Danielsen, Publicity and Marketing Coordinator, Coordinator of Large Instrumental Ensembles
Eddy Bickford, Assistant Technical Director Josh Reid, Front of House Coordinator Madeline Stanley, Design Coordinator
SLAY AND ASSOCIATES, INC. Laura Slay Dean Minderman Julie Lally
Tammy McNiel, Website Designer Susan Worstell, Student Support and Facilities
THANK YOU!
Lucy Urlacher, Piano Technician
Dr. Jeanne and Mr. Rex Sinquefield
Ben Harting, Admissions Coordinator
Sinquefield Charitable Foundation Slay & Associates, Inc.
MIZZOU INTERNATIONAL COMPOSERS FESTIVAL
LinderVox Sound and Entertainment
Stefan Freund, Artistic Director
Odyssey Chamber Music
Jacob Gotlib, Managing Director
Missouri Symphony Society
Carolina Heredia, Assistant Director
Uprise Bakery
Bret Bohman, Assistant Director
Café Berlin
Robert D. Boullion, Recording Engineer
Dismal Niche
Dale Lloyd, Photographer
Matthew Crook
Mikkel Christensen, Production Assistant
Dr. Bruce Gordon
Daniel Vega, Production Assistant Douglas Osmun, Assistant
Graphic design and layout by:
Brianna Trainor, Percussion Coordinator
RYE-JOL