Kyle Bruckmann, oboe
Jonathan La a, percussion
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
7:30 pm
Recital Hall
Tótem I, Camino sobre la tierra (2019)
Wilfrido Terrazas (b. 1974)
Tre Danze (1959)
I.
II. Lento, liberamente
III. Presto
a poet you must become (2023)
Wilhelm Killmayer (1927–2017)
Dana Reason (b. 1978)
Grace Coberly (b. 1999) earthworms, following heavy rain (2020)
Laboryinth (2023)
Agrestic Landscape (Birds at Dawn) (2021)
Kyle Bruckmann (b. 1971)
Nailah Nombeko (b. 1976)
Du Yun (b. 1977) Ignition from Angel’s Bone (2015)
PROGRAM NOTES
Terrazas: Tótem I, Camino sobre la tierra
Wilfrido Terrazas has been active since the early 1990s as a flutist, improviser, composer, and educator exploring the borderlands between improvisation, musical notation, and collective creation. His music making is heavily influenced by many traditions, notably experimentalist practices from Latin America, the US, and Europe, such as African American creative music and jazz, European free improvisation, sound-based approaches to composition, and the emergence of collective approaches to musical/sound creation in Latin America in the early 21st century. It is also robustly informed by folk traditions and Indigenous aesthetics and ethics from his native Mexico, and by many traditions of wind instrument performance from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and beyond. But he cites perhaps the most important influence as being his life “as a borderlander, as a fronterizo. I grew up in Ensenada, Mexico, and spent most of my formative years coming and going across the Tijuana - San Diego border, slowly learning how to make apparent opposites come together and how to navigate through hybrid cultures.” He has performed over 400 world premieres, composed over 80 works, and recorded more than 50 albums, eight of them as a soloist or leader. He is currently associate professor of music at the University of California San Diego, where he has worked since 2017.
Note by the composer
Tótem I, Camino sobre la tierra is an essay in composition-improvisation for an oboe and percussion duo. It is a part of my seven-composition cycle The Torres Cycle (2014–2021), which celebrates and honors the presence of the Cardinal Directions in human cultures, and it is dedicated to Below.
—adapted from wilfridoterrazas.com
Killmayer: Tre Danze
The individual note and its melodic power lie at the core of Wilhelm Killmayer’s aesthetics. Born in Munich, he received regular piano tuition from the age of six. He studied conducting and composition at Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen’s Musikseminar in Munich (1945–1951). Alongside courses in musicology given by Rudolf von Ficker and Walter Riezler, Killmayer simultaneously undertook private studies with Carl Orff (1951–1953) and subsequently entered his master class at the Staatliche Musikhochschule in Munich (1953/54). From 1955, Killmayer taught music theory and counterpoint at the Trappsches Konservatorium in Munich and
PROGRAM NOTES
was employed by the Bavarian State Opera as ballet conductor between 1961 and 1964. After two scholarship sojourns in Rome in the Villa Massimo (1958 and 1965/66), Killmayer became a freelance composer and settled in Frankfurt am Main in 1968. He was appointed as professor of composition at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Munich in 1973. From becoming emeritus professor in 1992 to his death in 2017 in Starnberg, Killmayer divided his time between Munich and Lake Chiemsee.
—adapted from schott-music.com
Reason: a poet you must become
Dana Reason is a composer, improvisor, keyboardist, sound artist, producer and researcher, with a PhD in critical studies and experimental practices from the University of California, San Diego. Her focus is on performance, improvisation, composition, scoring, and research in new and emergent musical fields. As a performing artist working at the intersections of twentieth and twenty-first century musical genres and intermedia practices, she moves easily between genres encompassing a dynamic stylistic range and repertoire. She has been featured on more than 17 commercially released recordings, including as a member of The Space Between Trio with American electronic arts pioneer, Pauline Oliveros. She currently lives in Oregon, where she holds the position of assistant professor of contemporary music, School of Arts and Communication, at Oregon State University.
Note by the composer
A poet you must become encapsulates quantum time, space, and sound. Jittery phonons; a halted linear universe; an electric overdrive. Tracing displaced remembrances and the immediacy of rupture. Is everything Quantum?
An action, a feeling, a memory, a fragmented charge: the empath’s gait. Sound and space become object. Viewer becomes viewed. Guarded and habituated reactions collapse, becoming fragments of poetry crackling.
Throughout the work, human and environment act as sonic portraits. The field recording captures the rupture and emancipation of the lived experience amongst its resident distortions and multiple realities. Spheres of tensions—the human, the organic, the synthetic, and the sublime— intermingle, teasing out the shadows within the sonic environment, birthing an augmented replication of ourselves.
PROGRAM NOTES
In composing this piece, I studied the ornamentation and embellishments of the works by Couperin; musica secreta (the secret ensemble of female musicians and the nuns of Ferrara, research by Laurie Stras); and manuscripts from Edward Paston (d. 1630), a manuscript collector and lutist (as well as an associate of William Byrd (research by Philip Brett). Additionally, I consulted one of my long-term references, “Contemporary Notation for the Shakuhachi” from The Perspectives of New Music by Jeffrey Lependorf Vol. 27, No. 2 Summer 1989. The Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music by F. Schuyler Mathews, and literary works by Etel Adnan Journey to Mount Tamalpais, and Joan Didion Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, served as additional literary and psychological influences.
Some of the ways in which I hear the performance of this work draws from techniques and use of breath and timbral resonances and production from the Honkyoku school of shakuhachi performance, introduced to me many years ago by my longtime friend, and musical collaborator, the Bay Area shakuhachi performer, Philip Gelb (recorded as: The Space Between Trio with Pauline Oliveros, Philip Gelb and myself). The main piece Koku (The Empty Sky) is an artifact and inspiration in the work, as is Philip Gelb’s performance practice.
The raw and manipulated field recordings come from collecting non-pristine, selfie-like sound recordings of bird songs (western tanager, northern flicker, American robin, and some unidentified) from a small oak grove outside my home in Corvallis, Oregon, during the summer of 2023. Field recordings, captured on my iPhone, include my fascination with architecture’s spatial and social poetics, and include spontaneous vocalizations from various visits to buildings and museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, throughout the summer and fall of 2022, including: the Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Great Dome, Media Lab, and MIT Museum; The Mount, Edith Warton’s House; The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCa); and Walden Pond State Reservation.
—adapted from danareason.com
Coberly: earthworms, following heavy rain
Grace Coberly is a composer, singer, and educator with a passion for human connection. They write linguistic-focused music that plays with dialogue, phonetics, and musical vernacular. Above all, they seek to create musical experiences that are accessible to audiences of any background.
PROGRAM NOTES
Coberly’s work has been performed across the United States and Europe. They have received commissions from Chicago Fringe Opera, the Latin School of Chicago, Heritage Chorale (Oak Park, Illinois), All Saints Episcopal Church (Worcester, Massachusetts), St. Paul’s Episcopal Church (Natick, Massachusetts), Concord Singers (Summit, New Jersey), and the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC. Recent honors include being named a finalist for the American Prize in Composition, a finalist in the ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Awards Competition (2022), a performance winner of the EXTENSITY Commission (2022), and a runner-up in the Women's Sacred Music Project Commission Competition (2020).
An alum of Choral Arts Initiative’s PREMIERE|Project Festival, Connecticut Summerfest, and Wildflower Composers Festival, Coberly completed their undergraduate studies in music and linguistics at Haverford College. They are now working towards a master’s degree in music education at George Mason University, where they recently completed their Orff Schulwerk certification. Coberly teaches elementary music in Massachusetts. They sing with Lilith Vocal Ensemble and the Boston Cecilia. When not making music, they enjoy doing yoga, roasting vegetables, and playing with their cat.
Note by the composer
In the moments after a summer rainstorm, when the ground is still waterlogged and the air still wet, millions of earthworms emerge from the earth. Their surfacing is not cowardly; worms breath through their skin using moisture and therefore cannot drown. Instead, they dream of rain, seek it out. For once, the dampness of the surface is enough to let them breath aboveground. The earthworms emerge, emancipated. This piece documents their migration.
—gracecoberly.com
Bruckmann: Laboryinth
Laboryinth is another of many works I’ve written from the vantage point of a composer/performer: they are rickety (and often rather obsessive) structures not so much to be played as to catalyze playing. The notated components frame improvisation but also require an improvisational mindset in their reading. I suppose in one sense I’m an old-fashioned Modernist: I have zero intention of “expressing myself” or “telling a story” through these abstractions. But in another sense, I wouldn’t be composing
PROGRAM NOTES
at all were it not for the seminal inspiration of various Black American experimentalist traditions (think Free Jazz, Creative Music, and also, this time around, minimal techno) wherein the full, collective engagement of individual creative voices is the whole point. Above all, I aim to set in motion experiences of playful discovery and sensory (over)stimulation for performers and listeners simultaneously.
(Incidentally, this piece’s electronic component was created with our very own Buchla 200/200e, a vintage treasure of an analog synthesizer hiding in plain sight in Owen 223. Students: if you’re intrigued, consider signing up for MCOM 029 at University of the Pacific next fall!)
—Kyle Bruckmann
Nombeko: Agrestic Landscape (Birds at Dawn)
Nailah Nombeko is a native New Yorker. Her music has been performed all over the US in such venues as Symphony Space, Columbia University, The University of Kansas, The University of Kentucky, The International Double Reed Conference at the University of Colorado, National Sawdust, The Annapolis Opera and The Portland Opera. Internationally her music was performed in the Netherlands with soprano Marijke Groenendaal and in England at the Royal Northern College of Music.
Nombeko has received commissions from the Maryland Opera Studio, the Ethel Quartet, Intersection Music to compose a new work for oboist Jared Hauser, Ex-Aequo’s Changing the Canon project, and the Wollman-BreaBaitel Trio for their Becoming America project.
In 2022 Nombeko was among ten composers selected to participate in the National Association of Teachers of Singing composer mentor/mentee program. Her most recent projects include writing a string quartet for the Overlook Quartet in honor of the life of Mary Eliza Mahoney. In the summer of 2023 her new work entitled Fortitude, about the life of Harriet Tubman with texts by Alicia Haymer, was premiered at the Skaneateles Music Festival with soprano Kearstin Piper Brown. She is a member of the African American Art Song Alliance, Vox Novus, and the New York Women Composers.
—nailahnombeko.muscianeo.com
PROGRAM NOTES
Yun: Ignition from Angel’s Bone
Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, who works at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, musical theater, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise.
Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone, won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 2017; in 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow; and in 2019 she was nominated for a Grammy Award in Best Classical Composition. Known as chameleonic in her protean artistic outputs, Yun’s works are championed by some of today’s finest performing artists, ensembles, orchestras, museums, and organizations around the world. Her albums Angel’s Bone and Dinosaur Scar were named in the New Yorker’s list of Top 10 Albums of the Year in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
An alumna of Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Oberlin College (BM), and Harvard University (MA, PhD), Du Yun is currently professor of composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and distinguished visiting professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.
—adapted from wisemusicclassical.com
Oboist and electronic musician Kyle Bruckmann is assistant professor of practice and program director of Varied Ensembles at University of the Pacific. He freelances throughout the greater Bay Area’s Euro-classical music scene while actively producing experimental solo and collaborative work within an international community of improvisers and sound artists. His current ensemble affiliations include Splinter Reeds, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Quinteto Latino, Eco Ensemble, sfSound, and the Stockton Symphony.
Bruckmann tramples genre boundaries in widely ranging work as a composer/performer, educator and New Music specialist. His creative output—extending from conservatory-trained foundations into gray areas encompassing free jazz, post-punk rock, and the noise underground—can be heard on more than 100 recordings. Three decades of chameleonic gigging have found him performing in settings including the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Venice Biennale, 924 Gilman, Berghain, a 12-foot diameter bomb shelter, and dangling 30 feet in the air by a harness from a crane.
Jonathan Latta is an associate professor of practice in percussion and program director of ensembles at University of the Pacific. He has also maintained an active performing career as a percussionist, having performed with the Stockton Symphony, Modesto Symphony, and Sacramento Philharmonic and serving as principal for the Music in the Mountains Festival Orchestra in Durango, Colorado. Prior to moving to California in 2014, Latta was director of percussion studies for six years at Fort Lewis College in Durango, teaching applied percussion, percussion ensemble, non-Western music, orchestration, and jazz. Latta was chair of the University Pedagogy Committee for the Percussive Arts Society (PAS) for six years as well as a member of the PAS Education Committee.
From 2002 to 2006, Latta was a member of the United States Air Force Band of the Golden West, performing in over three hundred performances on percussion/timpani for the Concert Band, drum set for the Commanders Jazz Ensemble, marching percussion for the Ceremonial Band, and drum set for the Golden West Dixie Ramblers. These performances included the 2003 Tournament of Roses Parade, the 2004 Sacramento Jazz Jubilee, and the interment of former President Ronald W. Reagan. Latta has performed as a chamber musician in the Durango Chamber Music Festival, the Animas Music Festival, and at the Percussive Arts Society International Conference. In 2019 Latta performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall with Pacific’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble. Most recently, Latta has been heard as a soloist and helped produce the Pacific Wind Bands’ recording, From a Deep Blue Sky (2024).
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