Recital, Kyle Bruckmann

FACULTY RECITAL

Kyle Bruckmann

oboe and English horn

Magdalene Myint, piano

Apollo Parish Mitchell, oboe

Juliette Frediere, soprano

Judy Kim, piano

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

7:30 pm

Recital Hall

Jordan Wier, bassoon

Jenna Bosnick, oboe

Glenn Michael Adcock, oboe

Still (2006)

Three Silhouettes, op. 38 (1904; 2022)

Valse

RE|Member (2022)

Magdalene Myint, piano

Dorothy Chang (b. 1970)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)

arr. Katherine Needleman

Apollo Parish Mitchell, oboe

Reena Esmail (b. 1983)

Love Song (1995)

Juliette Frediere, soprano Judy Kim, piano

Intermission

Rise (2022) for Oboe and Fixed Media (World Premiere)*

Sift (New No Normal) for English Horn, Bassoon, and Electronics (2021; 2023)

Jordan Wier, bassoon

Andrea Clearfield (b. 1960)

Suite (2010)

Toccata

Jenna Bosnick, Glenn Michael Adcock, oboes

Adam Zolty (b. 1996)

Kyle Bruckmann (b. 1971)

Viet Cuong (b. 1990)

*Commissioned by the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music

PROGRAM NOTES

Chang: Still

Described as “evocative and kaleidoscopic” and “beautiful and gripping,” the music of composer Dorothy Chang reflects an eclectic mix of musical influences ranging from popular and folk music to elements of traditional Chinese music. Born to Chinese immigrant parents and raised in both the US and Taiwan, Chang has often explored in her music the curious phenomenon of being a “third culture kid”; many of her works are inspired by place, time, memory, and the question of cultural identity.

Chang’s catalog includes over seventy works for solo, chamber, and large ensembles as well as cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations involving theater, dance, and video. She received degrees in composition from the University of Michigan and the Indiana University School of Music. She has served on the music faculty at Indiana State University and since 2003 has been a professor of music at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Coleridge-Taylor: Three Silhouettes

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a British-Sierra Leonean composer and conductor. He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor sought to draw from traditional African music and integrate it into the classical tradition, which he considered Johannes Brahms to have done with Hungarian music and Antonín Dvořák with Bohemian music. He was greatly admired by Black Americans; in 1901, a 200-voice chorus was founded in Washington, DC, named the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society. He visited the United States three times in the early 1900s, receiving great acclaim, and earned the title "the African Mahler" from the white orchestral musicians in New York in 1910.

Despite wide renown, he always struggled financially. The popular Hiawatha's Wedding Feast sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but Coleridge-Taylor had sold the music outright for the sum of fifteen guineas, so did not benefit directly. He learned to retain his rights and earned royalties for other compositions; nevertheless, his death from pneumonia at the age of thirty seven is often attributed tothe stress of his financial situation.

PROGRAM NOTES

Clearfield: Love Song

Creating deep emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges, the music of Andrea Clearfield is performed widely in the US and abroad. She has written more than 160 works for opera, chorus, orchestra, chamber ensemble, dance, and multimedia collaborations, exploring subjects ranging from freedom and oppression to ancient cultures, environmental sustainability, health and healing, gender, and technology. Among her works are sixteen cantatas including one for the Philadelphia Orchestra with librettist Charlotte Blake Alston. She has been awarded a Pew Center International Residency Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, two Independence Foundation Fellowships and Fellowships at the Rockefeller’s Bellagio Center, American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, MacDowell and Copland House among others. Clearfield has served on the Boards of the Recording Academy/Grammy’s Philadelphia Chapter and Wildflower Composers. Passionate about building community around the arts, she is also founder and host of the Philadelphia SALON featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, multimedia, and world music since 1986.

Note by the composer

Scored for soprano, oboe (or flute) and piano, Love Song was composed for the ChamberWorks Trio and premiered in February 1996 in Philadelphia. The text is by Philadelphia poet Patrick Kelly, from his collection of works entitled, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Patrick Kelly. Rhythmically exciting, evocative, and lyrical, Love Song explores the chaotic, surreal, and urban dimensions of love. Musicians enjoy performing this piece as it challenges the player’s dramatic sense, allowing for some improvised freedom within the structure of the work.

Esmail: RE | Member

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and she brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. She divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber, and choral work; she has written commissions for ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and Kronos Quartet, and her music has featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums. She is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020–25 Swan Family Artist-inResidence, and was Seattle Symphony’s 2020–21 composer-in-residence. She also holds awards/fellowships from United States Artists, the S&R Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.

Esmail holds degrees in composition from the Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music. Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse, and Samuel Adler. She received a

PROGRAM NOTES

Esmail: RE | Member continued

Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak.

Note by the composer

In its original version, RE|Member is a wildly colorful overture for orchestra, sandwiched between two plaintive solos for oboe. In the opening solo, a recorded oboist on a screen plays alone in her living room, and at the end of the overture, the onscreen oboist returns to play a duet—with the real oboist, live in person, in the hall. This piece opened the 2021–22 Seattle Symphony season with oboist Mary Lynch–it was the first piece performed at Benaroya Hall after eighteen months of shutdown.

"When I saw the piece live, I knew that I had to make a version of the work that focused on the two oboes—there are times when the oboes are almost playing as one instrument, and other times where they feel like a huge ensemble, as they cascade over one another in huge waves of sound.”

Zolty: Rise

Having grown up with professional dancers in his family, composer and visual artist Adam Zolty strives to create musical experiences that are in tune with his sensitivities to physical motion. His compositions have been performed by many esteemed Canadian ensembles and performers including NU:BC Ensemble, Phoenix Chamber Choir, Vancouver Chamber Choir, and Heidi Krutzen. After receiving his Bachelor of Music degree from the University of British Columbia, he was pursuing his master’s degree at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, studying composition under Ted Hearne and Sean Friar, until the pandemic hit; he currently resides in Laitila, Finland. In 2019 he joined the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, where he has enjoyed composing for their programs ever since.

Rise (2022) for oboe and fixed media was commissioned by the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music and receives its world premiere performance on this concert.

Note by the composer “Rise! Unveil yourself! It’s time!”

Bruckmann: Sift (New No Normal)

Note by the composer

I originally devised this piece to play with violist Ellen Ruth Rose for a recital livestreamed from an empty hall at UC Davis during the depths of the COVID pandemic. Bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck and I premiered a revised version in Brooklyn (in a small room filled with real live friends) this past August. I’m grateful to Jordan for her willingness to co-create it anew, here and now.

I see my compositions as not things to be played, but rather catalysts for playing. While I would never consider them “programmatic”—they’re not about anything— they are invariably next to plenty of things, entangled in tangential connections and deeply inflected by context, circumstance, emotional resonance. So, if it’s helpful, please feel free to consider this a meditation on the decidedly mixed blessings of upheaval: combing through rubble . . . re-evaluating old habits and received norms . . . striving to rebuild kinder, more ethical modes of togetherness and interconnection.

Cuong: Suite

Called “alluring” and “wildly inventive” by the New York Times, the music of American composer Viet Cuong has been performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Eighth Blackbird, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Atlanta Symphony, Sandbox Percussion, Albany Symphony, PRISM Quartet, and Dallas Winds, among many others. Cuong’s music has been featured in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center, and his works for wind ensemble have amassed several hundreds of performances worldwide. Passionate about bringing these different facets of the contemporary music community together, he recently composed a concerto for Eighth Blackbird with the United States Navy Band. Cuong also enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying. His works thus include a snare drum solo, percussion quartet concerto, and double oboe concerto. He is currently the California Symphony’s Young American composer-in-residence, the Pacific Symphony’s composer-inresidence, and serves as assistant professor of music composition at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. Cuong holds degrees from Princeton University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Peabody Conservatory.

Viet Cuong will be composer-in-residence at University of the Pacific October 25–28, 2023.

—program notes compiled by Kyle Bruckmann

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

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.

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Oct. 11, 7:30 pm, Recital Hall

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Rebecca Hang, violin

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Oct. 20–22, 2:30 pm & 7:30 pm, Vereschagin Alumni House

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