NMF 2022: Faculty Chamber Music Recital

New Music Festival Chamber Music Concert

Mi Vecino El Cotopaxi

Sixto Gallegos (b. 1957) Oswaldo Zapata Correa, trumpet Kasandra Keeling, piano

A Heaven Full of Stars

Paul Millette (b. 1992) Paul Millette, marimba

Romance for Marimba and Smartphone

Thomas Yee (b. 1992)

Sarek Gutierrez, marimba

Emulation for Clarinet and Electronics

Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix (b. 1994) Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix, clarinet

On Fluidity

Nicole Russell (b. 1997) Kasandra Keeling, piano

Light

Yoojin Muhn (b. 1983) Rachel Woolf, flute Zach Cook, percussion Ivan Hurd, piano Crystal Jarrell-Johnson, mezzo-soprano Shawn Demuth, violin

Coming Together

Frederic Rzewski (1938-1921) UTSA NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE Donna Arevalo, speaker Jared Worman, bassoon Zach Cook, percussion Levi Ingraham, cello Alex Valles, cello Jonathan Foster, bass guitar Oswaldo Zapata Correa, conductor

BIOS and PROGRAM NOTES

Sixto Germán Gallegos Castillo, from Chimborazo, Ecuador, attended the Conservatorio Nacional de Música de Quito, where he also taught clarinet and saxophone for 28 years. In 2012, he obtained his Masters in Pedagogy and Musical Research from the Universidad de Cuenca in conjunction with the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Quito. He currently devotes his time to composition, and has written six works using different traditional Ecuadorian rhythms, arranging them for various instrumental ensembles. El Cotopaxi, one of the tallest volcanoes in the world, erupted in 2015 for the first time in a century, alarming the Ecuadorian community and attracting attention worldwide. This event inspired Mr. Gallegos to compose Mi Vecino el Cotopaxi, which describes different moments associated with the eruption: the suspense and surprise with which people reacted (initial cadenza), the joy and happiness felt when the calm returned (albazo, a traditional Ecuadorian musical genre), the worry about additional eruptions (final cadenza), and the uneasiness and panic provoked by a volcanic eruption (final effect).

Paul Millette is a percussionist, composer, and educator based out of San Antonio, Texas. He currently serves as a Lecturer of Percussion at the University of Texas at San Antonio where he teaches applied percussion, percussion pedagogy, and percussion literature. He has been invited to present clinics and masterclasses at universities throughout the United States and is a private teacher and masterclass instructor in public schools throughout San Antonio.He has also served on the faculty of the Interlochen Arts Camp.

Millette maintains an active performance career as both a soloist and chamber musician. Recent performance engagements include performances with the King’s Brass, Classical Music Institute Chamber Orchestra, Mid-Texas Symphony, Public Theater of San Antonio and Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra.With the King’s Brass, Millette toured nationally and performed on the Holland America Cruise line. He has recorded with both the Naxos and Summit Records labels.

An active composer, Millette’s music is published through Wildlight, C. Alan, and Tapspace Publications. His music is frequently performed by soloists and collegiate ensembles throughout the country. He received his Master of Music degree from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and his undergraduate degree from the University of North Dakota.

A Heaven Full of Stars was written during the spring of 2016 as a tribute to my grandmother, Betty Jean Ellingson, who has always been a constant source of inspiration for me. I decided to use her initials, “B.E.” as the main thematic material for the work. At almost every point in the piece the pitches B and E can be heard.

During the early stages of writing the work I participated in a weekend retreat at a lake cabin in Minnesota, and remember looking up at the starry night sky for the first time without the hindrance of any artificial light. Experiencing the breathtaking beauty of seeing stars so clearly

had a deep impact on me, and I tried to recreate those feelings of awe and wonder in A Heaven Full of Stars. The title of the piece comes from a Sara Teasdale poem entitled Stars: Alone in the night On a dark hill With pines around me Spicy and still, And a heaven full of stars Over my head, White and topaz And misty red; Myriads with beating Hearts of fire That aeons Cannot vex or tire; Up the dome of heaven Like a great hill, I watch them marching Stately and still, And I know that I Am honored to be Witness Of so much majesty.

Some composers found their love of music at the symphony hearing Brahms or Beethoven — Thomas B. Yee (b. 1992) discovered his from the beeps and boops of the family Super Nintendo. As a composer, his artistic mission is to transmute meaningful human stories into immersive, transformative musical works. Thomas' music of Holocaust remembrance synthesizes his fierce commitment to musical meaning with a passion to spotlight acts of racial injustice throughout history and the world. His research in music semiotics and the representation of gender, race, and religion in video game music explores the creation and interpretation of music as a meaningful, communicative, and quintessentially human activity.

Thomas' opera Eva and the Angel of Death presents the powerful story of Holocaust survivor and educator Eva Mozes Kor, and will premiere starring Page Stephens in Austin, TX. His work has been performed by the NOW Ensemble, Ensemble Mise-En, Density512, Hear No Evil, Indiana University Symphonic Band, University of Texas at Austin New Music Ensemble, Kansas State University Percussion Ensemble, and Mary Pickford Ensemble; honored as a finalist in the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, ISCM World Music Days, and winner of the Hear No Evil and Voices of Change Composition Competitions; and received grants from the Austin Cultural Arts Division, Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, and Friends of Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission. His scholarship has appeared in the United States and internationally in journals, conferences, and a forthcoming monograph on musical meaning in video game soundtracks. His musical mentors include Donald Grantham and Nina C. Young in composition, Robert Hatten in music theory, and Jerry Junkin in conducting.

Thomas completed his DMA at the University of Texas at Austin and is Assistant Professor of Instruction in Music Theory at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Thomas lives in Austin, Texas and can often be found cooking gourmet cuisine from the "Yee Bistro" with his wife Tori or on walks with their affectionate dog, Cassie the Kelpie. Learn more at thomasbyee.com.

Siri. Alexa. Cortana. Google Assistant. From 2012 to today (2018), the technology market was inundated with artificially intelligent virtual assistants taking up residence in our homes and pockets. As technology improved and became increasingly woven into the fabric of our lives, these programs acquired ever more human-like personalities. Romance for Marimba and Smartphone envisions society's growing dependence on (or addiction to)technology as a complex interpersonal relationship, with all its inherent ups, downs, drama, idealizations, misunderstandings, and reconciliations. All Google Assistant voice and Android OS sounds used with written permission under a Creative Commons License. Google Assistant voice recorded through the "Google Assistant" application for iOS and Android phones. Android OS sounds accessed through Google's developer website (https://developers.google.com/actions/tools/sound-library/foley). Changes were made to many of the sounds and voice as they appear in this piece. This piece is not endorsed by Google LLC. Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix (b. 1994) is a composer, producer, audio engineer, sound designer, educator, and performer who has a love for all types of music for the stage, the screen, interactive media, or the sounds that surround the world. Wesley also creates synth focused popular music under the artist name WSU-P. After receiving his B.M. in Music Education and Certificate of Clarinet Performance at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Wesley decided to make composing music his main focus.

Returning to his alma mater, he received a Certificate of Music Technology learning to become an audio engineer and producer while also refining his compositional technique. Afterwards, Wesley attended Texas State University to obtain his M.M. in Music – Composition where he continued to develop his music writing for the traditional and electronic/computer setting, but also for various media such as dance, film, and video game. Wesley has studied under Ethan Wickman, Michael Ippolito, and Richard Hall.

Wesley is a member of the San Antonio Wind Symphony as a clarinetist. Wesley has also helped establish the week long music technology event held at UTSA, MuTe Fest, where events include student/guest concerts, guest masterclasses, and student ran events with the theme of audio/music technology. He is also the recipient of multiple ASCAP Plus Awards.

Emulation for Clarinet and Electronics. As technology advances with each passing day, so too does our understanding of the benefits and costs of this way of living. We have spent decades trying to get our technology to contribute to society with the same capabilities as the human brain. As this trend continued, we truly understood the limits of the human mind and are now developing technology to surpass us. So that brings up the question: who is emulating whom?

Nicole Russell is a New York based composer, pianist, vocalist, teacher, and producer. Her work is exploratory and harmonically adventurous, and is often inspired by nature, mental health, gender issues and race. She is originally from Austin, Texas.

Her work was featured on the Calliope’s Call “Sounds of Unity” program and the 2019 Women in Music Festival on the campus of the Mississippi University for Women. She was also a selected student composer for the 2019 CISUM Percussion Workshop in New York City, and has had works performed by Transient Canvas and the JACK quartet. Recently Nicole was named a recipient of the Charles Ives Award in Music Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Nicole is an active musician and producer, and has a background in teaching private lessons in piano, voice, and composition. She previously worked at Central Christian Church in San Antonio, Texas, singing alto in the Chancel Choir and also playing with the Handbell Choir.

Nicole completed her bachelor’s degree in Music Composition at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is pursuing her master’s in Music Theory and Composition at New York University, studying under Julia Wolf, Joan La Barbara, and Morton Subotnick. Her past teachers include Ethan Wickman, James Syler, and Andrew Lloyd.

On Fluidity. I wanted to create a sound as fluid as the ideas and feelings around sexuality and gender. I have felt stuck for a long time trying to put a label on my identity. My thoughts are constantly changing, unable to be defined, conformed, or put into a box. My identity exists outside of any label I try to attach to myself. I have started to fully understand and feel comfortable with the meaning of fluidity, and I have begun to abandon my search for “meaning” and be happy existing in the blurred lines.

Yoojin Muhn serves as the Director of Choral Activities at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she directs the UTSA Chamber Singers, Concert Choir, and teaches choral conducting for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Prior to coming to Texas, Dr. Muhn has served as the Artistic Director at Tucson Masterworks Chorale in Tucson, Arizona and directed the Oriana Women’s Chorus, and led the Concert Choir as an assistant director at the University of Southern California. She recently has been invited to the Missouri Choral Directors Association as the All-State honor choir conductor and headliner and appointed as a choral conducting faculty at the Music Across the Pond, a summer music program in England.

Dr. Muhn received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Choral Music with honors from the University of Southern California, the Master of Music degrees in Choral Conducting from the University of Cincinnati and in Sacred Music from Westminster Choir College where she graduated with distinction, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Composition from SookMyung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea.

Chun Sang Byuk is my favorite Korean poet and I grew up with reading his poems. My composition, Light was originally written in Korean language and later translated into English. In this work, I used specific intervals (minor second, tritone, and perfect fifth) and a whole-tone scale to express brightness of light. The audience will hear the five notes in a whole-tone scale played by players and mezzo-soprano throughout the music, and it unifies the music.

Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021) was born in Westfield, Massachusetts. He had his first piano lessons at the age of three and began composing music at a very early age. He initially studied piano with Charles Mackey in Springfield and went on to study composition with Walter Piston (orchestration) and Randall Thompson at Harvard University and with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt at Princeton University, where he also took courses in philosophy and Greek. A Fulbright-Scholarship enabled him to study with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence in 1960/61. His musical collaboration with Dallapiccola marked the beginning of his career as a pianist for contemporary piano music. He continued his studies with Elliot Carter in Berlin from 1963 to 1965. His friendship with Christian Wolff and David Behrman and his acquaintance with John Cage and David Tudor influenced his development, both as a composer and as a pianist. During the 1960s, Rzewski taught and took part in the first performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Klavierstück X” (1962) and “Plus Minus” (1964). From 1977 to 2003, he was a professor for composition at the Conservatoire Royal in Liège/Belgium. He also taught at various other universities, among them Yale University, the California Institute of the Arts and the Berlin University of the Arts. Through the live electronics ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva, founded by Rzewski together with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum in Rome in 1966, he was introduced to politically active colleagues and jazz musicians.

The music of the ensemble is distinguished by elements of improvisation and the use of electronic live instruments. The aim was to revolutionise contemporary thinking about classical composition and performance. These musical experiences with the ensemble are reflected in Rzewski’s compositions of the late 1960s and the 1970s. They combine elements both from improvised and composed music. After his return to New York in the early 1970s, his politically outspoken compositions probably made it difficult for him to obtain a long-term teaching position in the US. Since 1976, he has been living mainly in Rome and Brussels. During the 1970s, he continued to experiment with forms that treat style and language as structural elements. His best-known work from the 1970s is “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!”, a 50-minute-long composition featuring 36 piano variations on a song by Chilean composer Sergio Ortega. Today, Frederic Rzewski lives and works in Brussels.

Although he did not consider music seriously as a career until college, Rzewski did study piano from early youth and is a brilliant performer. In Italy in the 1960s, he formed Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, and the group became well-known for pioneer- ing work in live electronics and improvisa- tion. He continues to perform and was the soloist in the world premiere of his Piano Concerto at the BBC Proms in 2013, with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

In 1971, Rzewski returned to New York from his period in Italy. That was an eventful year in a tumultuous era, and in September, a riot broke out at the At- tica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, demanding improved health care, sanitation, and food, as well as an end to beatings.

Four days of tense negotiations followed, culminating in the storming of the prison by state police as ordered by Gover- nor Nelson Rockefeller. At least 43 people died, including 33 prisoners.

One of those was Samuel Melville (born Grossman; he borrowed Melville from the American novelist), a draftsman who became radicalized by apartheid when his company put him to work on new bank offices in South Africa. He became increas- ingly active in political demonstrations, which escalated into a series of bombings in 1969. Melville pleaded guilty to conspira- cy and

bombing the Federal Office Building in Manhattan and was transferred to Attica, where he became one of the leaders of the prison rebellion. He was shot and killed during the retaking of the complex. A book of letters he wrote from prison was posthu- mously published, and Rzewski took his text for Coming Together from Melville’s letter of May 16, 1971 (which was first published separately in a magazine): I think the combination of age and the greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time. it’s six months now and i can tell you truthfully few periods in my life have passed so quickly. i am in excellent physical and emotional health. there are doubtless subtle surprises ahead but i feel secure and ready. As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis, so am i dealing with my environment. in the indifferent brutality, incessant noise, the experimental chem- istry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, i can act with clarity and meaning. i am deliberate – sometimes even cal- culating – seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of oth- ers. i read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

“As I read it, I was impressed both by the poetic quality of the text and by its cryptic irony,” Rzewski wrote. “I read it over and over again. It seemed that I was trying both to capture a sense of the physical pres- ence of the writer and, at the same time, to unlock a hidden meaning from the simple but ambiguous language. The act of reading and rereading finally led me to the idea of a musical treatment.”

This treatment is the recitation of the text, a few words at a time, over a driving pentatonic bass line of steady 16th notes. The instrumentation is open and the piece can be performed by any number of players, though usually 8-10. Only the bass line is notated; all of the other parts are derived from it in ways specified by the composer. The overall form is also clearly defined, as are dynamics and articulation.

That recalls the medieval idea of a canon (“rule”), instructions – often deliberately cryptic – for deriving polyphonic music from a single line. But within the rigidity of the rule is the flexibility of improvisa- tion, and this juxtaposition of control and unpredictability may suggest some of the contradictions of prison life in musical metaphor. The steady pulse and slow phase cycling reflect the influence of early Mini- malist landmarks such as Terry Riley’s In C (1964), also for an indeterminate ensemble.

The result is a performance master- piece, very much of its time, but with an enduring moral and musical presence. Its seething anger at the injustices of incar- ceration has lost none of its power or relevance with time, and Rzewski’s strong and artistically expressive social and politi- cal reach resonates in the work of younger composers such as Ted Hearne, whose catalog includes large-scale reflections on the war in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. — John Henken

Giving Day 2022 is all about giving our students opportunities to shine! On April 19-20, make a gift of any size to UTSA at givingday.utsa.edu and watch us #buildthenest.

We will be launching three campaigns: Friends of Music, the Spirit of San Antonio Marching Band, and Mariachi Los Paisanos.

Your gifts help us impact students from across the university who participate in the SOSA Marching Band and Mariachi Los Paisanos.

And when you give to Friends of Music, you are creating transformative opportunities for music majors as they advance their skills through scholarships, participating in competitions, presenting research at conferences, and giving premiere performances of works commissioned through this fund.

When you give, our students can boldly pursue their dreams!

- Tracy Cowden, Department Chair

WE CULTIVATE ARTISTS

UTSA DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC 2021-2022 SEASON

@utsamusic music.utsa.edu

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO