Twilight Tear (2022)
PROGRAM
En Vivo Guest Artist Series
Richard D. Hall Instrument “On a Seizing Sky”
Tuesday, February 27 at 7:30 p.m. UTSA Recital Hall
Richard D. Hall (b. 1972)
Sparrow Hawk Flute
Rain Delay (2008) Hall
Guitar
Twilight Tear (2022) Hall
Various Bowed and Struck Percussion
The Way through the Woods (2023) Hall
Alto Saxophone
Machina Ratiocinatrix (2023) Hall
Tongue Drum
Improvisation (2024)
Trioon (2002)
Richard D. Hall
Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix (b.1994)
Richard D. Hall, live electronics
Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix, live electronics
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023)
Alva Noto (b.1965)
Richard D. Hall, piano
Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix, live electronics
Nothing has been prerecorded. All sound material is recorded and manipulated in real-time.
All video material is controlled in real-time often using prerecord video manipulated through filtering and color alteration.
Some video may potentially affect people with photosensitive epilepsy. Discretion is advised.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Richard D. Hall is a musician, composer, animator, and music educator based in central Texas. His main interest is performing live laptop “art” music in concert settings. Richard has performed at several national and international conferences and festivals including those sponsored by the College Music Society, the National Association of Composers USA, the Association for Technology in Music Instruction, the International Society of Improvising Musicians, the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors, and the Texas Society of Music Theorists. His music has also been featured at conferences by the National Flute Association, the Society of Composers, Inc., the Vox Novus 60x60 Contemporary Music Project, the Electronic Music Midwest Festival, and the International Computer Music Association as wells as the Sonic Art Oxford Festival in England, the LOOP Video Art Festival in Spain and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. His electronic music has been used at art museums in many major US and European cities. He has also created several animated Digital Art works that have been featured in numerous national and international performances.
Richard has received numerous commissions throughout the country, scored several independent films, written for television series, documentaries, podcasts and theatrical productions and has pieces published by Dorn Publications and GoFish Music. His 2019-piece Desert Waves, Wilderness of Water for saxophone and electronics and 2014 score for the Spanish film drama “Viva La Reina De La Muerte” both won medals from the Global Music Awards, a peer reviewed, prestigious international music competition. In 2020, he was co-composer for the screen-dance film, “THULE,” which won Best Original Score at the Frostbite Film Festival and in 2011, his music score for the theatrical production “Electra,” won an award for Excellence in Musical Score from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. His music has also been recorded by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra for ERM Media and the Wild Basin Winds with the Emmy award-winning children’s group The Biscuit Brothers. He is also the recipient of several ASCAP Plus Awards grants. He has composed music for films that have been included in multiple festivals including the Flagler Film Festival in Florida, the Atlanta Web Fest, the Dallas Indie Festival, the Rio Web Fest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Kolkata Shorts International Film Festival in Kolkata, India and the Studio City International Film Festival Film Festival in Hollywood, CA. His musical collaborations with dancers have been featured in Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Romania, Scotland, Guatemala, Egypt, South Korea, India, Iran and Berlin, Germany. He has published software and book reviews for the South-Central Music Bulletin for which he was also the music graphics editor. In 2021, Richard was one of the only musicians invited to write a chapter for the book “Dance and Philosophy,” published by Bloomsbury Publishing, London.
Richard is currently a Senior Lecturer of Music at Texas State University-San Marcos. His teaching duties include Composition, Electronic Composition, Music Technology, and Humanities. He also directs the Texas State Mysterium for New Music Ensemble.
richallmusic.com
Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix (b. 1994) is a composer, producer, audio engineer, sound designer, educator, and performer. His main musical interests stem from mixing a variety of styles and sounds together ranging from soundtrack styles, hybrid sounds between electronic and acoustic, and improvisatory moments in a large scale setting. Wesley also creates synth-pop 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.
Recently, Wesley was commissioned by the University of Texas at San Antonio Lyric Theatre to compose Soul of Word, a short chamber opera exploring the importance of language and how it relates to one’s sense of self and their connection to their culture. Wesley has also been commissioned by the South Texas Symphonic Orchestra to compose A Traveler’s Fantasy. He has been selected for performances at the Performing Media Festival at Indiana University South Bend for his piano and post-processing work, Azure, in 2024 and his flex chamber piece, The Border of Wind, in 2023. His piece Reverie of Mist was selected for the JACK Studio program in 2022 hosted by the JACK Quartet. Before its cancelation, Wesley was invited to Echofluxx 2020 in Prague, Czech Republic for his electronic work What Lies in the Night edited for 4-channel surround sound.
As a performer, Wesley is a member of the San Antonio Wind Symphony as a clarinetist. He is also a founding member of the San Antonio Ambient Orchestra (SAAO) with clarinet, keyboard, and mixing engineer. He is the recipient of multiple ASCAP Plus Awards.
wsupmusic.com
PROGRAM NOTES
On a Seizing Sky (2023)
On a Seizing Sky is an electro-acoustic work inspired by the hawk, which utilizes live laptop manipulation of the Sparrow Hawk flute. Sparrow hawks and red-tailed hawks are common in Texas. They are characterized by their dignified presence, quick agility in the air, and lightly colored chest feathers that camouflages them against the clouds when in flight. The flute provides the basis of the sound material, which mimics birds by using flutter tonguing, overblowing and multiphonics. The sound material is looped live incorporating laptop manipulation using granular synthesis, random delay elements and extended reverb. Abstract video is performed using MIDI controllers to convey important elements of a hawk’s life: sky, food, and water. The title On a Seizing Sky is taken from a line in the Dylan Thomas poem “Poem on His Birthday.”
Rain Delay (2008)
Rain Delay is a minimalistic work originally written for electric guitar trio andvvideo projection. The piece is inspired by the visual aspects of rain, not the sound. (What would the “look” of rain sound like?) The instruments utilize delay effects and various guitar techniques including pick slides and tremolo picking. Compositional aspects of the work include polytonality and ametric rhythms.
Twilight Tear (2022)
Written for choreographer and dancer Michelle Nance, Twilight Tear is an adaptation of a musical fragment/poem from Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925-2000). The piece features sounds from various metal lids and bowls being struck or bowed and then manipulated with granular synthesis. A student of Edgard Varèse, Lucia was a poet, writer, inventor, choreographer, musician, and composer. She often utilized “found” musical instruments and invented over 100 instruments. She was the composer-in-residence of the New York based Erick Hawkins Dance Company from 1953 until her passing. Virgil Thompson once described her music as “Far out music of great delicacy . . . ” Lucia was friend of Michelle Nance and wrote the following poem for her:
Thanksgiving sidewalks
Ruffles of ginko gold
And the high wild throb of the twilight tear
—Lucia Dlugoszewski, Nov. 27,1997The Way through the Woods (2023)
The Way through the Woods is a work influenced by the American experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson. Heavy delay and reverb are used in conjunction with fast passages and multiphonics. Stetson is known for haunting, atmospheric backgrounds, and contrasting rhythmic “noises.” He has collaborated with many artists including Lou Reed and the Chemical Brothers. He has also composed music for multiple films and video games such as the 2018 film Hereditary and the award-winning video game Red Dead Redemption 2. The title comes from the 1910 Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name. The poem is known for its mysterious atmosphere and symbolism on the passage of time.
Machina Ratiocinatrix (2023)
Machina Ratiocinatrix was coined by Norbert Wiener in his 1948 book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The work utilizes live looping of a diatonic tongue drum. It is inspired by the minimalism of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. The term machina ratiocinatrix, reasoning machine, is found in the introduction to Wiener’s book in which he compares machines and circuits to living organisms.
Trioon (2002)
Trioon is one of the tracks from the album Vrioon, which is the first album featuring a collaboration between Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and the German composer/sound artist Carsten Nicolai, who goes by the pseudonym Alva Noto. The album was released in 2002 and named album of the year in by The Wire magazine. This was the beginning of a twenty-year partnership that would end with the death of Sakamoto in 2023. Sakamoto and Noto produced multiple albums, scored films, and toured all over the world. Sakamoto’s delicate piano with Noto’s glitchy rhythmic patterns create an unusual and contrasting yet cohesive sound. Critics have labeled their sound as a “symbiotic relationship, . . . an exercise in restraint from two different approaches to music.” (Andy Gillham, 2019)
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