october 6, 2011 Morse Recital Hall Thursday at 8 pm artistic director Christopher Theofanidis featured composer David Lang and music of Paul Kerekes Hannah Lash Loren Loiacono Garth Neustadter
Robert Blocker, Dean
NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN
Garth Neustadter
New Haven Counterpoint Garth Neustadter, soprano saxophone
Paul Kerekes
connecticut shift Edward Tan and Sung Mao Liang, violin Jessica Li, viola Qizhen Liu, cello
Loren Loiacono
Waking Rhythm Paolo Bortolameolli, conductor Hyun Sun Sul, violin Soo Jin Chung, cello Peng Zhou, flute Caroline Ross, oboe Soo Jin Huh, clarinet Craig Hubbard, horn Larry Weng, piano
David Lang
sweet air David Radzynski, violin Jurrian Van Der Zanden, cello Anouvong Liensavanh, flute David Perry, clarinet Esther Park, piano
Intermission
October 6, 2011 路 Sprague Memorial Hall
Hannah Lash
Hush Yang Jiao, conductor Holly Piccoli and Tammy Wang, violin Jane Mitchell, viola Shinae Kim, cello Matthew Rosenthal, bass Kyeong Hoon Seung, flute Hsuan-Fong Chen, oboe Wai Lau, clarinet Lauren Yu, bassoon Patrick Jankowski, horn Paul Futer, trumpet Hana Beloglavec, trombone Cristobal Gajardo-Benitez, Jonathan Allen, and Leonardo Gorosito, percussion Yue Guo, harp Michael Noble, celeste
David Lang
cheating, lying, stealing Hannah Collins, cello Gleb Kanasevich, bass clarinet Michael Compitello, Victor Caccese, and Adam Rosenblatt, percussion Wayne Weng, piano
As a courtesy to others, please silence all cell phones and devices. Photography and recording of any kind are strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.
PROFILES + NOTES
DAVID LANG composer Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms. In the words of the New Yorker, “With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” Many of Lang’s pieces resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling, and emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music. the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Theater of Voices, was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Other recent projects include the concerto world to come, premiered by cellist Maya Beiser and the Norrlands Operans Symfoniorkester; darker, premiered by Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles; plainspoken, a new work for the New York City Ballet; writing on water, for the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and visuals by Peter Greenaway; the difficulty of crossing a field, a fully-staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist
Evelyn Glennie; and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe. David Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Rome Prize, BMW Music-Theater Prize (Munich), and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts, and American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also received a Bessie Award and a Village Voice OBIE Award for Best New American Work.The recording of The Passing Measures (Cantaloupe) was named one of the best CDs of 2001 by The New Yorker. His recent CD Pierced, on Naxos, was praised both on Pitchfork and in Gramophone and was called his “most exciting new work in years” by the San Francisco Chronicle. The recording of the little match girl passion on Harmonia Mundi received the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of the legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His work has been recorded on the Sony
Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, and Cantaloupe labels, among others. His music is published by Red Poppy Music (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc.
sweet air notes During a trip to the dentist my oldest son Isaac was given laughing gas. The dentist called it “sweet air,” a gentle name to take the fear out of having a cavity filled. It worked. My son experienced something—a drug—so comforting that it made him ignore all signs of unpleasantness. This seemed somehow musical to me. One of music’s traditional roles has always been to soothe the uneasy. I must say I have never been that interested in exploring this role. It is much easier to comfort the listener than to show why the listener might need to be comforted. My piece sweet air tries to show a little bit of both. In sweet air, simple, gentle musical fragments float by, leaving a faint haze of dissonance in their wake. sweet air was written for the ensemble Sentieri Selvaggi for premiere at the Settembre Musica Festival in Torino, Italy, in 1999. It is intended as a birthday present for Louis Andriessen – Happy sixtieth birthday, Louis!
cheating, lying, stealing notes A couple of years ago, I started thinking about how so often when classical composers write a piece of music, they are trying to tell you something that they are proud of and like about themselves. Here’s this big gushing melody, see how emotional I am. Or, here’s this abstract hard-to-figure-out piece, see how complicated I am, see my really big brain. I am more noble, more sensitive, I am so happy. The composer really believes he or she is exemplary in this or that area. It’s interesting, but it’s not very humble. So I thought, What would it be like if composers based pieces on what they thought was wrong with them? Like, here’s a piece that shows you how miserable I am. Or, here’s a piece that shows you what a liar I am, what a cheater I am. I wanted to make a piece that was about something disreputable. It’s a hard line to cross. You have to work against all your training. You are not taught to find the dirty seams in music. You are not taught to be low-down, clumsy, sly and underhanded. In cheating, lying, stealing, although it is phrased in a comic way, I am trying to look at something dark. There is a swagger, but it is not trustworthy. In fact, the instruction in the score for how to play it says: Ominous funk.
PROFILES + NOTES
GARTH NEUSTADTER composer Garth Neustadter is an Emmy Award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist. He has composed feature-length scores for PBS, Turner Classic Movies, Warner Bros., and China’s CCTV. The Baltimore Sun says, “The guy’s a natural, as his soaring theme makes plain.” In 2011, Neustadter received a Primetime Emmy Award for his score for the PBS American Masters documentary “John Muir in the New World.” Neustadter gained international attention in 2007 when he was selected by Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer as the First-Prize Winner in the Turner Classic Movies Young Film Composers Competition. He was subsequently commissioned by Turner Classic Movies and Warner Brothers to compose and produce the feature-length musical score for the film The White Sister, which premiered on the TCM channel. Neustadter has been recognized as a five-time DownBeat Magazine award winner in the areas of composition, classical violin performance, and jazz saxophone performance. His achievements have been profiled in USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, Film Music Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, DownBeat Magazine, the National Federation of Music Clubs Review, and NPR. He recently received an ASCAP Morton Gould Award, ASCAP Young Jazz
Composers Award, and ASCAP fellowship for Film Scoring Studies at Aspen, as well as multiple awards from the National Federation of Music Clubs. Most recently, he was selected as the second-prize winner in the Transatlantyk Film Music Competition (Poland). He currently studies with Martin Bresnick.
NEW HAVEN COUNTERPOINT notes New Haven Counterpoint, for solo soprano saxophone and pre-recorded saxophone ensemble, is loosely inspired by concepts used in Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint. Although the three-movement work is not overtly “minimalist,” it uses certain repetitive rhythmic devices to manipulate perceptions of pulse and meter.
PAUL KEREKES composer Composer and pianist Paul Kerekes (b. 1988, Huntington, NY) is currently pursuing a master’s degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, where he studies with David Lang. His music draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including free improvisation, early music, repeating patterns, and visual art. In July 2010, Paul worked alongside eighth blackbird as both a composer and performer at the festival Music10 in Blonay, Switzlerland. He also attended notable programs such as the Stony Brook Summer Music Festival, the Young Artists Piano Program at Tanglewood, California Summer Music, and Yale’s New Music Workshop in Norfolk, Connecticut. Paul received his undergraduate degree in piano performance and composition from Queens College, where he received numerous awards, including the Gabriel Fontrier Award and the George Perle Award for achievement as an undergraduate composer. He has worked
closely with David Fulmer and the Second Instrumental Unit, who have premiered many of his works. Paul has also had the privilege of hearing his music performed by TwoSense, the Stonewall Chorale, Mannes Preparatory Division Choir, Norfolk Contemporary Ensemble, cellist Nicholas Photinos, flutist Kelli Kathman, and saxophonist/composer Ed Rosenberg in such venues as (le) poisson rouge, Symphony Space, Centre de musique Hindemith, Lefrak Hall, and Central Park.
CONNECTICUT SHIFT notes Connecticut Shift was written for the 2011 Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. While writing this piece, I thought a lot about the environment in which it would be premiered. The piece opens with a tender melodic line in chorale texture – the opening is my musical perception of Connecticut. This melody undergoes a series of progressive transformations, taking what was once gently tonal and distorting it into something brutally atonal. The initial presentation of the melody and its degenerate form are then juxtaposed. It is my hope that the listener, knowing what transpired, will find the returning tonal melody lifeless.
PROFILES + NOTES
LOREN LOIACONO composer Loren Loiacono (b. 1989), a native of Stony Brook, New York, is currently pursuing her master’s degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, where she is a student of Ezra Laderman and Christopher Theofanidis. She received her B.A. in music from Yale University, where she was a student of Kathryn Alexander and Michael Klingbeil. While there, she was the recipient of the 2009 Abraham Beekman Cox Composition Prize. She is also the recipient of the 2010 Susan and Ford Schumann Fellowship from the Aspen Music Festival, and was a Composer Fellow at the 2011 Bennington Chamber Music Conference. She has received awards from ASCAP’s Morton Gould Awards and the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, among others. Her works have been performed by the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, Yale Symphony Orchestra, 5th House Ensemble, Argento Ensemble, Berkeley College Orchestra, Jonathan Edwards College Philharmonic, and soprano Rachael Garcia, among others.
WAKING RHYTHM notes Between sleep and wakefulness, there is a state of consciousness known as ‘hypnopompic sleep.’ Unlike the vivid narratives of dreams, the sounds and images of this state, sometimes called ‘dreamlets,’ are usually static, regular,
even mundane. A common phenomenon is ‘sleep thought,’ where the sleeper will hear fragments of conversation, or even work through a mental argument, following what the sleeper believes is sound logic. It’s not until fully awake that the sleeper realizes the incoherence of his or her thoughts. It is this state of intense, but misinformed, focus that I was trying to recreate in Waking Rhythm. The musical materials are simple and direct: the slow woodwind chorale that provides the underpinning for the first half of the piece, or the staggered arpeggiations of the piano. The music is both clear and consistent in its harmonic and rhythmic materials. However, these elements come together in an uncertain, hazy way, coming in and out of focus like a dreamer awakening.
PROFILES + NOTES
obtained her bachelor’s degree from Eastman, her Ph.D. from Harvard, and a performance degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music. She studies at at the Yale School of Music.
HUSH notes
HANNAH LASH composer Hailed by the New York Times as “striking and resourceful…handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been performed at (le) Poisson Rouge, Chelsea Art Museum, Harvard University, Tanglewood Music Center, Times Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Commissions include the Fromm, Naumberg, and Howard Hanson Foundations, Orpheus Duo, Circle Wind Ensemble, MAYA, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. Lash has received the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship, a Yaddo Artist Colony fellowship, Barnard Rogers Prize, Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize, and numerous academic awards. She was selected by the American Composers Orchestra for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings. Her chamber opera, Blood Rose, was presented by NYC Opera’s VOX. God Music Bug Music has been selected by the Minnesota Orchestra for performance in 2012. Lash
Relentless canons propel Hush forward towards its inevitable catastrophe. This catastrophe or climax is followed by a kind of post-traumatic response: secondary canons, and an unrelated piece of material that enters—alien to the piece, like scar tissue—within a hushed surface. This alien material is a quote from the old English lullaby, “All the Pretty Little Horses,” emerging in the horn: a call—suggested by the melody’s opening fifth, but not a triumphant or military horn call. The horn is left in a no-man’s-land after a disaster to sing to itself, to try to find solace—or perhaps to try to forget. The return of the opening material that follows acts as a memory rather than a resolution. Its accumulation is simply an arc of activity, silenced by repeated notes that also recall an earlier spot in the piece. These notes ring as the last of the string pizzicati fade in the viola and cello: a gentle sleep. In my mind, the lullaby is an apt choice for suggesting the reaction to a violent destruction or trauma. A lullaby is itself a false world, an invitation to dream…to escape… to hush.
NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN
artistic director Christopher Theofanidis managing director Krista Johnson assistant Benjamin Firer music librarians Cristobal Gajardo-Benitez Timothy Hilgert Wai Lau Holly Piccoli Matthew Rosenthal Kathryn Salfelder Kaitlin Taylor stage crew John Allen Jonathan Allen Landres Bryant Colin Brookes Timothy Hilgert Michael Levin Matthew Rosenthal Aaron Sorensen Gerald Villella
Thursdays at 8 pm Morse Recital Hall Free admission
NOV 3 Featuring Martin Bresnick’s Going Home - Vysoke, My Jerusalem, with Double Entendre, and Ingram Marshall’s September Canons, with Todd Reynolds. FEB 2 Featuring faculty composer Ezra Laderman’s Piano Sonata No. 5. MAR 1 Featuring Aaron Jay Kernis’s Ballade out of the Blues and Christopher Theofanidis’s Flow, my Tears. MAR 29 Featuring guest composer Steve Reich’s Proverb (1995). With members of the Yale Camerata and Yale Schola Cantorum. APR 12 Featuring guest composer Kaija Saariaho’s Serenatas and Terrestre.
COMING UP
Yale School of Music 203 432-4158 concerts@yale.edu music.yale.edu/media
concerts & public relations Dana Astmann Danielle Heller Dashon Burton new media Monica Ong Reed Austin Kase operations Tara Deming Christopher Melillo piano curators Brian Daley William Harold recording studio Eugene Kimball
Janna Baty, Peter Frankl, and Friends Oct 9 | Sun | 4 pm | Sprague | Free Faculty Artist Recital Janna Baty, soprano, and Peter Frankl, piano, with Ani Kavafian, violin; Ole Akahoshi, cello; and Allan Dean, trumpet. Songs by Schumann, de Falla, Shostakovich, and Beethoven, and Ivan Fischer’s Eine Deutsch-Jiddische Kantate.
Brian Lewis, violin Oct 11 | Tue | 8 pm | Sprague | Free Faculty Artist Recital Sonatas by Milhaud, Schumann, and Robert Avalon (Connecticut premiere); Bennett: Hexapoda: Five Studies in Jitteroptera; Copland: Hoedown from Rodeo.
Lucas Wong, piano Oct 13 | Thu | 8 pm | Sprague | Free Doctor of Musical Arts Recital Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, transcribed by Franz Liszt; George Crumb: Makrokosmos, Volume II: Twelve Fantasy Pieces after the Zodiac.
Brentano String Quartet Oct 18 | Tue | 8 pm | Sprague Tickets $25–$35 | Students $10 Oneppo Chamber Music Series String Quartets by Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert; Ginastera’s Piano Quintet, featuring pianist Ignat Sozhenitsyn.