Robert Blocker, Dean
new music new haven
featuring music by
Caroline Shaw and works by Yale School of Music graduate-student composers
Hannah Lash, Artistic Director Thursday, May 3 • 7:30 pm Sudler Recital Hall
Yale School of Music
New Music New Haven May 3, 2018 โ ข Sudler Recital Hall
Sophie Cash b. 1987
Four Stories Ryan Lindveit, conductor Sophie Cash, voice Alishan Gezgin, accordion Aaron Israel Levin, percussion Michael Moy, clarinet Dhyani Heath, violin Matthew Woodard, violin Abby Elder, viola Fjรณla Evans, cello Russell Thompson, double bass
Fjรณla Evans b. 1987
Perishable Tanner Porter, soprano Giovanni Bertoni, clarinet Alexandra Simpson, viola Samuel DeCaprio, cello Jordan Calixto, double bass Nate May, synthesizer
Alishan Gezgin b. 1994
No end Will Doreza, baritone Alishan Gezgin, accordion Ethan Hoppe, violin Andy Peng, violin Zsche Chuang Rimbo Wong, viola Sophie Yu, cello
Yale School of Music
Grant Luhmann b. 1994
Chorales and Contrails Ariel Horowitz, violin Yejin Min, violin Márta Hortobágyi Lambert, viola Anita Balázs, cello Jenny Lee, piano Intermission
Caroline Shaw ’07mm b. 1984
Taxidermy (2012) Sam Um, percussion YoungKyoung Lee, percussion Jisu Jung, percussion Dmitrii Nilov, percussion
Tanner Porter b. 1994
Two Moons and the Squid Hannah Lash, harp
Shaw
Entr’acte (2011) Renyu Martin Peh, violin Elliot Lee, violin Márta Hortobágyi Lambert, viola Yiqiu Chen, cello
As a courtesy to the performers and audience, silence electronic devices. Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.
Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program biography Sophie Cash Sophie Cash is in her second year of the Master of Music degree program at Yale. Text Four Stories by Sophie Cash I. and now, to follow I could never know how to couldn’t save another raccoon on the day another one no disease, upend the dark in the world and in the crowd integral identical undergirding this hotel right to the columns when they fought a demoted former guard end the days of shoreline waste at the word the kids looked up end the days of shoreline waste at the word the kids looked up at the word the kids looked up at the word they kicked up dust II. it’s like a painted duck it’s happy to be in the kingdom I don’t want it even if it’s just a painted duck he’s happy to repeat it with a tape deck if it didn’t end even they’ll prohibit the making of a painted duck but even if it’s imitated admit it it’s a painted duck ta da ta ta woke to the party the party it’s fake like a painted duck but
it would be like a painted duck fell down it would be like a painted duck fell down it would be a pain to duck out now it’s a painted duck ta da ta da it’s a good imitator it would be like a painted duck fell down it would be like a painted duck fell down even if it paid to duck out now III. I’m gonna give a brief history of the city there were settlers and there were other people and they didn’t get along that well and there was some sort of I’m not even sure I should talk about it it would raise all kinds of questions and I would rather talk about the transportation system it’s a little bit rickety but it’s improving IV. it’s from a sense of estrangement left in the cab a moccasin how innocent a promise to look for a single wire a foundation would be built before the countdown faith is the thing that they let go all the widows visit no foundation was built during that time promises of a strange country with a tabernacle synth in the hotel he’ll admit--for a souvenir he spent Christmas morning in the corner where he looked for a single wire faith is the thing that they let go all the widows visit it it’s the thing that they let go all the widows visit it
Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program biography Fjóla Evans Fjóla Evans is a Canadian/Icelandic composer and cellist. Her work draws inspiration from the behaviors of natural phenomena as well as the droning lilt of Icelandic folk music. Commissions and performances have come from musicians such as Bang on a Can All-Stars pianist Vicky Chow, the Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Her work has been featured on the MATA Festival, Ung Nordisk Musik, and the American Composers Orchestra’s SONiC Festival. As a performer, she has presented her own work at the Cluster Festival of New Music, (le) poisson rouge, and at the Music Gallery in Toronto. Fjóla participated in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and KulturKontakt Austria, among others. She has studied composition with Julia Wolfe, cello performance with Matt Haimovitz, and is currently pursuing a Master of Musical Arts degree at the Yale School of Music as a student of Martin Bresnick and Christopher Theofanidis. biography Alishan Gezgin Alishan Gezgin is a composer living in New Haven, Connecticut. His projects include Nous, a multimedia cantata for soprano, string quartet, and electronics premiered inside James Turrell’s “Twilight Epiphany” light installation in Houston, as well as a work for Thai traditional instruments at the Burapha International Music and Performing Arts Festival in
Bangsaen, Thailand, where he was a composer-in-residence. He received a Bachelor of Music Degree in composition from Rice University and is currently pursuing an Master of Music Degree at the Yale School of Music, where he studies with Martin Bresnick, Hannah Lash, and Christopher Theofanidis. program note No end No end is a cantata for baritone, string quartet and piano, inspired by the poetry of the Bengali artist-poet-musician-activist Rabindranath Tagore. biography Grant Luhmann Grant Luhmann’s work explores the intersection of his interests in composition, music technology, and performance. His compositions have been performed by the Parker String Quartet, oboist Roger Roe of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra (MN), violinist Mary Orwell of the Ethel Quartet, the IU New Music Ensemble, and the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra in venues ranging from National Sawdust in New York to the Château de Fontainebleau in France. Grant currently attends the Yale School of Music in pursuit of his Master of Music degree, studying with Hannah Lash and Aaron Jay Kernis. An active performer and composer, Grant studied oboe and English horn with Roger Roe and Linda Strommen at Indiana University and considers his performance background
Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program an integral part of his work. When Grant is not composing, practicing, or making reeds, he can usually be found outdoors rock climbing, hiking, camping, or running. program note Chorales and Contrails Chorales and Contrails establishes a set of polar opposites which are gradually mediated and reconciled over the course of the piece. biography Caroline Shaw ’07mm Caroline Adelaide Shaw is a New Yorkbased musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for the Dover Quartet, the Calidore Quartet, the Aizuri Quartet, FLUX Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Anne Sofie von Otter, The Crossing, Roomful of Teeth, yMusic, ACME, ICE, A Far Cry, Philharmonia Baroque, the Baltimore Symphony, and Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. In the 2017–18 season, Caroline’s new works will be premiered by Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sö Percussion and Gil Kalish, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Britten Sinfonietta, TENET with the Metropolis Ensemble, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, and Luciana Souza with A Far Cry. Future seasons will include a new piano concerto for Jonathan Biss with the St. Paul Chamber
Orchestra and a new work for the LA Philharmonic. Caroline’s scoring of visual work includes the soundtrack for the feature film To Keep the Light as well as collaborations with Kanye West. She studied at Yale, Rice, and Princeton, and she has held residencies at Dumbarton Oaks, the Banff Centre, Music on Main, and the Vail Dance Festival. Caroline loves the color yellow, otters, Beethoven’s Op. 74, Mozart opera, Kinhaven, the smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin. program note Taxidermy Why “Taxidermy”? I just find the word strangely compelling, and it evokes something grand, awkward, epic, silent, funny, and just a bit creepy — all characteristics of this piece, in a way. The repeated phrase toward the end (“the detail of the pattern is movement”) is a concept I love trying (and failing) to imagine. It comes from T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (Four Quartets), and I’ve used it before in other works as a kind of whimsical, perplexing, existentialist mantra. program note Entr’acte Entr’acte was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77, No. 2 — with their spare and soulful shift to the D-flat major trio in the minuet. It is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. I love the way some music (like the minuets of Op. 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.
Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program biography Tanner Porter Tanner Porter is a composer-performer and visual artist from California. Her work has been performed at Ann Arbor’s Threads All Arts Festival, the 2015 Midwestern Composers Symposium, the University of Michigan’s write Hear, right Now concert series, and by art-ensemble Willo Collective at New Music Detroit’s Strange Beautiful Music 9. Tanner received a Bachelor of Music degree in Composition from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance, and is currently pursuing a Master of Music degree in Composition from the Yale School of Music. She is thrilled to be the 2017–2018 Artist in Residence for the Michigan-based all-arts collective Red Shoe Company. Upcoming performances include a set at this year’s New Music Gathering in Boston. program note Two Moons and the Squid The title of Two Moons and the Squid was taken from a line of a poem of mine, “Little House in the Light”. When fishing at night, squid boats often set up a large light, or collection of lights, to attract the squid; this can be done in accordance with the new moon, when it is darkest out. From the shore, multiple moons are visible: the real moon, and the false lights set up on the boats. Below is an excerpt from the poem: Little house in the light, I was draggling you like some hallowed birthright
up the sand dune, all bursting with saltbush and beach bur – cursing you, heaving you over the weeds. I was shouldering you from the blight of the shoreline – the pall and the drift of the tooth-riddled tide, which was testing the taste of your piers with its tongue (when I happened upon it, all slow-teething, lizard-like, hungry for more than those boats lost mid-week). It didn’t surprise me; you’re sand-fixed, a beach house; How brazen to build you so close to the mouth of a creature with lips of eternal unfurling, changing, a face always-moon made, reshaped. There were two moons that night; there was one for the people, and one for the squid, and it made for a scene that was milk sodden, blinding, and ridden by light, and I trailed my birthright, in fear, up the dune. biography Hannah Lash, harp Hailed by The New York Times as “striking and resourceful … handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, the Naumburg Foundation, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as the Colorado and Aspen Music festivals, among many others.
Artist Profiles • Notes on the Program Lash has received numerous honors and prizes, including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship (2011) and Fellowship (2016) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fromm Foundation Commission, the Naumburg Prize in Composition, the Barnard Rogers Prize in Composition, and the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize in Composition, among others. Recent premieres include Three Shades Without Angles for flute, viola, and harp, by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Two Movements for violin and piano, commissioned by the Library of Congress for Ensemble Intercontemporain, a new chamber opera, Beowulf, for Guerilla Opera, and new orchestral works for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, as well as two concerti for harp premiered by the American Composers Orchestra and the Colorado Music Festival, both with Lash as soloist. In 2016, Lash was honored with a Composer Portraits Concert at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. In the 2016-2017 season, Lash’s major, large-scale orchestral work The Voynich Symphony was premiered by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Lash obtained her Ph.D. in composition from Harvard University in 2010. She has held teaching positions at Harvard University (teaching fellow) and Alfred University (guest professor of composition) and currently serves on the composition faculty at the Yale School of Music.
New music new haven staff Artistic Director Hannah Lash Manager Jeffrey M. Mistri Music Librarian Samuel Bobinski Conducting Fellow David Yi Philharmonia Office Assistant Kristy Tucker Library Antonia Chandler Bora Kim Marta Lambert Gregory Lewis Laura Park Lauren Williams Leonardo Ziporyn Stage Crew Jisu Jung Matt Keown YoungKyong Lee Aaron Israel Levin Gabriel Mairson Dmitrii Nilov Lucas Oliveira Tanner Porter Hillary Simms Sam Um Daniel Vaitkus Rimbo Wong
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