New Music New Haven: Hannah Lash & Christopher Theofanidis, faculty composers, Nov 8, 2018

Robert Blocker, Dean

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN Hannah Lash, Artistic Director

Featuring music by

Hannah Lash and Christopher Theofanidis and Yale School of Music graduate-student composers Thursday, November 8, 2018 | 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Anteo Fabris b. 1991

Terrifying Leaps Paul Mortilla, conductor Yun Jae Choi, violin Albert Yamamoto, violin Rubina Lee, viola Sein Lee, cello Amy Nickler, double bass Brendan Dooley, flute Elliot Lichtenberg, oboe Leonard Ziporyn, English horn Richard Adger, clarinet Michael Moy, bass clarinet Kristy Tucker, bassoon Dana Brink, bassoon Steven Newberry, horn Melissa Munoz, trumpet William Wortley, trombone Aidan Zimmerman, tuba Nicoletta Todesco, electric guitar Aaron Cardenas, acoustic guitar Leah Brzyski, soprano

Grant Luhmann b. 1994

There’s no there there Jessica Chen, violin Marlea Simpson, viola Yun Han, cello

Miles Walter b. 1994

Eighteen figments after Joanna Newsom, side B X: “love you again”— XI: “fists and guitars— XII: “unhinged towards diminishing lights”— XIII: “time/was just a line”— XIV: “each phantom-limb lost”— XV: “even the ghosts huddle up for warmth”— XVI: “lagging, rising”— XVII: “brakeless, gravel-loose, falling”— XVIII: “everywhere i tried to love you” Maura Scanlin, violin Alex McLaughlin, viola Valentina Crnjak, cello Ross Wrightman, double bass Miles Walter, piano

intermission

Hannah Lash b. 1981

Music for Nine, Ringing (2018) II. Paul Mortilla, conductor Hannah Lash, harp Anna Ellsworth, harp HĂŠloĂŻse Carlean-Jones, harp Miles Walter, piano Yandi Chen, celesta Kevin Chow, harpsichord Russell Fisher, vibraphone YoungKyoung Lee, vibraphone Jisu Jung, marimba

Christopher Theofanidis b. 1967

At the Still Point (2013), for piano quintet I: In my beginning is my end Kate Arndt, violin Matthew Woodard, violin Marta Lambert, viola Guilherme Nardelli Monegatto, cello Nenad Ivovic, piano

As a courtesy to others, please silence all devices. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

Faculty Profiles

Student Profiles

Hannah Lash, composer

Anteo Fabris ’19MM Student of Hannah Lash and Aaron Jay Kernis anteofabris.com

Hailed by The New York Times as “striking and resourceful … handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been performed at major venues throughout the United States. In the 2017–2018 season, Jeremy Denk and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra premiered Lash’s Piano Concerto No. 1, In Pursuit of Flying; the Atlantic Classical Orchestra debuted Facets of Motion; and Music for Nine, Ringing was performed at the Music Academy of the West. Next season, Lash’s Songs of Imagined Love will be premiered at Carnegie Hall.

Christopher Theofanidis, composer Christopher Theofanidis’ music has been performed by many of the world’s leading performing arts organizations, from the London Symphony and New York Philharmonic to the San Francisco Opera and the American Ballet Theatre.

He is a two time Grammy nominee, and his work Rainbow Body is one of the most performed works of the new era, having been performed by over 150 orchestras worldwide. Mr. Theofanidis is currently on the faculties of Yale University and the Aspen Music Festival.

Grant Luhmann ’19MM Student of Martin Bresnick grantluhmann.com Miles Walter ’23MM Student of Christopher Theofanidis

Staff Manager Jeffrey M. Mistri Music Librarian Samuel Bobinski Office Assistant Kristy Tucker

Program Notes There’s no there there Grant Luhmann Gertrude Stein’s increasingly-famous remark, “there is no there there,” has taken on a life of its own as a commentary on placeless places, cities or natural locations which have lost their unique relationships to the lands they occupy.

This piece is a series of brief musical postcards from landscapes which I feel are either in danger of losing their sense of place or have lost it already.

Eighteen Figments Miles Walter Eighteen Figments is a response to the work of singer/harpist/composer Joanna Newsom, whose insightful, expansive poetry and beautiful, eclectic music have been a constant presence in my life since I was in high school. Each of the eighteen figments correspond in some oblique way their narrative counterpart on the two-hour-long album Have One On Me, JN’s third; the figment titles listed in your program are all excerpts from the lyrics to Newsom’s corresponding song. In my piece, the figments run into each other continuously; there is only one movementbreak, halfway through the piece.

The present movement contains the latter nine figments, which, like the latter nine songs of the album, grow darker, more blunt, and more trenchant. In this B-side, I’ve attempted to retrace all of Side A’s material, but this time with less artifice

and embellishment, and with more clarity and honesty — even in, or perhaps especially in, the places where simplicity strikes the harder blow.

At the Still Point Christopher Theofanidis At the Still Point was part of a interdisciplinary collaboration with the two visual artists, Makoto Fujimura and Bruce Herman, and the theologian, Jeremy Begbie, responding to T.S. Eliot’s great work, Four Quartets. Set against the backdrop of the London bombings and World War II, Eliot’s magnum opus wrestles with the swirl of time and decay against a sense of ever-elusive stability, using a powerful series of opposites and recurring lines to eventually arrive at what he calls, ‘the still point of the turning world’ — a sense of equilibrium and acceptance in the fray.

The first movement of my 35’ work is represented on tonight’s concert. The musical figure which inaugurates the piece becomes a kind of “Ur-pattern” for the work — a generative shape permeating all of the subsequent material. It is a group of four notes: a single note followed by a lower note, then reversed lowerupper. To me, this figure has implicit in it a kind of balance and an evocation of a central paradox of Eliot’s poem: “And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” Two ‘bad’ actors threaten the flow of the work — one in the pitch

Program Notes realm and one in the rhythmic realm; they play important roles in the ultimate resolution of the larger piece. The first is an intensely widening vibrato, which seems to regularly undermine a solid sense of pitch stability. The second is an occasionally materializing stream of pulses, which runs counter to a prevailing sense of tempo.

Commissioned by Denise and Stephen Adams

Music for Nine, Ringing Hannah Lash The music plays with elements that recur exactly or nearly exactly, as opposed to elements which are constantly varying and developing. It begins with a very emphatic and bell-like chord progression.

The next type of material is a kind of whispering gesture: a quick and quiet figure that is restless and constantly changing. Chords interject every now and again, recalling the opening, but give way to a kind of accompaniment bass figure which also has a mercurial function through the rest of the work, implying different harmonic areas and ever re-contextualizing the material it accompanies. After a third section, in which the whispering figure and more are developed, the opening chord progression returns, unchanged, to close the form.

Commissioned by The Music Academy of the West, with the generous support of Regina and Rick Roney and Stephen Schaible and Daron Builta

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Upcoming Events nov 12 Daniel S. Lee, violin, and Jeffrey Grossman, harpsichord

Faculty Artist Series 7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Free nov 13 Escher String Quartet

Oneppo Chamber Music Series The Escher String Quartet performs music by Mozart, Korngold, and Beethoven.

7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall

Tickets start at $28, students $13 nov 14 Lunchtime Chamber Music 12:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Free nov 15 Peter Oundjian, principal conductor

Yale Philharmonia Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, with Sophiko Simsive, and Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra.

7:30 pm | Woolsey Hall Tickets start at $12, Yale faculty/ staff $8, students $5 $3 surcharge at the door

Special Offer: Buy one, get one

free Orchestra seats!

nov 28 Melvin Chen, piano

Horowitz Piano Series

Faculty pianist Melvin Chen performs an arrangement of Brahms’ Symphony No. 3, and works by Sibelius and Ravel.

7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $15, students $7 nov 29 Paul Kerekes, composition

Doctor of Musical Arts Recital 7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

free dec 4 Emerson String Quartet

Oneppo Chamber Music Series

A performance by the legendary Emerson String Quartet, an ensemble The New Yorker has said is “as eminent as ever.”

7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall Tickets start at $28, students $13 dec 6 New Music for Orchestra

New Music New Haven

A program of new orchestral music by the School’s student composers performed by the Yale Philharmonia, with guest conductor Julian Pellicano.

7:30 pm | Woolsey Hall | Free

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