Robert Blocker, Dean
faculty artist series
Ingram Marshall Tribute Concert with Benjamin Verdery & Friends
Benjamin Verdery, guitar | Joseph Kubera, piano | Timo Andres, piano Todd Reynolds, violin | Libby Van Cleve, English horn
Sunday, November 13, 2022 | 3:00 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Ingram Marshall 1942–2022
So-epa (2000) for electric classical guitar with delay and loops in 3 movements
Benjamin Verdery, guitar
Five Easy Pieces (2002) for piano–4 hands
1. Fluttering
2. Inbal
3. Tangoesque
4. Jimnopedique
5. Barbaresco
Joseph Kubera, piano Timo Andres, piano
September Canons (2002) for amplified violin with live electronics
Todd Reynolds, violin
Authentic Presence (2002) for solo piano
Timo Andres, piano
Program cont.
Marshall Dark Waters (1993) for English horn and tape
Libby Van Cleve, English hornThis program was made possible in part through the very generous support of the Thendara Foundation.
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.
Artist Profiles
Ingram Marshall, composer
Ingram Marshall lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1973 to 1985 and in Washington state, where he taught at Evergreen State College, until 1989. He studied at Lake Forest College, Columbia University, and California Institute of the Arts, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree, and has been a student of Indonesian gamelan music, the influence of which may be heard in the slowed-down sense of time and use of melodic repetition found in many of his pieces. In the mid-1970s he developed a series of “live electronic” pieces such as Fragility Cycles, Gradual Requiem, and Alcatraz, in which he blended tape collages, extended vocal techniques, Indonesian flutes, and keyboards. He performed widely in the United States with these works. In recent years he has concentrated on music combining tape and electronic processing with ensemble and soloists.
His music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras such as the Theatre of Voices, Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, and American Composers Orchestra. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Rockefeller, Fromm, and Guggenheim Foundations. Recent recordings are on Nonesuch (Kingdom Come) and New Albion (Savage Altars). Among recent chamber works are Muddy Waters, which was commissioned and performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and In Deserto (Smoke Creek), commissioned by Chamber Music America for the ensemble
Clogs. January 2004 saw the premiere of Bright Kingdoms, commissioned by Meet the Composer and performed by the OaklandEast Bay Symphony under Michael Morgan. The American Composers Orchestra in New York premiered his new concerto for two guitars and orchestra, Dark Florescence, at Carnegie Hall in February 2005. Orphic Memories, commissioned by the Cheswatyr Foundation, was composed for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and premiered at Carnegie Hall in April 2007.
Ingram Marshall taught composition at the Yale School of Music as an adjunct faculty member.
Benjamin Verdery, guitar
Hailed for his innovative and eclectic musical career, Benjamin Verdery tours regularly throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, performing at major venues and festivals. As a recording artist, Verdery has released more than 15 albums, some featuring works by leading composers of our time who have created music for Verdery, including Yale faculty composers Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Han Lash, and Christopher Theofanidis, as well as by Jack Vees, Yale lecturer in electronic music. He has also created and released several exquisitely filmed videos in collaboration with other artists.
Verdery has recorded and/or performed with such diverse artists as Andy Summers, Frederic Hand, William Coulter, Leo Kottke, Anthony Newman, Jessye Norman, Paco Peña, Hermann Prey, John Williams, hip-hop artist Billy Dean Thomas, beat
Artist Profiles cont.
box/vocal percussionist Marc Martin, and Nano Stern.
A prolific, published composer in his own right, many of Verdery’s compositions have been performed, recorded and published over the years. He has been commissioned to compose works for guitar solo, duo, large ensembles, and film. His Scenes from Ellis Island, for guitar orchestra, has been extensively broadcast and performed at festivals and universities in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Europe. DobermanYppan (Canada) currently publishes his solo and duo works for guitar and Alfred Music distributes some solo pieces and instructional books and videos. Other compositions are available at Verdery’s web site.
Since 1985, Verdery has been guitar professor at the Yale School of Music, Artistic Director of 92Y’s Art of the Guitar series since 2007, and Producer of his Maui Summer Master Class since 1999. At Yale, he teaches a studio of graduate-level guitarists, directs guitar chamber music, and has been featured many times in performance on Yale’s Faculty Artist Series and Yale in New York concert series. Verdery uses D’Addario strings and guitars by Garrett Lee and Otto Vowinkel.
Joseph Kubera, piano
Joseph Kubera “may be this era’s David Tudor,” wrote Robert Carl recently in Fanfare. Kubera has been a leading interpreter of contemporary music for the past four decades. Recent activities include concerts and master classes at New England Conservatory of Music, direction of Julius Eastman multi-piano performances in Los
Angeles, Philadelphia and New York, and new CDs of music by Daniel Goode, Lejaren Hiller, and John J. Becker. He has been a soloist at major European festivals and has worked closely with such luminaries as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, and Robert Ashley. Composers who have written works for him include Larry Austin, Michael Byron, Anthony Coleman, David First, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny.
A longtime Cage advocate, Kubera has made definitive recordings of Music of Changes and the Concert for Piano, and toured widely with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Cage’s invitation. He is a core member of the S.E.M. Ensemble, and has worked with myriad ensembles in New York City. He has collaborated with pianists Marilyn Nonken, Adam Tendler, and Sarah Cahill, and baritone Thomas Buckner. Kubera has been awarded grants through the N.E.A. and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has recorded for Wergo, O.O. Discs, New Albion, New World, Lovely Music, Mutable Music, Cold Blue, Tzadik, and Opus One.
Timo Andres, piano
Brooklyn-based composer-pianist Timo Andres has written major works for the Boston Symphony, Carnegie Hall, the Barbican, the Takács Quartet, the Concertgebouw, and elsewhere. He performs regularly with Gabriel Kahane, and has frequently appeared with Philip Glass, Becca Stevens, Nadia Sirota, the Kronos Quartet, John Adams, and others. As a pianist, Timo has performed at Lincoln Center, for the New York Philharmonic, the LA Phil, at Wigmore
Hall, for San Francisco Performances, and at (le) Poisson Rouge. He inaugurated the Cincinnati Symphony’s “American Perspective” series with a curated program featuring Dance Heginbotham and a performance of Andres’s cello concerto, Upstate Obscura. Recent recordings include Sufjan Stevens’ The Decalogue, as well as I Still Play for Nonesuch Records, where he is a label artist. Since the Covid-cancellation of his solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall in April 2020 and subsequent “playlist” performance on YouTube, his performance films have received widespread critical and popular acclaim. Timo received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale College in 2007 and Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music in 2009.
Todd Reynolds, violin
Todd Reynolds is a self-proclaimed “solo classical violinist gone horribly wrong.” For years the violinist of choice for contemporary artists such as Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, and Bang on a Can, he’s also a founder of the string quartet known as Ethel. As a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall and in concert halls around the world, his compositional and performance style is a hybrid of old and new technology, multidisciplinary aesthetic and pan-genre composition and improvisation. He thrives on a stage, whether virtual or physical, encircled by many speakers and a mission control with which to record himself and compose in real-time. His musical weapon of choice is made up of hybrid technology from the 1800s to the 2100s – a classical violin wired into digital technology running through Ableton Live and Cycling 74’s Max/MSP
which was integral in creating his doubledisc debut solo album Outerborough, released in 2011 on the Innova label. His thirty years of creating inside the music industry based in New York City have left him fortunate and grateful, with a bucket list of items greatly filled already, especially having collaborated with artists like Yo-Yo Ma, Todd Rundgren, Joe Jackson, Mark Mothersbaugh, and even Bruce Springsteen. He currently lives in the woods of northwestern Massachusetts where he produces, records, coaches, streams, and supports like-minded artists through his education portal, Amplify This.
Libby Van Cleve, English horn
Described as “expert” by the Washington Post, “dazzling” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and “absolutely exquisite” by Paris Transatlantic, Libby Van Cleve’s most extreme moniker was from the Hartford Courant, which dubbed her “the double reed queen of the new music world.” Van Cleve is recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of chamber and contemporary music for the oboe. Her playing can be heard on the New Albion, Tzadik, New World, OODisc, Braxton House, What Next?, CRI, Artifacts, and Centrediscs CD labels. She is the author of Oboe Unbound, a book on contemporary oboe techniques published by Rowman and Littlefield, and co-author of the awardwinning book/CD publication, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale University Press). She is the editor of Six Suites, oboe performance editions of Bach’s cello suites, published by T.D. Ellis Music Publishing. Ms. Van Cleve received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale School of
Music, her Master of Fine Arts degree from California Institute of the Arts, and her Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude, from Bowdoin College. She is the oboe teacher at Connecticut College and Wesleyan University and Director of Yale’s Oral History of American Music. Her former teachers have included Ronald Roseman, Allan Vogel, and Basil Reeve.
» libbyvancleve.com
Program Notes
Soe-pa Ingram Marshall
I never would have written a piece for guitar without the encouragement and help of my dear friend, Ben Verdery. Ben’s fearless wading into the murky waters of pedal-operated effects hardware in real time allowed me to compose for him in my own eccentric manner of employing rather old-fashioned digital delay tactics.
But the music is not about the technology at all; with much valor and hope, it leaves all that in the dust and becomes simply a musical statement. Therefore, I shall say no more about the actual electronics employed!
“Soe-pa” is a Tibetan word for “patience.”
Soe-pa was composed in 1999, on commission from Benjamin Verdery with assistance from the Gilmore Music Library at Yale University. It was recorded and released on the New Albion Label in 2006.
Five Easy Pieces Ingram Marshall
I started to write these pieces in 2001 for no particular reason, just to have fun, but when I heard that Sarah [Cahill] and Joe were developing some piano–four hands repertory, I forged ahead and composed the set of five (shamelessly emulating Stravinsky!).
September Canons Libby Van Cleve
Ingram Marshall described September Canons as a lamentation on the events of September
11, 2001. Commissioned in 2002 by Marshall’s lifelong friend and collaborator, the photographer Jim Bengston, the work is not so much a tone painting as a musical reflection of the anguish surrounding that dreadful day and its aftermath. Scored for amplified violin, digital delay, and other electronic processing, September Canons was written in close collaboration with the violinist Todd Reynolds. Marshall had previously worked with Reynolds and felt that his soulful playing and natural affinity with electronics were well suited to this piece. It was premiered at Joe’s Pub in New York City in December 2002 and later recorded at Reynolds’s private studio.
The musical material subtly evokes themes of death, sorrow, and mourning. Descending figures dominate the melodies: Sometimes we hear a sigh; sometimes we’re reminded of falling, collapsing, plummeting objects. Marshall quotes one of his previous works, Gradual Requiem, referencing the Catholic Mass for the repose of the souls of the dead. At another point we hear fragments of Bach’s famous Chaconne in D minor for solo violin. In writing this work, Bach quoted the chorale “Christ lag in Todesbanden (Christ lay in Death’s Bonds).” Another familiar melody comes at the end of the piece: “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.” Marshall intended this as an homage to Charles Ives, whose piece, From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose incorporates this hymn. This movement from Ives’s second orchestral suite, memorializes an event he witnessed on May 7, 1915 in New York City. On hearing the news of the sinking of the Lusitania, workers and riders waiting for the elevated
train spontaneously sang this popular hymn.
Authentic Presence Timo Andres
Authentic Presence is one of Ingram’s few purely acoustic pieces. The electronic-music tools of delay, reverb, and sampling are integral to his composing style, taking their place alongside 1970s California minimalism, Balinese and Javanese harmonies, and early American hymns in his musical nature preserve. Hazy memories of the civil rights protest song “We Shall Overcome” cycle through the dramatic episodes of Authentic Presence; the piece has a pleasantly unrigorous formal logic to it, concerned peraps with following a train of thought rather than any set musical program.
Dark Waters Ingram Marshall
Dark Waters, for English horn and tape, was written in 1996 for the oboist Libby Van Cleve. The English horn is amplified and processed through several digital delay devices and mixed live with the tape part. The tape part was created using raw material garnered from sampling fragments of an old 78 rpm recording from the twenties of “The Swan of Tuonela” by Sibelius. The ‘low fi’ sound and even the surface noise of the old acetate record, clearly heard at the very beginning of the piece, are essential to the dark qualities I tried to produce in this music.
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