Robert Blocker, Dean
Nate May, composition
Thursday, December 1, 2022 | 7:30 pm | Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Nate May b. 1987
Swift Messengers (2021)
Nate May, bitKlavier
Pudl (2021) World premiere Yongqiu Liu, piano
One Brilliant (2020)
Yukiko Nakamura, vibraphone Yongqiu Liu, piano
Talking If You Are Going To Talk (2019) Recording of Norfolk Festival Chorus Premiere
Emily Donato, soprano Simon Carrington, conductor
Liquid Animal (2021)
Michael Ferri, violin Caitlin Cawley, vibraphone Neil Beckmann, guitar Amanda Chi, cello Nate May, piano
Program, cont.
intermission
May
Mobile (2021)
Michael Ferri, violin Amanda Chi, cello Springlike (2019) Recording of Next Festival Orchestra Exi Vr II (2019)
Neil Beckmann, guitar Caitlin Cawley, percussion Sunflower (2021)
Yongqiu Liu, piano
So Shrunk My Sinews (2020)
Nate May, bitKlavier
This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree. 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 Profile
Nate May, composition
Nate May is a versatile American composer and improviser whose music has been heard across four continents: in jazz clubs and DIY spaces, on radio and television, in museums and modern dance venues, and on mainstage classical events at New York’s Sheen Center, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and others. His music spans a wide array of genres: he has composed orchestral, choral, chamber, electronic, and experimental music, scored a nationallybroadcast documentary, played in a postrock band, and given fully-improvised performances on piano and Fender Rhodes. Also an award-winning educator, he served as a teaching artist with the American Composers Orchestra and taught courses at Yale University, Cincinnati’s CollegeConservatory of Music, Montclair State University, the Walden School, and the Thurnauer school, before founding the online music school Synthase. Currently a doctoral candidate in composition at Yale, he holds degrees from Cincinnati’s CollegeConservatory of Music (M.M., Composition) and the University of Michigan (B.F.A., Jazz and Contemplative Studies). He grew up in Huntington, West Virginia and currently resides in the San Francisco Bay area.
Program Notes by the composer
Swift Messengers
“Hypnagogic” is the effect I was cultivating for this piece: the feeling just before falling asleep, where taps and tinkles have that sensory meridian tingle and breath finds a slow ebb and flow. The sounds for this piece come entirely from wine glasses that I either struck with a pencil or bowed with a violin bow. The pianist activates these sounds by playing a keyboard running through a patch I made on a digital instrument called the bitKlavier. Dan Trueman, the creator of the bitKlavier, commissioned this piece.
Pudl
Pudl starts with two simple melodies and follows a few simple rules: I can interpolate notes of the melody with stacked fifths in the right hand and minor sevenths in the left, and I can “wipe away” any notes I want. The melodies themselves each outline triads which end up sounding in different combinations with furry stuff in between them. This allowed me to build some gentle waves into the form. It also delightfully leads to these little moments where it feels like the character suddenly shifts—at one point I feel like Joni Mitchell is about to start singing before more dissonant notes re-enter. It’s those little moments that I started to think of as puddles where the music collects for a moment. This performance marks the world premiere.
One Brilliant
I composed One Brilliant during a week away from my apartment in Brooklyn that turned into four months as the virus raged. The piece was commissioned by Brianna Matzke as a response to Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations. Oliveros was an accordion player, and the gentle hum of this instrument was the perfect emblem for the idea of resonance that was such a focus of her work. On the other end of the tone-noise spectrum was white noise, the subject of her Sonic Rorschach meditation, which features a white noise generator creating a wall of sound.
“One Brilliant” soaks in both of these, using recordings of an air pump and an accordion to pull the piano and vibraphone in both directions.
Talk If You Are Going To Talk
In this piece I wanted to capture the feeling of being in a crowd and hearing the brouhaha of voices, knowing they’re all saying something but barely catching small fragments of anything intelligible. The piece is entirely acoustic, but I did solicit some digital help: I wrote code to download a large number of tweets from Twitter, chop them up, and sort them by their sonic properties.
I paid particular attention to sibilance— the sound of the letter “s” that seems to float above every chattering crowd. In the opening you’ll hear the mass effect of sibilance-free fragments like this one:
your red oak looking peep your work The online complainer: If
Then, over the course of the opening, the sibilance knob gradually gets turned up to this:
For some, the answer is an easy yes. For others, knowing their Sometimes your words just hypnotize me
From a distance it’s a sea of sounds. Standing closer, husks of meaning may float briefly to the surface. No single perspective is authoritative, and no single narrative is intended.
I’m grateful to the soloist, Emily Donato, the brilliant Norfolk Festival chorus— twenty-four singers who learned twentyfour unique vocal parts—its conductor, Simon Carrington, and the instrumental ensemble that premiered this piece at the Norfolk Choral Festival in 2019.
forced into a notation system based on pulse. The piece was commissioned by a consortium led by Chris Graham, and premiered online by the Purchase Contemporary Ensemble in 2021.
Mobile
Mobile starts with a simple melody expressed in sighs, with the two instruments gently passing off inner voices and weaving in and out of each other. This is one of those melodies that never quite settles—one phrase constantly elides into the next. By the end of the piece, this has blossomed into something new. This piece was commissioned by the Walden School and premiered by Hub New Music in 2021.
Springlike
Liquid Animal
This piece is a mess. Just like everything beautiful, it’s full of parts that are out of sync, cells that are evolving, fluids finding equilibrium. It was written for musicians who had been a year without direct human connection through their art, in order to give space to share that feeling without erasing it. Like in One Brilliant, players read from a video score in which notes on a staff scroll right to left and are played when they cross a vertical red line. I created this motionbased engraving system in order to free organic rhythms from the complicated realizations that they end up taking when
I should start by admitting that I really like Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. The sense of clarity and refinement of idea, the precision of the orchestration, the emotional appeal—it affects me much like it does so many other Americans. I was raised in Appalachia, and I feel great nostalgia for the soft mountains and gray rivers that this music conjures in so many minds. Copland’s open, airy string chords seem to settle in the valleys, riding up the hollers on a brisk wind. Yet it’s one small fact that made me giddy with the idea of turning Copland’s piece into musical confetti, like a balloon meeting a ceiling fan in slow motion: it had nothing to do with Appalachia. Copland was informed post hoc by Martha Graham that the name,
Program Notes, cont.
lifted from a Hart Crane poem, would be applied to their collaboration, a ballet about American pioneers in Pennsylvania. Appalachia gets a lot of bad publicity, so I see no need to protest this happy accident. But the irony—how easily the pastoral and folksy tropes slipped into people’s preexisting image of Appalachia, as if it were an orchestral changeling that burst forth from the rhododendrons and found its way into the pen of a Brooklynite—was too good to resist. This piece has no corrective ambitions; I have not intentionally drafted any of Appalachia’s many musical traditions into service here. Nor have I even touched the hallmark Shaker melody. I mostly focused on one small excerpt, which suggested possibilities not realized in the original, and carried it to its logical, if somewhat maniacal, conclusion. This piece was written for the 2019 Next Festival of Emerging Artists.
Exi Vr II
Following up on Exi Vr for violin, viola, and noise, this piece mostly explores toneless sounds, heard both acoustically and as amplified by contact microphones, which are also used as implements for playing the instruments, along with a toothbrush, a spoon, and the players’ fingers. The players read off of a graphic score that scrolls across a screen. The phrase “Exi Vr” comes from a book of gibberish that was allegedly dictated by an angelic figure to the sixteenthcentury mathematician John Dee. This piece was commissioned by the Walden School and premiered by Ensemble Dal Niente in 2019.
Sunflower
As with most of my pieces in the Antiphonia series, this piece takes a simple idea and evolves it through repetition. The way it happens here takes on one of my favorite formal devices, which I first heard in James Blake’s “The Wilhelm Scream”: one idea is repeated throughout the whole piece while being gradually transformed. I premiered this piece as part of an event at Santa Clara University in 2022.
So Shrunk My Sinews
I’m not sure if this piece is comforting or terrifying, if it’s full of boundless joy or apocalyptic destruction. It’s definitely full of something. What do you think?
Upcoming Events at YSM
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