New Music New Haven, Tania Leon, featured composer, February 9, 2023

Robert Blocker, Dean

Aaron Jay Kernis, Artistic Director

Tania León

featured

Thursday, February 9, 2023 | 7:30 p.m.

Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Program

Luke Haaksma

b. 1997

with, draw

Charlie Lovell-Jones, violin

Yukiko Nakamura, marimba

Jessie Chiang, vibraphone

Michael Yeung, piano

Mingyu Son, bass drum & crotales

Arseniy Gusev

b. 1998

Voynich Plants Guide (2022)

Alexander Franco Goldberg, violin

Yukiko Nakamura, marimba

Jessie Chiang, vibraphone

Michael Yeung, piano I

Mingyu Son, piano II

Forrest Eimold

b. 1999

Antares

Charlie Lovell-Jones, violin

Yukiko Nakamura, percussion

Sijia Huang, percussion

Mingyu Son, percussion

Michael Yeung, percussion

Makana Medeiros, percussion

Dayton Hare

b. 1996

Fits and Starts

Emma Meinrenken, violin

Jessie Chiang, marimba I

Makana Medeiros, marimba II & kick bass

Mingyu Son, vibraphone I & crotales

Yukiko Nakamura, vibraphone II

Aaron Israel Levin

b. 1995

Videogame Vespers

Albert Steinberger, violin

Lila Meretzky

b. 1998

Tania León

b. 1943 León

Lunch

Alexa Stier, piano

Derek Hartman, piano

AXON for solo violin and interactive computer (2002)

Emma Meinrenken, violin

De memorias (2000)

Collin Stavinoha, flute

Michelle Oh, oboe

Zikang Wang, clarinet

Ryan Goodwin, bassoon

Franco Ortiz, horn

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

Tania León, featured composer

Tania León (b. Havana, Cuba) is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2022, she was named a recipient of the 45th Annual Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements.

Recent premieres include works for Los Angeles Philharmonic, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Grossman Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Jennifer Koh’s project, Alone Together. Appearances as guest conductor include Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Gewandhausorchester, Orquesta Sinfónica de Guanajuato, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuba, among others. Upcoming commissions feature works for the League of American Orchestras, and Claire Chase, flute, and The Crossing Choir with text by Rita Dove.

A founding member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas Festivals, was New Music Advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and is the founder/Artistic Director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning and advocacy organization for living composers.

Honors include the New York Governor’s Lifetime Achievement, inductions into the American Academy of Arts and Letters

and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowship awards from ASCAP Victor Herbert Award and The Koussevitzky Music and Guggenheim Foundations, among others. She also received a proclamation for Composers Now by the New York City Mayor, and the MadWoman Festival Award in Music (Spain).

León has received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Colgate University, Oberlin, SUNY Purchase College, and The Curtis Institute of Music, and served as U.S. Artistic Ambassador of American Culture in Madrid, Spain. A CUNY Professor Emerita, she was awarded a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, Chamber Music America’s 2022 National Service Award, and Harvard University’s 2022 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award.

Student Profiles

Luke Haaksma ’24MM Student of David Lang » lukehaaksma.com

Arseniy Gusev ’24MM Student of Christopher Theofanidis » arseniygusev.com

Forrest Eimold ’24MM Student of Martin Bresnick

Dayton Hare ‘24MM Student of David Lang » daytonhare.github.io

Aaron Israel Levin ’19MM ’27DMA Student of Katherine Balch » aaronisraellevin.com

Lila Meretzky ’22MM ’23MMA Student of Christopher Theofanidis » lilameretzky.com

Staff

manager

Jeffrey M. Mistri

assistant manager/music librarian

Samuel Bobinski

office assistant

Marty Tung

Program Notes by the

composers

with, draw

luke haaksma

with, draw is driven by a simple question: what happens when a receptor has nothing to receive?

Voynich Plants Guide

arseniy gusev

The piece is inspired by whimsical shapes of the botanical drawings in the famous Voynich Manuscript. The plants in the manuscript are mostly unidentifiable, and the music offers one of many interpretations of their nature. Throughout the piece, the musical material is being transformed according to the structure of the plants, as if they were actual bioprocessors. Each performer is supposed to read from the part, decorated with the collage made after the drawings. Special thanks to the Beinecke Library for the cooperation and to Lila Meretzky for creating the collages.

Antares

forrest eimold

Things fall apart, things come together. Auto-TuneTM is causing as much of an uproar today as it did in Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme. Mistakes are fixed, failure persists. ‘Technique’ remains powerful only insofar as it is incomplete, risks and even surrenders itself for something else— if Satie’s Socrate were to have a lesson, might it be this? We don’t believe our ears, we hear what we believe. What would it mean to hear Grainger as documentary?

Antares is a phased demolition—or distillation?—of fragments taken from the above three composers (dating from 1901 to 1918), and transformed via an acoustic imitation of Auto-Tune. These materials are not meant to be recognizable as such, but they shape the piece as fully as our forgotten memories shape ourselves.

Fits and Starts

dayton hare

The creative process is often a struggle for me. I’ll sit on a piece idea for months—years, even—before finally deciding to commit it to paper. I wrestle with exactly how to get my point across, measuring the idea’s unanticipated deficiencies and its surprising possibilities. When I write, I often turn a corner to find dead ends where I least expect them, and other times I round a bend to stumble across an oasis of untapped possibilities. It’s a process of false starts and reconfigurations, but over time the work generally emerges. This piece is in some ways a metaphor for that process, and in it I try to take an idea and carry it as far as I feel it can bear before it emerges into a transformed landscape.

Videogame Vespers

aaron israel levin

The world of classical music is a lot like a video game. As a performer, you start at level one; as the music becomes more and more challenging, you start to level up; winning a competition or an audition feels like conquering a final level boss in a video game; in the virtual world of games, losing

often means losing a life. The stakes of performance are different, but the feeling of loss is equally crushing. For me, these symmetries offer a potent metaphor for the ambition that we have as artists, the pressures we—and this industry—put on ourselves, and the pain of disappointment. In a video game, satisfaction is short-lived, and there is a constant drive for further improvement. Classical music is a discipline propelled by this same perfectionism. Videogame Vespers puts violin virtuosity and video game violence in conversation with one another in order to examine the mastery and finesse of performance, as well as its frailties.

Lunch

lila meretzky

Lunch is adapted from a piece I wrote for vibraphone and marimba (also called Lunch). Going from four mallets per player to ten fingers per player and from five octaves to seven octaves in the range opened up a world of new possibilities for this version of the piece. There are certainly a lot more notes! For this reason and many others I am very grateful to Alexa and Derek, who bring virtuosity, generosity, and a great sense of humor to Lunch.

AXON

tania león

AXON for solo violin and interactive computer is a work in which pulses and impulses travel and refract away from each other, thus creating a sound world of new spectral motivic sound images. This piece was

commissioned and premiered at the ISCM World Music Days 2002 in Hong Kong by Mari Kimura, who created the original MAX/SMP samples based on sound samples of two of the composer’s earlier works. Special thanks to Noah Creshevsky for his assistance in compiling the original sound files used in the work. Ms. Kimura recorded AXON for Bridge Records, released in 2007.

De memorias

tania león

Dedicated to my teacher, Cuban composer Alfredo Diez Nieto, De memorias has the sensation of days gone by, of my own memories, so familiar that I know them “By memory”.

The internal movement of the piece contrasts sounds framed within a rhythmic atmosphere; and opposite them, an atmosphere that is completely free, giving the sensation of a dialogue between capricious imaginary resonances.

The work is marked by the use of insistent accents, over which weaves contrasting, lyrical fragments. The use of various methods of tone production contributes to the creation of a special, unified atmosphere. Contrasting elements in the work exist between parallel movements and other materials of an apparently opposing nature. Brief ostinato throughout the piece impart a definite structural cohesiveness, as do glissandi, a discreet use of microtones, and a few specific dialogues between pairs of instruments.

Upcoming Events at YSM

feb 12 Wendy Sharp & Friends Faculty Artist Series

3 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Free admission

feb 14 Handel & Haydn Society

Oneppo Chamber Music Series

7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Tickets start at $28, Students $13

feb 15

Lunchtime Chamber Music

12:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Free admission

feb 15 Callisto Quartet

YSM Ensembles

4:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Free admission

feb Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia

17 & 18 Yale Opera

7:30 p.m. | Legacy Theatre (Stony Creek, CT)

Tickets sold out

feb 24 Samuel Hollister, student conductor

Yale Philharmonia

7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Tickets start at $12, Yale faculty/staff start at $8, Students free*

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