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.