New Music New Haven, George Lewis, guest composer, March 9, 2023

Robert Blocker, Dean

Aaron Jay Kernis, Artistic Director

George Lewis

guest composer

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

Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall

Program

George Lewis

b. 1952

Mnemosis (2012)

Jarrett May, flute, bass flute & piccolo

Amer Hasan, clarinet & bass clarinet

Yukiko Nakamura, percussion

Sijia Huang, percussion

Arseniy Gusev, piano

Andrew Samarasekara, violin

Brian Isaacs, viola

Jakob Taylor, cello

Samuel Hollister, conductor

Benjamin Webster

b. 1997

Three Pieces for solo violin

I.

II. Interlude

III.

Emily Shehi, violin

Lila Meretzky

b. 1998

Confection I

Esther Kwon, double bass

Chelsea Strayer, double bass

Anjali Pillai, bassoon 1

Winfred Felton, bassoon 2

Darius Farhoumand, bassoon 3

Matiss Čudars

b. 1991

relief

Makana Medeiros, marimba

Aaron Israel Levin

b. 1995

Stitches

Tiffany Wee, violin

Emma Carleton, violin

Matthew McDowell, viola

Jenny Bahk, cello

Harriet Steinke

b. 1994

Rituals

I. Practice

II. Chorales

IV. More Canons

V. Requiem

Lloyd Van’t Hoff, clarinet

Lisa Moore, piano

Dayton Hare

b. 1996

A blue heron alights on the riverbank near dawn

Benjamin Lanners, cello

Jun Hwi Cho, piano

Lewis

float, sting (2018)

Lloyd Van’t Hoff, clarinet & bass clarinet

Cheng “Allen” Liang, cello

Makana Medeiros, drum set

Muzi Zhao, piano

Joe Tollefsen, electric guitar

Nicole Wiedenmann, double bass

Samuel Hollister, conductor

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

George Lewis, guest composer

George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvisative forms is documented on more than 150 recordings. His work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, RadioSinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Mivos Quartet, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, London Sinfonietta, Spektral Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, Ensemble Erik Satie, Eco Ensemble, and others, with commissions from American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Harvestworks, Ensemble

Either/Or, Orkestra Futura, Turning Point Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, IRCAM, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and others.

Lewis has served as Fromm Visiting Professor of Music, Harvard University; Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Fromm Composer in Residence, American Academy in Rome; Resident Scholar, Center for Disciplinary Innovation, University of Chicago; and CAC Fitt Artist in Residence, Brown University. Lewis received the 2012 SEAMUS Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award; Lewis was elected to Honorary Membership in the Society in 2016. Lewis is the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016), and his opera Afterword (2015), commissioned by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, has been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic. In 2015, Lewis received the degree of Doctor of Music (DMus, honoris causa) from the University of Edinburgh.

Student Profiles

Benjamin Webster ’23MMA Student of Katherine Balch » benwebstermusic.com

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

Matiss Čudars ’23MM Student of David Lang » matisscudars.com

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

Harriet Steinke ’22MM ’23MMA Student of David Lang » harrietsteinke.com

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

Staff

manager

Jeffrey M. Mistri

assistant manager/music librarian

Samuel Bobinski

office assistant

Marty Tung

Program Notes by

the composers

Mnemosis

george lewis

Mnemosis draws inspiration from two sources in the Western philosophical literature. First, we have Friedrich Nietzsche’s classic 1882 conception of the eternal recurrence in The Gay Science: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence...’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?”

One one view, the demon’s visit exemplifies one of European history’s most terrifying myths: the fate of King Sisyphus, whom the gods punish by compelling him to push an enormous boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down again – a task he was doomed to repeat endlessly, throughout eternity. A subliminal version of this narrative may well shed light on the aversion some have to repetitive, minimalist, or process musics, and/or their Indonesian, African, and Afrodiasporic fellow travelers; all of these elements inform Mnemosis in various ways. But we can turn to the affirmative side of the gift offered by Nietzsche’s demon: “Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!”

Program Notes cont.

The condition of the eternal recurrence leads to the second source of inspiration for Mnemosis, proposition 6.4311 of Wittgenstein’s 1921 Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus: “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.” The implication in both cases treats history, memory, and experience as existentially recursive, allowing progress to coexist with stasis. This apparent paradox threatens to recur eternally in my creative work, and this is the sense in which I hope listeners can encounter this piece.

Three Pieces for solo violin

benjamin webster

Three Pieces is a collection of short, contrasting works for unaccompanied violin. The opening movement is spirited and virtuosic, with constant motion from start to finish. The second, titled “Interlude,” is gentle and nostalgic, foregrounding a simple pizzicato chord progression as its primary idea. The final movement, the most lyrical of the three, moves freely between emotions of anguish and introspection.

Confection I

lila meretzky

Confection I is a tasty morsel for a consort of some of the lowest instruments of the orchestra. Though the ensemble seems low-end-heavy, bassoons and basses can actually produce sounds across an extremely wide pitch and textural range. As you listen, I invite you to get inside the sound and enjoy both the grit and velvet these wonderful players can evoke.

relief

matiss Čudars

Working on relief mostly filled me with a sense of relief. You too might experience a sense of relief while listening to it. You might experience a sense of relief when the music is finally over. You might notice the notes riding on a smooth or bumpy relief. You might experience anything else or nothing at all, and I’m happy for you just being here.

Stitches

aaron israel levin

I recently learned that both sets of my grandparents came from families of tailors. When I was asked to write a piece that dealt with the Silk Road—the historical trade route that connected significant portions of Asia, Africa, and Europe—I decided to channel my heritage by dealing with silk itself, a material that would have been very familiar to the tailors in my family. I have vivid memories of seeing and playing with old sewing machines in my grandparents’ houses, and I chose to treat the musical material of Stitches with the same rhythmic regularities and irregularities of these old tools. I also wanted to reimagine this machinery as if it were an ancient technology being discovered anew. In this way, past and present are connected and brought into dialogue through music.

Rituals

harriet steinke

Rituals is a five-movement work for clarinet and piano, running roughly 20 minutes in

length. Tonight’s performance will feature a shortened set of four of the five movements. This work is the first that I completed in the new year, and the process of writing the piece became an exercise in reseting my own regular creative practice for 2023. I set out to write a movement each day at the start of the year, and each of the five movements is based on one of the those sketches. The resulting work begins with two longer movements, “Practice” and “Chorales,” each running around 6 minutes, and three much shorter movements, “Canons,” “More Canons,” and “Requiem.” During the writing process, some movements inspired ideas in other movements, creating both obvious and subtle reoccurring musical impulses across the five-movement set. This work was written for Lloyd Van’t Hoff and Lisa Moore, and the work was deeply inspired by their tender and expressive playing as well as their lovely personalities. Please enjoy!

A blue heron alights on the riverbank near dawn

dayton hare

Perhaps I’m a bit late in writing a piece about an early pandemic experience, but in the time since 2020 I’ve returned to the same memory often enough that I felt compelled to do something with it. In the first months of the lockdown following COVID-19’s emergence, I (like a lot of people) got into the habit of taking long walks to stave off cabin fever and anxiety. Most often, I would circle down the sloping route to the river and follow the water’s winding way. As the weeks wore on and the riverside paths grew more populous

with stir-crazy quarantiners, I began to take these strolls in the moments just after dawn, when I could be alone with nature. One mist-shrouded morning, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a blue heron balancing on one leg in shallow water, unperturbed by my presence. We watched one another silently for a few minutes, before the bird, with a nonchalant gesture, spread its wings and flew off down the river. It was a comfort, in that uncertain and chaotic time, to see a fellow creature so unbothered by its surroundings, seemingly at peace with the world. I carried that image with me for months to come.

float, sting

george lewis

Composing music is a matter of engaging with the behavior of human bodies and minds situated in historical time and sonic space. Methodologically, float, sting embodies my three tropes of compositional engagement: first, adornment, or what Zora Neale Hurston called “decorating a decoration,” as realized in The Will To Adorn (2011), my work for sixteen instruments from 2011; and second, creolization, in which new music brings new modes of subjectivity to the fore. The third trope is less methodological than affective. This piece deploys the classic American strategy of musical depiction, as with Blind Tom’s 1863 piano work The Battle of Manassas, in which thunder, lightning, and the sounds of cannons are recalled via cluster-like sounds that presage by more than half a century early Henry Cowell and the Futurists, as well as Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony, Ives’s The Housatonic at Stockbridge, and Duke Ellington’s tone

Program Notes cont.

parallels to Harlem. Affectively, this new work’s blend of depiction and abstraction alternatively floats and stings—like Muhammad Ali, whose remarks about facing the feared Sonny Liston in 1964 remind one the spirit in which we can welcome new musical ideas and the need for change: “This chump has got everybody scared. Scared of what? Nothing to be scared of.”

Upcoming Events at YSM

mar 10 Derek Wang, piano

Artist Diploma Recital

7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Free admission

mar 28 Dallas Symphony Orchestra

7:30 p.m. | Woolsey Hall

Free admission; registration requested » music-tickets.yale.edu/dso

mar 30 Yefim Bronfman, piano

Horowitz Piano Series

7:30p.m. | Morse Recital Hall

Tickets start at $28, Students start at $11

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