José García-León, Dean
new music new haven
Aaron Jay Kernis, Artistic Director
Martin Bresnick & David Lang faculty
composers
Thursday, November 7, 2024 | 7:30 p.m.
Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Program
Jaebong Rho
b. 1995
Kacper Madejek
b. 1999
Lily Koslow
b. 2001
ludus cyclus
Ria Honda, violin
Nicolas Garrigues, viola
Robin Park, cello
Rafael Mendez, flute
Nicole Martin, clarinet
Forrest Eimold, piano
Maya Miro Johnson, conductor
Butterfly Hunt
Elizaveta Kozlova, soprano
Laurel Gagnon, violin
Josh Liu, violin
Nicolas Perkins, viola
Jiyeon Kim, cello
Patrick Curtis, bass
Jolie Fitch, flute
Ben Smith, flute
Katelyn Poetker, clarinet
RADIO SILENCE
Laurel Gagnon, violin
Josh Liu, violin
Ayano Nakamura, viola
Jiyeon Kim, cello
Patrick Curtis, bass
Sophia Jean, c flute & bass flute
Maren Tonini, oboe
Nikki Pet, clarinet
intermission
Nicole Martin, clarinet
Tucker Van Gundy, bassoon
Sam Hart, horn
Matt Boyle, percussion
Han Xia, accordion
Subin Lee, harp
Ryan Sheng, piano
Stefano Boccacci, conductor
Darius Farhoumand, bassoon
Sam Hart, horn
Grace O'Connell, trumpet
Jude Morris, trombone
Chad Beebe, percussion
Miu Ishikawa, piano
Ezra Calvino, conductor
Maya Miro Johnson
b. 2001
Ritual in Transfigured Time II
Megan Lin & Matthew Cone, violin
Andy Park, viola
Kyeong Eun Kim, cello
Michael Huerta, flute & piccolo
Nikki Pet, clarinet & bass clarinet
Kyle Rappe, percussion
Maya Miro Johnson, conductor
Diallo Banks
b. 2001
Martin Bresnick
b. 1946
David Lang
b. 1957
a river dies of thirst
Julian Seney, viola
Yihan Wu, bass
Sophia Jean, flute
Naomi Wharry, trombone
Jessie Chiang, percussion
Ezra Calvino, conductor
Songs of the Mouse People, Volume One, Book One
I. Common Squeaking (Made apparent by its delicacy)
II. That Peace We Yearn For
III. Every Disturbance Is An Opportunity
IV. A Thousand Pairs of Shoulders Tremble (Under a burden actually meant for one)
V. Laughter Stops (When we see Josephine)
Miriam Liske-Dorandish, cello
Chad Beebe, vibraphone
ever-present
Yuxin Yin & Matt Boyle, pianos
Jessie Chiang & Han Xia, marimbas
Chad Beebe & Kyle Rappe, vibraphones
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
Martin Bresnick, faculty composer
Martin Bresnick was educated at the University of Hartford, Stanford University, and the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. His principal teachers of composition included György Ligeti, John Chowning, and Gottfried von Einem. Bresnick has taught internationally, including at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, and the Royal Academy of Music in London, among others.
Bresnick’s compositions, from opera, chamber, and symphonic music to film scores and computer music, are performed throughout the world by leading symphonies, chamber groups, and festival ensembles. His music has been recorded and released by New Focus Recordings, Tall Poppies Records, Starkland Records, Cantaloupe Music, Composers Recordings, Inc., Centaur Records, New World Records, Artifact Music, and Albany Records, and is published by Carl Fischer Music, Bote & Bock, and CommonMuse Music Publishers.
At Yale, Bresnick teaches a studio of graduate students, and his works are often featured on the New Music New Haven concert series. During the summer, he is Director of the New Music Workshop at the Yale Summer School of Music/ Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.
David Lang, faculty composer
David Lang is one of America’s mostperformed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber, and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling, and emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike. the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, was recently listed by The Guardian as “one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st century.” The composition won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and the recording received a Grammy Award in 2010. Lang’s simple song #3, written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed film Youth, received many award nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe.
Lang is a Professor of Music Composition at the Yale School of Music, and is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP), and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Group.
Student Profiles Staff
Maya Miro Johnson ’26MM Student of David Lang mayamirojohnson.com
Diallo Banks, ’25MM Student of Christopher Theofanidis diallobankscomposer.com
Jaebong Rho, ’26MM Student of Aaron Jay Kernis jaebongrho.com
Kacper Madejek, ’25MM Student of Aaron Jay Kernis kacpermadejek.com
Lily Koslow, ’25MM Student of Aaron Jay Kernis
Texts
Madejek, Butterfly Hunt
last words in a mist of sighs, time’s forgotten we were born, I prayed the rainbow sheen of skies would set us free, so we may fly above the burning stakes and thorns.
general manager
Jeffrey Mistri
production coordinator & music librarian
Marika Basagoitia
office assistant
Abby Smith
on the trampled grass we bid farewell, their empty nets flung in defeat alike deathly rings, as borne aloft these hunting grounds we dwell and flutter toward a blossom, waiting for the spell that dying flowers cast on our pair of wings.
like the fleeting butterflies we’ll soon bring the lingering morn, and the sparkling dew'd bear witness to our yester cries, spurring gardens into bloom, from the chrysaline disguise we’ll emerge again, transformed.
Kacper Madejek
Program Notes by the composers
ludus cyclus
Jaebong rho
I usually take inspiration from topics outside of music when starting a composition. However, this piece began solely as a methodological exploration of compositional techniques. It involves creating a limited number of patterns in various forms, and these patterns combine in different ways to generate new cycles. The cycles of varying sizes intertwine like tangled multiple Ouroboros, offering an analytical game.
Butterfly Hunt
Kacper madeJeK
This plaintive chamber concerto for soprano serves as a vector of my feelings about the violations of belonging and self-expression. Upon reading Walter Benjamin’s eponymous essay, I was taken aback by the striking resemblance between his reckless butterfly hunt and violent human persecution. Such unprovoked cruelty continues to claim lives of people stigmatized simply for daring to be themselves; like innocuous butterflies fluttering in the garden before being captured. Set to my introspective poem in three stanzas, my music symbolically demarginalizes the individual voice by making it a catalyst for the ensemble, and reflects on its audacious strife in vulnerability...
RADIO SILENCE
lily Koslow
RADIO SILENCE represents the beginnings of an existential reflection on the brutality of modern imperialism and its representation in mass media. The metaphor of the screaming solo bassoon against an unflinching layer of “broken radio” noise represents an individual’s struggle to make sense of the world while being surrounded by unclear, interrupted, and/or disturbed communications. With textures ranging from subtly expressive to harsh and unrelenting, the piece aims to capture and distill complex and irreconcilable feelings, and to explore their inherent tensions in the framework of musical discourse.
Ritual in Transfigured Time II
maya miro Johnson
This summer, I created music for Maya Deren’s 1946 silent dance film Ritual in Transfigured Time, a core work of experimental cinema exploring the stretching and compressing time using (at that time, novel) camera techniques, as well as the idea of surveilling and manipulating the captive and active body via cameras. The music in the now - multimedia work, which also references Teiji Ito’s posthumous re-scoring of silent Deren films, starts out diagetic, then becomes more and more abstract over the course of film’s 4 segments (introduction, party, garden, chase), while retaining an umbilical cord connection to filmic rhythm, ornament, and narrative.
a river dies in thirst diallo banKs
In April of 2024 I wrote a viola solo work for Julian Seney of the same name, it was such a fun project that I expanded it here for small chamber group with viola solo. The material had a lot more to say and a lot of different ways of saying it.
Songs of the Mouse People martin bresnicK
Songs of the Mouse People is based on Franz Kafka’s last short work “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People.” In that remarkable valedictory story Kafka meditates on a mouse diva, Josephine, and her relationship to both her art and her audience. In my composition I have translated sentences from the original that suggested (to me, at least) titles in the mouse people’s multi-volume treasury of songs.
Songs of the Mouse People was commissioned by Maya Beiser and Steven Schick with the assistance of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.
ever-present david lang
In 2018, I got a request from (YSM alum!) Bryce Dessner to write a piece for the debut of his new ensemble, Dream House Quartet, which he started with fellow electric guitarist David Chalmin and the pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque. I have been a friend of Bryce’s for a million years and I was very happy to get to write a new piece for him, and my
first thought was to honor the fact that I knew Bryce but not the other players. My idea was to write a musical figure for Bryce that would never change much but would never repeat exactly, and which would go through the entire piece, from start to finish. All the changes in the flow of the piece come from how the other players hear what Bryce is doing - do they double his part, do they echo in canon, do they hold certain notes and let others go? Bryce’s part is “ever-present” but the music does change, depending on what the other instruments can hear. I wrote the piece, they premiered it, and then the COVID pandemic happened, and all music stopped, everywhere. One way I kept myself optimistic during the pandemic was by making arrangements of several of my pieces, as gifts for musicians I hoped might want them, when the world opened up again. One of these gifts was an arrangement of ever-present for Bob Van Sice and the Yale percussionists, and tonight marks its premiere.
If you are curious to hear my piece in its original instrumentation, the recording was just released last week on Deutsche Grammophon, on an album called SONIC WIRES, and it includes music by fellow Yale School of Music Alums Bryce Dessner, Timo Andres and Caroline Shaw, among others.
Upcoming Events at YSM
nov 12
American Brass Quintet
Oneppo Chamber Music Series
7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Single tickets start at $31, Yale faculty/staff start at $23, students $14
nov 20
Robert Blocker, piano
Horowitz Piano Series
7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Single tickets start at $17, Yale faculty/staff start at $12, students start at $8
nov 22
Bruckner’s 8th Symphony
Peter Oundjian, principal conductor, Yale Philharmonia
7:30 p.m. | Woolsey Hall
Single tickets start at $13, Yale faculty/staff start at $9, students free
dec 1
William Purvis, horn
Faculty Artist Series
3:00 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Free admission
dec “Generations of Music at Yale”
3 & 4
Oneppo Chamber Music Series & Yale in New York
Tues 7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Single tickets start at $31, Yale faculty/staff start at $23, students $14
Wed 8:00 p.m. | Weill Hall, NYC
Tickets $40, carnegiehall.org
yale school of music box office
Sprague Memorial Hall, 470 College Street New Haven, CT 06511
203 432–4158 | music-tickets.yale.edu
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