José García-León, Dean
new music new haven
Aaron Jay Kernis, artistic director
Hannah Kendall, guest composer
Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 7:30 p.m.
Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
Program
Maya Miro Johnson
b. 2001
Play in One Act
Shiraz Ensemble
Sepehr Pirasteh, alto kamancheh
Parsa Ferdowsi, santour
Nico Mateo Hernandez, double bass
Maya Miro Johnson, violin
Lily Koslow
b. 2001
Jules Barin-Fontaine
b. 2000
par des chemins qui hantent les lointains
Diallo Banks
b. 2001
Josh Liu, violin
Hammond organ
Diallo Banks, organ intermission
Theodore Haber
b. 1999
Ben Rieke
b. 2000
Hannah Kendall
b. 1984
Belief
Caroline Durham, violin
Laurel Gagnon, violin
Upward Mobility A
Forrest Eimold, piano
Tuxedo: (Copper): Ivory Mask
Annie Winkelman, oboe
Daniel Qin, prepared piano
How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing
Emma Meinrenken, violin
Haram Kim, violin
Julian Seney, viola
Charles Zandieh, cello
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
Hannah Kendall, guest composer
Hannah Kendall's music has been widely celebrated, and in 2022 she was awarded the Hindemith Prize for outstanding contemporary composers. In 2023, she won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Large Ensemble Composition for shouting forever into the receiver, commissioned by Südwestrundfunk for Ensemble Modern. Her 2016 chamber opera, The Knife of Dawn, received critical acclaim for its involving and claustrophobic representation of the incarceration of Guyanese political activist Martin Carter. A new production was presented on the Royal Opera House's main stage in 2020. She has worked with ensembles such as BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, LA Phil, London Sinfonietta, London Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. Festival appearances inlcude the BBC Proms, Berliner Festspiele, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Lucerne Festival and Tanglewood Music Festival.
Born in London in 1984, Kendall read music at the University of Exeter before completing a master's in advanced composition at the Royal College of Music and a doctorate at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her music is published by Ricordi (Berlin).
hannahkendall.co.uk
Student Profiles
Maya Miro Johnson, ’26MM
Student of David Lang mayamirojohnson.com
Lily Koslow, ’25MM
Student of Aaron Jay Kernis
Diallo Banks, '25MM
Student of Christopher Theofanidis diallobankscomposer.com
Theodore Haber, '26MMA
Student of Aaron Jay Kernis theodorehaber.com
Ben Rieke, '30DMA
Student of Christopher Theofsubmanidis
Staff
general manager
Jeffrey Mistri
production coordinator and music
librarian
Marika Basagoitia
office assistant
Abby Smith
Program Notes
by the composers
Play in One Act
Maya Miro Johnson
This piece is about dissolution from order into chaos and the cyclic urge to reinstate order at any cost. Choices are made. Orders are obeyed and disobeyed. The work was made collaboratively with and is improvised by Sepehr Pirasteh (alto kamancheh), Parsa Ferdowsi (santour), Nico Mateo Hernandez (double bass YSM '23), and Maya Miro Johnson (violin).
par des chemins qui hantent les lointains
Lily Koslow & Bastin-Fontaine
par des chemins qui hantent les lointains (on paths that haunt far-off lands) is the result of a collaborative creation process between Lily Koslow and Jules Bastin-Fontaine, exploring noise in resonance, melodic treatment of timbre, feedback, and heterogeneous textural writing. From intimate sustains to harsh outbursts, the piece traverses a series of evolving, resonant virtual spaces. The piece was composed in 2023 in Montréal and Saint-Irénée, Québec.
Hammond Organ
Diallo Banks
this is a work for Hammond organ
Program Notes, cont.
Belief
Theodore Haber
This piece asks the players to believe in the sound they are hearing from each other...
Upward Mobility
Ben Rieke
This piece, like my experience of life in this country in 2025, is somewhere on the border of sincerity and perversity. Pure effort always has some component of irony.
Pitch Black Night
Tuxedo: (Copper); Ivory Mask
Tuxedo: (Copper); Ivory Mask (2021) for oboe, piano and small auxiliary instruments, commissioned for the International Double Reed Society’s 50th anniversary, is the fourth piece in a series of 10 works after Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artwork Tuxedo, a collection of 16 smaller white-on-black silkscreen pieces originally made on paper. It comprises a matrix of hand-drawn words, symbols, and images including the phrases “(Copper)” and “Ivory Mask” concealed within a complex web of meaning. Similar to Basquiat, I embed codes throughout the work, namely through incorporating extracts from classical European and Afro diasporic folk songs as descriptors, often related to water; a symbol referenced indirectly throughout Basquiat’s Tuxedo. Indeed, I have carried the notion of traversing water, specifically, into my own Tuxedo series. For example, I include
a Bosun’s whistle in Tuxedo: (Copper); Ivory Mask as an act of reimagining the possible soundworld of enslaved Africans being taken across the Atlantic in the hold of a ship. Furthermore, instruments in several of the pieces are prepared with objects often associated with Afro hair in extension to Basquiat’s iconic crown motif. In Tuxedo: (Copper); Ivory Mask, eight Afro combs of varying materials (metal, plastic and wooden) are clustered between the lowest strings of the piano to produce a distorted, percussive sound. Also, the oboe-piano duet eventually dissolves into a prayerful, meditative call and response between two harmonicas, as the players breathe and speak into these instruments associated with Afro diasporic sorrow.
How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing
How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing (2022) takes its title from Ocean Vuong’s poem “Seventh Circle of Earth,” which he wrote in response to the murder of Dallas couple Clayton Capshaw and Michael Humphrey in their home by immolation in 2011. The work was commissioned by the Australian National Academy of Music for the Marmen Quartet.
The strings of the first violin and viola are bound with dreadlock cuffs, which are malleable metallic hair accessories. These preparations distort the sound of these instruments, primarily making a raw, harsh, yet simultaneously, fractured and fragile quality.
Furthermore, pitch production becomes unstable, unpredictable and changeable. Small auxiliary instruments are also incorporated, namely harmonicas, and pre-programmed music boxes playing Beethoven’s Für Elise and Ode to Joy. I chose these tunes in an attempt to conjure the same love, tenderness and intimacy that Vuong so powerfully interweaves throughout his text, despite the tragedy behind its inception.
Upcoming Events at YSM
feb 8
Guitar Extravaganza
All day | Morse Recital Hall & Sudler Hall
Free admission
feb 9
Ettore Causa, viola and Boris Berman, piano
Faculty Artist Series
3:00 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Free admission
feb 12 Wei-Yi Yang, 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
feb Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta
15 & 16 Sat 7:30 p.m. & Sun 2:00 p.m. | Shubert Theatre
Yale Opera presents a new production of Tchaikovsky’s romantic fairy tale Iolanta. Danilo Gambino returns as stage director and Metropolitan Opera conductor J. David Jackson leads the Yale Philharmonia and an exciting young cast in this lush opera about the transformative power of love.
Tickets available through the Shubert box office, 203-562-5666 and shubert.com
feb 21 Stefano Boccacci, conductor
Yale Philharmonia
7:30 p.m. | Morse Recital Hall
Single tickets start at $13, Yale faculty/staff start at $9, students free
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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