Pietà (NEW WORK)

 

08/11/17 – Louisville, KY – Pietà (violin, cello and piano)
PREMIERE – Bird Hall, The University of Louisville – Longleash Trio

Program Note:
Pietà was written during the Spring and Summer of 2017 for Pala Garcia, John Popham and Renate Rohlfing for the Loretto Festival 2017.

Our father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
…

Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.
…

“…I’m tired now.
Sometimes I talk too much. That’s happiness.”
…

Give us this day our daily bread…

(Fragments from: Lord’s Prayer – English vernacular version, Another Weeping Woman – Wallace Stevens, Three Views of a Mother – John Ciardi)

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The Panther (PREMIERE)

The Panther [8′]
violin and bassoon (for William Overcash and Benjamin Roidl-Ward)      Score

Program Note:
The Panther was composed during the Summer and Fall of 2016 for my good friends William Overcash and Benjamin Roidl-Ward.

The Panther
Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Diana Toman)

His gaze, from pacing back and forth
Behind the bars, has grown so tired
That it contains nothing anymore.
He feels as if there were a thousand bars
And behind the thousand bars, no world.

The soft treat of supply powerful steps,
Which goes around with the very smallest circle,
Is like a dance of force around a center
In which stands numbed a potent will.

Only sometimes, the eye’s lid
Soundlessly opens – Then an image enters,
Moves through the limbs’ taut silence –
And in the heart, it ceases to be.

Horror Vacui (PREMIERE)

Horror Vacui [14′]
flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano (for the Nouveau Classical Project)       Score

Commissioned by The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at The University of Maryland for The Nouveau Classical Project

Program Note:
Horror Vacui (a fear or dislike of leaving empty spaces, especially in an artistic composition) was composed during the Summer and Fall of 2016 for the Nouveau Classical Project.

Movements:
1. Prelude (catalogue of notes)
2. Monochord (fantasia)
3. Interlude 1
4. Bookend 1
5. Interlude 2
6. Vacui
7. Interlude 3
8. Bookend 2 (postlude)

…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! And since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee…
-Moby Dick, Herman Melville

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

The sea sparkled far and wide in the last glow of evening; … The fog rose, the water surged. The gull flew back and forth; …
-Am Meer, Heinrich Heine (fragment)

Not Sorrow (PREMIERE)

Amaranthine (PREMIERE)

04/05/17 – New York, NY – Amaranthine (violin, cello and piano)
PREMIERE – Hunter College, Lang Recital Hall – Longleash Trio

Program Note:
Amaranthine was written during the Winter and Spring of 2017. There are two performance versions, one for piano trio premiered by the Longleash trio, and another for piano trio + flute, clarinet, harp and french horn commissioned and premiered by NAT 28. I would like to thank my good friends Jean-Patrick Besingrand and Zoe Sorrell of Nat 28 for commissioning this piece.

Amaranth/amaranthine
1. An imaginary, undying flower.
2. Unfading, everlasting: a woman of amaranthine loveliness.

As I row over the plain
Of the sea and gaze
Into the distance, the waves
Merge with the bright sky
…
As certain as color
Passes from the petal,
Irrevocable as flesh,
The gazing eye falls through the world

Haiku – Fujiwara no Tadamichi (trans. Kenneth Rexroth)
Phoenix and the Tortoise (fragment) – Kenneth Rexroth

Eolian (Florida State University Festival of New Music)

 

02/02/17 – Tallahassee, FL – Eolian (violin solo)
Florida State University – Benjamin Sung, violin

Program Note:
Eolian refers to the mode that is today commonly known as the Aeolian mode. The nature of this piece stems from the complex history of the Aeolian mode (all modes in general) and its etymology, mainly dealing with the concept of wind and erosion finding its roots in the name of the Greek god Aeolus “ruler of the winds”. Structurally this solo is based on the prelude and fugue model of the baroque era. The opening prelude presents a sound world that is interrupted by wind-like gestures, and is in part inspired by the instrument known as the Aeolian harp, an instrument placed outside or at an open window whereby the strings are put into motion by wind alone. The concluding recitative and quasi fuga (canonic fugue) never fully generate into a traditional form, rather an antiphonal call and response between pitched dyads and wind-like gestures takes place, which is further eroded over the course of the piece. Eolian is part of the Melos Cycle for string quartet, in which a series of solos and duos are performed one after another (attacca), each based on a mode and the concept of its etymology and complex historical utilization.

Eolic “…was fittest for lyric verses, as having a particular sweetness mixed with gravity.”
-Brossard Dictionary (1703)

Returning (PREMIERE)

 

11/16/16 – New York, NY – Returning (violin and piano)
PREMIERE – Elebash Recital Hall at the CUNY Graduate Center – Seohee Min, violin; Irfan Tengku, piano

PROGRAM NOTE
Returning was written for the violinist Seohee Min during the Spring and Summer of 2016.

Movements:
1. Incipit I
2. Con moto I
3. Chimera I
4. Murmurations I-II, Flight, Canticle
5. Returning
6. Murmuration III
7. Con moto II
8. Incipit II/III, Chimera II
9. Circulatio

ALL I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.

Renascence [fragment]
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Or on still evenings when the rain falls close
There comes a tremor in the drops, and fast
My pulses run, knowing thy thought hath passed
That beareth thee as doth the wind a rose.

Camaraderie [stanza 3]
Ezra Pound

Du bleibst doch immer was du bist. “you remain always what you are.”

Manifesto (2016)
Lewis Nielson

Recitation Tomb (premiere)

 

02/16/16 – New York, NY – Recitation Tomb (3 baritones and 2 perc.)

PREMIERE – Elebash Recital Hall at the GC – Ensemble C4 and The Curiosity Cabinet

Perry Townsend, Brian Mountford, David See; baritones
Ellery Trafford, Joe Tucker; percussion
Martha Sullivan; conductor

Program Note:
Ezra Pound’s poem The Tomb at Akr Caar depicts the presence of a soul or perhaps the perspective of time. The quality of isolation and suppression found in this poem struck me as fit for homogeneous musical ensembles, especially whereby two groups are at odds with one another while attempting to fuse at the same time. This piece is also a response to Georges Aphergis’ Recitations for solo voice, and utilizes rhythmic material from Recitations eleven and fourteen as well as pitched material from Recitation four. Accumulation of these materials (for instance the pyramid shape of Recitation eleven) is further pronounced, in Recitation Tomb by a slowly descending series of dyads throughout the first part of the piece, effectively burying the vocal range in the low register. Pound’s poem deals with aspects of decay, in such a way that a reading of his poem isn’t much different from running one’s fingers along the remains of hieroglyphs from an unearthed tomb, in an attempt to decipher the words in greater detail. Here bits and pieces of text have fallen to the ground, the voices pass the words around in fragments, although following the original linear arc of Pound’s poem a sense of decoding these cryptic words permeates this setting. The feeling of accumulation in Aphergis’ Recitations is here reconfigured and fragmented, whereby a simplicity of pitch and timbre attribute to a static yet accumulating development through which the voices are affectively “buried” in a tomb themselves.

Beat and Marais

Hibari and Rabin 川の流れのように