Blog - Seattle Modern Orchestra

“she, herself, said it” – Program Notes

KATE SOPER IPSA DIXIT (2010-2016)

I. Poetics (voice, flute, percussion, and violin)
text by Aristotle (abridged Soper) and Sophocles (from “Oedipus Rex”)

II. Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say (voice and flute)
text by Lydia Davis

III. Rhetoric (voice, flute, percussion, and violin)
text by Aristotle (abridged Soper) and Soper

IV. The Crito (voice and percussion)
text by Robert Duncan and Plato (abridged Soper)

V. Metaphysics (for voice flute, percussion, and violin)
text by Aristotle, abridged/adapted Soper

VI. Cipher (for voice and violin)
texts by Jenny Holzer, Wittgenstein, Pietro Bembo, Freud, Guido d’Arezzo, and Sarah Teasdale

PERFORMERS
Maria Männistö, soprano
Sarah Pyle, flute
Eric Rynes, violin
Bonnie Whiting, percussion

CREATIVE TEAM
Neil Parsons, director
Nabilah Ahmed, projection designer
Ryan Dunn, light designer
Marcin Paçzkowski, sound designer

PRODUCTION TEAM
Maria Manness, production manager
Amanda Balter, stage manager

These performances of Ipsa Dixit are generously sponsored by Patricia Tall-Takacs and Gary Takacs.

PROGRAM NOTE:
What is art? As the opening salvo to a piece of chamber music, the question is a little grandiose, bordering on pretentious. And expecting to arrive at an answer may be as deluded as putting stock into Jenny Holzer’s enigmatic assertion that it is useful to incorporate language into art because ‘people can understand you when you say something.’ Nevertheless, these two phrases are the bookends of IPSA DIXIT, which attempts to sound the depths of the tangled relationship between art, language, and meaning.

IPSA DIXIT is the feminized form of ipse dixit (literally “he, himself, said it”), a term used to describe a fallacious claim based on the authority of the claimer alone – e.g., “I don’t need to prove that what I say is true, it’s true because I say so!” The piece explores myriad ways in which the truth can be hidden, in how musical language can complicate sense, how a soprano’s sovereignty over instrumentalists can be challenged, and how gut feeling can overrule reason. The pursuit of honesty, under everyday circumstances as well as in matters of life and death, relentlessly haunts Ipsa Dixit at its surface.

IPSA DIXIT is an evening-length work of chamber music theatre that explores the tantalizingly convoluted intersections of music, language, and meaning through a deep interweaving of music and text, complex instrumental textures, contemporary vocal techniques, and blistering ensemble virtuosity. Scored for voice, flute, violin, and percussion, and developed over several years of intense collaboration with the members of Wet Ink, IPSA DIXIT blends elements of monodrama, Greek theatre, and screwball comedy in its examination of the treachery of language and the questionable authenticity of musical expression.

Ipse dixit /Ip-suh dik-sit/: noun (Latin). Literally “he, himself, said it.”

An unproven yet dogmatic statement which the speaker expects the listener to accept as valid without proof beyond the speaker’s assumed expertise.

Ipsa dixit: “she, herself, said it . . .”

– Kate Soper

DIRECTORS NOTES
It always starts with a question, doesn’t it? If I wish to stay true to form, these Director’s Notes certainly shall. And might we expect an answer? We might. But wouldn’t it be more interesting if it were phrased in the form of a question? In the case of this project, my involvement began on January 4, 2023 with an enticing question posed in an email subject: “Out of the blue inquiry/maybe directing gig?” This was how percussionist Bonnie Whiting unlocked the door and ushered me into the magical realm of Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit, a landscape where waves of musical invention splash, churn, and bubble up amongst craggy rocks of philosophical inquiry, and the air sizzles with shrieks, sighs, and softly-spoken secrets. Under Kate Soper’s guidance, we navigate dense intellectual forests to interrogate our understanding of art, language, and truth, only to emerge suddenly in clearings of pure sensory experience. The air here encircles us with visceral, gestural, almost palpable music. Music that must be seen to be believed. What is this place? Can we ever truly understand its secrets? Where does art begin? It always starts with a question, doesn’t it?

– C. Neil Parsons

ARTIST BIOS:
Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as “a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power” and by The New Yorker for her “limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style.” A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Koussevitzky Foundation, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, and Yarn/Wire. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Camargo Foundation, the Macdowell Colony, Tanglewood, and Royaumont, among others.

Praised by the New York Times for her “lithe voice and riveting presence,” Soper performs frequently as a new music soprano. She has been featured as a composer/vocalist on the New York City-based MATA festival and Miller Theatre Composer Portraits series, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series, and the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series. As a non-fiction and creative writer, she has been published by McSweeney’s Quarterly, PAJ, the Massachusetts Review, Theory and Practice, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies.

Soper is a co-director and performer for Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of Music at Smith College. http://www.katesoper.com (Photo Credit: Richard Burbridge)

Finnish-American soprano Maria Männistö, “one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices I have heard in years,” (Seattle Times), moves comfortably among a wide range of musical styles to international acclaim. Maria has appeared frequently as soloist with Seattle Symphony, Seattle Modern Orchestra, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, and has premiered works by Seattle-based composers Wayne Horvitz, Garrett Fisher, William O. Smith, and Tom Baker.

Recent solo engagements include Handel’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day with Seattle Symphony, Kate Soper’s Now is Forever with Seattle Modern Orchestra, Carmina Burana with Pacific Northwest Ballet, and a performance of her own compositions at Musiikkitalo concert hall in Helsinki. A dedicated member of the Nordic community in Seattle, she serves as music director of the Finnish Lutheran Church, directs the Swedish Singers of Seattle, and performs regularly at Nordic festivals and events. (Photo Credit: Pinehurst Photography)

Sarah Pyle, flutist, is a specialist in contemporary music and most enjoys working on projects involving intersections of nature, music, visual art, and improvisation. In 2022 she integrated all of these interests with her new work for flute and tape, Four Ways of Moving through Penrose Point, an electroacoustic piece played from a limited run of four linoleum print graphic scores, where each score depicts notable landscape features of Penrose Point State Park located in South Puget Sound.

Sarah has played with the Seattle Modern Orchestra since 2018. Previously, she was a founding member of the Seattle and Portland-based contemporary chamber ensemble Sound of Late, active 2014-2019. Sarah enjoys working with student composers and premiered more than one hundred works by young American composers at concerts throughout the Pacific Northwest with Sound of Late. She has held residences at the University of Washington, University of Oregon, Boise State University, and Illinois State University.

As a piccolo specialist, Sarah was awarded first place at the 2015 Kujala International Piccolo Competition in Chicago and second place at the National Flute Association’s 2014 Piccolo Artist Competition. She has played flute and piccolo with the Oregon Mozart Players and has played substitute flute and piccolo with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the Eugene Symphony Orchestra.

Sarah studied flute with Molly Barth, Michel Debost, and Kathleen Chastain. She holds master’s degrees in Flute Performance and Musicology from the University of Oregon as well as a B.M. in Flute Performance from Oberlin Conservatory and a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Oberlin College. A keen environmentalist, she is currently serving a term as a Rain Garden Specialist intern at the Kitsap Conservation District. She is based in Bremerton, Washington, and in her spare time she likes to sea kayak, garden, and explore fiber arts.

Eric Rynes has performed hundreds of works from the past 100 years, from concertante works and concertos by Scelsi and Berg to large-ensemble works by León and Ligeti to string quartets by Threadgill and Lutoslawski to solo pieces employing exotically-tuned violins and live electronics. He has performed in all thirteen SMO seasons. He has performed at June in Buffalo, ICMC (Havana), the Rotterdam Music Biennial, SEAMUS (Texas), Aspen, and other festivals, and in recital in Berlin, Barcelona, Belfast, Stanford, UCSD, and many other locations; he has performed with composer/performers Wayne Horvitz, Leroy Jenkins, Stuart Dempster, Garth Knox, Erin Gee, Sean Osborn, and Darius Jones, among others. His solo album of works by Xenakis, Boulez, Carter, Kotoka Suzuki, and others, on Albany Records, was praised in The Strad and called “a marvelous CD [by] a marvelous musician” by Helmut Lachemann. In his sixteen seasons as concertmaster of the Northwest Symphony Orchestra, he has performed the violin concertos of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Beethoven, and Barber; his extensive orchestra experience includes membership in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago during Daniel Barenboim’s tenure as its director. A versatile musician drawing inspiration from a wide range of experiences, he has performed Cuban music at The Triple Door and for several years performed in dance halls as the violinist of the quartet Tangabrazo; he has also performed with Sufjan Stevens, Natalie Cole, and Rod Stewart and recorded with jazz and rock groups. He received his M.M. in violin from the University of Washington, with further studies in Europe with Maryvonne Le Dizès (Ensemble Intercontemporain) and Irvine Arditti.

Bonnie Whiting performs and composes experimental music, seeking projects that involve the speaking percussionist, improvisation, and non-traditional notation. Recent work includes an evening-length song cycle for speaking percussionist composed by Eliza Brown and 10 musicians incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison, performances on the original Harry Partch instrumentarium, collaborations with Torch Collective, and concerti with the National Orchestra of Turkmenistan. Her debut album, featuring a solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage’s “45′ for a speaker” and “27’10.554″ for a percussionist” was released by Mode Records in 2017, and her second album, Perishable Structures, launched on the New Focus Recordings label in 2020. Whiting is a core member of the Seattle Modern Orchestra and she has performed with the country’s leading new music groups: Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and red fish blue fish percussion group. She is Chair of Percussion Studies and the Ruth Sutton Waters Associate Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. (Photo Credit: Titilayo Ayangade)

Neil Parsons has been performing for as long as he can remember, appearing in his first professional theatre production at age three. As a bass trombonist, actor, director, dancer, and choreographer, Neil’s creative output runs the gamut of music, theatre, dance, and interdisciplinary productions. Before co-founding the hybrid arts ensemble The Fourth Wall in 2010, Neil spent nine seasons touring with the “musictelling” ensemble Tales & Scales. Neil has directed and collaborated on interdisciplinary works with such musical ensembles as Hinge, Nightingale Vocal Ensemble, Shakespeare’s Ear, Sputter Box, Strange Trace Opera Company, and numerous projects with flutist Zara Lawler. Neil is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he declared an individual major in Interdisciplinary Performance and Education, and earned his master’s degree in Contemporary Classical Music Performance at Boston Conservatory. Neil is an Assistant Professor in Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s Contemporary Theater BFA program, with additional teaching duties in the conservatory’s Dance and Music Divisions. (Photo Credit: Andy Batt)

Nabilah Ahmed (she/her) is a multi-hyphenate artist with a background in acting, museums, design, and live production. She has collaborated with many arts organizations in her various creative capacities, including Seattle Shakespeare Company, Book-it Repertory Theater, On the Boards, Washington Ensemble Theater, and MoPOP. Nabilah is passionate about moving image as a source of cultural power and metaphysical exploration. She is a graduate of Smith College with a B.A in Economics.

Ryan Dunn is a Seattle-based lighting and scenic designer for theatre, dance and opera. Recent work includes designs at Book-it Rep, Intiman, Washington Ensemble Theater, On the Boards, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Village Theatre, ArtsWest Playhouse, Velocity Dance Center, Strawberry Theatre Workshop, and Café Nordo, among others. Ryan was a founding member of experimental theater troupe The Horse in Motion, is a resident designer for Washington Ensemble Theater, and has twice been the recipient of Gypsy Lee Rose awards for Outstanding Lighting Design. Outside of theater, Ryan is a freelance lighting designer, lighting director, and moving light programmer for concerts and events.

Marcin Pączkowski is a composer, conductor, digital artist, and performer, working with both traditional and electronic media. As a composer, he is focused on developing new ways of creating and performing computer music. As a conductor he regularly works with Evergreen Community Orchestra, presenting concerts of diverse repertoire to local communities. He collaborates with numerous ensembles in the Seattle area as an electronic music specialist, while also being active in the local improvised music community performing on various instruments.

Maria Manness facilitates the performing arts using her management and fabrication skills, and love of spreadsheets. As a freelancer she regularly works with On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, Kitten N’ Lou, MALACARNE, Drama Tops, Tim Smith-Stewart & Jeffrey Azevedo, and Hannah Simmons. She serves as Managing Director for Washington Ensemble Theatre, where she has been a company member for 10 (!!!) years. She also teaches technical theatre to the youth. @xo.m.e.m

therefore i was – Program Notes

ASH FURE therefore i was (2012)

Program Note:

My grandmother had advanced Parkinson’s disease. Despite its surface manifestations, her sickness was not muscular. Her body worked, her brain worked, but the method of passing messages between the two malfunctioned. She knew how she wanted to move, but she couldn’t make her muscles move. She knew what her emotions were, but she could not grasp their cause. She lived inside a radical disassociation, a gap between intention and execution so extreme that the simplest of actions required inordinate effort. This sense of disassociation pervades Therefore I Was. You’ll see it in the limbs of the cellist as they wrench away from the ordered movements required to sound stable pitches. You’ll hear it as the players strain towards a unified breath around which to coalesce. The music repels between two aesthetic poles: one pulling the instruments towards stillness; the other anchoring their gestures to an anxious, aggressive ground. This movement mirrors the crisis I watched my grandmother endure. The life to which she fiercely clung was brutal and unforgiving. At such times the will to live can seem irrational, even inhumane. And yet, somehow, astonishing, and unabashedly human.

Therefore I Was was commissioned by the Alice and Harry Eiler Foundation on receipt of the 2010 Jezek Prize. It was premiered by Talea Ensemble on March 4th, 2012.

ASH FURE is a sonic artist who blends installation and performance. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s full-bodied listening experiences open uncommon sites of collective encounter. Operating outside language or story, Ash shapes charged multisensory atmospheres that listeners and performers navigate together. Recent immersive productions include Hive Rise: for Subs and Megas (2020), commissioned by Club TransMediale (CTM) and premiered in Berlin’s iconic Berghain club; Filament: for Trio, Orchestra, and Moving Voices (2018), commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in New York’s Geffen Hall; and The Force of Things (2017), an installation opera, premiered at Peak Performances, that wrestles with the rising tide of climate dread inside us. Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and is an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Fure is the recipient of two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University.

R. MURRAY SHAFER The Crown of Ariadne (1979)

Program Note:

The Crown of Ariadne was written for Canadian harpist Judy Loman, who premiered it on March 3, 1979 in Toronto. It was intended as part of Patria 5, which retells the myths of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. Ariadne was the daughter of the King of Crete. Periodically the city of Athens was required to send a shipload of youths and maidens to be herded into the labyrinth (a maze so complex it could not be solved) as sacrifice for the Minotaur. By unwinding thread behind her, she was able to lead the group headed by Theseus (with whom she had fallen in love) out after they slew the Minotaur. She eloped with him, but he abandoned her on the Island of Naxos, where she found true love with the god Bacchus.

In this piece the harp represents Ariadne. However, the harpist also plays small percussion instruments such as ankle bells, crotales, cymbals, and wood blocks. She must also sing into the harp through a tube, slide the tuning key up and down the strings, and produce percussive techniques. The tape comes in during the closing “Labyrinth Dance.” It consists of a pre-recorded harp part, on a harp tuned to a different system than the “live” one. This creates a complex, “labyrinthine” sonic texture. Crown of Ariadne is in the form of a six-movement suite, twenty minutes long. It also makes up a portion of Patria 3: The Greatest Show, where it accompanies a Javanese-style shadow puppet play.

Source: https://penarthmusiccentre.com/product/r-murray-schafer-the-crown-of-ariadne-for-harp-percussion/

Born in Sarnia, Ontario, R. MURRAY SHAFER (1933-2021) won national and international acclaim not only for his achievement as a composer but also as an educator, environmentalist, literary scholar, visual artist and provocateur. After receiving a Licentiate in piano through the Royal Schools of Music (England) in 1952, he pursued further studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto, followed by periods of autodidactic study in Austria and England which encompassed literature, philosophy, music and journalism. A prolific composer, he wrote works ranging from orchestral compositions to choral music as well as musical theatre and multi-media ritual.

His diversity of interests is reflected by the enormous range and depth of such works as Loving (1965), Lustro (1972), Music for Wilderness Lake (1979), Flute Concerto (1984), and the World Soundscape Project, as well as his 12-part Patria music theatre cycle. His most important book, The Tuning of the World (1977), documents the findings of his World Soundscape Project, which united the social, scientific and artistic aspects of sound and introduced the concept of acoustic ecology. The concept of soundscape unifies most of his musical and dramatic work, as well as his educational and cultural theories.

His other major books include E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music (1975), Ezra Pound and his Music (1977), On Canadian Music (1984), Voices of Tyranny: Temples of Silence (1993), and The Thinking Ear: On Music Education (1986). He has received commissions from numerous organizations as well as several prizes. He was the first winner of the Glenn Gould Prize for Music and Communication as well as the Molson Award for distinctive service to the arts. In 2005 he was awarded the Walter Carsen Prize, by the Canada Council for the Arts, one of the top honors for lifetime achievement by a Canadian artist.

Adapted from: https://www.philmultic.com/composers/schafer.html

GIACINTO SCELSI Ko-Lho for flute and clarinet (1966)

Compared to Scelsi’s Suite for flute and clarinet (1953), KoLho seems to come from an entirely different imaginative world. In the 13 years that separate the two works, Scelsi went from a playful mode in which the two instruments are essentially staged like characters to a virtual blending of the two into a single entity. Scelsi developed this new approach to ensemble writing from the late ’50s onward. The style is perhaps bestheard in his string quartets from the third onward, but the modestly sized KoLho compares well with those pieces, which are among the most important of the last century. He tightly winds the parts together, usually keeping them within the range of a semitone or smaller, and both usually speak in monotone longtones, actively punctuated with rearticulations and spatially modeled with color shifts. The instruments blend into a single, flowing, ecstatic ribbon of red noise. The articulations cause brief ripples in the surface illusion, but the perceived unity of the sounds is so strong that it’s easier to believe that the sound is flowing from a single instrument than from a duo. It’s those decorative, poetic nuancings of the sound that are the true life of the piece, the focus of the listener’s interest, guided by Scelsi’s intuitive inner rhythm. Quartertone glissandi, quartertones, stunning multiphonics on the clarinet, and detailed demands on the specifics of technique, such as the width of the vibrato and subtle, dynamic crosshatchings, obsessively turn the timbres over and over in constant change as objects of contemplation. Scelsi was a composer keenly aware that a new work must be its own frame, that on a certain level even the most stylistically extreme art must contextualize and explicate itself. To that end, he occasionally completely severs the cohesion of the duo with melodic passages for either instrument. What’s extraordinary is that even these radical digressions still come off as disturbances, diversions from the main flow. Donato Mancini source:http://www.allmusic.com/composition)

GIACINTO SCELSI (1905 -1988) started making his way into the art, music and literary world during the 1920s – as he frequently travelled abroad – establishing friendships that would lead him into the most important international cultural movements of the time.

During the Thirties he became interested in compositional languages and techniques such as twelve-tone serialism and the musical theories of Skrjabin and Steiner. In 1930 he penned the final touches to Rotativa (Paris, Salle Pleyel 1931 under the direction of Pierre Monteux), a composition for orchestra that would usher his name onto the international musical scene.

He found refuge in Switzerland during II Word War, where he presented String Trio (1942) and various other piano works. These are troubled years for Scelsi and here he cultivates a deep interest for poetry, visual arts, Oriental mysticism and esotericism. His active acceptance of Oriental philosophies, Zen doctrines, Yoga and the subconscious mind date back to this moment of great instability and rediscovery that clearly shines through his musical experimentation of the time.

Afterwards, Scelsi moved to Rome (where he lived until his death, which occurred on August 8 1988) where he completed a few previously unfinished works: the String Quartet and La Nascita del Verbo (both performed in Paris in 1949). His most significant compositions are characterized by the instrumentation of figures determined at random, improvising and applying new uses to traditional instruments, the introduction of the ondiola (the first electronic instrument able to produce quarter and eighth tone notes) but above all, what stands out is his unconditioned way of improvising, as if wrapped in a mist of Zen-like emptiness.

Scelsi’s compositional method was quite unique: he would record his improvisations on a magnetic tape, subsequently entrusting the transcription to collaborators that would then work under his guidance.

The score would then be completed with detailed instructions on its interpretation and measures in order to obtain the specific sound so meticulously researched by Scelsi (dampers especially designed for the strings section, stringed instruments played like percussions, sound filters to distort the sound of the wind instruments, pre-existent recordings used to lead the performance).

His orchestration methods can also be regarded as highly original: he would pair similar instruments making sure that they were out-of-phase with each other by a quarter note, thus obtaining unexpected beat effects.

This new, important phase first saw the light with the live performance of his orchestra piece Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (1959). During this same time, Scelsi published his first theoretic and literary works. His impressive musical production was first released in the 1980s by Parisian publishing house Éditions Salabert.

JÉRÉMY JOLLEY (contro-)clessidra III, IV for cello and percussion, & for piano and electronics (2023) – World Premiere

The series of pieces titled (contro-)clessidra refers to (reverse-)hourglass in Italian; an hourglass in which the material (sand or liquid) falling down to represent the time passing, moves in reverse, down to up, against gravity and our expectation of the uni-directionality of time. This image captures the central relationship between the duet members of these pieces; a contrary motion of two structures in time, resulting in a third non-directional, meditative temporality. While each piece’s expression ranges from tumultuous to peaceful, the relationship between each duet member follows contrary trajectories, and yet are in conversation.

Through these pieces, I wanted to explore and elaborate on an intuition, one I later found echoed in diverse writings from Edouard Glissant to various buddhist literature, an experience without a center, but a relation. Focusing on the qualities of relation, between the intra- and extra-personal experience, the individual and (the lack of) community, these pieces became transformations of one another, interrelated, complementary, and empathetic, as well as single-minded, insular, and, at time, antagonistic. They can be performed (experienced) alone, simultaneously, and also dove-tail one into another in a single movement work .

French-American composer JEREMY JOLLEY was born in Lyon, France, and grew up in the French Alps where he played guitar in rock and fusion bands. He moved to Seattle in 1997 and pursued composition studies and received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Music degrees in Composition from the University of Washington. During these years, he studied composition primarily with Joël-François Durand, electronic music with Juan Pampin, and classical guitar with Steven Novacek. Jeremy has been awarded the Brechemin Scholarship in Music, the William Bergsma Endowment for Excellence in Music Composition, a residency in the 2008 Jack Straw Artist Support Program for his work in the improvisation and experimental ensemble, Unused Lexical Variable. His music has been played by celebrated contemporary music performers such as the Dutch pianist and ensemble ASKO|SHOENBERG member René Eckhart, cellist Séverine Ballon, violinist Graeme Jennings, and clarinetist Carol Robinson. He attended the master classes of Brian Ferneyhough, Chaya Czernowin, Pierluigi Billone, and Mark André at the Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse. Since 2010, he is the co-Artistic Director of the new music ensemble, Seattle Modern Orchestra. Since 2017, he is Associate Director of Artistic Collaborations at the Seattle Symphony leading numerous community centered initiative including community composition projects with Derek Bermel, Alexander Gardner, Charles Corey, Janice Giteck, Swil Kanim, and Paul Chiyokten Wagner.

SMO @ The Royal Room – Program Notes

HENRY THREADGILL Sixfivetwo (2018) for string quartet – Seattle Premiere

About the work: Henry Threadgill composed Sixfivetwo, a 12-minute work for string quartet that includes opportunities for players to improvise. “The improvisational component is very important,” he said in an interview while describing his philosophy which guided the creation of this piece. “Kronos knows it’s important and I know it’s important. It’s a shame that the classical concert world doesn’t understand how important it is… Everything is about exploration. We get to where we are because of exploration. That’s why improvisation is so important… We won’t improve anything unless we have an improvisational approach to life.”

“This piece was commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, a project of the Kronos Performing Arts Association. The score and parts are available for free online at kronosquartet.org.”

Composer bio: For over forty years, Henry Threadgill has been celebrated as one of the most forward-thinking composers and multi- instrumentalists in American music. The New York Times has called him “perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation.” Threadgill is a recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music for In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Threadgill is an early member of the AACM.

VIJAY IYER Mutations IV, VI, and VII for string quartet, piano and electronics (2005)

About the work: A major piece built out of cells and fragments, [Mutations] veers through many atmospheres, from moment to moment propulsive, enveloping, lyrical, luminescent, and strangely beautiful. Through thematic interactivity, the interweaving of acoustic and electronic sound-textures, and some decisive improvisational interventions in notated music, Vijay Iyer has created a multi-faceted suite whose very subject is change. Iyer gives a positive value to the concept of ‘mutation’ in this music, and variously appears in it as an interpreter of notated elements, as an improviser, and as “a sort of laptop artist, mixing in noise and different sounds,” encouraging the transformative processes. – ECM Records

Composer bio: Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last twenty-five years, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation.

He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German “Echo” awards, and was voted Downbeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the last decade. He has been praised by Pitchfork as “one of the best in the world at what he does,” by the Los Angeles Weekly as “a boundless and deeply important young star,” and by Minnesota Public Radio as “an American treasure.”

Iyer’s musical language is grounded in the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, the African American creative music movement of the 60s and 70s, and the lineage of composerpianists from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

Iyer is also an active composer for classical ensembles and soloists. His works have been commissioned and premiered by Brentano Quartet, Imani Winds, Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Silk Road Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, and virtuosi Matt Haimowitz, Claire Chase, Shai Wosner, and Jennifer Koh, among others. He recently served as composer-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, music director of the Ojai Music Festival, and artist-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A tireless collaborator, he has written big-band music for Arturo O’Farrill and Darcy James Argue, remixed classic recordings of Talvin Singh and Meredith Monk, joined forces with legendary musicians Henry Threadgill, Reggie Workman, Zakir Hussain, and L. Subramanian, and developed interdisciplinary work with Teju Cole, Carrie Mae Weems, Mike Ladd, Prashant Bhargava, and Karole Armitage.

A longtime New Yorker, Iyer lives in central Harlem with his wife and daughter. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a Steinway artist. website: vijay-iyer.com management: musicandart.net

HA-YANG KIM Lens for cello and pedals (2006)

About the work: A structured improv for amplified solo cello with wah wah and distortion pedals, Lens uses standard rock pedals to draw out the vast inherent sounds of the cello, exploring the lush complex sound worlds of the instrument with an array of extended string techniques. – Ha-Yang Kim

Composer bio: Drawing from a breadth of western classical music, American experimentalism, rock, electronic, noise, avant-improv, to non-western sources (Balinese, South Indian, and Korean), Ha-Yang Kim’s music is inspired by acoustic phenomena, ritual ceremonial processes, and characterized by an organic visceral lyricism of sound influenced by the East Asian sense of space and emptiness. She developed a unique signature language of extended string techniques and has also composed music for film, dance, and multimedia. Her current practice involves explorations in tunings, and researching acoustical and spatial phenomenology of resonance-amplification-feedback.

Kim’s music is performed throughout the US, Europe, Asia, Russia, Turkey, Morocco, Bali, Cuba, and Canada. She has released 2 monograph albums on the Tzadik label: “AMA” in 2008, and “Threadsuns” in 2014. Performers of her work include the JACK Quartet, FLUX Quartet, flutist Claire Chase, violist Nadia Sirota, vocalist Hanna-Maria Strand, members of International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and Odd Appetite. In addition, the diverse range of artists Ms. Kim has worked with include Meredith Monk, John Zorn, Cecil Taylor, Terry Riley, Alvin Lucier, Louis Andriessen, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Evan Ziporyn, Yannis Kyriakides, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, Miya Masaoka, Hahn Rowe, Bang on a Can All-Stars, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Kronos Quartet, indie-rock band The National, poet Anne Waldman, choreographer Douglas Dunn, video artist Ursula Scherrer, and pop superstar Beyoncè.

Kim has recorded over 25 albums, for labels such as ECM, Tzadik, New World, Cold Blue, Beggars Banquet, New Albion, Brassland, Karnatic Lab and Bridge Records. Ms. Kim has been Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room and Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, NY, and done residences at Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Brandeis Universities, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts College of Art, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Walden School for Young Composers. She has also given presentations of her work at MIT, Massachusetts College of Art, and the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag, Netherlands.

Dedicated to cross-cultural exchange, social transformation, and education, Kim has conducted workshops with Berber youth communities in Morocco, performed at youth detention centers in the Bronx supported by the Ford Foundation, performed alongside gamelan orchestras in Bali, and performed for the UN Humanitarian Aid Campaign.

Kim has received grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, Van Lier Fellowship, ASCAP, New Music USA, Meet the Composer, Argosy Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and the Hemera Foundation. She’s also active as a curator of new music events, and has written an article for “ARCANA Volume III” (edited by John Zorn). Ms. Kim composed the original music score for the 2014 documentary film, DIOR AND I, which received worldwide critical acclaim.

Kim studied at the New England Conservatory where her mentors included Joseph Maneri, Lee Hyla, and Michael Gandolfi, and the application of Carnatic music concepts to contemporary music at the Amsterdam Conservatorium. Currently, she lives in Seattle, Washington, and is on the music faculty at the Cornish College of the Arts.

IANNIS XENAKIS Mikka (1971), Mikka «S» (1975)

About the works: One of many natural phenomena that fascinated Xenakis was randomness and the variety of random processes in nature. (How long you wait in line at the grocery is a different kind of randomness than the heights of the people in front of you; different equations apply.) The motion of a gas molecule within a large volume of gas can be modeled as a series of footsteps and pauses that make up a random “walk” in three dimensions. This was the inspiration for Mikka. Xenakis wrote a computer program that simulated this random motion in one dimension (for example, up and down), and printed out the locations it predicted for a gas molecule (its height in a room) as time elapsed. He then laid this graph of height vs. time onto music paper and traced out the pitches, forming a continuous “melody” in the process. To make the unfurling “melody” more compelling for listeners, he changed the size of the molecule’s “footsteps” during randomly-chosen periods of time by random amounts drawn from a different random process. Here is the beginning of the pitch vs. time “curve” that became the beginning of Mikka (taken from “Xenakis: His Life in Music” by James Harley, Routledge 2004):

And here is roughly the first half of the above excerpt in final form:

Xenakis added considerable drama to his piece by adding enormous changes in volume, both gradual and abrupt, and changes in tone color. He notated the contours of the curve with extreme precision (usually via pitches that land between the adjacent pitches on a piano), which enables two things in performance: accuracy (fidelity to his curve) and reproducibility (when different violinists play Mikka, you can tell it’s the same piece). He chose to write it for violin because violinists can slide continuously across wide ranges of pitches spanning, overall, over 4 octaves. Irvine Arditti, who premiered Xenakis’s violin concerto Dox-Orkh, said of Xenakis’s string writing: “There is nothing in the classical repertoire that could prepare us for this.” Those who learn to play Mikka often report an unexpected and unique musical satisfaction, and a deeper facility with the instrument that transfers to new and old works alike. Mikka «S» extends the language of Mikka into two curves flowing simultaneously, often in contrary motion, and ends with a violent barrage of tiny curves occasionally interrupted by stasis. Xenakis named the two pieces after his publisher, Mica Salabert; “mikka” also means “small” in ancient Greek, appropriate for these pieces whose durations are roughly 4 minutes each. – Eric Rynes

IANNIS XENAKIS Akéa (1986) (piano & string quartet)

About the work:The title Akéa means “cure”, [but also has the sense of “atonements” or “sacrifices”]. Although [many composers today have] written one or several string quartets, Xenakis [was] almost the only one who dared take up the typically romantic genre of the quintet for piano and strings. It is a less aggressive and perhaps more classical work than [his string quartet] Tetras and it also [is representative of his late period, likewise] exemplified in [his string quartet] Tetora. In the first of the five sections, rapid piano arpeggios alternate with held chords from the strings. In the second, the piano hammers out an ostinato in [sixteenth notes] centered around the notes G and E-flat, taken over by the strings, which dismember it in asynchronous polyphony. Flowing and nimble “aborescences” from the piano then move on to the strings, dominating the third section, to be gradually submerged by a denser polyphony in long note values. The fourth section first alternates chordal pillars with rapid scales, then brings in a piano solo with complex polyrhythms. The fifth section, a slow coda, is of harmonic character, and even offers an entirely “classical” string polyphony, such as one would never find in [his] older works. – Harry Halbreich, 1994, revised 2022 by SMO.

Composer bio: Iannis Xenakis was one of the leaders of modernism in music, a hugely influential composer, particularly in the later 1950s and 1960s, when he was experimenting with compositional techniques that soon entered the basic vocabulary of the twentieth-century avant garde.

Xenakis was born, not in Greece, but in Braïla, Romania, of Greek parents, on 29 May 1922. His initial training, in Athens, was as a civil engineer. In 1947, after three years spent fighting in the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation, during which time he was very badly injured (losing the sight of an eye), he escaped a death sentence and fled to France, where he settled and subsequently became an important element of cultural life.

Xenakis was first active as an architect, collaborating with Le Corbusier on a number of projects, not least the Philips Pavilion, designed by Xenakis, at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. It was in the 1950s, too, that Xenakis’ compositions began to be published. In 1952 he attended composition classes with Olivier Messaien, who suggested that Xenakis apply his scientific training to music.

The resulting style, based on procedures derived from mathematics, architectural principles and game theory, catapulted Xenakis to the front ranks of the avant garde – although there was never any suggestion that he was a member of a clique or group: he was always his own man. He never, for example, embraced total serialism, and he also avoided more traditional devices of harmony and counterpoint; instead, he developed other ways of organizing the dense masses of sound that are characteristic of his first compositions. These stochastic, or random, procedures were based on mathematical principles and were later entrusted to computers for their realization.

But for all the formal control in their composition, Xenakis’ scores retain an elemental energy, a life-force that gives the music an impact of visceral effectiveness: works like Bohor for electronics (1962), Eonta for piano and brass quintet (1963-64), Persephassa for six percussionists, placed around the audience (1969), and the ballet Kraanerg, for 23 instrumentalists and tape (1969) all exhibit a primitive power that belies the complexity of their origins. The Sydney Morning Herald said of Kraanerg, for example, that it “remains staggeringly powerful and clamorous, an essay in constantly renewed energy that shows not the least sign of faltering.” Married with this primordial power is the composer’s fascination with ritualism, most often that of ancient Greece, finding fullest theatrical form in his setting of the Oresteia (1966).

Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes

Performer Bios:

Eric Rynes, violin has performed in all 13 SMO seasons. Coached in Europe by Maryvonne Le Dizès (Ensemble Intercontemporain) and Irvine Arditti, he has performed hundreds of works from the past 100 years. He has performed at June in Buffalo, ICMC (Havana), the Rotterdam Music Biennial, Aspen, and other festivals, and in recital in Berlin, Barcelona, Stanford, and many other locations. His solo album on Albany Records was praised in The Strad and called “a marvelous CD [by] a marvelous musician” by Helmut Lachenmann. His 2022 performance of the Tchaikovsky Concerto with the NWSO drew a cheering ovation. More info: ericrynes.com.

Pamela Liu, violinist, has been in demand as a performer and pedagogue since returning to the Northwest twelve years ago. She received her Bachelors in Violin Performance at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, and was a member of the Evergreen Symphony Orchestra in Taipei, Taiwan, before attending the University of Washington where she received a Masters Degree in Violin Performance.

A devoted mentor to young musicians, Ms. Liu coaches and teaches with Edmonds College, The Bellevue Youth Symphony Orchestras, the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras, and Musicworks Northwest. As an active performer, Ms. Liu appears regularly on the Music at the Museum series with the Cascadia Art Museum, as a section member of the Yakima Symphony, and in the violin-guitar duo, Tutti Dolce, with husband Chris Liu.

Alessandra Barrett is a performing violist, violin/viola teacher, and composer based in Seattle, WA. After receiving a B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in violin/viola performance, she went on to study with Melia Watras at the University of Washington. There, she received an M.M. and a D.M.A in viola performance. Alessandra’s research is centered around the health and wellness of upper-string instrumentalists: through looking at practice habits that foster deliberate practice, self-regulation, and motivation, psychological factors that both enable and hinder musical progress, and physiological issues surrounding violin/viola playing. Through this interdisciplinary approach to her research, she is uncovering the tools that make for more resilient music learning, and is designing a method that builds both psychological and physiological strength in musicians. In alignment with this research, Dr. Barrett is a certified yoga instructor and earned a certificate in the essentials of performing arts health through the American College of Sports Medicine. She has performed in festivals and presented in conferences throughout the world.

Composer and cellist Ha-Yang Kim collaborates with artists and ensembles in festivals and venues throughout the world. Kim’s work is inspired by acoustic phenomena, ritual ceremonial processes, and characterized by an organic visceral lyricism of sound. Kim has released 2 monograph albums on Tzadik Records: “AMA” (2007), and “Threadsuns” for string quartet (2014), performed by JACK Quartet. Featured commissions and performances include Seattle Modern Orchestra, members of International Contemporary Ensemble, violist Nadia Sirota, and vocalist Hanna-Maria Strand. Kim is currently on the music faculty at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA.

Pianist Stephen Olsen has premiered dozens of new works for piano and performed with new music ensembles across the United States. He graduated with a Master’s degree in piano from The New England Conservatory and a Doctorate from Stony Brook University. He currently teaches piano in the Seattle area.

Greg Dixon works as Assistant Professor of Music and Sound Design at DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA, where he teaches courses in game audio, audio engineering, sound design, and music composition. Greg holds a Ph.D. in composition with a specialization in computer music from the University of North Texas, where he worked at the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia (CEMI). His music has been released on labels such as Kohlenstoff Records, SEAMUS, Irritable Hedgehog, New Adventures in Sound Art, Vox Novus, Pawlacz Perski, winds measure, Flannelgraph Records, and on his own label, noxious fumes.

Greg has worked extensively on interactive audio systems for video games, installations, concerts, and other forms of interactive media. He has helped create hundreds of published recordings spanning many genres as a performer and technician; including extensive work as a recording, mix, and mastering engineer. Greg currently works as a sound designer and composer for the collectible card game, Runestrike, by Making Fun Games and also helps to create interactive voice-driven soundscapes for popular children’s books with Novel Effect. Greg also contributed music composition and sound design to three DigiPen games: Subray VR, Suara, and Reprise.

Greg currently serves on the committee for the Pacific Northwest Section of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and is the chair of the Game Audio Education Summit for GameSoundCon.

2022-2023 Season Announcement

SEATTLE, WA – Seattle Modern Orchestra (SMO) returns for its thirteenth season with five live performances featuring the West Coast premiere of 2019 Pulitzer-nominated chamber theatre work Ipsa Dixit by Kate Soper; Barlow Endowment for Music Composition commission by Berlin prize winner and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow Wang Lu; commemorating two quintessential explorators in music, Greek composer Iannis Xenakis and Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, and works by Seattle-based composers Ha-Yang Kim, Jérémy Jolley, Joël-François Durand, along with works by Henry Threadgill, Vijay Iyer, Ash Fure, and Anna Thordsvalsdóttir.

This season SMO is excited to present concerts at five different venues across the Seattle area, performing for a wide array of in-person audiences. The first concert will take place at the Royal Room on November 8, featuring pieces by jazz-rooted composers Henry Threadgill (winner of 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music) and Vijay Iyer, alongside the music of avant-garde legend, Iannis Xenakis and beloved Seattle composer, Ha-Yang Kim. In February, they will present a world premiere by SMO’s co-artistic director, Jérémy Jolley’s sequels to his original work, (contro-)clessidra II, III, IV for piano and electronics, flute and clarinet, cello and percussion at the Chapel Performance Space. They will also be in residency at the University of Washington School of Music in February, performing faculty and student compositions at the Meany Studio Theater. Kate Soper’s chamber music theatre work Ipsa Dixit will be brought to life by SMO musicians in March at the newly constructed Raisbeck Performance Hall at Cornish College of Arts downtown. Concluding our season in June, they will return to Town Hall Seattle with a world premiere by Wang Lu, and music by Anna Throdsvalsdóttir and Joël-François Durand.

“I’m constantly reminded of how much of our work truly supports local musicians through commissions and performances,” says SMO percussionist and UW professor Bonnie Whiting. “Many U.S. contemporary music ensembles focus on touring and measure their success by high-profile out of town concerts and guest appearances. It’s refreshing to be part of an organization that instead focuses on what it can bring to our already vibrant local arts scene.”

SMO’s video podcast, Open Score, will return this season bringing in-depth conversations with featured composers to audiences. The discussions will be broadcast live through our Digital Stage on Crowdcast, where audiences are welcome to ask questions and join in the conversation exploring the music and creative paths of this season’s composers. Schedule to be released.

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Concert #1 – SMO @ The Royal Room
Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022 @ 8:00pm
The Royal Room

Program:
Henry Threadgill Sixfivetwo (2018) for string quartet – Seattle Premiere
Vijay Iyer Mutations IV, VI, and VII for string quartet, piano and electronics (2005)
Ha-Yang Kim Lens for cello and pedals (2006)
Iannis Xenakis Mikka (1971), Mikka «S» (1975)
Iannis Xenakis Akéa (1986)

Performers:
Eric Rynes and Pam Liu, violins
Alessandra Barrett, viola
Ha-Yang Kim, Cello
Stephen Olsen, Piano

Tickets: $15 In Advance | $20 Doors

Seattle Modern Orchestra celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis with his iconic Akéa for piano and string quartet, and Mikka «S» for solo violin, alongside the Seattle premiere of celebrated composer Henry Threadgill’s Sixfivetwo and works by Vijay Iyer and local composer Ha-Yang Kim.

Sixfivetwo was commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, a project of the Kronos Performing Arts Association. The score and parts are available for free online at kronosquartet.org.

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Concert #2 – therefore i was
Friday, Feb. 3, 2023 @ 8:00pm
Chapel Performance Space

Program:
Ash Fure therefore i was (2012)
R.Murray Schafer The Crown of Ariadne (1979)
Jérémy Jolley (contro-)clessidra II, III, IV for piano and electronics, flute and clarinet, cello and percussion (2015-2022)

Performers:
Sarah Pyle, flute
Rachel Yoder, clarinet
Ha-Yang Kim, cello
Bonnie Whiting, percussion
Cristina Valdes, piano
Sophie Baird-Daniel, harp

Tickets: $25 General | $20 Seniors | $10 Students

SMO will return to the Chapel Performance Space for its second concert, featuring exclusively small chamber and solo works. The program includes Ash Fure’s piano trio therefore i was, world premieres by Jérémy Jolley for piano and electronics, flute and clarinet, and cello and percussion from his (contro-)clessidra series, and a remembrance of Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer, with the performance of his virtuosic work for solo harp, The Crown of Ariadne.

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Concert #3 – SMO in Residency at UW School of Music
Tuesday, February 7, 2023 @ 7:30pm
Meany Hall – Studio Theater

Program:
SMO will perform works by students, faculty, and guests of the UW Composition Program.

Tickets: https://tickets.artsevents.washington.edu/tickets/11771
$20 general | $15 UW Affiliate (employee, retiree, UWAA member) | $10 students and seniors

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Concert #4 – “She, herself, said it…”
Friday, March 24 & Saturday, March 25, 2023 @ 8pm
Raisbeck Auditorium at Cornish College of the Arts

Program:
Kate Soper Ipsa Dixit: “She, herself, said it…”

Performers:
Maria Männistö, soprano
Sarah Pyle, flute
Eric Rynes, violin
Bonnie Whiting, percussion
Tickets: $30 General | $20 Seniors | $10 Students

A “twenty-first century masterpiece” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit is a semi-staged, evening-length chamber music theater work for voice, flute, violin, and percussion exploring the intersections of language and music, emotion and meaning, expressivity and truth.

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Concert #5 – Thorvalsdóttir, Durand, Wang
Saturday, June 3, 2023 @ 8:00pm
Town Hall Seattle: The Great Hall

Program:
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir aequilibria (2017)
Joël-François Durand Mundus Imaginalis (2015)
Wang Lu New Work for soprano and ensemble (2023) – World Premiere commissioned for Seattle Modern Orchestra

Tickets: $30 General | $20 Seniors | $10 Students

The 2022–2023 season will conclude with a world premiere written for SMO by celebrated composer, Wang Lu (commissioned by the Barlow Foundation), and will feature the ensemble soprano, Maria Männistö, who was described in the Seattle Times as “One of the most hauntingly beautiful voices I have heard in years.” The program will also include Aequilibria by Anna Thorvaldsdóttir and Joël-François Durand‘s Mundus Imaginalis, exploring “the intermediary organ between sensible perception and intellectual intuition.”

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SMO Season Subscription: $100 (5-concert pass)
SMO Single tickets: $20-$30 General, $15-$20 Seniors, $10 Students

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SEATTLE MODERN ORCHESTRA
Founded in 2010, Seattle Modern Orchestra (SMO) is the only large ensemble in the Pacific Northwest solely dedicated to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Led by co-artistic directors Julia Tai and Jérémy Jolley, SMO commissions and premieres new works from an international lineup of composers, in addition to presenting important pieces from the contemporary repertoire that are rarely if ever heard by Seattle audiences. The ensemble “operates at that exciting cusp between old and new, between tradition and innovation” (Vanguard Seattle) curating new sounds and experiences for concert goers in the region.

SMO provides audiences with performances of the best in contemporary chamber and orchestral music, and develops podcasts, blog posts, lectures, and other forms of community engagement in an accessible and inviting format all designed to expand the listener’s appreciation and awareness of the music of today.

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COMPOSER BIOGRAPHIES

Henry Threadgill
For over forty years, Henry Threadgill has been celebrated as one of the most forward-thinking composers and multi- instrumentalists in American music. The New York Times has called him “perhaps the most important jazz composer of his generation.” Threadgill is a recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music for In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Threadgill is an early member of the AACM.

Vijay Iyer
Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last twenty-five years, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation.

Ha-Yang Kim
Drawing from a breadth of western classical music, American experimentalism, rock, electronic, noise, avant-improv, to non-western sources (Balinese, South Indian, and Korean), Kim’s music is inspired by acoustic phenomena, ritual ceremonial processes, and characterized by an organic visceral lyricism of sound influenced by the East Asian sense of space and emptiness. She developed a unique signature language of extended string techniques and has also composed music for film, dance, and multimedia. Her current practice involves explorations in tunings, and researching acoustical and spatial phenomenology of resonance-amplification-feedback.

Kim has received grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, Van Lier Fellowship, ASCAP, New Music USA, Meet the Composer, Argosy Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and the Hemera Foundation. She’s also active as a curator of new music events, and has written an article for “ARCANA Volume III” (edited by John Zorn). Ms. Kim composed the original music score for the 2014 documentary film, DIOR AND I, which received worldwide critical acclaim.

Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was one of the leaders of modernism in music, a hugely influential composer, particularly in the later 1950s and 1960s, when he was experimenting with compositional techniques that soon entered the basic vocabulary of the twentieth-century avant garde.

Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes

R. Murray Schaefer
(b. 18 July 1933, Sarnia, Ontario – d. 14 August 2021, Indian River, Ontario).
Canadian composer of interdisciplinary works that have been performed throughout the world; he was also active as a writer.

Mr. Schafer initially studied harpsichord, music theory and piano at The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto from 1945–55. He then briefly studied composition with John Weinzweig, harpsichord with Greta Kraus and piano with Alberto Guerrero at the University of Toronto in 1954–55, from where he was expelled for insubordination. He obtained a piano degree from the Royal College of Music in London while still in Canada. He later taught himself journalism, languages, literature, music, and philosophy in Vienna and London from 1956–61, on a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. He received six honorary doctorates from universities in Argentina, Canada and France.

Among his honors were two prizes from the Fromm Foundation (1968, 1972), the Canadian Music Council Medal (1972), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), the William Harold Moon Award (1974), the Composer of the Year Award from the Canadian Music Council (1976), the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music from the Canada Council for the Arts (1977, for String Quartet No. 2, ‘Waves’), the Prix Honegger (1980, for String Quartet No. 1), the Glenn Gould Prize for Music and Its Communication (1987), the Molson Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts (1993), the Louis Applebaum Composer’s Award (1999, for his œuvre), the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts from the Canada Council for the Arts (2005, for his œuvre), the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement (2009), and the title of Companion of the Order of Canada (2013).

As a writer, he contributed articles to many publications and edited the collections British Composers in Interview (1963) and Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (1977, W. W. Norton & Company). He wrote the books The Composer in the Classroom (1965), Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course (1967), The New Soundscape (1969), The Book of Noise (1970), When Words Sing (1970), The Rhinoceros in the Classroom (1975), E. T. A. Hoffmann and Music (1975), Creative Music Education (1976), Music in the Cold (1977), The Tuning of the World (1977), On Canadian Music (1984, Arcana Editions), The Thinking Ear: On Music Education (1986), Patria and the Theatre of Confluence (1991, Arcana Editions), A Sound Education (1992), and Voices of Tyranny: Temples of Silence (1993). Among his other writings were the story Wolf Tracks, the novels Dicamus et Labyrinthos: A Philologist’s Notebook (1984, Arcana Editions) and Ariadne, the calligraphic stories The Chaldean Inscription and The Sixteen Scribes, and the autobiography My Life on Earth and Elsewhere (2012, The Porcupine’s Quill).

He was also active in other positions. He founded the series Ten Centuries Concerts in Toronto in 1962 and served as its director in 1962–63. He undertook research in the field of acoustic ecology and remained active as a researcher with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (formerly the World Soundscape Project), which he founded in 1970. He later co-founded with Diana Smith, Jerrard Smith and Thom Sokoloski the company Patria Music/Theatre Projects for the production of works in his cycle Patria in 1987.

He taught as artist-in-residence at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 1963–65, then taught at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia from 1965–75, where he founded the Studio for Sonic Research and Electronic Music.

His publisher is Arcana Editions.

Ash Fure
Ash Fure is a sonic artist who blends installation and performance. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s full-bodied listening experiences open uncommon sites of collective encounter. Operating outside language or story, Ash shapes charged multisensory atmospheres that listeners and performers navigate together. Recent immersive productions include Hive Rise: for Subs and Megas (2020), commissioned by Club TransMediale (CTM) and premiered in Berlin’s iconic Berghain club; Filament: for Trio, Orchestra, and Moving Voices (2018), commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in New York’s Geffen Hall; and The Force of Things (2017), an installation opera, premiered at Peak Performances, that wrestles with the rising tide of climate dread inside us. Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and is an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Fure is the recipient of two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University.

Jérémy Jolley
French-American composer Jérémy Jolley was born in Lyon, France, and grew up in the French Alps where he played guitar in rock and fusion bands. He moved to Seattle in 1997 and pursued composition studies and received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Music degrees in Composition from the University of Washington. During these years, he studied composition primarily with Joël-François Durand, electronic music with Juan Pampin, and classical guitar with Steven Novacek.

Jeremy has been awarded the Brechemin Scholarship in Music, the William Bergsma Endowment for Excellence in Music Composition, and a residency in the 2008 Jack Straw Artist Support Program for his work in the improvisation and experimental ensemble, Unused Lexical Variable. His music has been played by celebrated contemporary music performers such as the Dutch pianist and ensemble ASKO|SHOENBERG member René Eckhart, cellist Séverine Ballon, violinist Graeme Jennings, and clarinetist Carol Robinson. He has attended master classes with Brian Ferneyhough, Chaya Czernowin, Pierluigi Billone, and Mark André at the Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse.

Since 2010, he has been the co-Artistic Director of the new music ensemble, Seattle Modern Orchestra. He is the Senior Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Seattle Symphony leading numerous community centered initiatives including community composition projects with Derek Bermel, Alexander Gardner, Charles Corey, Janice Giteck, Swil Kanim, Paul Chiyokten Wagner, and Paul Kikuchi.

Kate Soper

Kate Soper is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated composer, performer, and writer. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as “a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power” and by The New Yorker for her “limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style.” Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (The Virgil Thomson and Goddard Lieberson awards and the Charles Ives Scholarship), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Chamber Music America, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, the Music Theory Society of New York State, and ASCAP, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, and Yarn/Wire. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Civitella Raineri Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Camargo Foundation, the Macdowell Colony, Tanglewood, Royaumont, and Domaine Forget, among others.

Praised by the New York Times for her “lithe voice and riveting presence,” Soper performs frequently as a new music soprano. She has been featured as a composer/vocliast on the New York City-based MATA festival and Miller Theatre Composer Portraits series, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series, and the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series. As a non-fiction and creative writer, she has been published by McSweeney’s Quarterly, Theory and Practice, the Massachusetts Review, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies.

Anna Thorvaldsdóttir
Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s (b. 1977) “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (NY Times) and striking sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR). Her music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material – it is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired in an important way by nature and its many qualities, in particular structural ones, like proportion and flow.

Anna’s “detailed and powerful” (Guardian) orchestral writing has garnered her awards from the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, the Nordic Council, and the UK’s Ivors Academy, as well as commissions by many of the world’s top orchestras. CATAMORPHOSIS was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko in January 2021, following the orchestra’s European premiere of METACOSMOS with Alan Gilbert in 2019. CATAMORPHOSIS received its UK premiere by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot in June 2022, with the US premiere with the New York Philharmonic and Santtu-Matias Rouvali taking place in January 2023. ARCHORA – the latest addition to Anna’s “ever-growing and ever more essential catalogue of orchestral pieces” (BBC Radio 3) – was premiered at the BBC Proms in August 2022, by the BBC Philharmonic and Eva Ollikainen. The work will receive its US premiere with the LA Philharmonic and Eva Ollikainen in May 2023. And “while [she] has made the symphony orchestra her own,” according to Gramophone Magazine, “her chamber music is cut from the same cloth and somehow sounds with much the same combination of immensity and intimacy.” Anna’s recent string quartet Enigma was recorded and released by Sono Luminus in August 2021, performed by the Spektral Quartet, and was one of the New York Times’s recordings of the year (“a masterly entrance to the genre”). Portrait albums with Anna’s works have appeared on Deutsche Grammophon, Sono Luminus, and Innova.

Anna’s music is widely performed internationally and has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading orchestras, ensembles, and arts organizations – such as the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain, BBC Proms, and Carnegie Hall. Among the many other orchestras and ensembles that have performed her music include the Boston Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can All-Stars, BBC Singers, The Crossing, the Bavarian Radio Choir, Münchener Kammerorchester, Avanti Chamber Ensemble, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, and Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

Portrait concerts with Anna’s music have been featured at several major venues and music festivals, including Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival in NYC, London’s Spitalfields Music Festival, Münchener Kammerorchester’s Nachtmusic der Moderne series, the Composer Portraits Series at NYC’s Miller Theatre, the Leading International Composers series at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra’s Point Festival. Other prominent venues and festivals include the BBC Proms, Aldeburgh Festival, London’s Royal Opera House, Southbank Centre, ISCM World Music Days, Nordic Music Days, Ultima Festival, Lucerne Summer Festival, Beijing Modern Music Festival, Reykjavik Arts Festival, Tectonics, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Helsinki’s Musica Nova Festival, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.

Anna is currently based in the London area. She regularly teaches and gives presentations on composition, in academic settings, as part of residencies, and in private lessons. Invited lectures and presentations include Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, NYU, Northwestern, University of Chicago, Sibelius Academy, and the Royal Academy of Music in London. Anna is currently Composer-in-Residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. She holds a PhD (2011) from the University of California in San Diego.

Joël-François Durand
Composing, writing, teaching, inventing new ways of hearing – all are linked in the work of Joël-François Durand. As a composer, his career was launched in Europe with important prizes: a Third Prize at in the 1983 Stockhausen Competition for the piano piece “…d’asiles déchirés…,” the Kranichsteiner Preis from the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in 1990. Commissions and performances from many of today’s most significant ensembles followed – Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Jack Quartet, Quatuor Diotima, ASKO, Ensemble Recherche, musikFabrik, Talea Ensemble, Dal Niente Ensemble, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philarmonique de Radio France, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Durand is Professor of Composition at the School of Music, University of Washington, as well as Associate Director. He was awarded the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professorship in 2003-06.

Durand’s works are singular and powerful, combining rigorous and innovative structures with a prominent lyrical impulse.

Durand’s music and personality received critical attention in the 2005 book Joël-François Durand in the Mirror Land (University of Washington Press and Perspectives of New Music) edited by his University of Washington School of Music colleague Jonathan Bernard, which features in addition to analyses by Bernard and several of the School’s students, an innovative self-interview authored by Durand himself.

Commercial recordings of his music are available on the Auvidis-Naïve, Mode Records, Wergo, Albany Records and Soundset Recordings labels.

In 2010, Durand embarked on a new path: he designed and started commercial production of a new tonearm for record players. The Talea, as it was called, took the audio world by storm and was soon followed by two further models, the Telos and the Kairos, also aimed at the most refined audio reproduction systems. For his work at his company Durand Tonearms LLC, he was made a University of Washington Entrepreneurial Fellow in 2010.

As a guest composer and lecturer, Durand has contributed to the “Centre de la Voix” in Royaumont, France where he was co-director of the composition course in September 1993, the “Civica Scuola di Musica” in Milan, Italy (1995), the Royal Academy for Music in London, UK (1997), the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (1984, 1990, 1992, 1994), the “VIII. Internationaler Meisterkurs für Komposition des Brandenburgischen Colloquiums für Neue Musik”, Rheinsberg (1998), Washington State University, Pullman, WA (2004), and Stanford University (2006), among others. In the Fall 1994 he was Visiting Assistant Professor in Composition at the University of California at San Diego.

Durand is listed in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Wang Lu

Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a very natural identification with influences from urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music and freely improvised traditions, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.

She is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, after receiving her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Wang Lu’s works have been performed internationally, by ensembles including the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW, Minnesota Orchestra, Boston Lyric Opera, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Holland Symfonia, Shanghai National Chinese Orchestra, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Musiques Nouvelles, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Sound, Yarn/Wire, Curious Chamber Players, The Crossing Choir, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Argento, the Aizuri Quartet, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Momenta Quartet and violinists Miranda Cuckson, Jennifer Koh, pianist Shai Wosner and Joel Fan among others.

A 2020 recent recipient of the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond award from American Academy of Arts and Letters Wang Lu has also received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (Spring 2019 residency) and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and she has received commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard. She won first prize at Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne’s Young Composers Forum in 2010 and shared the Tactus International Young Composers Orchestra Forum Award in 2008. She was selected for a Tremplin commission by IRCAM/Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2010 and the International Composition Seminar with the Ensemble Modern in 2012. She has also received two ASCAP Morton Gould awards.

Wang Lu’s music was programmed on festivals such as the 2022 New York Philharmonic’s Sound On series curated by Nadia Sirota, 2014 New York Philharmonic Biennial, MATA Festival, Cresc. Biennale in Frankfurt, Gaudeamus Music Week, Tanglewood, Cabrillo Music Festival, Beijing Modern, Pacific and Takefu festivals in Japan, Mostly Mozart, Aspekte Festival in Salzburg, Mizzou International Composers Festival, and the Havana New Music Festival. She has also been a resident at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and Hermitage Artist Retreat. Collaborations have included an installation at Brown University’s Cohen Gallery with artist Polly Apfelbaum and an evening of poetry and music with poet Ocean Vuong. In 2019, her music was featured on portrait concerts at Miller Theater with ICE and Yarn/Wire, with Ensemble Recherche in Paris, and with Ensemble Mosaik plus soloists Ryan Muncy and Wu Wei in Berlin. In 2021, her projects include Aftertouch a flute electronic and video piece for Claire Chase’s Density 2036; a solo piano work Lacuna for Shai Wosner in honor of Chinese American architect I.M. Pei; a new work for the LongLeash trio supported by New Music USA; November Airs for the Talea Ensemble commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University; At Which Point a new choir and electronic work for The Crossing, and episode V of TV opera desert in, produced by the Boston Lyric Opera.

Wang Lu is the current Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer at the Chicago Opera Theatre (2020-22). On March 4th her full-length chamber opera The Beekeeper in collaboration with librettist Kelley Rourke was concert premiered at Chicago’s Athenaeum Center.

Her upcoming projects include a new chamber work commissioned by the Berlin Based Ensemble Mosaik, and a commission from the Barlow Foundation for soprano and large ensemble with the Seattle Modern Orchestra.

Of her portrait album Urban Inventory, released in March 2018, Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker, “I’ve listened at least a dozen times to the composer Wang Lu’s new album, “Urban Inventory” (New Focus Recordings), and remain happily lost in its riotous maze of ideas and images. Every moment is vividly etched, drenched in instrumental color, steeped in influences that range from ancient Chinese folk music to the latest detonations of the European avant-garde… The sense of loneliness that emerges at the end of “Cloud Intimacy” lurks behind all of Wang Lu’s meticulous frenzies: it is of a piece with the essential solitude of composing, of sitting in silence and dreaming of a music that has never been heard.

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Yiğit Kolat interview – “Inference Engines”

This work was commissioned specifically for Darius Jones to perform on alto saxophone with Seattle Modern Orchestra. How did writing with Jones in mind as a performer impact the creation of this piece?

I have been an avid follower of Darius Jones’ work since the premiere of his LawNOrder with Seattle Modern Orchestra back in 2019. Jones has the rare ability to transform musical material in a way that is analogous to transitions between different states of matter — just like a superheated gas shifts into plasma state, a simple melodic line in Jones’ music may become a visceral gesture under conditions of high intensity, or ossified structures might slowly melt into amorphous interplays of timbre. This project drew a great deal of inspiration from Jones’ music, but I particularly wanted to set up conditions that could resonate with the transformational aspect of Jones’ performance practice.

Where did the title “Inference Engines” come from?

An inference engine is a component of a neural network that infers new information based on what it has learned. There are three types of inference engines in this piece: a natural neural network (i.e. the musician’s mind) that creates new expressions based on the material at hand, the artificial neural network that generates new notation based on the written score, and another network which creates distortion by running inference on a face recognition network.

What other elements, either musical or non-musical, served as inspiration for this project?

Musical applications of deep learning have been a point of interest for me for several years. One of the first decisions I made about the piece was to use deep learning methods both for musical notation and audio processing. But at the same time, I wanted to make sure that the project would address a particular topic that is often buried under the hype: the complicated ethical issues that surround the field of artificial intelligence.

The audience will hear a distortion effect throughout the piece. It will randomly appear and disappear, revealing itself as an independent component, like sonic artifacts of a damaged equipment. Behind this distortion effect, there is a face recognition network that was trained on a set of photos which disproportionately features white individuals. As a result, the network cannot recognize faces of people of color. When another neural network that can process audio applies inference on the biased “insights” of the facial recognition network, it functions as a distortion component.

In 2020, a face recognition network with similar biases caused Robert Julian-Borchak to be arrested from his home and wrongfully imprisoned when the facial recognition software used by the law enforcement misidentified him. By exhibiting a similar tool in the form of an independently running audio effect, the piece attempts to separate it from the musical context, and seeks to emphasize its essential identity: a tool that carries considerable potential of inflicting harm.

How does the notation relate to the ideas and sound world of the piece?

The idea of inference is closely related to the interpretation of the notation. When one of the neural networks is fed materials from the score, it generates a fluid, constantly changing notation captured in short videos. These video-notations are meant to guide or inspire the performers during the performance. On the other hand, the musicians use the score as a basis for improvisation, rather than as a material to practice/learn in conventional sense. Thus the score serves as a model for both natural and artificial neural networks.

Can you explain what is going on in this gif? Is there a particular significance behind your use of color in the score?

Drum Kit video-notation – Except from “Inference Engines”

This is from the video part for the drum kit, the colors emphasize different parts of the instrument. The notation stands somewhere between the conventional and graphic notation, and since it changes in time, the time-axis for the conventional notation becomes invalid. Percussionist Bonnie Whiting finds that this situation prompts the performer to catch glimpses of certain events and play them from the short-term memory. I am excited to explore the possibilities with this sort of musical communication, and I am very lucky to have started on this path with insights from Darius, Bonnie, Jordan, and Michael.

Is there anything else you would like to share with us?

I’d like to thank SMO co-artistic directors Julia Tai and Jérémy Jolley for their herculean efforts to keep the new music scene in Seattle – and in the Pacific Northwest at large – vibrant, relevant, and uncompromising.

Concert III – Darius Jones in Seattle – program notes

About grey angel (2001) by Christopher DeLaurenti

grey angel reflects my interest in updating the musician-plus-tape genre of electroacoustic music by distorting and blurring the perceptible distinction between what is ‘live’ and prerecorded, two categories which are ultimately meaningless to a truly attentive and absorbed listener. Through the use of deeply reductive materials, I intended the score of grey angel to foster imaginative, out-of-the-box interpretation and improvisation with electronics.

-Christopher DeLaurenti

About Cyclic Complement (2010) by Angelique Poteat

In Cyclic Complement, Angelique Poteat unites two of her passions: bass clarinet and bicycles. The piece emphasizes the rhythmic aspects of cycling, and juxtaposes that with a drawn-out focus on pitch with the bass clarinet. To complement each other, a rhythmic motive is utilized by both recorded bicycle sounds and the bass clarinet. Basic extended techniques on the bass clarinet, such as slap-tonguing and flutter-tongue, attempt to remove the instrument from its fixation on pitch and place it in a more percussive, transitory world. Conversely, by speeding up some of the bicycle sounds and bringing out a variety of frequencies, every-day bicycle noises are converted to pitch-based music, uniting melodically with the bass clarinet.

– Angelique Poteat

About find — viola ( / cello / bass) and electronics (2019, rev. 2021) by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti

Original viola and electronics version commissioned by Kieran Welch. Bass and fixed media version commissioned by Shangri La. Special thanks to sound engineer Greg Heimbecker for recording, to Adam Morford for the use of his Morf-enhanced electric guitar that is featured in the electronics, and to Nina C. Young for creating the patch for the live electronics.

find is about the illusion of repetition—remembering, altering, trying to hold on.

– Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti

About Inference Engines (2022) by Yiğit Kolat

An inference engine is a component of a neural network that infers new information based on what it has learned. This piece features three inference engines. The first inference engine is the musician’s mind that is able to generate new musical expressions based on a score provided for this piece. The second inference engine is an artificial neural network that outputs changing, evolving excerpts of musical notation.

The third inference engine is a facial recognition network that is unable to recognize and distinguish black faces due to biased training. The output of this network is routed into a secondary network which processes audio. The result is a distortion effect, applied to the soloist’s sound. The distortion emerges as an independent element that disrupts the musical experience for both listeners and performers. While it is an inescapable part of the overall experience, the distortion is not part of the musical process—it does not interact with the musical narrative or with the soundscape. It exists as an inherent flaw in the system, like the sonic artifacts of a damaged speaker.

This deliberate distancing between the musical process and the sound effect serves to emphasize the essential identity of the distortion as an output of a faulty neural network. Its separate and insistent presence reminds us the very real consequences of using such networks. In 2020, Robert Julian-Borchak was arrested from his home, in front of his wife and young children, and wrongfully imprisoned, when facial recognition software powered by a neural network with similar biases, misidentified him. Mr. Julian-Borchak’s experience was possibly the first known instance of such misidentification by law enforcement, but certainly will not be the last.

Today, despite all efforts, the “distortion” still remains.

– Yigit Kolat

About echo fantasia V (2018) by Maria-Eva Houben

echo fantasy V is part of a series: the echo fantasies I – VI were composed in 2018 for several instrumentations, some of them are dedicated to the ensemble Ordinary Affects (USA), in connection with a project in Boston during October 2018. Playing the organ, I joined the group Ordinary Affects (Morgan Evans-Weiler, violin; Laura
Cetilia, cello; J.P.A. Falzone, vibraphone/piano; Luke Martin, guitar) during our trip in Boston and to New York, Middletown, and Hannover. In Middletown we had a beautiful recording of the fantasies I, IV, V, and other pieces (edition wandelweiser EWR 1904-05). One notice in the score might be a path into the piece, for performers as well as for listeners: “nothing more than a vibrating standstill.”

– Eva-Maria Houben

About WAR (2022) by Darius Jones

Darius Jones has created a new minimalist work titled WAR for the Seattle Modern Orchestra. WAR explores the sonic palette of sustained intensity and aggression in an orchestral environment. This work attempts to elicit the same emotional weight of the battle cry and lay bare the ominous reality of impending conflict.

What does it mean to prepare for WAR? It’s not just the physical but the psychological aspect of confronting sustained conflict, violence, and the reality of death; how often we confront these elements is dependent on who we are within a society or community. This piece commands the ensemble to prepare for WAR.

-Darius Jones

Concert I – Dissociation – Program Notes

WANG LU Ryan and Dan (2017)

To play as if only to create an alone space with oneself and a soulmate, in this piece, clouds of sonorities produced by the electric guitar and saxophone hover over and envelop one another. The microtonal and processed tones on the guitar and subtle sax multiphonics are interwoven into each other’s texture and harmony, combining to form a faint melodic trace that resembles the ancient Chinese seven-string guqin and the tranquility one experiences while playing it in nature for a soulmate. This piece is dedicated to my dear friends Ryan Muncy and Dan Lippel. – Wang Lu

Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a very natural identification with influences from traditional Chinese music, urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, and freely improvised traditions, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.

She is currently the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University, after receiving her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Wang Lu’s works have been performed internationally, by ensembles including the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Alarm Will Sound, Minnesota Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille,

Holland Symfonia, Shanghai National Chinese Orchestra, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Musiques Nouvelles, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Sound, Yarn/Wire, Curious Chamber Players, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Argento, the Aizuri Quartet, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Momenta Quartet and violinists Miranda Cuckson, Jennifer Koh, and pianist Joel Fan among others.

Wang Lu has received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (Spring 2019 residency) and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and she has received commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard. She won first prize at Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne’s Young Composers Forum in 2010 and shared the Tactus International Young Composers Orchestra Forum Award in 2008. She was selected for a Tremplin commission by IRCAM/Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2010 and the International Composition Seminar with the Ensemble Modern in 2012, and has also received two ASCAP Morton Gould awards.

Her music was programmed on festivals such as the 2014 New York Philharmonic Biennial, MATA Festival, Cresc. Biennale in Frankfurt, Gaudeamus Music Week, Tanglewood, Cabrillo Music Festival, Beijing Modern, Pacific and Takefu festivals in Japan, Mostly Mozart, Aspekte Festival in Salzburg, Mizzou International Composers Festival, and the Havana New Music Festival. She has also been a resident at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Collaborations have included an installation at Brown University’s Cohen Gallery with artist Polly Apfelbaum and an evening of poetry and music with poet Ocean Vuong. In 2019, her music was featured on portrait concerts at Miller Theater with ICE and Yarn/Wire, with Ensemble Recherche in Paris, and with Ensemble Mosaik plus soloists Ryan Muncy and Wu Wei in Berlin. Wang Lu’s recent compositions include a brass fanfare Code Switch for the opening of the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW 2019-20 season, a duet for Noh performer Ryoko Aoki and cello, a flute and electronic piece for Claire Chase’s Density 2036, a solo piano work for Shai Wosner in honor of I.M. Pei, a new work for the Longleash trio supported by New Music USA, and a new work for the Talea Ensemble commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University.

Wang Lu is the next Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer at the Chicago Opera Theatre starting in the Fall 2020. Her residency will conclude in 2022 with a full-length opera produced by the Chicago Opera Theatre.

Of her portrait album Urban Inventory, released in March 2018, Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker, “I’ve listened at least a dozen times to the composer Wang Lu’s new album, “Urban Inventory” (New Focus Recordings), and remain happily lost in its riotous maze of ideas and images. Every moment is vividly etched, drenched in instrumental color, steeped in influences that range from ancient Chinese folk music to the latest detonations of the European avantgarde… The sense of loneliness that emerges at the end of “Cloud Intimacy” lurks behind all of Wang Lu’s meticulous frenzies: it is of a piece with the essential solitude of composing, of sitting in silence and dreaming of a music that has never been heard.”

MARISOL JIMÉNEZ Yiríya aiteiya (2017) – US Premiere

This piece belongs to a series of works inspired by the concept of transformation as expressed by rituals of the Wixárika culture. The title is in the Wixárika language, which closest translation could be echoes and darkness. It is also the continuation of a piece for violin and electronics entitled “Yuaríya Vaicairi”. In Yiríya áiteiya the sonic entities created in the previous piece are echoed, transformed, expanded, and multiplied to the point of concealment. It is also, the part of the ritual where the senses dissolve into their most fantastic state. The Wixárica people are one of the only native cultures in Mexico that still have Pre-Columbian traditions that were not replaced by the Spanish, and continue to flourish. This work features some self-made electroacoustic instruments/sound sculptures called Noise Spring Harps. The piece is also conceived as a performative installation work, where the sound sculptures are physically connected to the instruments, which are transformed and extended in multiple ways acoustic and electronically.

Marisol Jiménez is a composer, performer and multi- disciplinary artist from Guadalajara, Mexico currently residing in Berlin. Described as “Fashioning a deep, original musical discourse.” Her work expresses an intense fascination with the tactile process of creating sound, an interplay of the entropic within the structured musical machinery, colliding the primeval with the technological to seek forceful sensuous and visceral energies. Her output includes numerous chamber and electronic works, as well as sound and intermedia installations. Most of her acoustic, electronic and mixed media works involve self-made sound sculptures, found objects, and collected sound materials from her own field recordings, improvisations, and performances. She completed a Doctorate degree in composition at Stanford University in 2011, and a Masters of Arts degree from Mills College, Oakland, CA (2005). Recently, she developed a project entitled SENSUOUS MATTER, a large scale performative installation for intervened autonomous machines and performers, which was selected for an inm-Funding grant for 2018 in Berlin. Jimenéz was a winner of the 39th Irino International Composition prize in Tokyo and has recently been a member of the National System of Art Creators in Mexico from the national Found for the Arts and Culture (FONCA). Her work has been performed and commission by leading ensembles and interpreters of new music throughout Europe, The United States, Japan, Brazil and Mexico.

KALEY LANE EATON Dissociation, or Self-Portrait (2020) – World Premiere

Dissociation is about self-censorship, and the fabrication (and eventual dissolution) of a public identity that steers observers away from wildness and vulnerability. The work puts pop and experimental idioms at war with one another as a metaphor for my own quest for authentic self-expression. This battle is ultimately fought and won by the explosively virtuosic speaking and singing percussionist, who transforms the initial chaotic, abrasive soundscapes into a beautiful song.

Written in late 2019 and early 2020, the composition of Dissociation was abruptly interrupted by the pandemic, which affected my approach to this composition in some deeply surprising ways – notably, the compulsion to strip everything down to its essence, to de-complicate my existence and my artistry. As such, I chose to end the piece with hope, simplicity, and beauty. I am grateful to this piece for helping me rediscover my origins as a songwriter, and I am ever indebted to the masterful speaking percussionist Bonnie Whiting for embodying the raw bravery, ferocity, and courage that I sought in its composition. – Kaley Lane Eaton

A conservatory-trained classical pianist and vocalist who fell into creating electronic music shortly after a stint playing Baroque lute, Seattle composer Kaley Lane Eaton’s music is colored by this eclecticism, expressing a preoccupation with harmony, nature, improvisation, storytelling, emotion, physical gesture, and vocal virtuosity. Her work has been performed across the US and internationally, in venues ranging from Hong Kong concert halls, to the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Her “disconcertingly lovely” (Seattle Magazine) compositions combine innovative digital processes with ancient performance practices, questioning humanity’s growing dependence on technology and the resulting exploitation of the planet.

Eaton’s work has garnered recent support from the Jack Straw Cultural Center (2020 Artist Support Program), New Music Gathering (2020 and 2021), ASCAP (2019 Plus Award), Seattle Office of Arts and Culture (2019 CityArtist Award), the Allied Arts Foundation (2018 Listen Up! Grants for Composers grantee), the International Alliance for Women in Music (2017 Pauline Oliveros New Genre prize for lily [bloom in my darkness]), the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences (2017 Distinguished Holland and Knight Fellowship), the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2017 Associate Artist), and 4Culture (2017 Tech-Specific Grant). In 2019, her work BIG DATA for clarinet, string quartet, and 3D electronics was commissioned and premiered by Derek Bermel and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra as part of the inaugural season at Octave 9.

Eaton is an Interim Associate Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts, and co-directs the improvisation-centric ensemble Kin of the Moon. She lives in a little blue house in Seattle with her partner Rian, dog Nikos, and the many, many plants, birds, bugs, and slugs in their garden.

FAUSTO ROMITELLI Professor Bad Trip, Lesson I (1998)

“At the centre of my composing lies the idea of considering sound as a material into which one plunges in order to forge its physical and perceptive characteristics: grain, thickness, porosity, luminosity, density and elasticity. Hence it is sculpture of sound, instrumental synthesis, anamorphosis, transformation of the spectral morphology, and a constant drift towards unsustainable densities, distorsions and interferences, thanks also to the assistance of electro-acoustic technologies. And increasing importance is given to the sonorities of non-academic derivation and to the sullied, violent sound of a prevalently metallic origin of certain rock and techno music.”

Born in Gorizia on 1 February 1963, Fausto Romitelli graduated in composition at the Conservatorio “Giuseppe Verdi” of Milan and subsequently went on to take part in advanced courses at the Accademia Chigiana of Siena and the Scuola Civica of Milan. In 1991 he moved to Paris to study the new technologies at the “Cursus d’Informatique Musicale” of Ircam, with which he also collaborated as “compositeur en recherche” from 1993 to 1995. Although his attention was directed to the principal European musical experiences (György Ligeti and Giacinto Scelsi, in particular), his main inspiration was drawn from French spectral music, in particular Hugues Dufourt and Gérard Grisey, to whom he dedicated the second piece of the cycle Domeniche alla periferia dell’Impero (1995-96, 2000). In EnTrance (1995-96) his writing encompasses the study of the voice, using a mantra from the Tibetan Book of the Dead: the resulting music is extremely compact, with a hypnotic and ritualistic flow, in which the sound, “like material to be forged”, is matched by a taste for technology and the search for new acoustic horizons.

Romitelli also pursued his personal research outside the cultured avant-garde, so his music also accommodates an expressive content of great eloquence and a violent sonic impact of considerable formal complexity. These qualities are featured in one of his most significant compositions: the trilogy Professor Bad Trip (1998-2000), based on a reading of the works written by Henri Michaux under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. In it, along with his taste for the deformed and the artificial, Romitelli added the sonic research of rock, with an electro-acoustic treatment of sound and instrumental gestures. As in Blood on the floor, Painting 1986 (2000), which emphasizes the violent and destructive aspect of the projection of reality onto fiction, the trilogy is also openly inspired by the work of Francis Bacon, particularly the series of Three Studies for Self-Portrait. With Flowing down too slow (2001), commissioned by Art Zoyd and Musiques Nouvelles, the compositional landscape of Romitelli’s musical writing is enriched by sonic suggestions borrowed from the experiences of artists like Aphex Twin, DJ Spooky and Scanner, though there is always a dominance of the hypnotic and ritualistic aspect, together with his taste for the dissimilar and the artificial. As for his interest in the social and artistic aspects of the contemporary world, and in particular in the means and processes of mass communication, this spawned works like Dead City Radio. Audiodrome (2003), the essence of which is encompassed in the Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Message. “Perception of the world is created by the channels of transmission: what we see and hear is not simply reproduced, but elaborated and recreated by an electronic medium that overlays and replaces the real experience” (Romitelli). Dead City Radio interprets the nightmare relationship between perception and technology and reflects on the techniques of production and reproduction of the electronic channels.

In his last work, An Index of Metals (2003), the musical experimentation and literary suggestions that accompanied his real-surreal approach to compositional work were fulfilled in a grand abstract narration. Based on the “desire to create a total perceptive experience, uniting with the musical aspect its visual double to immerse the spectator in an incandescent, enveloping material,” this work was conceived by Romitelli as “an initiatory celebration of the metamorphosis and fusion of matter, a light show, in which an extension of the perception of the self beyond the physical limits of the body is provoked by means of techniques of transference and fusion in an alien material. It is a path towards perceptive saturation and hypnosis, one of total alteration of the habitual sensorial parameters.”

After a series of successes at various international competitions, at Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Graz, Milan, Stockholm and Siena (first prize at the Casella in 1989), Romitelli’s music was routinely played at the main international concert venues. At festivals ranging from the Festival Musica of Strasbourg, the Festival Présences of Radio France and the Ars Musica of Brussels to the Saisons of the Ircam- Intercontemporain, the Venice Biennale, and the Festival Milano Musica, his works were performed by ensembles and orchestras that included Ictus, L’Itinéraire, Court-Circuit, Intercontemporain, Musiques Nouvelles, ensemble recherche, Alter Ego, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra and the Rundfunk- Sinfonieorchester Berlin, with commissions from institutions such as the French Ministry of Culture (Acid Dreams & Spanish Queens and Professor Bad Trip: Lesson II), Musiques Nouvelles (Professor Bad Trip: Lesson I), Ictus (Professor Bad Trip: Lesson III), la Musique et les Arts (Mediterraneo), Radio France (Cupio Dissolvi), Ircam (EnTrance), the Gulbenkian Foundation (The Nameless City), Milano Musica (The Poppy in the Cloud), L’Itinéraire (Blood on the Floor, Painting 1986) and the Royaumont Foundation (Lost and An Index of Metals).

Struck down by a fatal illness, Fausto Romitelli died in Milan on 27 June 2004 at the age of 41.

– Roberta Milanaccio

2021-2022 SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT

SEATTLE, WA – Seattle Modern Orchestra returns for its twelfth season with live performances and five world premieres, featuring SMO commissions from local composers Kaley Lane Eaton, Huck Hodge, Jérémy Jolley, and Yiğit Kolat. This bold season also includes a world premiere and performance collaboration with NY-based composer and saxophonist, Darius Jones, two US premieres by Mexican composer, Marisol Jiménez, a commemoration of Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer, and works by Ash Fure, Fausto Romitelli, Tania León, and Kate Soper. All concerts will be available for audiences both in-person and through live broadcast via Crowdcast Digital Stage.

SMO’s video podcast, Open Score, will return this season bringing in-depth conversations with our featured composers to audiences. The discussions will be live-broadcast through our Digital Stage on Crowdcast, where audiences are welcome to ask questions and join in the conversation as we explore the music and creative paths of this season’s composers. Schedule to be released.

“We’re so excited to be back performing live for our Seattle audiences again,” says co-artistic director, Julia Tai. “Last season we were able to experiment with online software to rehearse and perform remotely, and we were proud to present five virtual concerts. It has expanded our reach to audiences not just in Seattle, but around the country. This season we’re glad to continue our live broadcast for all of our concerts, while welcoming back our beloved Seattle audiences. We’re thrilled to be bringing new music to listeners wherever they are, whether or not they live in Seattle.”

Concert #1 – Dissociation
Friday, Nov. 19, 2021 @ 8:00pm
Town Hall Forum

Program:
Kaley Lane Eaton Dissociation, or Self-Portrait (2020) – World Premiere
Marisol Jiménez Bestiario Onírico III – Ciudadela – (2009) – US Premiere
Marisol Jiménez Yiríya aiteiya (2017) – US Premiere
Wang Lu Ryan and Dan (2017)
Fausto Romitelli Professor Bad Trip, Lesson I (1998)

Our season opening concert will present a world premiere from Seattle composer and Cornish faculty member, Kaley Lane Eaton. Eaton’s music has been described as “disconcertingly lovely” (Seattle Magazine), and her new work, Dissociation, or Self-Portrait, “puts pop and experimental idioms at war with one another as a metaphor for […] authentic self-expression.” Alongside Eaton’s premiere, SMO will give two US premieres by Mexican composer, Marisol Jiménez, and Seattle premieres by Wang Lu and celebrated Italian composer, Fausto Romitelli.

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Concert #2 – therefore i was
Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022 @ 8:00pm
Chapel Performance Space

Program:
Murray Schafer The Crown of Ariadne
Jérémy Jolley (contro-)clessidra III & IV
Ash Fure therefore i was

SMO will return to the Chapel Performance Space for our second concert, featuring exclusively small chamber and solo works. The program includes Ash Fure’s piano trio therefore i was, world premieres by Jérémy Jolley for piano and electronics, and cello and percussion from his (contro-)clessidra series, and a remembrance of Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer, with the performance of his virtuosic work for solo harp, The Crown of Ariadne. Performances will be given by pianist Cristina Valdés, percussionist Bonnie Whiting, cellist Ha-Yang Kim, and harpist Sophie Baird-Daniel.

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Concert #3 – Darius Jones in Seattle
Friday, April 15, 2022 @ 8:00pm
Town Hall Seattle Forum

Program:
Darius Jones NEW WORK
Yiğit Kolat NEW WORK

After the enthusiastic reception of our collaboration with New York-based composer and saxophonist, Darius Jones, in 2019, SMO is commissioning a new work from the celebrated composer. This experimental concert will feature Jones on the saxophone and will explore the intersection between written and improvised music. The second SMO commission of the concert will be by Seattle-based composer, Yiğit Kolat, composed specially for Mr. Jones and SMO.

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Concert #4 – The shape of the wind, the shadow of time
Friday, June 24 @ 8:00pm
Town Hall Great Hall

Program:
Tania León Indígena
Kate Soper Now is Forever for soprano and chamber orchestra
Huck Hodge The shape of the wind, the shadow of time for percussion soloist and ensemble

The season will conclude with a world premiere percussion concerto by celebrated Seattle composer, Huck Hodge, entitled The shape of the wind, the shadow of time (commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation) and will feature the ensemble’s tour-de-force percussionist, Bonnie Whiting. The program will also include Now is Forever by Kate Soper, specially arranged for SMO, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban composer Tania León‘s Indígena.

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SMO Season Subscription: $100 (including access to all concert broadcasts)
SMO Single tickets: $25 General, $15 Seniors, $10 Students
SMO Digital Stage Season Pass: $50
SMO Digital Stage Single Tickets: $15
For more information, please visit: www.seattlemodernorchestra.org.

Safety Protocols
The safety of our musicians and audience is of top priority to us. We will continue to follow guidelines and recommendations from the CDC, King County, and the City of Seattle as we move forward this season. All of our performances this season will require masking and proof of vaccination. Details about Town Hall Seattle’s Covid-19 policy can be found here.

Anahita Abbasi on Situation VI – Happenings

Ha-Yang Kim on the day is burnt, the night is calm

Composer and cellist Ha-Yang Kim joined SMO’s co-Artistic Director Jérémy Jolley on OPEN SCORE broadcast on Sunday February 28th. Kim shared her musical path and details on her new piece the day is burnt, the night is calm. Here’s a transcription of her thoughts on the new work commissioned by SMO.

For information about this concert- Click Here!

Almost any piece of music if I think about it as a performer, improvisor, or a composer, I want to start from a place of stillness and nothing. There is something very important about being in this place of stillness. It is part of something that I am asking everyone to do, to participate in. Active listening and being very present requires a tremendous amount of focus and integrity. It is that intention and focus that I am interested in all of us sharing. Making music is like a ritual for me, and I hold it and carry it in that way, even if I am an audience member. The sense of this whole intense year feels like the world has been on fire. How do we find stillness amidst this fire? How do we find our peace? How do we find that space that we can return to or remember the essence of who we are?

FORM
It is a long-form piece. It is pulseless, meterless, and the whole piece is about revealing the scale. It starts with the lowest fundamental in the double bass, and then we have different octave iterations for the different instruments. Then it goes through the scale and reveals the different intervallic and harmonic chordal colors of this beautiful system. The piece evolves over a long period of time and invites everyone to be deeply listening to the different colors.

The passing of time and duration of it is also an important feature. It is long and there are a lot of held notes, because I am working with very small incremental intervals. There will be beating, and especially because there are strings, different kinds of overtones will emerge, and the electronics will be enhancing that. We are working right now with spectral and granular synthesis. It is this architectural, three-dimensional space and the beauty of that revealing itself to us. That whole experience and process is very much like a sitting meditation, except we are working with frequencies.

excerpt from Ha-Yang Kim’s score for the day is burnt, the night is calm

SCORE
I just give parameters in terms of choices. I have a group of numbers or pitches that can be played, then I have another two lines with different intervallic material and melodic fragments that keeps us moving together as a herd. Everything else is indeterminate in the sense of duration and who plays what when, other than that we are moving together through this system. So I don’t know what someone is going to play, which enforces a letting go and real active, attentive listening. Whatever I do is going to be in response to whatever is happening at that moment. We are going to be collectively engaging in this process together, and we will be in a different place than from when we started. – Ha-Yang Kim, transcribed by Mina Esary.