NONO film release

I am very happy to be able to release this film of Luigi Nono’s “La […]

playing harmonics

Student and professional violinists often ask about harmonics. . Mostly, people need more familiarity and […]

New Music Miami

I was thrilled to play a live-streamed concert at the New Music Miami ISCM Festival this week […]

Caló

My audio recording of Dave Soldier‘s flamenco suite Caló for violin has been released. [New […]

Vienna 2021

   This month I made a wonderful trip to Vienna. I performed two solo concerts […]

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thoughts

. (2018) I think art can be whatever you feel it to be, whether having […]

WWFM interview

Thank you very much to David Osenberg for having me back on his radio show on WWFM after ten years, to talk about my new album Világ. I enjoyed all of our discussion very much and was moved that he actually did a retrospective of my varied life in music so far. The interview was recorded on March 24 and aired on his weekly show on March 30.  Listen HERE

NONO film release

I am very happy to be able to release this film of Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgic utopia Futura” for more people to see and hear. Many thanks again to the AMOC team including amazing Zack Winokur and Julia Eichten; filmmaker Rafe Scobey-Thal; and my wonderful ongoing collaborator in the lontananza, Christopher Burns. Happy birthday, Luigi Nono!

View it here on the AMOC website and here on Vimeo. Notes below.

In honor of Luigi Nono’s 99th birthday, AMOC is thrilled to offer a limited release of the concert film NONO. AMOC’s production of Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” premiered in two live performances at the Clark Art Institute in August 2020. Rafe Scobey-Thal’s film NONO presents six imaginative portraits of the production—one for each section of Nono’s music. Creating a kaleidoscopic, mobile sculpture in sound, and melding the real-world sound samples in Nono’s electronics with the natural outdoor environment of the Clark Art Institute at dusk, the production brings a physical and humane urgency to the piece’s evocation of a displaced wanderer seeking refuge.

Music by Luigi Nono

Featuring the work of AMOC* Company Members
Miranda Cuckson, violin
Julia Eichten, movement
Zack Winokur, director

With special guests
Christopher Burns, sound artist
Rafe Scobey-Thal, film director

A Note from the Artists:

“La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” (1989) is the penultimate work by Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924 -1990).

Nono was a masterful composer, whose music combined vivid emotive qualities with intellectual depth and rigor, expressing a poetic lyricism through distinctly modern approaches to sound and form. His astonishing synthesis of music with words and political message serves as a beacon for today’s multimedia artists, and those who are motivated in their art to convey passionate political convictions. His work was steeped in historical knowledge while vehemently confronting the social issues of the present – most of all, the fight against fascism, which continues from his time into ours.

His compositional craft involved rich musical layering, dramatic juxtapositions of sounds ranging from lush to austere, and innovative use of the voice. A native of Venice, his sensibilities were shaped by the aural landscape of that city, its bell towers, piazzas, and canals. Early in his life, he studied the vocal music of the Renaissance, the madrigal tradition, and the sacred music of Italy. Following his time at the Darmstadt courses, which put him in the avant-garde company of Stockhausen and Boulez, he had his first major success with Il canto sospeso, for singers, chorus and orchestra (1955). The piece put forth a pointedly anti-fascist message, incorporating letters written by political prisoners in World War II. For the next several decades, Nono’s works – mostly large-scale in duration and forces – strove towards new kinds of music theater, involving text (often documentary material) both sung and spoken, spatialization, theatrical sets, improvisation, field recordings, electronics, and amplification.

Later in life, his work turned inward, emphasizing listening and introspection over protest and declaration, and pursuing collaborative approaches to chamber music, including works for string quartet and solo piano. In “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura”, he distilled his many lifelong preoccupations into the intimate medium of solo violin and 8-track tape. Created with violinist Gidon Kremer, its full title is “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. Madrigale per più ‘caminantes’ con Gidon Kremer, violino solo, 8 nastri magnetici, da 8 a 10 leggi” – or “The nostalgic, utopian, future far-distance. Madrigal for a ‘wanderer” with Gidon Kremer, solo violin, 8 magnetic tapes and 8 to 10 music stands.”

Miranda and Christopher’s work together began in 2011 with a performance of this piece at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. This first collaboration was highlighted by Miranda’s discovery of a vocal part in the score, written by Nono but apparently not performed previously. Nono’s indication for the violinist to sing felt revelatory, illuminating the lyrical, almost operatic quality at the heart of the work and unveiling the multi-layered ‘madrigal’ Nono described.

That year, they took the piece into the recording studio. With the assistance of engineer Richard Warp and producer Gene Gaudette, they found ways to represent the spatial qualities of the work in both stereo and surround-sound versions of their interpretation. The resulting album captured the visceral and tactile quality of Miranda’s performance, expressed the dramatic dynamic range of Nono’s music, and earned a “Best Recording of 2012” citation from the New York Times.

Miranda and Christopher’s decade-plus partnership has included a dozen live performances in a variety of venues across the US and in Germany. In 2017 they participated in “Utopian Listening”, a conference on Nono’s electroacoustic music presented by Harvard and Tufts Universities.

For the AMOC* production, Miranda took the new step of memorizing the 50-minute piece (the violin part is fully composed and notated), dispensing with the music stands and allowing for a deeper exploration of choreography, mobility, and interaction with the audience. “La lontananza…” is meant to be adapted to its performance space, and AMOC’s production made use of the Clark Institute’s Tadao Ando-designed outdoor terrace and reflecting pool along with the surrounding natural environment, the setting sun, and the sounds of the frogs, birds, and insects.

VILÁG album

“Világ” is a Hungarian word meaning “world” or “illumination”.
It also resembles the word “village” in English.
In Sanskrit, “vilag” means “to cling to”; in Hindi, “separated”.

I’m very happy to share my new, double-length album Világ, featuring the Sonata for solo violin by Béla Bartók along with compositions written for me by Aida Shirazi and Stewart Goodyear, plus works by Manfred Stahnke and Franco Donatoni.

This recording is available below for download purchase. CDs can be purchased on the store page and starting March 17 from Barnes&Noble, Amazon etc. Streaming here.

My program notes are here

Select your preferred format below, to download a .zip file with the full recording along with the booklet and cover.


Apple Lossless


FLAC


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AIFF


mp3 (320k CBR)


program at Bargemusic

Thought I’d share this program I hugely enjoyed playing last month at Bargemusic (even with the boat being tossed around by strong waves and tides). The concert featured Signs, Games, and Messages by György Kurtág followed by premieres by two dear friends of mine from South America – Alba Potes from Colombia and Pablo Mainetti from Argentina. Alba is a longtime New Yorker and active in the music community. Pablo is a very soulful bandoneon player, composer, and member of Quinteto Astor Piazzolla. I ended the concert with Manfred Stahnke’s whimsical, lively, and thoroughly microtonal work Capra 4, which is on my soon-to-be-released new album on the Urlicht Audiovisual label.

Below are program notes by the composers, and something I wrote about the Kurtág.

music of Anthony Cheung

 

I met composer and pianist Anthony Cheung during our student days in New York. His dramatic and atmospheric music draws from a well of music ranging from the older Western classical repertoire, American and European recent classical music, jazz, Chinese traditional music, and more.

I’m happy to have several collaborations with him. In 2020, in the midst of pandemic lockdowns, I posted a video project I was involved in, featuring Asian musicians, for which I played Anthony’s piece Character Studies.

His new album All Roads includes that work and also his duo Elective Memory, which I play with his beautiful playing at the piano. Hope you’ll have a listen!

 

 

This summer at the Ojai Festival, we gave the world premiere of Anthony’s work “the echoing of tenses” . Along with violin and piano, the piece involves song (sung by AMOC’s Paul Appleby), spoken text, sampled recordings, electronics using six different microtonal tunings, and poetry by seven Asian-American poets. We’re very excited to perform “the echoing of tenses” this May 18th at the 92nd Street Y in New York. 

 

 

 

playing harmonics

Student and professional violinists often ask about harmonics.
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Mostly, people need more familiarity and knowledge of all the standard harmonics (touch-4, touch-3, touch-5, fingered in the high register, etc) and what pitches they produce.
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Also, some composers nowadays are using less common harmonics (for example, at the 7th or the lowered minor-3rd) which, while naturally-occurring on the instrument, are more difficult to locate on the string than the more common ones. People are exploring the different timbres and tuning colors that result from these harmonics. To me, that’s what’s interesting about them, along with the polyphonies that are possible (with double-harmonics or a solid tone with a harmonic).
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Recently I was asked again about harmonics and whether there’s a chart or worksheet. I decided to make one – here it is!
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Harmonics p1
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Emphasis is on the touch intervals and what notes they make. The goal is to know, given a specific pitch, how to play that pitch using touch-4, touch-3, touch-5, and high-register harmonics (and -8 or -6 if relevant). Pages 2 and 3 have some examples of harmonics that sound the same pitches.
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At top of page 3 are naturally-occurring harmonics, going up the fingerboard and going down.
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Touch-8, -5, and -4 harmonics are the easiest to do and speak most reliably. Touch-Maj3 and -Maj6 are next in terms of reliability, then touch-min3 and -min7 and -tritone. The rest of the harmonics sound more delicate and are trickier to produce, especially in first position.
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These charts show the natural harmonics, with an open string (D in this case) as the base note. Touch harmonics can also be produced on a fingered base note (artificial harmonics). Getting them to sound may depend on how high a position it is on the fingerboard (but bow placement/pressure can also help).
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With a little searching online, I found two other charts, differently formatted. One is by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, the other by Paul Zukovsky. Also just brought to my attention: a remarkable 50-page treatise “I suoni armonici: classificazione e nuove tecniche” on violin harmonics by Enzo Porta, published by Ricordi in 1985, and Michelangelo Abbado’s “Tecnica dei suoni armonici per violino” published in 1934, also by Ricordi.
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AMOC director of Ojai Festival 2022

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Thank you to the Ojai Festival and to the entire AMOC team! My AMOC colleagues and I were, collectively, artistic director of Ojai’s 2022 festival. After months of planning and preparation, we brought and dove into an exuberant four days of music, dance, and poetry, in venues around the town. Thanks to the loveliest volunteer staff and to the audience, with whom I had conversations and interactions that were the most meaningful part of the whole thing for me, aside from the satisfying work with my colleagues and friends.

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Julius Eastman show


premiere of Anthony Cheung’s “the echoing of tenses” with Paul Appleby, Arthur Sze, Victoria Chang

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premiere of Prelude and Dance from Stewart Goodyear’s Suite for violin

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Cassandra Miller’s “About Bach” with Keir GoGwilt, Coleman,Itzkoff, Carrie Frey

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Reiko Füting’s “tanz.tanz”

 

microtonal playing

On June 5th, Johnny Reinhard’s American Festival of Microtonal Music held a one-day Microtonal Violin Festival (part of his Microtonal University courses). He had invited me to give a presentation about my work with microtonality, but I had to fly to California that day, so I made this video the week before, on a rehearsal break.

Relative pitch is most useful for a musician. The only times I wish I had perfect pitch are when there’s a very complex harmony or cluster and I wish I could identify individual notes immediately, instead of needing time or effort to figure it out.

For the most part, I think really precise intervals are important when 1) there’s a long sustained harmony or you’re using the overtone series, so the exact frequencies are really discernible, and 2) if the piece returns to the same pitches and intervals repeatedly so you need to be consistent. But in many pieces, and especially in melodic or fast passages, the point is to have more ways of being expressive through a greater variety of intervals, not to play exactly a 6th-tone or whatever. As Georg Friedrich Haas told me, just make sure a 6th-tone is a little smaller than a quarter-tone!

As I mention in the video, I did ear training as a kid, starting at home but mostly at Juilliard Pre-college. At 9 when I started at Juilliard, I was placed in level II of ear-training, skipping the first-year class. I struggled and flailed at first but I was encouraged by teacher Sandra Schuler to persevere and after a couple months I was good at it. And when I started college at Juilliard at 18, I didn’t have to take ear training. But Rebecca Scott, who had been my ear training teacher in Pre-college the past few years, asked me to take the advanced college class for a year, which was required of conductors (I think she was hoping I’d become a TA). I’ve realized over the years how much I use those skills.

Saariaho/Steiger program

This spring, I greatly enjoyed giving two recitals of music by Rand Steiger and Kaija Saariaho. Rand ran the live electronics. We performed at National Sawdust in Brooklyn and again at UC San Diego’s Prebys Music Center a few weeks later. The program was mostly works with electronics: two premieres by Rand – Nimbus and longing – and Kaija Saariaho’s Frises from 2011. I also played Kaija’s short Nocturne at the start of the program.

The livestream video:

Rand’s pieces use live processing of the violin sounds in very evocative, beautiful ways. Longing layers the violin tones and extends them with reverb for extra-long, continued sonority, much like the sustain pedal of a piano. Nimbus is his re-composition of a kaleidoscopic sound installation he made for Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
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Kaija Saariaho composed the 4-movement Frises to be performed following the Bach D minor Partita. Commissioned by an art center in Istanbul, Frises was also inspired by these artworks (below) by Odilon Redon – Frise jaune, Frise de fleurs, Frise grise – and, in the 3rd movement, by MC Escher’s paintings. (I picked this one below as an example.) The last movement sounds to me like a Muslim prayer.

Frises
and Nocturne are such a pleasure to play, as you can melt and shift among many sonic colors, and relish the long breaths of phrases and the arc of each movement and the piece as a whole.
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I also very highly recommend Saariaho’s latest opera Innocence, a masterwork both musically and theatrically. Some of the music’s expressive qualities are strikingly different from her works for solo strings and electronics.
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Frise jaune

Frise de fleurs

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New Music Miami

I was thrilled to play a live-streamed concert at the New Music Miami ISCM Festival this week and I had a wonderful time. Thanks so much to Orlando Jacinto Garcia for inviting me. I played three premieres composed for me: the live premiere of a beautiful work by Orlando in tribute to his friend Moses Shumow; a new work with live electronics by Jacob Sudol called “A Boat Cast Adrift”, inspired by chapters from the Tale of Genji; and “Portrait No. 1” by my friend Diego Tedesco. I began with “longing for a distant memory” by Aida Shirazi, the shorter of two pieces she’s written for me. The finale was Huang Ruo’s exciting “Four Fragments”.

Thanks again to FIU, Orlando, the composers, and all who have listened and are listening, in person or virtually! The video is on Youtube:

 

Miami dinner

Chasalow collaboration

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It was great to be back at Brandeis this week working with Eric Chasalow. Our project has two parts or versions, taking the same kernel of music in very different directions. In October, I came to Brandeis to workshop and talk to students about a few passages of a concerto for violin and chamber orchestra that Eric had started. This Wednesday, we were at the Rose Art Museum for a few hours, where I improvised from a page of material he’d derived from the concerto, while he used various kinds of electronic processing, exploring what happens with a violin interacting with the museum space and the visitors. The Rose has been the site of new works by Alvin Lucier, John Cage, and Christian Wolff. Thanks to the music department for recording the visit and to the museum for having us activate the space again.
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Shortly before this visit, Eric said he wanted to make a demo recording of the finished three-movement concerto, with piano. So I quickly learned the piece and on Thursday morning recorded it with Yoko Hagino playing the also challenging piano reduction. On no rehearsal aside from a play through the piece, we plunged in and made the recording. I was very glad to play and hear it and get it off the page. Great piece and energy, beautiful harmonies, and I think people will enjoy it. It will be premiered with orchestra with BMOP and Gil Rose.
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Caló

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My audio recording of Dave Soldier‘s flamenco suite Caló for violin has been released. [New videos of Caló are posted HERE] Caló is the language of the Spanish Romani or gitano people.

This has been an ongoing years-long project with Dave Soldier, me, and Pedro Cortes, who grew up among generations of flamenco artists. He produced the recordings and plays some percussion on the piece. Musician/dancer Jose Moreno is on palmas and cajon. Dave (aka David Sulzer) is a neuroscientist in his “day job”, but he was a professional musician for years and has always been active on the music scene as a composer and performer. Thanks to him and these wonderful flamenco artists for a great collaboration!

Check out the whole recording. There’s no “correct” order to the pieces, which are in a range of tempos and moods. With some albums, you want to make a narrative sequence. This is a collection of flamenco numbers, a kaleidoscopic assortment to enjoy however you want.

I’ve loved flamenco since I went to a show by Maria Benitez’s company in New Mexico years ago. This project has been fun and also fascinating because, while the violin or a similar bowed string instrument is a major element of many folk traditions, flamenco mainly features guitars, voice, and percussion (including palmas, or clapping). The guitarists play with a lot of gutsiness and percussive effects and flamenco singing is powerful and raw even when the emotion is tender and sweet. Figuring out how to play this music on violin (with Dave who is also a violinist) was a lot of fun. The cantabile music is natural to bowed strings, but playing the fast chordal music with the rhythmic definition needed is an exciting challenge. I love this music’s fierce passion and pulsing rhythms, and taking subtle freedoms within and around it.

Traditionally in flamenco, the guitarists are men, but the dancers, singers, and percussionists comprise both women and men, and the women’s roles are equally ones of tremendous strength, skill, proud dignity, and intense emotions. Flamenco is also music of today that continues to evolve. Check it out!

 

Vienna 2021

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This month I made a wonderful trip to Vienna. I performed two solo concerts at the Alte Schmiede as part of the exciting month-long Wien Modern festival. Please watch, listen and enjoy.


Many thanks to Wien Modern for the invitation, for rescheduling when it was postponed last year, and also for adding a second show. I was asked for two different programs. While the theme of this year’s festival was “Mach doch einfach was du willst”, I decided to adapt the program we’d planned together last year, which explored the idea of microtonality. It was exciting to share an array of music from Georg Friedrich Haas (twice), Manfred Stahnke, Aida Shirazi, Reiko Füting, Carlos Simon, Anthony Cheung, Wang Lu, and Iannis Xenakis. It was a great chance to hear the myriad expressive possibilities of microtones: from the charged angst of every interval in the Haas piece to the lively rustic timbres of Stahnke and Shirazi, from the mercurial atmospheres of Cheung and Wang Lu to the blues bends of Simon to the buzzing sound waves of Xenakis.

These concerts were very personally meaningful to me – not just that it’s a terrific festival and the land of Mozart and Mahler (though that’s all great) but my grandfather and his parents were Viennese and, as a Jew, he had to leave the country, becoming a refugee. It’s unlikely he would’ve emigrated if the Nazis hadn’t been persecuting Jews. So as in any family whose elders had to flee a country (say, Somalia or Venezuela or Myanmar or Syria or Afghanistan) and whose next generations were born and grew up someplace else, it can mean a lot to return and connect personally with that country and its people. Playing there is something I’ve long hoped to do.

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It was also so wonderful to get to participate in events in Vienna announcing next summer’s Grafenegg Festival. At morning and evening events for press and subscribers, I spoke about Georg Friedrich Haas’s violin concerto that he wrote for me, his inspiration – the lives of my grandfather and his own – and played a short excerpt. Thanks to all the very lovely people I met. I’m so excited to see you there for the Haas concerto on August 28. Here’s to a marvelous winter season and summer festival!

thoughts

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(2018) I think art can be whatever you feel it to be, whether having a deep social purpose or as light entertainment, or for pushing challenging frontiers and communing with a certain group. Anyway some of my favorite artists often work(ed) between categories.. between more direct expression and more “experimental” or abstract or unusual things that satisfied their own need to explore and were appreciated by particular people. I think Beethoven did that, also Stravinsky, for instance. Over the years. And they figured out how to bridge these things sometimes, so the popular stuff was still so ingenious and full of sophistication and surprise on some level, and depth rather than clichés.
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Ojai Festival 2021

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I was very honored to be a featured soloist at the Ojai Music Festival this month, among fantastic company. My heartfelt thanks to this year’s artistic director, the great John Adams, and to festival director Ara Guzelimian, for inviting me. It was my first time performing at Ojai. I played Carlos Simon’s violin piece “Between Worlds” on the opening concert. Later in the week, and also at the Libbey Bowl, I played Samuel Carl Adams’ Chamber Concerto with John Adams conducting a marvelous band, and the Preludio from the Bach E major Partita (leading to the Esa-Pekka Salonen piece FOG, which was inspired by the Bach Preludio and by Frank O. Gehry).

I also gave a recital at the Zalk Theater, playing Anthony Cheung’s “Character Studies”, Dai Fujikura’s “prism spectra” (on viola), the first four movements of the Bach D minor Partita, and Kaija Saariaho’s “Frises”. The Saariaho and Fujikura both involve live electronics (my thanks to Dan Gower for our work together).

Thank you so much to all the wonderful artists, the hard-working staff, and the terrific audience. I’m excited to return to Ojai with AMOC next June as 2022 collective artistic director.

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Reviews:
Los Angeles Times
Sequenza 21
Santa Barbara Independent here and here
San Francisco Classical Voice
New York Times

Ligeti Concerto recording reviews

My performance of the Ligeti Violin Concerto, in 2018 with Christian Baldini and the UC Davis Orchestra, went notably well and I was very happy it was live-streamed and that the video has stayed available on Youtube. It was my first time playing the piece. Recently it was an unanticipated thrill when this performance was also released on Centaur Records (on which label I’ve released five albums previously). Having it on an album provides further avenues for people to listen to it, and also has drawn substantial attention as a recording that it had not received as a Youtube video – I’m very grateful for these reviews:

David McDade, MusicWeb International:

“the scintillating Miranda Cuckson in the Ligeti. Ligeti’s violin concerto burst into my consciousness thanks to a Boulez-directed disc of the Ligeti concertos on DG with the work’s dedicatee, Saschko Gawriloff, as soloist. I always assumed that recording pretty much closed the book on how to perform this gleefully crazy piece, but that was until I heard this performance. This is a piece that teems with ideas, wonderful, weird and wacky (ocarinas anyone?) and Miranda Cuckson’s enthusiasm is utterly infectious. She makes complete sense of the many disparate elements in an absolute tour de force reading. The energy levels of soloist and orchestra match those of the indefatigable Ligeti at his most unbuttoned. If you have yet to make the acquaintance of this masterpiece, then this is now the performance to go for.

The work isn’t all capers and extravagance. The Passacaglia is full of pathos and great solemnity, reminding us that some of the most profound lines in King Lear come from the mouth of the Fool.

This is the first recording of hers I have listened to, though she has amassed a considerable discography which I shall now be checking out. It is a real pleasure to hear a musician of such charisma taking on contemporary music instead of yet another Sibelius or Tchaikovsky concerto.”

Jari Kallio, Adventures in Music:

“The performance, caught on disc on 5 May 2018, is perhaps the crown jewel of the album. The soloist, the orchestra and the conductor are all on the top of their game, delivering an admirable iteration for Ligeti’s astonishing concerto. In the opening movement, Cuckson’s solo line weaves through the increasingly complex orchestral fabric with dexterous virtuosity, while Baldini keeps his formidable ensemble ever well-balanced and beautifully in accord with the soloist.

The second movement is a well-shaped affair. Its wonderfully realized solo opening paves the way to the marvellously surreal entry of the ocarina quartet, followed by the aptly jagged hockets. The harmonic clouds of the closing chorale bring the movement to its captivating close.

The central Intermezzo lives up to its presto fluido marking, with its seamless flow unraveling with absolute virtuosity. A well-shaped Passacaglia fourth movement ensues, paving the way for the agitated, appasionato finale and its whirling cadenza, in a tour-de-force rendition from Cuckson. With the scattered closing notes from the ensemble and the soloist, the concerto is brought to its witty close with style.”

Lynn René Bailey, Art Music Lounge:

“The Ligeti Violin Concerto, despite its strangeness, is clearly a first-class work, and I was very impressed by our soloist, Miranda Cuckson, who plays it with not only technical fireworks but also with tremendous feeling. Here everything falls into place in a first-rate performance that does full justice to the music. Listen particularly to the way she plays the slow second movement, with so much heart that you’d think she was in love. Unfortunately, the horns crack a couple of times which mars its effectiveness. Cuckson also plays the “Intermezzo” movement with tremendous passion. She is one outstanding violinist!”

Thomas May, Gramophone:

Gramophone Ligeti

Christian Carey, Sequenza 21:

Győrgy Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, completed in 1993, was one of his most significant late works. In it, he explored his interests in microtonal tunings, folk dance rhythms, older forms such as Medieval hockets and Renaissance passacaglias, and unorthodox instrumentation (the winds double ocarinas) and playing techniques. The language moves between tonal (often modal) reference points and post-tonal construction. This may sound like quite an amalgam to navigate, but it is achieved with abundant success. Violinist Miranda Cuckson is a superlative interpreter of contemporary concert music, and she delivers a memorable rendition of concerto, with tremendous sensitivity to tuning and balance, authoritative command of challenging solos, and a dramatic portrayal of its narrative arc. Once again, Baldini proves an excellent partner, eliciting a tightly detailed performance from the UC Davis Symphony while giving Cuckson interpretive space as well. The performance of the cadenza displayed some of the violinist’s creativity. Cuckson started with four lines of the original version, composed with input from the concerto’s dedicatee Saschko Gawriloff, then continued with cadenza material she wrote herself.

Fromm concert 2021

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Please enjoy this concert I recently did with Harvard’s Fromm concerts! Filmed at National Sawdust, it features two solo premieres by Dongryul Lee and Jeffrey Mumford and two duo works by Natasha Barrett and Rebecca Saunders with marvelous pianist Conor Hanick. More info at https://frommfoundation.fas.harvard.edu/fromm-players-2021 Also, on their Youtube channel, check out our interviews with the composers, done in the weeks before and after the concert.
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Usually the annual Fromm concerts at Harvard are a pair of live events, co-curated by a professor from their music department and a guest artist. Thanks to musicologist Anne Shreffler for the honor of co-curating with her and for the very enjoyable conversations and collaboration. I met Anne in 2016 at a Tufts/Harvard conference on Luigi Nono’s music, at which Chris Burns and I were invited to perform “La lontananza nostalgia utopia futura”. It’s been wonderful to have a fascinating dialogue with Anne on the music of our time.
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 We worked together last year planning two programs, one a recital, one chamber and ensemble music. When they had to be canceled due to the pandemic, I was asked to film a recital. I thought about what would be most fun to work on and share on video right now. I wanted to explore very new works, and music that was exciting and new to me and my collaborators.
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The Saunders Duo focuses on timbres and sustained tensions, exquisitely sensitive or startlingly acute. The Mumford violin piece “fleeting cycles of layered air” evokes billowing gusts of wind with long bursts of notes. Lee’s “A finite island in the infinite ocean” takes us to outer space, the first movement a venturing into the unknown, the second an exploration of an expansive new terrain, its melodies both somehow familiar and foreign. Barrett’s “Allure and Hoodwink” is a piece I programmed for its romantic mood with the instruments enmeshed together in an electronics world of tactile sounds, ranging from lush and dense textures to concrète samples of traffic, sirens, and dripping water.
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These are filmed run-through performances, audio unedited, aside from post-processing the electronic effects on Dongryul Lee’s piece.
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Frommposter
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Thank you to Anthony diBartolo and the Harvard team for their work on these videos, and to the National Sawdust team for the filming and recording. Thank you to Yamaha for providing the piano for Conor.
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Talk with Jeffrey Mumford

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On March 30th, I had the pleasure of hosting a conversation with composer Jeffrey Mumford, online for National Sawdust. I’ve collaborated with Jeffrey for about a decade, playing and recording his pieces and premiering new ones.

The full conversation is here. We talked about his music, his feelings about being an African-American artist, and inspirations from nature and visual art. Note the shifting, Rothko-esque patch of light behind me, along with the blue-grey wall I found for a backdrop. We also shared an excerpt from the recording of my performance of his piece “eight musings…revisiting memories”.

On April 16th, I’ll be premiering a new solo he wrote for me, called “fleeting cycles of layered air”. It’s on a recital I just recorded for Harvard’s Fromm concerts. Check it out here.

Nono: La lontananza, outdoors and no music stands

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In 2011, I did my first performance of Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” for violinist and electronics, with sound artist Chris Burns in New York City. Our subsequent album of the piece – on the Urlicht label, in both stereo and surround sound and including the singing indicated in Nono’s score – was named a Best Recording of 2012 by Zachary Woolfe in the New York Times. We’ve gone on to perform the 50-minute piece in a wonderful variety of spaces and venues, in Europe and America.

Our collaboration on a new production with AMOC, the exciting interdisciplinary collective I’m part of, is a leap forward in taking the piece into new conceptual territory. We workshopped with director Zack Winokur for a week last winter and met this summer at the Clark Art Institute for two live performances outdoors. By memorizing the music this time – an intense summer-long project for me – and eliminating music stands, I had freedom of movement not only between sections and locations, but anytime. I felt like I was moving within a giant, kaleidoscopic mobile sculpture in sound, both in physical reality and in my mind. There were wonderful interactions with the physical and sonic environment of the Clark – the pond and hills, the frogs, birds, and bugs, and the progression of day time to night. The beautiful film by Rafe Scobey-Thal, capturing much of our collaboration and performance there, will hopefully be publicly shared again sometime.

Recital at the Stissing Center

 

I recently had the pleasure and honor to give a short recital filmed live at the beautiful new Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY. It was recently posted to Youtube and remains viewable. Hope you’ll enjoy it! 

The program is an optimistic-sounding one for these times: the Ysaÿe Sonata No. 5 for solo violin,  Elliott Carter “Rhapsodic Musings” and “Statement: Remembering Aaron” from his “Four Lauds”, and, with pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, Ross Lee Finney’s “Fiddle-doodle-ad: Eight American Folk Tunes”.

The Ysaÿe starts with the sounds of rosy dawn (L’Aurore) as the natural world awakens, and bursts into joyful dance. Carter’s music for me always has a feel of living in the now and charging into the future. The Finney is a wonderful and lively suite of folk tunes he arranged at the end of World War 2.

My very warm thanks to the Stissing Center for inviting me, J. Henry Fair and team for the terrific video, and Ryan McCullough for sound recording.

 

Live recital at PS21 Chatham

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This August I was very excited to give a live recital at the marvelous semi-outdoor theater at Performance Spaces 21 in Chatham, NY. PS21 put together of series of solo concerts by superb artists, mostly pianists. I was delighted to be on the line-up and play a concert for a sold-out, socially-distanced audience.  I played the Bach A minor solo Sonata and “modern classics” by Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, and Mario Davidovsky. The video of the livestream is also viewable here. Great review here

video recital for New Music Miami


The New Music Miami ISCM Festival had to be canceled in April due to the coronavirus, so it’s now online this July and August. In lieu of my in-person recital there, I did this video concert. Hope you’ll enjoy! Thanks to Orlando Garcia, Jacob Sudol and New Music Miami and I hope to come visit and do concerts together soon!

In the spirit of a live performance, I did under three takes of the pieces (mostly one or two), they are unedited, and there is some ambient sound from West End Avenue.

About interdisciplinary collaboration

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Thanks to the Violin Channel for asking me to write about interdisciplinary arts and my lifelong interest in them!

The page is here and the text is also below:

In first grade, my class was asked to make human figures from colored paper to illustrate what we wanted to do when we grew up.

Enthusiastically, I made three figures and called them a violinist, a writer, and a poet.

I remember drawing and cutting out the figures and outfitting them with clothes and violin and bow, paper and pens.

I had recently begun playing violin and had just written my first short story.

I grew up in a house filled with music and my own life has been centered around music since my pre-teens.

Music is the most mysterious of the arts, sound being invisible yet highly physical, its emotional impact obvious yet its meaning hugely subjective.

Music is made of materials and tools – sounds, rhythms, time, silence, volume – which together communicate and move us in ways we can never totally define.

Since childhood, I’ve kept up writing of various sorts and always been immersed in all the arts, taking in performances, movies, books, visual art, and learning about the artists.

In recent years, I’ve had opportunities to collaborate with a number of wonderful choreographers/dancers, poets/speakers, and visual artists. In my experiences collaborating with, or creating in, different genres, I’ve found it thrilling to combine the bodily senses and steer the imagination to less familiar pathways.

Sometimes artists in other genres work in ways that go on tangents or are more circuitous than I’m used to, and that can be stimulating.

I think what has most intrigued me and affected my work is how blended the art forms actually are.

When we think of putting art forms together, we of course think of opera, or dancing to music, or film with music.

Or we think of musical compositions specifically inspired by another artwork, say a painting or poem.

Besides the ways in which the genres can enhance or inspire each other, I’ve been fascinated exploring the aspects they share.

For instance, playing music involves physical qualities of dance: in the movements we make in response to the music, in playing our instruments and in performing or communicating with others.

Dance is related to acting, in the embodiment of motivations, desires, the gamut of emotions.

Both acting and dance involve a musical kind of phrasing, of timing and inflections.

In music, a performer takes on roles like an actor: I often think of the composer as the playwright whose personality permeates the work, and the composition as the various characters, and maybe narrative, in the play.

Musical composition also can be analogous to ideas in visual art: the use of space/time, repetition, perspective, and so on.

When I study a piece of composed music, I sometimes visualize it as a painting or sculpture, and when I write about music, I go back and forth between the verbal and musical, grappling with the specificities and ambiguities in either genre.

When I’m playing music, sometimes I think of myself an actor or dancer to connect more deeply with the humanity expressed in the sounds.

 

New videos of the Sciarrino Caprices

During this past month, I made videos of the Six Caprices for solo violin by Salvatore Sciarrino. I’m very proud of them. I hope you’ll listen and watch. They’re very beautiful music.

I first played several of these caprices back when I was starting to explore a lot of contemporary music. The pieces mean a lot to me and I feel strongly about the expression and sound world of this music. There’s a lot I can say and explain but I’m not in the mood to write it down at this time, so for now, I’ll post the interview I did at the West Cork Festival in Ireland after I’d performed the six of them. Suffice to say: while they’re certainly drawn somewhat from Paganini’s caprices, I feel their wonder and sparkle comes from the combination of notes, noise, and silence-as-environment, and the effect of Sciarrino’s caprices is much more Mendelssohnian than noisy. As in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or perhaps, as my interviewer suggested, The Tempest.

My interpretation is that Sciarrino’s many written harmonics mean different things: some produce noise and some are actual harmonics that create notes, which give the music a gorgeous radiance and also melody, rather than being an ongoing pile-on of frenetic effects.

Youtube playlist of all six Caprices is here.
I will probably make an audio recording someday but I’m actually very happy with the videos for now, as the detail and physicality are very enjoyable in this medium.

Heritage and Harmony: Asian musicians

Thanks to WQXR and Donna Weng Friedman for the wonderful project “Heritage and Harmony” and for including me in this celebration of Asian and Asian-American musicians. They asked me to choose a short work by an Asian composer and make a video of it, with a spoken intro about my background. I played “Dramatis Personae” (2016) by Anthony Cheung. He also made a video talking about his piece and the influence of his background on his work.

 

 

AMOC in Cultured magazine

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AMOC
is in the new issue of Cultured magazine. Beautiful article and photos by Emma McCormick-Goodhart and words from several AMOC artists.

Among many things we look forward to is the 2022 Ojai Festival, for which we are collectively the artistic director.

I am also very excited to be working with AMOC on a new production of Luigi Nono’s “La lontantanza nostalgia utopia futura”, with Zack Winkur and my longtime collaborator Christopher Burns. It’s wonderful to have this opportunity to thoroughly rethink and reinterpret the piece both musically and as theater.

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Playing at the Library of Congress

In 2012 at the Library of Congress, I had the pleasure to premiere “Kreisleriana”, a work by Harold Meltzer commissioned by the Library’s McKim Fund, established by Leonora Jackson McKim to support new compositions for violin and piano. The concert program was a tribute to Fritz Kreisler, hence the piece’s title. Robert Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” was another inspiration. Harold’s “Kreisleriana” had been commissioned immediately following a Library of Congress concert I played in 2008 with his group Sequitur. On that concert, I was part of the Duo for violin and piano by Elliott Carter.

This season, I was honored the LoC reached out to me with an invitation to perform there again. Amid discussing various ideas, we were given the opportunity to use Jackson McKim’s Stradivarius violin. With its current owner’s support of an event honoring her remarkable legacy, we decided to program a concert of old and new chamber music, with the Meltzer “Kreisleriana” in its revised 2014 version. The rest of the Feb 21 program:  Robert Schumann’s Op. 47 quartet; the seldom-played “Intermezzo” by Kodály; “Dhipli zyia”, a folksy early work by Xenakis; the Finale from Beethoven’s Op. 3 trio (the LoC owns the manuscript); and “Sāniyā” by Iranian composer Aida Shirazi, in its US premiere.

The McKim violin (which was also owned by Joseph Joachim) was brought to DC the night before. I played the whole concert on it except for the Shirazi piece, which involves detuning and which I played on my own violin. (I’m fortunate to play a wonderful Guadagnini.) It was a privilege to play Leonora Jackson McKim’s Strad. Laurie Niles wrote a very interesting essay on it for Violinist.com.

My very warm thanks to the Library. Playing in beautiful Coolidge hall, and in this amazing repository of the recorded history and cultural legacy of the USA, is hugely meaningful to me  – as an artist and an immigrant, and as someone who’s played a lot of music by American composers and done research on the music of this country.

Reiko Füting “passage:time (copy)”

I am thrilled to share the new piece written for me by German composer and New York resident Reiko Füting. Many thanks to the Violin Channel for featuring us!

Reiko is a dear friend and colleague. In my opinion, this and his piece “tanz.tanz”, which I recorded for his album and have performed numerous times, are among the great recent works for solo violin. Reiko is deeply engaged with the music of the past, Bach in particular. His music, especially in recent years, takes its jumping-off points from compositions of past centuries. It’s also inspired by some contemporary techniques of playing. In our lives, we all absorb from all around us and from the past (unless you are really solipsistic). I think Reiko has fully absorbed his inspirations and created something that is in his own voice, and very special and beautiful.  I am honored and very happy to be the dedicatee of this piece and to play it. I have performed it live several times this season and will continue to into the future!

Video by David Bird, audio recording by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Studio

 

Sam Perkin “Language”

I’m very pleased to share this new video of “Language” by young Irish composer Sam Perkin. The piece was commissioned by the West Cork Festival in Ireland, where I had a great experience in 2017. I premiered this piece on the opening concert, which was shared on an Irish radio broadcast a while after. We also recorded this video at Bantry House the next morning. Film and audio were done at the same time, in a few takes. I left all decisions on editing, mixing and reverb up to Sam. We also had video footage of me playing violin in the gardens and walking around in town, but Sam ultimately opted, after trying various approaches in making the film, to focus it on my embodiment of the alternating voices. To me, the music sounds kind of like minimalism-meets-Ysaÿe. The philosophical Chomsky ideas in the Youtube description are maybe a heavy context for the music, but I feel Sam took relatable inspiration and he was very sensitive to and imaginative with the details and nuances of the speech fragments he transcribed. The musical result, while lively and fun, is also touching in its drawing together of the similarities and differences in the ways people speak. 

 

Soundsofmusic and LeGuessWho Festivals

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Earlier this month, I had a fantastic time playing solo concerts at two festivals in The Netherlands: the Soundsofmusic Festival in Groningen and LeGuessWho in Utrecht. It was my first time performing in that country. The audiences were terrific, attentive and eager to listen, responding enthusiastically. 

Soundsofmusic is a contemporary classical music festival in Groningen, a few hours north of Amsterdam. I played in the beautiful and simple wooden Luthersekerk. The festival suggested doing a stylistically varied program so I played Iannis Xenakis’ “Mikka S”, Michael Hersch’s “the weather and landscape are on our side”, Aida Shirazi “longing for a distant memory”, “Charged” by Anna Meredith (the festival’s featured composer), and “Hammer and Anvil”, a seguiriya that’s part of a flamenco suite for violin by Dave Soldier. The Hersch and Shirazi pieces were also written for me.

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LeGuessWho is a thrilling festival that features many artists and bands, with concerts happening simultaneously or overlapping at different venues, and curated by various performers. Thanks to Patrick Higgins for inviting me! I played the first day of the festival, at the Hertz hall at TivoliRedenburg arts center. The hall was full and the very quiet audience responded with whoops and cheers. I played Xenakis “Mikka S”, Richard Barrett “Air”, Donatoni “Argot”, and two premieres. Reiko Füting’s “passage: time (copy)”, a beautiful, frantic fever-dream piece in its European premiere, makes brief references to works by Biber, Kühnel, Westhoff, JS Bach, and Pisendel. Aida Shirazi’s “Sāniyā”, which had its world premiere, evokes the dappled effects and rustling, whispery noise from the movement of wind and sunlight through tree leaves. I’ll be performing both these pieces multiple times this season.

Here is a write-up of the concert and here is another.

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the music of George Walker

I had the pleasure to not only play both remarkable Violin Sonatas by the great American composer George Walker, but to hear back from him when he heard the recording of one of the concerts. Posted on Facebook:

responses to Haas, Hersch, Meltzer

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2018 finished with a few highlights:

I played the Violin Concerto No. 2 by Georg Friedrich Haas in Porto, Portugal with the wonderful Orchestra of the Casa da Música and their director Baldur Brönnimann. Just before performing, I was asked by the orchestra manager if I was going to play an encore. I thought about it a moment and, after the concerto, played the Andante from Bach’s A minor Sonata. There was a standing ovation and a terrific, thorough review of the concerto from the Spanish magazine Mundo Clasico, which said “Miranda Cuckson gave an authentic lesson of instrumental mastery and microtonal intonation, a prominent aspect of this Violin Concerto”. And:

“After the Haas concerto, Miranda Cuckson gave us something extra.. what was done by the American violinist in the ‘Andante’ of the Sonata in A minor BWV 1003 (c. 1720) was impactful, going from the microtonality of Haas to the fullness of a Bach whose double-stops spurred Cuckson to explore and handle the polyphony of this Andante not only with marvelous technique, but with a warmth and beauty of sound as I have rarely heard in these Sonatas and Partitas (and without gut strings, or baroque bow, or “historical” interpretation). A moment, therefore, of genuine beauty; in essence, the most refined and intense that we have heard this afternoon in Porto.”

Also, much appreciated from an audience member: “I have no word to express my feelings about the concert. Haas’s music comes from another dimension and you get all the atmospheres. I really enjoyed the piece. Your sound is full of color, force and humanity. And thank you for the beautiful postlude.”

2018 also ended with the two nice accolades: David Wright at New York Classical Review picked my duo concert with Michael Hersch at National Sawdust as one of his top ten concerts of the year. I had the pleasure to play the Hersch Violin Concerto in its New York premiere last year, with Ensemble Échappé and conductor Jeffrey Milarsky, with whom it was great to reconnect having known him at Juilliard years ago. 

Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times chose a movement from my recording with pianist Blair McMillen of Harold Meltzer’s “Kreisleriana” as one of the 25 best classical tracks of the year.  It’s on Harold’s new album “Songs and Structures” on Bridge Records. Check it out!

National Sawdust shows & interview

Thanks very much to the National Sawdust Log and Kurt Gottschalk for this interview.

I’m excited to play two shows at National Sawdust this season. Tonight September 18, I play with Michael Hersch in a kind of collage of movements from his duo “the wreckage of flowers”, and also “14 Pieces” and “The Vanishing Pavilions”. On January 6  I’ll premiere a new multimedia project called “folds” with Katharina Rosenberger on the Ferus Festival. Hope you can come!

*Update: Video from the Sept 18 Hersch concert is here. The concert was called one of the top 10 best classical performances of the year by New York Classical Review (thank you!) Selections from this live performance are included on Michael Hersch’s new album Carrion-Miles to Purgatory.*

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UC Davis composers and Ligeti Violin Concerto

 

This month I had the wonderful pleasure to visit the University of California at Davis for a week as artist-in-residence. Everyone was a joy to work with and get to know. Seven graduate composers wrote excellent works for me, which we workshopped, followed by my performance the next day in their beautiful new hall. I also did a reading session of pieces by nine undergrads. Superb work all round and congrats to them and their professors, Mika Pelo, Pablo Ortiz and Chris Castro!

I also performed the Ligeti Violin Concerto with the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra at the Mondavi Center on May 5th. It was my first performance of this piece and I had a blast! The orchestra – non-music majors and three of the grad composers playing violin and flute – took on the challenge with aplomb and made superb progress over the week. Conductor Christian Baldini was a joy to collaborate with. I played mostly my own cadenza for the final movement. It begins with the first four lines of the Ligeti/Gawriloff cadenza that’s in the score, then goes on to my own take on the concerto material.

Above are the live videos of the Ligeti Concerto and my recital of graduate composers’ works. Enjoy!

Robert Mann memorial at The Juilliard School

 

On April 29, The Juilliard School held a memorial for my teacher Robert Mann – founding 1st violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet, American artist, composer, teacher, writer, husband, father. I studied with him for my Masters and Doctorate degrees at Juilliard. After that, I still occasionally went to play for him at his apartment. I also had the great joy to play Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert with him at his family’s annual Christmas parties.

In my life I consider it one of my hugest blessings, and my best luck, to have had a big array and sequence of extraordinary teachers, with each of whom I got to spend a lot of time. In my 20 years at Juilliard (and beyond), these included my violin teachers Shirley Givens and Dorothy DeLay, violinist Felix Galimir, cellist Fred Sherry, and the members of the Juilliard String Quartet. From my childhood, I particularly remember my teacher Rosemary Glyde. My musician parents, Robert and May, have given me continual support, dialogue, and sophisticated feedback. In recent years, composer Mario Davidovsky was essentially a teacher to me, engaging me in rich conversations about music, culture, and the world. And I’ve learned from so many other remarkable musicians and people I’ve worked with.

However, of all these numerous influences Robert Mann is the teacher who was my most life-altering inspiration, with whom I felt most “on the same wavelength” in playing and personality, who burst open my world and set me on a real path, who showed me how to think and feel inside the music and how to be true to myself, and who I adored.

His mantra when he founded the Juilliard Quartet was, “Our goal is to play new music as if it had been composed long ago, and to play a classical piece written hundreds of years ago as if it had just been written.” [from his autobiography, A Passionate Journey]

I was tremendously honored and moved to be asked by Juilliard and his family to perform at the memorial, and to play “Rhapsodic Musings”, which Elliott Carter wrote for him in 2001. I remember his happy excitement when he told me, one day at my lesson, that Carter had given him this piece as a birthday present. R.M. stands for Rhapsodic Musings, for Robert Mann, and for the notes Re Mi, which figure strongly in the work. The piece is an amazing, delightful character study of Bobby, his characteristic gestures and personal qualities, both fiery and tender, and a wonderfully concise example of Carter’s brilliant and lyrical music-making.

Haas Violin Concerto

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*I’m editing this post to add the European premiere of the Haas Concerto No. 2 with Staatsorchester Stuttgart and Sylvain Cambreling, and to include information about the concerto’s programmatic significance and my grandfather. 

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with Sylvain Cambreling

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with Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov

I just returned from Japan, where I gave the world premiere of a concerto by Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas. Georg is one of the great musicians of our time and a warm person and friend. The emotion in his music has meant so much to me since meeting him eight years ago as an ensemble player and playing his music for him – his violin piece “de terrae fine”, the US premiere of “In Vain”, and several other works. I’ve since performed “de terrae fine” many times. I was beyond thrilled when he told me, after the release concert for my album including “de terrae fine”, that he wanted to write a concerto for me . I’m so moved and honored to have this work written for me. Our premiere in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall received a very enthusiastic response.

Prior to the concert, I wrote:
“Georg Friedrich Haas’ music has revealed new dimensions of musical meaning and an astonishing richness of expression conveyed in the exquisite distances between notes, in powerfully pulsating harmonies, and in the accumulation and contrast of surprising sound-colors. While the innovative compositional aspects are fascinating, what has excited me most about his work is its profoundly visceral impact and the deep psychological and emotional sources that he connects to with his music.”

The concerto is microtonal, using quarter, sixth and eighth tones. It’s in nine continuous sections: Praeludium-Kadenz-Resonanz und Feedback-Dreistimmige Invention-Sgraffito-Sotto voce-Interludium-just intonation-Aria. In some sections it evokes the Violin Concerto by Alban Berg, who dedicated his piece “to the memory of an angel”.

Shortly after we met, Georg and I discussed our Austrian family histories. Much of this violin concerto has a programmatic significance regarding the life of my grandfather, Erich Engel, who passed away when I was eight. “Engel” means angel in German. My grandfather was Jewish and he had to flee from Vienna during WWII, first to England and then, after the war, emigrating to Australia with my English grandmother and their two children. 

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To address another aspect of Georg that’s gotten publicity: he and his wife Mollena are kind and intelligent people whom I like very much and respect, but I do not relate to their BDSM lifestyle. I just want to be clear and public about that. I relate to the emotions in his music, which are universal ones we all share. But I am not “submissive” or “dominant”, and I am not attracted to pain, except for an occasional well-applied massage or knuckle-crack. A person can be very sexy without BDSM. That’s all I have to say about it.

The violin concerto was co-commissioned by the Suntory Festival and the world premiere was with the excellent Tokyo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov.  I also played “de terrae fine” on a portrait concert of Georg’s chamber music. The next concerto performances will be in July 2018 with the Staatsorchester Stuttgart and Sylvain Cambreling and December 2018 with the Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música and Baldur Brönnimann.

 

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composers Toshio Hosokawa and Georg Friedrich Haas in pre-concert talk

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performing “de terrae fine” for solo violin by GF Haas

from Brian Ferneyhough

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My album “Invisible Colors” was released a few months ago in the USA by Urlicht Audiovisual. I play pieces by Carter, Wolpe and Ferneyhough.  There haven’t been many reviews but I much enjoyed making it and spending some time venturing into the “complexity” byways and absorbing the restless, super-layered qualities of it all. It’s gotten some wonderful feedback. Recently, I received this email from Brian Ferneyhough, out of the blue (posted above). I was very excited, especially since I’d never (still haven’t) met or spoken with him before.

It was also very interesting to find recently this note by him about that piece:

I have always been fascinated by the sometimes problematic but always stimulating parallels between musical and non-musical modes of cognition. In the same spirit, the titles of my works are not infrequently selected with a view to throwing at least a little light on the limits and nature of the specific discursive models involved. In many surrealist paintings the title stands in a strikingly fractured or discrepant logical relationship to the image, thereby sensibilising the observer to the unseen presence of a complex field of semantically active energies. According to one of Marcel Duchamp’s most celebrated pronouncements, the title of a painting thus assumes the status of an “invisible colour”, that of the imagination, amplifying and enriching our subliminally speculative perceptions somewhere beyond the limits of the ocularly accessible spectrum. In the case of this short composition for violin it seemed fitting that the various degrees of “invisibility”, absence or erasure involved in the compositional process should be evoked by means of a title itself suffering from radical strategic incertitude at one degree remove. In a sense, Unsichtbare Farben might be seen as the “tip of the iceberg”, to the extent that the vast preponderance of materials that went into its preparation appears nowhere in the musical phenomenon itself, having been suppressed by a formal filtering operation selecting and interleaving structurally equivalent elements from a relatively large number of through-composed layers. Correspondingly, the unfolding of the work’s argument is characterised primarily by a series of rhetorical ruptures as short fragments of otherwise impalpable processes are abruptly invoked and, equally suddenly, abandoned.

Perlman and Milstein

I’m delighted and honored to be mentioned in wonderful company in this article in the Los Angeles Times. The article is about Itzhak Perlman, a huge talent with a rapport with a global audience (pre-internet!) In my NewMusicBox interview, I mentioned Perlman as one of my heroes. I’m very fond of his Glazunov, Lalo, Bruch Scottish Fantasy, the film of his Beethoven concerto with Giulini, and his playing on “Schindler’s List”. I went to many recitals he gave at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

I studied for eight years with Dorothy DeLay, who was his teacher at Juilliard. She talked about things she learned teaching him, aspects of his playing, favorite jokes of his. I was always moved by her steadfast belief in his ability, even when he was just starting out, to tour as a successful performer despite his handicap. In 2005, my subsequent teacher Robert Mann was honored by the American Composers Orchestra at their benefit gala. I was asked to perform a piece composed by him and Perlman presented him with the ACO award.

People these days usually know who Itzhak Perlman is, but they sometimes don’t know the generation before: Milstein, Szigeti, Szeryng, Elman, Grumiaux. I played for Nathan Milstein when I was 13. The previous year I won the Juilliard Pre-College concerto competition and performed the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1 with the orchestra. Someone there gave Milstein a recording of the concert, which led to his inviting me to participate in his annual week of masterclasses in Zürich, Switzerland. Corey Cerovsek and I were there along with about a dozen college students. Over the week, I played movements of the Tchaikovsky concerto, Beethoven Op. 30 No. 3 sonata, Wieniawski D major Polonaise, and Sarasate Zigeunerweisen.

I remember him joyfully playing Bach sitting at a table…at pauses or while speaking, he kept bunching lengths of a beautiful, dark silk, patterned scarf and stuffing it between his chin and the violin, with the rest of the scarf cascading down his front.  In the excitement of playing, he kept knocking the scroll of his Stradivarius violin against the table, at which we would all jump and glance at each other. He played a relatively small repertoire all his life, but he played those pieces so beautifully, his unique sound a combination of warmth and tenderness on the one hand, and directness, nobility and backbone on the other. He found endless things to experiment with, fingerings and bowing to change, notes and lines to bring out.

Performing at the West Cork Festival in Ireland

I was very happy to be invited by the West Cork Chamber Music Festival to come perform this July. I hadn’t been to that part of Ireland before and it was a great joy to visit, to make new friends and colleagues, and connect with a new, wonderful audience.

I played six pieces on concerts throughout the week and went to as many of the festival’s events as I had time for. I also did a video interview and gave a masterclass, coaching a promising Irish group on the Prokofiev String Quartet No. 1.

I was especially gratified to get a spontaneous excited response from so many people to my playing of the Six Caprices by Salvatore Sciarrino and a new piece by Irish composer Sam Perkin, commissioned by the festival. I played these on the first two concerts. The rest of the week afterward, I received delighted feedback from people who’d been there. Some of my most satisfying concert interactions recently have been performing new/recent music for audiences who weren’t necessarily looking to hear new pieces or new musical languages. For me, it just confirms my purpose to communicate on my instrument – to all kinds of people – how very enjoyable, beautiful, interesting, and multi-dimensional new music can be. 

It was a lot of fun to be part of performances of Sextets by Penderecki and Brahms with such terrific players. I had not played much of Penderecki’s music before and, in addition to the Sextet, I played his Sonata No. 2 with pianist Joonas Ahonen. Joonas and I had a great time together and we worked to make dramatic shape of this hefty piece during our rehearsal process. After the performance, someone came backstage and told us she’s a musicologist who has worked on Penderecki’s music. She said that she’d never heard the piece played so great!

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Premieres and pieces this March and April

On March 7 at Miller Theatre, I’m happy to share two pieces written very recently for me by Steve Lehman and Michael Hersch. Steve, an acclaimed jazz composer, bandleader, and saxophonist, did his doctorate in composition at Columbia University, working with the French spectral composer Tristan Murail. Steve and I were working a lot in the same circles of musicians and became aware of each other’s playing and work. Years have flown by since then and now I have a great new violin piece by him.

Titled “En Soi”  (or “En Soie” maybe?), it involves a microtonally detuned violin and intricate, groovy pizzicato in both hands. The plucking evokes the sounds and playing technique of the African ngoni. There also are a lot of harmonics. 

Michael Hersch has been one of my more frequent composer-collaborators lately. Though I’ve performed most of his music for violin, he hadn’t actually written a piece for me until now. It’s been gratifying to collaborate on this together. The piece is called “the weather and landscape are on our side” and based on text fragments from letters by Bruno Schultz. Along with his distinctive gestural and harmonic language, he adds a few elements relatively new to his music: quarter-tones, breathy sounds produced by bowing the wood of the violin, and even some gentle singing.

Aaron Jay Kernis has been acclaimed for his compositions since he was quite young and I knew him as a figure on the musical landscape long before I was playing much contemporary music. I was very happy recently to meet him personally and to get to know his violin works. While I love to explore unfamiliar sounds and ways of playing, and to expand the violin’s palette to include surprising colors, I also love to return to the violin’s roots and I’m glad there are composers who, like Aaron, continue to utilize stringed instruments that way. I especially appreciate Aaron’s deep musicality, pitch sense, and way of pacing a piece as a whole. At Miller, I’m playing two pieces. “Aria-Lament” (1992) builds from an opening of stillness and quietude to a frenzied torrent. “A Dance of Life” (2010) was inspired by Edvard Munch’s painting “The Dance of Life”. Aaron says he was looking to evoke the circular motions suggested in the painting.Edvard_Munch_-_The_dance_of_life_(1899-1900)

Huang Ruo and I were doctoral students at the Juilliard School concurrently. We now both teach at Mannes School of Music. I think I maybe met Huang Ruo in Juilliard’s research library – in any case I remember talking with him there. He was very chatty and animated (never mind that we were in the library!) A few years ago, I ran into him on the subway in NYC and as we parted, he said “I must send you my violin piece!” I’m very happy to play it now. It’s singing and brilliant and idiomatic to the instrument. Incidentally, he recently told me that he was, like Aaron Jay Kernis, inspired by Munch when writing this piece. He had just seen a show of Munch’s paintings, where he read a statement by Munch posted on a wall: “I paint not what I see, but what I saw”.

Being half Taiwanese (ethnically half Chinese), it has been satisfying to me to work with Chinese composers who are writing in the context of Western classical music. On my concert at National Sawdust on April 5, I’m delighted to premiere a work by another friend of mine from China, Wang Lu

Wang Lu

Lu and I met a few days after she arrived in NYC to study at Columbia University. We had lunch at the now non-existent Cafe Mozart.  Lately we’ve talked about working together on a solo piece and I asked her if she’d write something for this concert. The concert marks the release of my album of music by Ferneyhough, Carter and Wolpe. Rather than perform all the pieces from the album, I wanted to mix it up with something new. So, along with two Ferneyhough pieces, the shorter Wolpe piece and a movement from the Carter “Four Lauds”, I’m going to play Lu’s new work and a piece by Richard Barrett.

Wang Lu decided to write a piece called “Unbreathable Colors” dealing with the issue of smog pollution, which has become dire in some cities of the world. The piece is intended to be performed with or without a slideshow she made of smoggy scenes in China. Breathing is necessary for life – we all need oxygen in order to survive. The sense of breathing is also vital in a lot of music – the intake and release, the feeling of flow, the shape of a phrase, each arc of breath.  These days, the word “unbreathable” likely recalls, for many people, Eric Garner’s final, repeated words “I can’t breathe” as he died in 2014 from a police chokehold. Along with Wang Lu’s piece, I decided to play English composer Richard Barrett’s “Air”, which also evokes the primal “process of respiration”. Richard, whom I was delighted to meet and collaborate with in 2015, worked with Ferneyhough at Darmstadt and has written about his music.

I also want to mention another new work I’m anticipating: a piece for violin and piano from Cuban-American composer Ileana Perez-Velasquez, which I’ll premiere with Jacob Greenberg on April 7. Last year, Ileana wrote a beautiful piece for me for violin+ensemble, called “Lightning Whelks” after a spiral-shaped seashell. She wrote that an archeologist friend of hers “ties the shell’s clockwise ‘movement’ winding up in the interior of the shell to the movement of the sun, which has long signified light to darkness, and birth to death, in native beliefs.”

“Invisible Colors”: Ferneyhough, Carter, Wolpe

Invisible Colors cover

My new album on Urlicht Audiovisual is called “Invisible Colors” after Brian Ferneyhough’s piece “Unsichtbare Farben”. (I thought this sounded much more evocative than titling it after Wolpe’s “Piece in Two Parts” or Ferneyhough’s “Intermedio”.) If you google the words “unsichtbare farben”, you’ll see websites of German companies selling glow-in-the-dark paint. I applied some photo filters to the album cover to give the picture that sort of effect.

The album features five pieces by three composers: Ferneyhough, Elliott Carter and Stefan Wolpe. It will be released digitally on March 31, and available as CD. I’m playing a concert to celebrate the release on April 5, 7pm at National Sawdust, where the album was recorded. Hope you can come.

Ferneyhough’s pieces often involve such complex, dense textures and rhythms that performers, myself very much included, flail at executing them and this is part of the drama of the piece. I feel the qualities of hyperactivity and overload in much of his music reflect the modern state of the world, with its barrage of information, internet data, and connections. While I enjoy that barrage and effort toward mastery, I also became especially fascinated with his unusually spare, linear, and exquisite “Unsichtbare Farben”. The piece offers an opportunity to really absorb his phrase shapes, notes and harmonies, and I put a lot of care into giving it a particularly pristine interpretation. [See also his program note, which I discovered months after the album’s release.]

I’ve played a lot of Elliott Carter’s music, from the Duo and the Violin Concerto to the Triple Duo, Canon for 4, and other chamber pieces. I love the “character study” quality of the “Four Lauds” – depicting the banjos in Copland’s music, the brusque cut-offs of Robert Mann’s verbal declarations, the ornate style of Roger Sessions. I’m also drawn to the taut tension and unfolding of Carter’s intervals/harmonies, the long dramatic lines, and the back-and-forth between the gruff and the sweet and singing. Wolpe was a deep-thinking composer whose music is like mobile sculptures, with musical ideas taking up distinct pitch-space and interacting across irregular sections of time. He had a wide and impactful influence among both classical and jazz composers of his time. I enjoyed performing these two Wolpe pieces on a festival of his music presented by the Wolpe Society in New York.

Interview in April Magazine


Thank you to April Magazine and Jill Marshall for interviewing me for
 this article about “embracing the world with violin and viola”.

I’m happy with how the article turned out but thought it would be nice to also share some “outtakes” from our (Oct 23, 2016) email interview:

— Do you prefer playing solo or as part of an ensemble?

I love to play both solo and with others. I would not want to do just one or the other. Violinists are lucky to have some great solo repertoire but it’s been very interesting to me to further explore what the instrument can do and encompass expressively on its own. The thing about playing solo is that you are the one who has to deliver and speak for yourself. You have to do it, no one else can do it for you. I like that situation of responsibility and having to focus on what you want to say and how you can do that. On the other hand, I enjoy the dialogue of playing with other musicians, the reacting to each other, the spur-of-the-moment interplay as well as drawn-out discussions about the work we are doing together. I like to sometimes step back and listen to others and savor the sense of being one strand of a bigger thing.

I feel it’s just as in life – it’s not even a metaphor, it’s the same thing. You need to be alone sometimes, to learn how to both support and critique yourself, how to express yourself and not rely on others. How to listen and think for yourself, not just accept what others around you are saying. On the other hand, you need to be feel part of the group and to understand your role in a larger context. How to have a discussion, how to embrace differences, how to cooperate in an agreed-upon structure. Interacting with a small group, a large crowd, or with one other person – it all teaches you a lot about yourself. It’s also just fun and enjoyable.

— Was the violin a natural choice for you ? Did (do) you play other instruments ?

My first violin was a hand-me-down from my older, Taiwanese-American cousins. So I didn’t actually request a violin but I did take to it very quickly. I always wanted to play my violin as soon as I was home from school. I also play a bit of piano and I like to sing (though my voice got kind of frayed from a bad bout of bronchitis a few years ago).

— Do you remember your very first performance in front of a discerning audience ?

The first performance I remember was at the Hoff-Barthelson music school when I was five or so. I was sick with the flu and my parents said I’d have to miss the concert. But I was so disappointed so they let me play, and I remember being onstage and feeling all hot and feverish but so glad to be playing. The first performance I gave for a discerning audience was probably my audition at Juilliard when I was eight years old. I played a Telemann concerto and the Valse Sentimentale of Tchaikovsky. The teachers were smiling at me when I finished, and I remember my future teacher Dorothy DeLay said to me, “Beautiful music, isn’t it?”

— You travel a great deal. Do you get down-time to explore the towns and cities where you perform ?

I love to travel – not so much the transportation part but visiting new places. Sometimes there isn’t much time to explore – there are rehearsals and concerts and then you have to leave right away afterward – so all you may get to see are the hotel and the hall, and maybe a few other places such as a school or a radio station studio, and the ride to/from the airport! But I love if extra time can be squeezed into a schedule. It’s amazing what you can see in one day. I love to walk around, to see important historical sites but also just to get the feel of the neighborhoods where people live and work. And to go to concerts in other places, to hear the local musicians.

— You’re an Australian-born American with Taiwanese/Austrian/English heritage. Have mixed heritage and vast travel experience brought anything specific to the way you approach creativity and accessibility when making/performing music?

Having a very mixed background has affected my perspective in many fundamental ways, and certainly as an artist. I think it’s given me a basic belief that communication and connection are always possible between different cultures and peoples. It has given me a continual interest in trying to understand where others are coming from and what are the particulars of that culture that they have in themselves. And I think that attitude has carried over into what I do as an interpreter/performer of music: with each piece, I endeavor, as an actor does, to understand the psyche of the composer, wherever he/she may come from and whatever musical language they are using.

Western classical music came from Europe – much of it from Vienna where my grandfather was from – and then spread as an art form to America and other countries of the world. We tend to think of European giants like Mozart and Beethoven as defining “classical music” but classical music has, in the best American spirit of inclusion, now come to involve artistic voices from all over the globe, from every country and ethnicity. I really like to program music by composers from various countries and discuss how their heritage or their world outlook has affected their music – sometimes that’s in an overtly folkloric way, sometimes it’s more subtle or abstract.

Many of us experiment with and partake of different cultures, and wonderful hybrids happen, but I think there will always be a tension between this hybridization and the preservation of cultural identities. That’s causing conflicts but it’s also a huge opportunity to adopt an outlook of respect and try to understand each other, to value those differences and specifics that make each group part of a strong whole. Artists are often in the vanguard of that kind of understanding and exchange, because we essentially deal with personal and universal experience, and communicating that with others.

— When you’re not working through a calendar of events, what kinds of things do you enjoy doing?

I love to take walks and do yoga. I really enjoy an interesting conversation with a friend over a meal or a cup of tea. I love to go to concerts. I have a passion for all art forms. Looking at visual art or a dance piece and understanding what those artists are doing is a great pleasure to me. I can’t draw but I’m very verbal (I started reading very early as a child) and I’m always reading something. Novels, stories, and I am drawn to all kinds of essays and articles online. I like to look around for contemporary poetry that appeals to me. I enjoy cuddling my cat Oski.

Festival Integrales at Teatro Colón

I just returned from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I played a concert on the CETC’s Festival Integrales at the Teatro Colón. Each concert on the festival is an immersion in a composer’s, or group of composers’, works. My recital featured violin music by American composers of the last half-century: Stefan Wolpe’s “Piece in Two Parts”, Elliott Carter’s “Four Lauds”, Mario Davidovsky’s “Synchronisms No. 9 for violin and electronic sounds” and Roger Sessions’ “Sonata for Violin”.  It was an honor to play at the Teatro and to bring the music of these American artists to the audience there. Some of the pieces were probably Argentine premieres. Thank you to my very warm hosts and wonderful, eager, and responsive listeners.

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Desenne concerto with the Alabama Symphony

I was thrilled to perform as soloist with the Alabama Symphony and conductor Carlos Izcaray at the Alys Stephens Center earlier this month in Paul Desenne’s imaginative violin concerto “The Two Seasons of the Caribbean Tropics”. I was asked on three weeks notice to learn the piece and come perform it on a concert of Desenne works. The concerto is in six movements, three for the rainy season and three for the dry season, replete with sounds of crickets and frogs, rain on tin roofs and windshield wipers, mudslides, Vivaldi references and vivacious Latin rhythms. Paul, who is French and American and grew up in Venezuela, is composer-in-residence with the Alabama Symphony this season. The residency is sponsored by the great organization NewMusic USA – read about it here I had a joyful time playing this piece and working with superb musicians and colleagues. Review of the concert here

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Desenne rehearsal

 

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American Composers Forum/Liquid Music interview

I’m tremendously excited to perform on the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series on November 14. In anticipation of it, I was recently interviewed by the Minneapolis-based American Composers Forum. Chris Campbell asked some terrific questions – check out the interview HERE ! On this program, I play six works by Ileana Perez-Velasquez, Richard Barrett, Nina C. Young, Kaija Saariaho and Dai Fujikura, on violin, viola, and a detuned violin (borrowed for the day from the SPCO).

Look and Listen Festival

I had a great time playing at the Look and Listen Festival at the Whitebox Art Center. I played Shulamit Ran’s Inscriptions, Iannis Xenakis’ Mikka S, Kaija Saariaho’s Nocturne, and, with pianist Cory Smythe, Franco Donatoni’s wonderful Ciglio III. The program also featured Tyshawn Sorey, Jason Treuting, and Jeffrey Zeigler. It was broadcast on WQXR and hosted by Terrance McKnight.

You can listen to it all here.

about new Melting the Darkness


A few people have asked me about my process and intentions with the pieces on my album “Melting the Darkness” (available from the Store page, release by Urlicht on Nov. 11). So I thought I’d take a quick moment to write some more about these things.

Unlike most of my albums, which were each recorded in one chunk of a couple consecutive days, this was recorded over three years. That’s because a couple of the pieces were being written and because I was seeking opportunities to perform the pieces before recording. Robert Rowe, like my father Robert, has a daughter named Miranda, and he titled his piece after a line from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, Act V scene i: “Melting the darkness”.  I decided to use it as the title of the album because the phrase “melting the darkness” seemed to draw a thread among the works, of light and human warmth asserting itself.

The pieces on the album were originally going to be two projects, one microtonal and one electroacoustic, but I decided to put these seven pieces together since I felt the various strands of exploration bring it together effectively. The emotional heart of the album is Georg Friedrich Haas’ “de terrae fine”, an almost 20-minute, highly microtonal work of great emotional intensity and sustained quiet tension which builds to a wild, furious release. Oscar Bianchi’s sparkling “Semplice” provides a scherzando, spritely contrast after this, with microtones coming into play only in the middle section. Chris Burns’ piece is part of an ongoing adventure – he wrote it in response to our collaboration on Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopia futura” for violin and electronics, a piece we both love and have performed around the country a number of times.

In the Burns and the three pieces preceding it, the violin sound was mic-ed up close and the sound was left much as is, so that the details of the physical action and the intimate quiet sounds – the friction noise of the bow, the creaking of the fingerboard under my fingers in the Xenakis – are intact and clearly audible. The Xenakis is the only piece here by a deceased composer. I began the album with it because I love it, it’s short and strong, and because its sliding double-stops that buzz with microtonal beating (as in Scelsi’s music) anticipate the microtonal experiments of today.

The three electroacoustic pieces were sound-mixed by the composers themselves. Ileana Perez-Velasquez’s is an older work of hers, which I was asked to play on a concert some years ago and enthusiastically included in my performing repertoire. There is some reverb on the recording but the violin sound is much as in live acoustic performance and is recognizably my own. I hear the work as a swirling jungle of animal, insect and water sounds, with the violin singing freely and rather folk-like.

In contrast to this evocation of howling emotion and the natural world, the Sigman and Rowe pieces inhabit a machine-made environment. The two pieces were obviously processed in the studio and the sound world is, at times, quite synthesized. I was intrigued to contribute my violin playing to such experiments – and to master the purposely uncoordinated extended-technique challenges of the Sigman – to see what the composers would create using my sound-making on an old wooden instrument as a component of their imaginings. This is the opposite of playing Ralph Shapey’s music for instance: Shapey, as a violinist, was focused on expanding the possibilities of traditional violin playing and the music demands the traditional qualities of warm cantabile tone, refined intonation, defined rhythmic articulation from the bow, and so on. I enjoy working between these poles of interest in the use of the instrument and combining it with other sounds.

Regarding recordings: I love to perform, with all the glories and fun of personal interaction, ephemeral experience and risks and goof-ups that it entails. In recording, I always am aware and playing for the audience that’s going to hear it, like a time-phasing where they are not present yet but they will be. During the process of recording, I enjoy the focus on the sound itself and the chance to explore many ways of playing a passage or a piece. Of course most recordings are edited these days. I enjoy the sculpting of an interpretation from various possibilities I’ve recorded in the studio. Because I’ve recorded a lot, there are people who think I’m about the modern cliché of perfection, but my editing process is not fussy (you’re welcome to my edit charts and raw takes if you ask me nicely for them). I became a musician for the music, not for some kind of technical perfection. Nonetheless, I do work hard on my craft and there are big sections in my recordings (Shapey Sonata No. 1 as one example) that are one take. I don’t like to brag but it’s frustrating when people assume you edited it all so you must not be able to play like that  🙂

Hope you’ll enjoy checking out the music on the new album. Wishing everyone a wonderful season!

Interview with MusicaClasicaBA

I took a great trip this August to Buenos Aires with my organization Nunc to perform a couple concerts of Mario Davidovsky’s music at the Teatro Colón. You can see news from that adventure at Nunc’s website: http://nuncmusic.org/news/

The concerts had a wonderfully warm response and as follow-up, I did an interview with MusicaClasicaBA. English version posted below:

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Last August 15th we went to the CETC (Experimentation Center of Teatro Colón) in regard of a two concert series and a conference dedicated to the music of Argentinian composer Mario Davidovsky, celebrating his 80th birthday.

It was a night of great discoveries. The first one was in fact, Mario Davidovsky’s music, and the other one the amazing performance of Nunc Ensamble.
Nunc (“now” in Latin) was founded in 2007 by her director the violinist Miranda Cuckson. Since they opening concert in New York, Nunc has presented several programs each season and premiered many pieces of distinguished composers.
We present you the interview, in exclusive for MusicaClasicaBA, to Miranda Cuckson, where she tell us about her double function as an interpreter and director of Nunc Ensemble and some aspects of contemporary music.

After the concert in the CETC we were really amazed with your interpretation, to the point of feeling contemporary music in a whole different way. How was the idea of creating Nunc ensemble?

-I wanted to create an ensemble with a flexible list of performers so that the projects could possibly include anyone. I have worked with numerous performers and composers and I wanted a way to do projects also in a way that is broadly community-minded. I recently saw an interview with Christian McBride, the jazz bassist, in which he said that all the really great jazz groups at a given time are actually one big jazz band because the best players just go around and play with each other in different configurations. And the new-music scene is similar like that. It has expanded but it is still basically one network of people. There are musicians I work with a lot but generally as an organization and presenter, I prefer to draw on a pool of people and talents.

About interpretation, I see it as a combination of preparation and spontaneity – you study the score and think about it, and may work toward accuracy and execution in rehearsal but in both practice and performance you release the emotional flow of the piece so that the audience responds to the spontaneous emotional expression and not just to virtuosity or impressive coordination. Especially in challenging music, it’s a balance of keeping a cool head but having the heat of emotion flow into the piece. I find it important to sense the piece’s passing in time, a progression or structure, or a sequence of moods or a subtly changing transformation. And I think interpretation means a sensitivity to the inner flux of music, beyond what is written on the page – how do you play so you relate notes to each other, how does the line push or pull, move forward or hold back or stay still, how is the texture of a piece changing, with certain lines coming to the front or melting into the group. These things make a performance constantly interesting and alive with meaning and changing relations. Like in life when you are talking with a person in front of you and you can see their facial expression and hear the changes in the sound of their voice.

How is the repercussion or aceptación of New York public regarding the music that the ensamble specializes?

– New York, as a cultural capital, has a certain adventurous audience that truly comes to hear the new and the modern. It is one of the best places in the world for getting involved in new music because there is really a substantial interest, a network of support and a lot of events going on. In general, there has recently been a surge of interest in new music so the larger institutions have been embracing that and involving more new works and performers. But there are always people and organizations that see classical music as only the older heritage of compositions and that is all they really want to listen to. I love that music too and I think it is wonderful to want to keep enjoying those pieces, but there are people who will find that they also can enjoy new musical experiences if they just try it (and if we communicate it well). The music of “now” is often steps ahead of the “comfort zone” of some listeners- we have to keep doing it so the art form will continue to develop and express the present time.

What aspects of a piece makes you interested to incorporate into your solo or ensemble repertoire?

– I look for pieces that convey something very expressive, whether that is an atmosphere, emotions, a kind of energy, or a sound-world. As a player, I like challenges and pieces that need to be figured out and worked on, but I am glad to play something that is simple and seems “easy” to play if it communicates something very strongly. I am interested both in new pieces that relate to the tradition and pieces that experiment with new things, technically or in the language or form.

How was the experience of working with the composer Mario Davidovsky?

– Mario is an amazing musician. He is so imaginative and lively and he listens in a very absorbed, passionate way, like he is playing the music. He points out very important things about the balance of voices, the timing of an effect, the character of a gesture. As with electronics, the dynamics and timbres are a crucial part of his instrumental music and he shows how vividly expressive these make the music if you really do them and with conviction. The music is crafted incredibly well and is full of his personality and background and a very deep, earthy spirituality. Working with him in person, you relate the music to the person so directly, it is very moving and inspiring.

Is this you first visit to Argentina?
– Yes, this was my first visit to Argentina. It was fantastic!

Do you have invitations to come back in the future?
– Yes, the CETC director, Miguel Galperin, and I are going to talk about our next project together. So I hope to be back soon! It will be wonderful to play for listeners in Buenos Aires again.

What projects are expecting you in the United States?
– I am playing some solo recitals this year, including new violin works from my newest CD “Melting the Darkness” (to be released in November) and by some older American composers like Roger Sessions and Donald Martino. I continue to perform and collaborate with composers on new works- a few composers are writing for me right now!

Liner notes for Melting the Darkness CD

“Melting the Darkness”

Notes by MC (Nov. 6, 2013)

This album ventures into regions of the art of violin-playing the significance of which is now becoming clear. Devoted entirely to microtonal compositions for violin and pieces for violin with electronics, this CD explores works of seven composers who have been challenged by these areas of discovery to create intriguingly fresh and surprising sound worlds.

Like opera singing and ballet dancing, the violin-playing tradition as situated within the Western classical heritage is a tremendously rich vein of history and achievement. It has involved a collective cultivation of craft and technique, an establishing of certain models of sound, and particular styles of virtuosity and performance that have been passed down through a couple centuries. I grew up, like many burgeoning violinists, steeped in this tradition, attending concerts by Nathan Milstein and Isaac Stern, studying with Dorothy DeLay and Robert Mann, listening to recordings by Kreisler, Elman, Oistrakh, Hubermann and more. These influences remain central to my musical identity on some level, as does the largely tonal, Baroque-to-Romantic repertoire that this violin-playing tradition addresses. I also cherish my many formative experiences playing chamber music, often with piano or other string players.

Since turning much attention in recent years to the music being written in my own time, I have found it fascinating to explore certain areas of experimentation that have taken my instrument beyond the familiar glories of its heritage. One of these is the use of microtonality- a system of intervals involving distances smaller than the half-step (the keys on a piano). I have been intrigued by both the physical aspects of working with such intervals, and the idiosyncratic ways in which composers use such intervals for their own expressive aims. Another interest has been noise- that is, non-pitched sounds, often percussive or abrasive, produced by unusual techniques on the instrument. A third area I’ve been eager to explore has been music involving electronics. Since electronic music’s beginnings, using spliced reel-to-reel tapes decades ago, the possibilities of the technology have exploded so that there are numerous ways in which to create or generate sounds and to interact, as a live performer, with them. This has led to a palette of sound possibilities and a degree of agility of response often not offered by traditional instruments.

Except for Iannis Xenakis, who died in 2001, the composers on this album are all artists with whom I’ve had wonderful collaborative friendships. We have worked together and they heard me perform these pieces live. The works by Burns, Sigman and Rowe were composed for me, and I was involved at certain stages of the pieces’ progress. While most of the works are essentially “dark”, having an overall atmosphere of anxiety, danger or sadness, each piece also has elements that affirm a sense of warmth, hope or clarity. The pieces on the CD are ordered in a way that I feel illuminates the interplay between dark and light in these pieces, and also the different ways in which the composers used the resources of microtonality, noise and electronics.

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), a Greek/French citizen, was not only a musician, but an engineer, architect, mathematician and author of major theoretical works on music. In his compositions, he incorporated ideas stemming from his scientific interests, pioneering electronic music, and applying stochastic and aleatoric processes, and set and game theory. While his works derive from highly cerebral concepts and treat sounds as objects put through experimental processes, the results are often surprisingly visceral and emotional. Tension and excitement build up as layers accumulate and clash, and the combination of control and disorder in the rhythm creates a wild sense of motion. Xenakis wrote “Mikka S” in 1976 following his first solo violin work, “Mikka” of 1971. Both pieces are based mainly on the glissando, a sliding pitch effect. Whereas “Mikka” consists of a single line, “Mikka S” ups the ante with two contrapuntal lines that move independently. At times, this requires extreme physical flexibility, as the violinist’s fingers must converge and cross directions, or stretch across strings. The two lines are in almost constant motion and frequently create a buzzing microtonal friction, but they coincide now and then on momentarily consonant intervals. Toward the end of the piece, the energy of the constant sliding erupts into boisterous bowed attacks and jagged, short glissandos.

Oscar Bianchi’s Semplice is a sparkling, virtuosic work in which fleet lightness subtly shades into something more anxious and spiky. Written in a relatively conventional violinistic style, with spiccato flourishes and flights to the upper registers, the piece’s short phrases take on a somewhat more aggressive cast in its middle section, in which microtonal intervals pervade the music and the scratchy noise of ponticello adds an edge of prickliness. Bianchi’s note:

Partly as reaction towards an overwhelming practice in our times of associating all sorts of notions of complexity with musical representation, I gave to this solo violin work the title of Semplice. This is the Italian word for “simple” or “natural”. Despite being based, as one hears rather quickly, on clearly non-simple musical material, this work aims towards an ideal of an organically simple way of playing. In a similar fashion, Gaudi found in nature an expression of simplicity made by highly articulated forms and complex phenomena. I wished to propose in Semplice a music in which gestures are constituted of subtle quarter-tonal inflections as well as minute, timbral definitions, compressed into quick, almost verbal (vocal) brilliance.

Georg Friedrich Haas has probingly explored the sonic, harmonic, and expressive possibilities of microtonality. His work uses minute intervals like eighth-, sixth-, and quarter-tones, and pitch relationships from the overtone series, causing intense beating of frequencies and “difference tones” that buzz along. In addition to generating a radical focus on sound itself, Haas’ insistence on microtonality has created new wells of expressive meaning in these relatively unfamiliar sonic distances. Resonating with the malaise and despair of much twentieth-century art, his music finds nuances of despondency and pain, but also surprising beauty, in the uncomfortable spaces between tones. Haas has revealed that, while composing de terrae fine (2001) on a sabbatical in Ireland, he was mired in a severe depression. The title, meaning “from the end of the world”, evokes not just an apocalyptic vision but a devastating sense of isolation. The music’s single line of winding microtonal motions seems to trace the twinges in a person’s lonely, anguished train of thought. Long tones swell in heaving sighs. At times, the overwhelming feeling of desperation gives way to a sickly nostalgia, with startlingly sweet double-stops and sliding arpeggios. About halfway through the work, the mood turns to anger, as pounding chords burst out. Moving upward by microtonal increments, the chords build in accelerating waves to a violent frenzy of raging despair- followed by a collapse into exhaustion, as a few wisps disappear into silence.

Christopher Burns composed Come Ricordi Come Sogni Come Echi after we had been working together on Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura, an hour-long duo for violin and electronics. In Nono’s piece, the violin is a vulnerable, human protagonist amidst the ominous environment of recorded sounds. In Burns’ homage, this protagonist is taken out of the threatening context, and attention is focused on the intimate details of the violin sound, the grainy friction noise, and the warmth of the human voice, which, as in the Nono, joins in polyphony with the violin pitches. In the fourth and fifth movements, microtonal counterpoint creates a delicate tension. Burns writes:

I’ve been performing Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura since 2002. Nono’s composition is one of my most cherished musical experiences as a listener, and my continuing work with the electronics part has been profoundly influential on my development as a musician. Composed in 2011, Come Ricordi Come Sogni Come Echi is a series of six studies exploring a few of the most intriguing elements from the violin part of Nono’s work, and seeking points of connection between La Lontananza and my own compositional idiom. The title (which translates from the Italian as “like memories like dreams like echoes”) is a performance instruction in Nono’s score, and reflects the ways in which Nono’s materials and ideas resonate through my homage. The piece is dedicated to Miranda Cuckson, whose thoughtful collaboration, detailed musicianship, and inventive approach to the performance of the Nono inspired the creation of these etudes.

Alex Sigman’s VURTRUVURT for violin and live electronics was commissioned for this recording. In this piece, the violin is a live denizen of an urban sound world, adding its startling noises to a world of machines. The electronics part is triggered and adjusted by an additional live performer. The piece was recorded in studio, after which the composer added some further sound processing and also created the spatialized imagining found on the 5.1 surround disk. Sigman writes:

V is for Vehicle and Volume, not Violin. U is for Union. R is for Resonance, Recording, Reflection...and T is for Trigger. VURT refers to the 1993 cyberpunk science fiction novel by Jeff Noon. Set in a dystopian Manchester, the novel chronicles the (mis)adventures of a gang of Stash Riders, who travel between Manchester and a parallel universe called Vurt. The boundary between the universes remains permeable, as Vurt creatures and events materialize on Earth. The sound sources employed in VURTRUVURT include elements evocative of the decaying urban and industrial environments described by Noon, as well as songs by Manchester bands of the 1980s-90s that were influential upon the his writing. These sources were also central to generating the violin material. In performance, the electronics are projected through a pair of small sound exciters: one attached to the violin, the other to a resonating glass surface.  The violin thus becomes an electrified tension field, a physical point of actual/virtual intersection and cross-influence.

Ileana Perez-Velasquez’s work “un ser con unas alas enormes” is for violin and fixed media: the electronics were previously recorded onto a CD as one single track, with which the violinist performs in real time. The piece evokes a lush natural world with dangerous-sounding animal calls and insect noises in the electronics. Cuban motifs and a full-throated, heated lyricism characterize the violin part. Perez-Velasquez’s note:

“un ser con unas alas enormes”, which translates as “a being with enormous wings”, was inspired by the 17th Freeman Etude for violin by John Cage. Within the hectic gestures that are a major part of this etude are passages reminiscent of Cuban rhythms. An important idea for Cage is that human beings can be better themselves by overcoming their limitations. This piece translates that spirit; humans improve through the use of their imagination. The title is also related to the literary work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “un hombre muy viejo con unas alas muy grandes”. The tape part, as my departure of style, is fragmentary, and contains processed excerpts from the Freeman Etude. The piece also includes concepts of silence that are present in non-Western music. The use of silence as a conscious part of the piece yet again reflects back to Cage.

For Robert Rowe’s piece, Melting the Darkness, the violin part was written and recorded first; the composer then created the electronics as an accompaniment to the violin part, using processed snippets of the violin-playing, samples of percussion instruments such as the tabla, and other synthesized sounds. The violin propels the narrative of the piece, with a warm, largely conventional style of violin-playing.  Rowe writes:

Melting the Darkness was written for Miranda Cuckson and commissioned by the New Spectrum Foundation. The piece is built around contrasting styles of music and performance, ranging from gritty, rhythmic phrases to more lyrical and slowly shifting sonorities. These contrasts are amplified and elaborated by an electronic commentary consisting of fragmented and processed material from the violin performance as well as a number of secondary sources. The title comes from The Tempest (as it should when a piece is composed for Miranda): “…as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness…”

Cultured Cleveland review

A very thoughtful review by Frank Kuznik of my April 1 concert at Cleveland’s Transformer Station was apparently not archived on Cultured Cleveland‘s website, so I am posting the full text below. While I feel well-appreciated by this reviewer, I should say that, given the many styles of composition and musical expression these days, I think there is new music that can be, and has been, described as stylish or charming. But it’s true that some of the music I played here is not usually perceived or played that way. Another great review of the same concert is here on Cleveland Classical.

“Violinist Miranda Cuckson plays a lot like she looks – smart and stylish, with a beguiling charm. These are not terms one normally uses to describe modern music. Especially the kind that Cuckson takes on, wild excursions in sonic extremes and fierce technique. She described one piece that she played at the Transformer Station on April 1 as “practically impossible,” holding up a page black with notes to show the audience. What’s most impressive about Cuckson is the warmth and humanity she brings to the music. Highly abstract, it tends to sound cold even in the best hands. Cuckson refracts its hard beauty through a prism of color and emotion, bringing to life its primal appeal.

In an opening piece by Xenakis, she built an intense sound that crackled and buzzed and seemed to swoop around the room. An extended exercise in microtonality by George Freidrich Haas was like an inventory of new sounds and techniques, daunting at times but skillfully drawn. A final dazzling run gave Cuckson a chance to show some serious chops. Pierre Boulez sounded comparatively tame in this program, especially with Cuckson giving his Anthemes 1 an airy quality, rich in vibrant colors. An homage to a Luigi Nono work that Cuckson recorded with electronics wizard Christopher Burns built to a noise that sounded like the music itself was being torn apart. Cuckson added vocals in some of the quieter moments that gave the piece another dimension. And far from impossible, Brian Ferneyhough’s Intermedia alla ciaconna turned out to be a showcase for a variety of demanding techniques. Cuckson is not a flamboyant player – she is too deep into the music for that. But she gave a dazzling demonstration of why she’s become such an in-demand artist.

Speaking of which, Cuckson came to Cleveland from Munich, where she performed with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer. She’s on his latest CD, Mutations, another indication of her range and talent.”

thoughts on music at the new year

 I woke up this morning with these thoughts in my head so I wrote them down:

Here’s to
– music as a lifelong endeavor and part of personal growth
– the passion of music
– the flow of music in time
– the mathematics and science of music
– music’s ability to express anything
– the physicality of playing music
– the physicality of the dance in music
– the disembodied selflessness of feeling in the moment that you are only in service of the music, of wanting that phrase or sound to express what it wants to express, of making the music “happy”
– the communality and liveliness of a concert and putting on a show
– the ephemerality and unpredictability of the live moment in music
– the many hours of preparation and work before a performance
– the sculpting of sound and music in the recording studio
– the complexity of recording and making recordings, the spontaneous and the mulled over, the purity of focus and the act of documenting people, the making of a thing like a book or film or painting
– beautiful tones
– breathing and furniture creaking
– listening to lots of music
– sometimes not listening to music
– talking and writing about music
– not talking and writing about music
– thinking about anything
– the ambience of a casual concert
– the ambience of a formal concert
– meeting with and talking with people at and after concerts
– being alone with your thoughts after playing or hearing a concert
– entertaining while enjoying and responding to an audience’s responses, facial expressions, applause
– becoming unaware of anything at all but your innermost, nonverbal feelings while playing, the deepest emotions tapped into by the music
– discovering unfamiliar music
– playing pieces you know many times
– wanting to give people a terrific and fun experience for those couple of hours
– an easy phrase or flourish
– sharing music as a communally cathartic, non-escapist confronting of serious reality
– stretching your being by pushing your art forward while feeling the emotional ties to the past
– traveling a lot and being thankful for the ability to travel, which makes it possible to see different places, and mainly, to be with people
– enjoying the familiarity of home and treading the well-worn sidewalks of one of the world’s great cities
– recognizing life’s many facets and paradoxes
– when dealing with the murk of misunderstanding, working with others to reach the happiness of clarity, strength and integrity
– love of musicians

[This was originally a Facebook post in 2014 but it somehow disappeared. Thanks to John Darnielle, great musician and writer, who reposted it back then on his Tumblr.]

Ralph Shapey, Beethoven, and Dotted Rhythms

Ralph Shapey, Beethoven, and Dotted Rhythms: a Violinist’s Point of View

by Miranda Cuckson 

            For the violinist, Ralph Shapey’s compositional output offers an abundance of challenges and strikingly expressive music. Shapey wrote for the violin throughout his life, producing a large catalogue of works for the instrument. These include eight solo pieces, most of them multi-movement; seven pieces for violin and piano; six works for violin with orchestra or ensemble, including the Invocation-Concerto (1959) and a concerto entitled The Legends (1999); and duos with viola, cello, and voice. He also wrote numerous chamber works involving the violin, including ten string quartets, several trios, and many ensemble pieces.

When I planned my first album of Shapey’s violin music,1 I was just beginning to explore his work. I chose to record five pieces spanning his compositional career: Etchings for solo violin (1945), Five for violin and piano (1960), Partita for solo violin (1965), Mann Soli for solo violin (1985), and Millenium Designs for violin and piano (2000). In working on these pieces, I found that getting to know his music from a violinist’s standpoint is extremely interesting. In addition to the expressive satisfaction the pieces afford, they reveal a great deal about his compositional preoccupations and evolution, while also evincing his substantial background as a violinist.

During the early part of his musical life, Shapey was very active as a performing violinist. He began to play the instrument at age seven, and soon displayed much natural ability. In his teens, he studied with Emmanuel Zetlin, a former assistant to the pedagogue Carl Flesch. In the  summer of 1945, he took lessons with Louis Persinger, the teacher of Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern. Shapey learned much of the standard solo repertoire, including such pieces as the Beethoven and Sibelius concertos, the Bach Partitas and Sonatas, and the Wieniawski etudes. He went on to freelance as a performer, working with artists including Adolf Busch and the Juilliard Quartet. Violinist Robert Mann was a close friend of Shapey, and describes him as “a decent performer with a fluent command of the instrument.”[i] In the early 1950s, Shapey stopped playing, deciding that his composing and conducting projects left him too little time to practice. He taught violin for a time, in addition to composition and theory, at the Third Street Settlement School in New York.

In writing his own violin music, Shapey remained devoted to the instrument’s traditional qualities, while audaciously pushing the limits of conventional violin-playing technique. Unlike composers such as George Crumb, Luigi Nono, Krysztof Penderecki, and Luciano Berio, who investigated “extended” techniques involving non-pitched noise, percussive strokes, and microtonality, Shapey innovated by expanding upon the fundamental attributes of traditional violin playing – in particular, the capacity for lyrical melody, and for polyphonic, chordal textures. His pieces demand the familiar violinistic essentials – resonant tone, pure intonation, clear articulation – but feature linear shapes and chords requiring extraordinarily large left-hand stretches, unorthodox fingerings, quick leaps around the fingerboard, and adept string changes in both staccato and legato contexts. Shapey’s approach to writing for the violin recalls Leonard Meyer’s well-known description of him as a “radical traditionalist.” Shapey emulated the structures and motivic ideas of Beethoven, Brahms, and Haydn, while breaking away from tradition in his gestural and harmonic language. Similarly, he drew upon the techniques of traditional violin-playing, opening up new expressive possibilities of the player to extremes.

Shapey’s violin works are especially fascinating because of this intersection of his musical and communicative aims with his physical approach to the instrument. Though the technical puzzles he poses for the player are absorbing in themselves, those challenges are intrinsic to his expressive intentions. The huge intervals, leaps, and chords all contribute to what is probably the most pervasive characteristic of his music: its quality of expansiveness. Shapey wrote music with big dimensions – hefty, contrasting sections, dramatically wide-ranging melodies, and ruggedly distinct contours. At the same time, he exploited the physical characteristics of violin technique, with wide left-hand distances to be covered, and sometimes complex string crossings, in order to convey an expansive sense of space and time.

In all of the five works that I recorded, I observed a particular musical kernel that intriguingly relates to many of Shapey’s preoccupations, both expressive and technical: the dotted rhythm. This simple motive is featured prominently in all of these pieces, and indeed in much of Shapey’s oeuvre, with such frequency that it seems to have been something of an obsession for him. This makes sense when one notes that Shapey idolized Beethoven, and spoke often of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Opus 133. The Grosse Fuge was performed by the Juilliard String Quartet at Shapey’s memorial service.[ii]

The Grosse Fuge, of course, presents remarkable ongoing strings of insistent, dotted rhythms. As Robert Carl relates, Shapey liked to tell people that he had spent a year studying Beethoven’s music, and that of Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, in order to determine for himself the source of the strength of their compositions. He decided that this lies in the distinctiveness of their musical material, the almost tangible quality of their motives. Inspired by their example, Shapey described such concrete, compact musical ideas as “graven images,”[iii] or as musical “objects in space.”[iv]

In the Grosse Fuge, Beethoven used the dotted figure as a self-contained musical “object,” a building block that is the defining rhythmic element of the music, one with which he constructed whole passages and sections of the piece. The dotted rhythm possesses inherent musical traits that make it a vivid and intriguing compositional element with which to work. Its strongly articulated main beat makes it a firmly grounded pulse (whether or not the next beat is articulated or not), and its rhythmic components (long note plus short note) form an immediately recognizable shape. In contrast to the more horizontal directionality and constant motion of equal-valued notes, the dotted rhythm has a vertically weighted feel, and, in moderate to fast tempos, a natural jauntiness that denotes energy and liveliness. The rhythmic position of its shorter note can, however, affect the character of the motive in a variety of ways, depending on how it is played. It can rebound from the impetus of the main note, and pull briskly towards the next beat, propelling the motive forward, or creating momentum in a passage of continuous dotted rhythms. If purposefully delayed, it gives the figure a resistant and stubborn, or majestic and massive, character. If combined with intervallic leaps, the dotted rhythm possesses an extra measure of drama, conveying the sense of distances being crossed in a spurt of energy. Such leaps are a striking characteristic of the Grosse Fuge (see Fig. 1, mm. 30-31, or mm. 38-42), again suggesting that Shapey took inspiration from Beethoven’s work and seized upon its elements for his own creative purposes

The dotted rhythm is prominent in the three faster movements of Shapey’s Etchings, an early solo work dedicated to Louis Persinger. The five short movements are variations of contrasting character. The piece is neoclassical in style, with frequently changing meters, and a spare monophonic texture that is sometimes enriched by double-stops. In this context, the dotted rhythm takes on an elegant, Classical, character. The “object” is tidily contained within the constraints of the meter’s pulse and its subdivisions. The rhythm appears frequently in the lively first movement, Moderato. It is first introduced in measure 3, incorporating a descending half-step motive introduced in mm. 1-2 (Fig. 2). 

Shapey’s predilection for large leaps is already evident in the first bar’s wide-ranging intervals, the major seventh, D-C#, the major ninth, B-A, and the minor fourteenth, A-G. The expansive gestures of m.1 are restated in m. 3 in diminution, with the quick dotted rhythms enhancing the sense of acrobatic nimbleness.

The third movement, titled Moderato vigoroso marciata, is primarily in 4/4. It is composed entirely of homophonic double-stops. Its many dotted rhythms are self-evidently march-like. The fifth movement, Allegro très rhythmic, is faster, and features syncopations and more irregular rhythmic patterns (Fig. 3).

The rhythmic agitation of this movement causes the dotted rhythms to be more insistent in their forward motion. Their tendency to press onward to the next beat culminates in the triple stops in mm. 12-13 (Fig. 4). The last sixteenth note of m. 13 jumps into silence on the first downbeat of m. 14, toying with the expectations of the listener, as a syncopated beat arrives in place of the dotted rhythms of the previous measure.

Overall, Etchings shows signs of Shapey’s interests in wide-ranging lines and chordal playing. However, aside from some large leaps, it does not pose the degree of technical challenge that he later explored. A hint of more complex technical problems occurs in m. 29 of the fourth movement, Andante cantabile, where a reversed dotted rhythm moves, legato, from a G to an F-A double-stopped tenth, a somewhat awkward move for the left hand to negotiate (Fig. 5). Perhaps Shapey reversed the rhythm to facilitate the movement of the hand. In any case, given the languid, lyrical mood of the passage, it seems musically appropriate to stretch the end of the beat, and ease into the double-stop. The high A emerges delicately and surprisingly as the G moves to the F underneath.

In Five, Shapey explored a rhythmic sense in which precise, firmly defined rhythmic ideas  exist within a meter-less context, engendering a tension between precision and freedom. In this five-movement piece, Shapey worked with the dotted rhythm, extracting its essential gesture, and transforming it into various guises. This technique is somewhat reminiscent of Beethoven’s handling of the dotted-rhythm motive in the Grosse Fuge. Beethoven turns the motive into related forms. He employs ternary groupings of quarter notes and eighth notes (Fig. 6), and sixteenth note patterns in which the last of four sixteenths is the same pitch as the first of the subsequent group, suggesting a dotted rhythm (Fig. 7).

 

Rather than focus on the whole motive, Shapey concentrated on the upbeat gesture inherent in the dotted rhythm. In the opening Recitative movement of Five, the violin begins with a straightforward, broad dotted rhythm: a dotted quarter note plus an eighth note, in a tempo of quarter note=46. Shapey then presents several brief musical ideas in succession: a quick triplet, a single grace note, then an actual dotted rhythm. These all function as rapid upbeat gestures, each giving the effect of a dotted rhythm’s short note, leading into another event (Fig. 8).

Wide intervals abound: the opening G drops a major ninth to F, and the quick Eb–Bb dotted rhythm leads to a high B, requiring a fast left-hand shift. This pitch is a third higher than the opening G, producing a dramatic line of high peaks. A descent to the violin’s lower register brings about another series of “upbeat” gestures: a double-dotted rhythm, a triplet, and a two-note grace-note figure. These gestures lead to an A harmonic, the highest pitch so far.

Shapey employs these triplet and grace-note upbeat figures throughout the movement. Because of the absence of both meter and a regular pulse, the dotted rhythm gesture generates  points of pronounced emphasis, and motion toward those points. The rhythm serves to create “objects” which exist in a free expanse of time. When strung together in a quick series, the gestures suggest both a repeated thrust toward a goal, and a certain awkwardness or struggle, comparable to climbing over a pile of rocks in order to reach a higher level.

In evoking the dotted rhythm idea, Shapey often clarified his intention by writing symbols indicating “upbeat” and “downbeat,” a notation that he used in line 9 of Five (Fig. 9).

The sense of spaciousness created by this passage is especially dramatic, as the violin roams in an extended solo, untethered to the piano part. Shapey’s “downbeats” create an unsettling, jagged character. Shapey also uses the dotted rhythm as a conventional, emphatic closing gesture, as in line 4 (which is repeated at the end of the movement ) (Fig. 8).

Dotted rhythms do not play much of a role in the rest of Five. However, the last movement contains one other transformation of this rhythm that can be seen in Shapey’s other works: chords. Chordal playing on stringed instruments usually necessitates that the notes be somewhat arpeggiated, because the bow must traverse the curve of the bridge as it contacts the strings. This causes a grace-note-like effect that can also be interpreted as a kind of dotted rhythm, depending on how the “upbeat” notes are articulated or lengthened. Shapey maximized this effect by writing chords involving not only all four strings, but also large intervals, and left-hand positions requiring unusual extensions and knotty fingerings. Consequently, there is an added measure of time and effort involved in crossing from one side of a chord to the other. He also often included dissonant, clashing intervals within the chord, creating timbral tension. For example, the first violin chord of the fifth movement is Ab-A-Bb-E. This requires a moderate stretch from Ab to A, plus a movement of the first finger from the Ab on the G string over to the Bb on the A string, necessitating an arpeggiation. The minor second, A-Bb, and the tritone, Bb-E, inject jolts of dissonance, which lead into the sound of the bright, sustained open E string  (Fig. 10)

In the next “bar” (Shapey used dotted bar lines here), B-Db-F is an especially awkward chord, which I choose to play by shifting from a double-stop in second position (B-Db) to one in first position (Db-F). This splitting of the chord into two components creates an aural result similar to that produced by the broken chords around it, and is in keeping with the heavy, laborious character of the passage.

The various dotted rhythm gestures seen in Five are plentiful in Shapey’s Partita, written five years later. Like Five, this three-movement solo work features a great deal of chordal writing, involving complex, tangled fingerings and wide intervals. The intervals are often dissonant, so it is important to use sweeping arm movements to draw rich sound from the strings, so that the pitches resonate and can be heard clearly. The frequent splitting or arpeggiating of the piece’s numerous chords contributes to the craggy robustness of the music.

In addition to chords, Shapey makes much use in the Partita of quick upbeat triplets, and also employs his upbeat and downbeat symbols. As in Five, these symbols serve a meaningful purpose, for the rhythmic emphasis can be ambiguous unless elucidated by the player. There are no bar lines in the first two movements, so the rhythmic values and patterns are irregular and the main emphases come at unpredictable moments.

In the first movement, a theme and five variations, melodic and rhythmic units recur in modified forms, or are rearranged in different orders. In the opening sections, the ideas are grouped into fragments. The music progresses in compact, declamatory bursts.  Long, sonorous tones are often preceded by sixteenth notes, on which Shapey placed upbeat symbols. The upbeats are usually double-stopped or chordal, requiring  firm bow articulation (Fig. 11).

The beginning of the scherzando third variation presents a more continuous line, which jumps delicately across wide intervals. In this variation, the dotted rhythm is one of several small rhythmic cells that are strung together horizontally, including triplets, parts of triplets, and single eighth notes. As the various motives alternate, there is little sense of any beat or pulse, and the dotted rhythm becomes less distinct as a recognizable “object,” its components now forming part of a disjointed rhythmic line (Fig. 12). 

The fourth variation is labeled “march-like.” Its dotted rhythms move twice as fast as those in the preceding sections (FigEx. 13). Mostly double-stopped, these rhythms require clean attacks to project their crispness. The variation also includes weighty four-note chords, involving awkward left-hand fingerings. The effort entailed in breaking the chords clearly is again an important factor in conveying the expressiveness of the music.  

The third movement of the Partita consists of a Grosse Fuge-like series of dotted rhythms. In this case, the rhythms are actually double-dotted, a characteristic which imparts an especially jaunty springiness to the music. The dotted-rhythm “objects” are grouped into short phrases that usually open with a quarter note or eighth note sforzando upbeat. These sforzando attacks (marked with an upbeat symbol at their first few appearances) are basically an exaggeration and elongation of the upbeat idea. Their weighty gravitational pull counterbalances the airborne lightness and clipped quality of the thirty-second note in the double-dotted rhythms (Fig. 14).

In the movement’s middle section, beginning in m. 51, Shapey turned the double-dotted rhythm into a witty and technically tricky figure. He transformed the upbeat thirty-second note into a left-hand pizzicato, which leads in most instances to a bowed double-stop.  The pizzicati are played on open strings, facilitating their execution and requiring clean and quick moves from pizzicato to arco (Fig. 15).

            Mann Soli is composed of a theme and five variations, the theme returning at the end of the piece. The dotted rhythm is a central element of the material. The maestoso theme is written across two staves, the lower staff with the primary rhythm and pitches, while four-stringed grace-note chords are placed on the upper staff. (Fig. 16). The lower staff’s “melody” is in double-stopped fourths or fifths, and moves at a steady pace. Grouped into a few short phrases, it features weighty, double-dotted rhythms in the first measure and mm. 3-4. This powerful, declamatory line serves as a rhythmic foundation for the grace-note chords attached to it. Massive and very intense, with their wide intervallic range, strikingly dissonant intervals, and bright topmost notes on the E string, these chords must be split into two double-stops, essentially forming two-note grace-note figures. They repeatedly deliver huge upbeat motions that land forcefully on the subsequent beats of the theme. When combined with the main line’s own dotted rhythms, they produce a series of three upbeat articulations, fired off in a row with jarring intensity.

The first variation incorporates the dotted rhythm simply, with a single dotted figure opening each phrase. In the second variation, Shapey again employs the double-dotted rhythm, as he turns the theme into a primarily monophonic line that jumps around across an enormous pitch range (Fig. 17). The violin writing includes many vaulting left-hand leaps. Elaborate four-note chords punctuate many of the variation’s longer sustained notes. These chords directly recall the grace-note chords in the main theme, both in their intervallic make-up, and in the rhythmic effect of their arpeggiation. Shapey ties the second-highest pitch in each chord into the following held note, and writes, “break bottom to top & back to hold note,” along with a symbol that combines two arrows, one pointing upward, the other curving back downward. This kind of bi-directional arpeggiation is an established technique among string players, and is sometimes used in polyphonic works, such as the solo sonatas of Bach, in order to bring out specific inner lines. Shapey’s employment of the device serves that purpose, while replicating the swooping motion of the opening theme’s grace-note chords, which break upward in two double-stops, then veer back downward to arrive on the main notes.

In variation 3, dotted rhythms appear as part of a legato melodic line that moves by large intervals between the violin’s middle and high registers (Fig. 18). Quiet and spare, the variation conveys a remarkable sense of vast expanses of space and time. While the melody is essentially slow-moving, the dotted rhythms gently nudge it forward, with quick motions toward the subsequent beats. The large leaps in the dotted rhythm figures suggest a tightrope walker, making exquisitely graceful leaps above an open expanse.

The fourth variation is based entirely on dotted rhythms, bunched in brief phrases that halt on double- or triple-stopped chords, played on strong beats. In the fifth variation, the dotted rhythm is subsumed into a contrapuntal, polyrhythmic texture in which two cantabile melodies, written on separate staves, are played simultaneously. The two lines are closely entwined, crossing each other registrally, and interlacing disparate rhythms. The dotted rhythm is combined with large leaps, forming graceful, Romantic gestures, and leading the long, meandering phrases toward points of expressive focus (Fig. 19).

Since it is technically impossible to play both melodies at once, one must foster this illusion by seamlessly alternating between the voices and employing unusual fingerings. Shapey provides little clue as to how to execute the passage. There are various possible solutions, depending on which tones one chooses to sustain or drop. In m. 1, I play the two lines simultaneously by momentarily dropping the D# on the A string to play the B with the first finger. The B is then double-stopped with the open D string, and with the G on the E string. In this way, the dotted-rhythm leap is traversed, while both lines are continuously sustained. In m. 2, I choose to drop the lower line at the leap. Leaving the B-E fifth that occurs on the last sixteenth note of beat 1, I shift to fourth position for the A, playing it alone before bringing in the B flat on the D string on the second triplet of that beat. This allows for a smooth technical transition, and also creates a moment of open space in which the A sings through.

In this variation, the dotted rhythm is sometimes a passing element in the fluid texture of the music, rather than a focal point. In m. 3, it is placed against an eighth note quintuplet. The two lines are briefly entangled, then unspool, as the dotted rhythm occurs simultaneously with the quintuplet. At the point where the two rhythms intersect, the lines share a common pitch, D natural, which ties them together momentarily, and obfuscates the rhythmic distinction of the dotted figure (Fig. 19).

I play the upper-line D with the first finger, combining it as a unison with the lower-line D, played with the fourth finger on the D string. The fourth finger is then double-stopped with the F, played with the third finger on the G string. In order to sustain both lines, I shift to second position, moving the F to the first finger on the D string. The D# and F in the quintuplet are played on the G string.

 

Whereas Shapey’s music of the 1960s-80s is freely gestural and fragmented, his late works show a return to long lines and a strong metrical pulse, with simple rhythmic ideas interlocking in a dense web. Millenium Designs, for violin and piano, presents swathes of neatly meshed counterpoint, in which rhythm and texture are more important than melody. Formed of sections that recur in different movements, the piece is a large-scale patchwork of shifting characters. The dotted rhythm is very prevalent in this piece. It bears traits of both the weighty upbeat gestures of his middle-period music, and the Classical elegance of his early pieces.

The opening is a mighty refrain that returns both at the end of the movement and the end of the work. The instruments establish a slow eighth-note pulse as they alternately play heavy chords. The dotted rhythm is present by virtue of the violin’s splitting of the chords, which pushes the motion onward, while also evoking a sense of labor and struggle. In the violin’s repeated gesture of three eighth notes, Shapey increases the effect of the crescendo by making the last of the three a four-note chord, typically involving dissonant intervals and awkward fingerings. The piano’s chords are insistent, with upbeat gestures comprised of pairs of either grace notes or thirty-second notes (Fig. 20).

In much of the rest of the piece, the dotted rhythm is tightly locked within an eighth-note-based framework. The squareness of the rhythmic cells and neatness of the “objects” harks back to the neoclassical character of Etchings. In Millenium Designs, the dotted rhythm suggests certain emotional traits. In sections of moderate tempo, such as m. 10 in the first movement (Fig. 21), it creates a gentle tension, as the listener waits momentarily for the arrival of the next note. Shapey sometimes enhances this effect by double-dotting.

In faster sections (Fig. 22), the dotted rhythm has a jaunty character, conveying a more vertical stress, even as the music proceeds in a linear fashion. This jauntiness contrasts with the firmness and swagger of the section beginning at m. 55, where the violin plays groups of notes of equal value (Fig. 23).

Shapey’s manner of interlocking the dotted rhythm with other rhythmic units can be likened to Beethoven’s procedure in passages of the Grosse Fuge. At m. 111, the dotted rhythm is played by the cello, landing on the beginning of each beat of the 4/4 bar (Fig. 24). It is combined with the second violin’s repeated anapestic figure of two sixteenth notes leading to an eighth note, and with the first violin’s cross accents on the second half of beats 1 and 3. This layering of rhythms creates a texture in which one hears several discrete lines simultaneously, with emphases occurring one after the other in quick succession.

Beethoven was clearly the main exemplar of Shapey’s musical ideals. Even more than Haydn, Mozart, or Bach, Beethoven invested the individual motive with charged expressive significance, giving his music the etched impact of a “graven image.” The powerful character of Shapey’s music, whether rugged and bold, or ethereal and lyrical, is especially close in spirit to that of Beethoven. Furthermore, Shapey’s idea of virtuosity seems particularly akin to Beethoven’s. Although both composers sometimes brought agile brilliance to the fore, they often embraced a sense of physical exertion, making it an expression of strength in their music. Beethoven’s music sometimes appears blatantly to disregard the norms of idiomatic instrumental writing, aiming instead for a purely musical objective. His works can be very unidiomatic for stringed instruments, using patterns often more suited to the piano. With his knowledge of the violin, Shapey worked to push the performer to the extremes of established technique, designing technical challenges to convey the toughness, strenuousness, and spaciously dramatic qualities of his music. In this way, his pieces achieve the near-tangibility of their musical ideas through the physicality of their execution, and they expand the range of expression that virtuosity can supply.


1 Music by Ralph Shapey, Centaur CRC 2900. Miranda Cuckson, violin, Blair McMillen, piano.

[i] Robert Mann, interview by author, New York, 4 September 2007.

[ii] Anthony Tommasini, “Music; Rugged Music Once Packaged in Plain Brown,” The New York Times, 10 November 2002.

[iii] Robert Carl, CD liner notes, Ralph Shapey: Radical Traditionalism, New World Records 80681-2.

[iv] Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: interviews with American composers (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1982),

My meeting with Henri Dutilleux

Henri Dutilleux was one of the great artists of the last century and a wonderful man, and I treasure my memories of meeting him and playing for him in Paris one summer. Following the very saddening news of his death, Sequenza21 asked me to write about my visit with him. My little essay is now posted here on the Sequenza 21 site, also here on Tumblr (with larger photos). (A note: M. Dutilleux wrote the date wrong in his dedication on my score. It was 2001.)

Nono CD release!

I am really thrilled that my CD of Nono “La lontananza” will be released next month on the Urlicht Audiovisual label. It has been a truly great thing to work on. I hope you can join us for some really interesting and exciting performances and discussions to celebrate the release. Please see my blog posts from last year to read some thoughts on this very moving and multi-layered piece.

From the press release:

“la lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” distills Nono’s manifold lifelong preoccupations – philosophy, politics, history, theater, text, spatialization, improvisation, real-world sounds, electronics and amplification – into the relatively simple medium of solo violin and 8-track tape. The work requires a highly spatialized eight-channel speaker configuration for the electronics, and the violin soloist also wanders among the audience during the performance. Previous stereo recordings did not capture this crucial aspect of the work. The DTS-CD version of this new recording endeavors to present the work as the composer intended: a “surround-sound” experience. In addition, this recording also includes an element overlooked by previous recordings: vocalizations from the violin soloist that are pivotal to Nono’s intentions.  In the words of Miranda Cuckson, “Nono’s indications for the violinist to sing illuminate the fundamentally lyrical, almost operatic quality at the heart of the work: the piece is truly a ‘madrigal’ as Nono described it.”

Pre-release Event: November 2, CD release Event: November 3

Friday, November 2, 2012, 8 PM
Spectrum
121 Ludlow Street
Tickets: $15 general/$10 students and seniors

–Miranda Cuckson and Chris Burns perform Dai Fujikura’s “prism spectra” for viola and live surround electronics, which they are recording for an upcoming CD

–Chris Burns presents his compositions: “Opalescence”, a glockenspiel solo performed by Trevor Saint, and “Alligator Char”, electric guitar/percussion duo performed by Chris and Trevor

–Richard Warp demonstrates his new brain-computer spatialization interface

Saturday, November 3, 2012, 8 PM
Spectrum
Tickets: $15 general/$10 students and seniors

–Live performance by Miranda and Chris of Leggii 3 and 4 from “la lontananza nostalgica utopica futura”

–Demo of Richard Warp’s realizations of the electronics in 5.1 channel surround sound

— Chris’ composition “come ricordi come sogni come echi: six studies on Nono’s ‘la lontananza nostalgica utopica futura’ for solo violin”

–Open forum with the artists

from my liner notes:

There have been several recordings of “La lontananza”, including one by Kremer with Sofia Gubaidulina as sound artist, and another by violinist Melise Mellinger with Sciarrino. I recorded the piece in 2011 with composer/sound artist Christopher Burns, soon after our live performance that autumn in New York. In the performance, I was acutely aware of the physical environs (a high-ceilinged chapel); of the listeners sharing the performance space, thus eliminating the “fourth wall” between performer and audience; and of my sound mingling with the tape sounds emitted from various locations.  A few days later, I was immersed in the process of turning this intrinsically dramatic work into a recording. Any audio recording of music extracts the sound itself from its physical origins and its actual temporal context, thus creating a different experience. A recording of “La lontananza” particularly distills the piece, turning a theatrical, partly improvised musical work into a documented combination of sound elements. In this way, a recording of “La lontananza” is much like a sound recording of an opera, in that it removes the vivid visual distractions of the stage.  While this might be a partial experience of the whole, it can be a thrilling and illuminating means of focusing in on the music itself.

I am excited that, with this recording of “La lontananza”, we actually offer two  ways to listen to Nono’s piece: in stereo and in surround-sound. In stereo, you will hear simply the music itself from a concentrated sound source. In surround-sound, you will experience a recording that restores the sense of spatialization – and thus theater – to the piece. Through current technology, the “musique concrète” sounds come alive as if actually happening in the same room, the wandering of the violinist-figure is ghostly but palpable and the listener’s role in the work feels central and participatory as in a live performance. I am truly delighted that we are able to create such a tantalizingly immediate experience of this great work for the first time.

A couple years ago, I started looking into “La lontananza” and was drawn strongly to its magnetic synthesis of music, theater, text and socio-political awareness. I feel its evocation of the refugee’s condition is as urgent today as twenty years ago. I am delighted to work with Chris Burns and Richard Warp, who have done such brilliant, sensitive work on this piece and recording. I am grateful to New Spectrum Foundation, Urlicht Audiovisual, Glenn Cornett and Gene Gaudette for making this project possible.

Phillips Collection recital program

I’m playing a recital with pianist Aaron Wunsch at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC on April 15 at 3pm. Hope you enjoy! Come and hear if you’re in the area!

Here are program notes I wrote:

This recital program, consisting of the Violin Sonatas of Leos Janácek and Richard Strauss and a suite of transcriptions by Ross Lee Finney, presents two streams of commonalities among the works to be performed. One is the composers’ nationalistic use of folkloric material, and the other is the flowering of an ornate, stylistically individual Romanticism in the late 19th-early 20th centuries.

The Czech composer Janácek (1854-1928) developed a highly personalized manner of writing that incorporated piquant inflections and gestures from Moravian folksong, remarkably vivid atmospheres, and a beguiling mixture of fantastical and earthy qualities. Deeply involved in the collection and study of his country’s folk music, Janácek was a forerunner to the ethnomusicological work of Hungarians Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and was contemporaneous with Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, whose music also displayed a personal association with folksong. Janácek became known mainly for his vibrantly colorful and soulfully moving operas – Jenufa, Katya Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropoulos Case, House of the Dead– and he put much of his own effort into seeing those works produced in opera halls. However, his small but tremendously distinctive output of chamber works garnered great fondness and admiration in later years. These works often had an autobiographical bent – relating to his youth, falling in love etc. They include some piano pieces (Into the Mists, the Sonata), two programmatic and fiercely Romantic string quartets, and the Sonata for Violin and Piano.

The Violin Sonata was written in 1914 amid the early rumbles of World War I. Janácek kept revising the piece until 1920, by which time he was at work on his opera Katya Kabanova. It is in four movements, with moods that shift suddenly from sweetly wistful and warmly relaxed to breathless and impassioned. Pizzicato gestures evoke sounds from nature, and melodies have a plainness and directness that contrasts with the flourishes that suddenly erupt throughout the piece.

 

German composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) possessed a very identifiable compositional style that combined extravagantly swirling lines and intricately layered textures with advanced chromatic harmonies. Following on the innovations of Liszt and Wagner, Strauss and his contemporary Gustav Mahler took Romanticism to heady extremes of complexity, intensity and harmonic experimentation. Though florid and seemingly free-flowing, Strauss’ works form remarkably cohesive expressions of emotion, whether of heroic grandeur, poignant longing, tenderness or ardent romantic outpouring. Strauss did not profess particular interest in folk music, but certain elements, such as horn calls and snippets of melody, evoke the indigenous music of the Bavarian countryside.

Strauss was mainly renowned for his operas – Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Salome, Ariadne auf Naxos, Capriccio – his orchestral tone poems – Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Ein Heldeleben – and his songs. However, he did produce a small number of chamber works, mostly earlier in his career. These include the Cello Sonata, the Piano Sonata, and the Violin Sonata in E-flat major. The Violin Sonata was written in 1887-8 and is considered the last of his works to adhere to classical forms (mainly the sonata allegro of the first movement, Allegro ma non troppo). At the time of writing the piece, he was in love with the soprano Pauline de Ahna, and the work exudes a youthful, optimistic exuberance and an undercurrent of sweetness that pervades even the bold virtuoso writing. The second movement, titled Improvisation, meanders gently; its wistfulness and hovering dreaminess are qualities that recur throughout much of his oeuvre. The closing Finale movement opens with a somber introduction in the piano, after which the instruments sally forth with almost orchestral grandeur and sweep.

 

Ross Lee Finney (1906-1997) belonged to the generation of American composers that included Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Walter Piston and Virgil Thomson- artists who grappled with the conflicting European and homegrown influences on American classical music and sought to define it as a distinct national art form. Finney, who was born in Minnesota and grew up in North Dakota, sang folksongs with his family during his childhood, and he always retained a great love and affinity for the tunes of his native land. Following studies with Nadia Boulanger and Alban Berg, Finney sought to incorporate the twelve-tone method with material and melodic/harmonic qualities drawn from folksong, and the fluctuating balance of these elements formed the central dynamic of his compositions throughout his life. Though never a hugely well-known composer, he had some high-profile premieres and was a much-regarded teacher for decades at the University of Michigan, where his pupils included George Crumb and William Bolcom.

Fiddle-doodle-ad is a suite of transcriptions of American folktunes. Written in 1945, it comes from a time when Finney was making much direct usage of folk material in his compositions. The piece was a nationalistic response as World War II was reaching a close. The eight melodies are presented simply, with little embellishment or departure from their basic forms, and with subtly enriched harmonic support.  The suite is artfully organized in a satisfying sequence of moods, ranging from the rambunctiousness of Rye Whiskey and Rippytoe Ray to the sorrowful Wayfaring Stranger, and from the pure simplicity of The Nightingale to the intriguing asymmetries of Cotton Eye Joe and Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death.

 

more on “La lontananza…”

A follow-up on the Nono performance:

It was a remarkable experience to perform it live, to move around the space and inhabit the character of the wanderer while dealing with the abstraction of the sounds and timbres: the fragile held tones, the rough outbursts and offhand-sounding phrases, pacing my breaths for the singing, and hearing the tape material emerging gently or jumping out from the speakers. Walking among the audience really took away that “fourth wall” to me – I saw and felt the people in the room as part of the scenario, as participants in the drama.

On Tues. and Wed., I spent a few hours with Chris Burns and composer/sound engineer Richard Warp recording the piece in a studio in Queens. Again, an amazing, unusual experience! We ran the piece a couple times (each run was 50-something minutes), and I found the playing and interaction with the tape part much more exhausting in the studio. The piece is certainly demanding live, not so much in terms of lots of physical busyness and technical hurdles, but because of the concentration and immersion in character that’s required. In the recording studio, I had to keep the theatrical message of the piece in mind, but also bring my focus fully onto the sounds. I realized as I recorded just how much the spatial aspects – my walking around and the spatialization of the speakers – had affected my perception of the music.

The piece has an openness to me, a visceral sense of an arena in which it takes place..it was intriguing to realize how ingrained the spatial dimension was in my musical concept.  I love recording because, even as I’m always conscious of playing ultimately for people, in the moment there’s nothing to it but the sound you’re making and the microphone…so simple, pure, intimate and detailed. Any performance, on the other hand, brings in those elements of theater – audience, space, visual factors. Distilling the theater of “La lontananza” into a sound recording, it was very contrasting to concentrate my energy into my static position in the recording booth, to hear the tape sounds in my right ear through a headset rather than from all round the hall, and to be, as Chris put it, “hyperattentive” for almost an hour just to the sounds. Anyway, we now have a couple quite different versions to choose from. Chris and Richard will work some technological magic to configure the spatialized effects of the piece for our “surround-sound” CD. I will be consulted on that but I basically leave those wonders to these guys. They have both been fantastic collaborators.

For the concert, I wrote a program note reworked from my previous blog post- read it below.

Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924-90) was one of the most significant and influential avant-garde artists and philosophers of the 20th century.  Early in life, he studied polyphony, the Italian madrigal tradition and the Second Viennese School, and was mentored by Bruno Maderna and Luigi Dallapiccola. During the 1950s, he participated in the Darmstadt courses in Germany, where, along with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, he was a visionary leader among composers of new music. His 1955 work, Il canto sospeso, for solo singers, chorus and orchestra, was his first major success. Many of Nono’s compositions put forth pointedly political, anti-fascist themes. Encompassing ideas drawn from philosophy, politics, history and religion, his work strove toward a new kind of music theater, involving text, spatialization, improvisation, sonic references to the real, physical world, and the most current technologies for electronics and amplification. He wrote many large-scale pieces, often involving electronics, including Intolleranza 1960 and Prometeo. Nono had a great impact on other composers, including Lachenmann, Sciarrino, Gubaidulina. Kurtág and Ferneyhough. Nono also formed close working partnerships with instrumentalists, among them Rudolf Kolisch, Gidon Kremer, Maurizio Pollini and the Arditti Quartet.

Nono wrote “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” in 1988-89 at the electronics studio of the Strobel foundation in Freiburg. His penultimate composition, it distils many of his lifelong preoccupations into a relatively simple medium. The full title is “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. Madrigale per più ‘caminantes’ con Gidon Kremer, violino solo, 8 nastri magnetici, da 8 a 10 leggii.”  Nono borrowed the term “lontananza” from Sciarrino, who used the word, usually reserved for poetic expression, in the title of his work “All’aure in una lontananza”.  “Lontananza” essentially means “the far distance”. So, Nono’s title is “The nostalgic, utopian, future far-distance. Madrigal for a ‘wanderer” with Gidon Kremer, solo violin, 8 magnetic tapes and 8 to 10 music stands.”

Nono recorded Kremer improvising, then processed the sounds to make the tapes. Also on the tapes are noises from the room as they worked: chairs scraping, objects being slammed down, voices speaking. In performance, the sound artist plays all eight tracks from beginning to end, but chooses which to boost in volume or to suppress – thus, which material to bring into play at a given moment. He/she also controls from which of eight speakers the sounds will emanate. The violinist has six sections of music placed on music stands located around the performance space. He/she is directed by the score to walk from one music stand to the next after playing each section.

Nono took inspiration for this piece from an inscription on the wall of a monastery in Toledo: “Caminante, no hay caminos hay que caminar.” “Wanderer, there is no way, there is only walking.” The “wanderer” is here not only an evocation of a general human condition – of looking for one’s way through life and in society – but also a reference to those displaced by war: emigrants, refugees, “alien” residents in foreign lands. Nono’s use of “musique concrète”- sounds from everyday life – also grounded his music in a political consciousness. The sounds from the work studio are a sonic diary of the work process – thus, an element of nostalgia. Other nostalgic elements are his use of a scale employed by Giuseppe Verdi in his “Quattro pezzi sacri”, and Kremer’s Romanticized style of playing, displaying characteristic 19th-century virtuoso gestures such as jeté and spiccato bowing.

Tonight’s performance features a facet of “La lontananza” that has perhaps never been experienced before by listeners. Nono indicated in the score for the violinist to sing (at the unison, 5th or octave) in parts of the piece. This does not seem to have ever been done. However, it brings a whole other meaningful and beautiful dimension to the piece, emphasizing the humanity of the violinist-figure and the introspective, “serene vision” that lies at the heart of this tumultuous work. I believe that, because Kremer did not vocalize, and he was so integral to the piece’s creation, people have not attempted it. It is possible that a male voice did not sound effective, given the register. However, Nono did not change the score and the indications are there to be explored. With the voice, “La lontananza” becomes even more of a human drama: the wanderer’s confrontation with a threatening environment leads her/him to turn inward, finding calm and harmony in what Nono calls a “serena visionata”. The warmth of the human voice contrasts with the hard percussive noises on the tape and with the harshness in the live violin part, specified by Nono’s numerous markings of “ponticello” (a raspy sound from playing on the bridge) and “legno” (a thin, unstable sound from playing with the wood of the bow). Afterward, the wanderer must weather external discord and tumult again, retreating ultimately in a state of uncertainty and becoming a fragile memory.

-MC

Nono’s “La lontananza”

I hope everyone had a very good summer! On Saturday, September 17, I’m playing Luigi Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” for violin and 8-track tape! This is part of  the whimsically-titled “Nono, Muchmore Warped festival”, music by Pat Muchmore, Richard Warp, and Luigi Nono.

Nono’s piece has drawn some illustrious interpreters of the tape part in past: Sofia Gubaidulina with Gidon Kremer, Salvatore Sciarrino with Melise Mellinger and Helmut Lachenmann with Mark Menzies. Chris, who teaches composition and music technology at the U of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, has performed the work multiple times in the US, and represents a younger generation’s technologically-fluent approach to this ground-breaking music. 

In addition to the usual matter of our trying to give a fantastic performance, this presentation of the piece will be exciting for a few reasons. We are performing in a remarkable space (the James chapel at Union Theological Seminary) which – given the theatrical, spatialized nature of the roughly hour-long piece and its philosophical and textual underpinnings – is very suitable to the performance and will enhance its impact. This rendition is also a great opportunity for you to hear the piece in a way that, I think, has never been heard or experienced before: I was surprised to see that Nono indicated in the score for the violinist to sing (at the unison, 5th or octave) in parts of the piece. I had never heard of this facet of the piece and I don’t think it has ever been done. However, I find it brings a whole other, wonderfully meaningful and beautiful dimension to the piece, emphasizing the humanity of the violinist figure and the introspective, “serene vision” that lies at the heart of this tumultuous work. I hope you’ll come and experience this performance!

“La lontananza…” is such a richly layered piece, offering much to think about and explore and try out. In any case, I wanted to write out some thoughts and share these with you. If you want to be fully in suspense about what happens in the piece, you could read no further, but I do think a fuller awareness of the piece’s many facets can deepen your experience of the piece.

I’m busy and pressed for time, so, even though I love to write good prose, I am going to forego contiguous paragraphs for now and set all these ideas and pieces of information as bullet points. It’s a bit like what I’d do as an outline for an essay, but anyway given the mobile, open quality of the Nono, maybe this is in the spirit of the piece (!) Sometime, I’ll actually turn this into an article or essay.

  • Luigi Nono (1924-1990) wrote “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” in 1988-89 at the electronics studio of the Heinrich Strobel foundation in Freiburg, Germany. It is his penultimate composition, the last being “‘Hay que caminar’ soñando” for two violins.
  • Collaboration with performers had become a significant part of his process (he worked closely, for instance, with pianist Maurizio Pollini and the Arditti Quartet). In “La lontananza”, he worked with violinist Gidon Kremer.  Nono had Kremer record improvisations at the studio, then he selected and electronically processed sounds from the recordings to make the 8-track tapes. Also on the tapes are noises from the room as they worked: chairs scraping, objects being slammed down, their voices speaking.
  • The full title is “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura. Madrigale per più ‘caminantes’ con Gidon Kremer, violino solo, 8 nastri magnetici, da 8 a 10 leggii.”  Nono borrowed the term “lontananza” from composer Salvatore Sciarrino, who used this word, usually a poetic expression, in the title of his work “All’aure in una lontananza”.  “Lontananza” essentially means “the far distance”. So, Nono’s title is “The nostalgic, utopian, future far-distance. Madrigal for a ‘wanderer” with Gidon Kremer, solo violin, 8 magnetic tapes and 8 to 10 music stands.”
  • In performance, the sound artist has all eight tracks playing from beginning to end (about 75 min. of material). He/she makes the choice of which tracks to bring out and boost in volume, which to make quieter – thus, which material on the tapes to feature or bring into play at a given moment.
  • There are eight speakers placed around the performance space. The sound artist also chooses from which of these the tape sounds emanate.
  • The violinist has six sections of music, each placed on a separate music stand. These are placed around the performance space, including locations among or near the audience. The violinist enters after the tapes have started, sits by the first music stand and plays. He/she is directed by the score to walk slowly from one stand to the next, after playing each section of music. It is suggested that the stands be randomly placed so that the performer must go searching for the next stand.  The violinist plays standing except in the first section. At the end of the piece, the violinist’s last note is picked up by a microphone, recorded and sent out into the hall, as the performer exits.
  • The violinist can modulate the pacing of the performance through choice of tempos (usually marked within a range of tempi in the score) and by the speed or slowness of walking between sections.
  • Nono took inspiration for this piece (and several others, including his last work) from an inscription he saw on the wall of a monastery in Toledo, Spain: “Caminante, no hay caminos hay que caminar.” “Wanderer, there is no way, there is only walking.”
  • Much of Nono’s work bore a political message. His early works, such as “Il canto sospeso” were often based on anti-fascist texts. The idea of the “wanderer” is not only an evocation of a general human condition – of looking for one’s way through life and in society – but also a more pointed reference to those displaced by war: emigrants, refugees, “alien” residents in foreign lands.
  • Nono’s use of “musique concrète”- sounds from everyday life – also grounded his music in a political consciousness
  • In “La lontananza”, the sounds from the work studio (bangs and scrapes and voices) are meant as a record or sonic diary of the work process that went into the piece – thus, an element of nostalgia (“nostalgica”)
  • Other nostalgic elements: use of a scale employed by Giuseppe Verdi in his “Quattro pezzi sacri”, and Kremer’s romanticized style of violin playing on the tapes, displaying characteristic 19th-century virtuoso gestures such as jeté and spiccato bowing.
  • I see the piece in this emotional progression:
  • leggio I:  wanderer enters into an ominous, rather threatening environment, somewhat confrontational
  • leggio II:  agitation and intensity but starting to turn more inward (a few passages with voice)
  • leggio III:  the “serene vision”, inward harmony as the violinist’s voice joins with bowed lines
  • leggio IV:  tumult, sudden fluctuations of speeds
  • leggio V:  uncertainty, use of microtonal instability, Nono writes: “cercando il suono” (“looking for the sound”)
  • leggio VI:  continuing uncertainty, microtonality, sound becoming very fragile before exit, the violinist’s last note lingers in the hall as the wanderer becomes a memory and part of nostalgia
  • on the use of the voice:
  • Nono calls the piece a madrigal. As a young man, he studied Renaissance madrigals and here, late in his life, he returns to the idea of a polyphonic vocal piece. Much of his work used text and singers, whether as soloists or chorus, vocal commentary or sung or spoken parts by instrumentalists
  • Here the voice invokes a “serena visionata”, the inner harmony and peace of the wanderer, whose relationship to the environment is more one of discord and flux. The warmth of the human voice contrasts with the harsher sounds, both on the tape and in the live violin part (dissonances, ponticello, col legno)
  • Nono writes in leggii 2 and 3:  “con voce dove possible, a unisono, V, VIII”. “With voice where possible.” Why has this not been attempted? Why have I never even heard the vocalizing mentioned?  I think that, because Kremer did not do it, and he was so integral to the piece’s creation, people have not bothered with it. However, Nono did not change the score: the indications remain and are there to be explored. It is possible that a male voice did not sound very effective: given the register of the violin part, it would be difficult for many men to sing at the unison or even the octave.
  • I admire Kremer’s playing hugely and he plays with such staggering conviction in all he does.  But I think he just had a different idea of how to execute some things in the piece. On his recording of the piece, he arpeggiates the chords in leggio 3, much as in the Bach Chaconne. It is a really lovely effect but it is very different from singing!
  • Chris and I discussed by email the theatrical issue of the two human figures in the performance: who are we? what do we represent? We agreed that, as the wanderer who is actually moving around the space and is described as a “caminante”, I am a personified figure. However, Chris is representing a world of sounds with all its associations and somewhat more abstract- and rather than being a controlling figure, he sees himself as a “hyperattentive listener”, exemplifying the listening of the audience and reacting in real-time to what he hears.