I haven’t posted on this blog since a year ago but I was busy from summer until March with music, projects, collaborations.. Have to say I’m proud of how it all went. Here are some highlights!

In June I played a duo concert at Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn with Ethan Iverson. The duo pieces were George Walker Sonata No. 1, Peter Lieberson Elegy, and Louise Talma’s Sonata, plus Ethan’s own Piano Sonata. We got a great review in the New York Times.

Back at PS21 Chatham I played a program of Lili Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, Rebecca Saunders, Claude Vivier, Leo Ornstein, and Kaija Saariaho, with Adrian Sandí on clarinet and Eric Huebner on piano.

Solo recital at the Walden School in New Hampshire – music by JS Bach, Stewart Goodyear, Caroline Mallonee, Dave Soldier, Lei Liang, Scott Wollschleger

Did a flamenco show with Pedro Cortes, Jose Moreno, and Dave Soldier at the Garage series at Chatham, upstate.

Cutting Edge Concerts at Symphony Space: I played solo pieces written for me by Jeffrey Mumford and Ileana Perez Velasquez. Thanks to series director and composer Victoria Bond!  Great to receive this review !

Morton Feldman concert with Conor Hanick at the New York Studio School, where he was the dean from 1969-71. We played Extensions 1, Vertical Thoughts 2, Projection 1, Piano Piece 1963, and Spring of Chosroes. Much appreciated this lovely review

I did a six-concert solo recital tour in Germany, including at the Schloss Köthen where Johann Sebastian Bach composed his partitas and sonatas for solo violin. On these concerts, I played Bach’s D minor Partita and pieces by Reiko Füting, Tongyu Lu, Biber, and Ysaÿe.

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I played the 2nd half of one concert with pianist Kristin Henneberg, in Magdeburg, collaborating in music by Füting, Stravinsky, and Clara Schumann.

Also I did a recital in Hamburg, featuring Manfred Stahnke’s Capra 4, Bach’s D minor Partita, and pieces by Jeffrey Mumford, Kaija Saariaho, and Reiko Füting:

On Nov 2nd I played at San Francisco Performances with my longtime good friend Blair McMillen, in the stunning Herbst Theater. We played sonatas by Janacek, Beethoven, and Prokofiev, and Ross Lee Finney’s Fiddle-doodle-ad suite. We also played a movement from Anthony Cheung’s duo Elective Memory, as an encore. Got a great review.

Photos from rehearsal:

After that I did a solo recital and a masterclass at Princeton University. No photos or videos from that, but thanks very much to Donna Weng Friedman for the invitation, it was a great pleasure!

Then it was on to my very exciting debut at the Musikverein in Vienna, playing the Violin Concerto written for me by Georg Friedrich Haas. Thanks to the Musikverein, the wonderful Vienna Radio Symphony and conductor Markus Poschner for a terrific experience. It was broadcast live on Ö1 radio and I hope it will be rebroadcast because it as my best performance of it yet!  Walter Weidringer wrote in Die Presse: “Miranda Cuckson is a poetic soloist with a strong personality, yet unpretentious.”

I also gave a masterclass for the Orchestra’s Academy program:

I joined David Sanford’s superb big band for a recording of his piece Reprise (which I played on the premiere of a few years ago).

I also recorded Scott Wollschleger’s new violin piece Secret Machine No. 7 that we collaborated on, and which appears on his next album, soon to be released! There will be a release show at Roulette on June 27, please come!

At the beginning of February I played a recital on the wonderful Florida State New Music Festival. The pieces and performers were terrific and I really enjoyed meeting and seeing everyone there. I also had the great pleasure to be interviewed for the HER-o podcast by violinist Darrian Lee.

I also recently had the pleasure to play quintets at River Arts with Philip Setzer, Kenji Bunch, Dan Panner, and Peter Seidenberg. We played pieces by Kenji Bunch and Jessie Montgomery and the C major and G minor quintets of Mozart.

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.

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.

 
Julius Eastman show

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

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

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

Reiko Füting’s “tanz.tanz”

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Library reached out to me with an invitation to perform there again. Amid discussing various programming 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 on a concert of old and new chamber music. This included 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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. 

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.”

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.

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

Desenne rehearsal

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:

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!

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.”

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.