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
“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.
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mp3 (320k CBR)
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.
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.*
Thanks to The Strad magazine for this review of my album “Invisible Colors”, music by Wolpe, Ferneyhough and Carter! Read it here and below.
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.
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.
Hugely excited that my new album on ECM Records with pianist Blair McMillen was released in May, with a release concert at Le Poisson Rouge. We play sonatas by Bartók and Schnittke and the Partita by Lutoslawski.
Buy it here
In deciding to record these works together, I had a few personal motivations. Recently I learned that the immediate ancestors of my Viennese grandfather had in fact come from Slovakia. I have always been drawn to the colorations and characteristics of this music: the dark-hued tones and harmonies, the mordant wit, the detailed shaping of folk ornamentation. Discovering my ancestry just made me feel personally even closer to these pieces. The music of Bartók, Schnittke and Lutoslawski was also significant to my early musical development, particularly my affinity for contemporary music. Bartók was the first 20th-century composer whose music I was strongly attracted to. When I was 11, his First Rhapsody was my favorite piece and I went on to learn the rest of his pieces for violin – sonatas, concertos, solo sonata, and chamber music. I also encountered Lutoslawski’s music at 11 years old, as a student at the Aspen Festival. Assigned to play in his Symphony No. 3, with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting and the composer present, I was initially puzzled by the notation, with its odd-looking squiggles and arrows, but found I loved the sound of the piece. I still remember it as one of my first thrilling experiences with recent music. As for Schnittke, I remember my excitement performing his “Quasi una sonata” at the Juilliard School when I was a student first learning about his work.
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.
In the March 2015 issue of Downbeat magazine:
New York Times review of my January 25 performance of Mario Davidovsky’s and Donald Martino’s music:
And this review in the Juilliard Journal, about my Carter/Sessions/Eckardt album.
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!
Last September, I was delighted to jump in last minute and play on Vijay Iyer’s new CD, his first for ECM Records. The central piece of the album is “Mutations I-X” for piano and string quartet. I had a marvelous time working with Vijay, a brilliant, inspiring and wonderfully warm person, and terrific colleagues Michi Wiancko, Kyle Armbrust and Kivie Cahn-Lipman. And it was an honor to meet Manfred Eicher, with whom I’m happy to say I’ll be recording my next CD soon in Lugano, for the ECM label.
The release of Mutations is March 4 and we will be taking the piece on tour soon, including the European premiere at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Video on our collaboration here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKZidHBqH5Q
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.
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