New Music for Orchestra Dec. 11 features music by David Lang
The Yale School of Music presents a concert of new music for orchestra, performed by the Yale Philharmonia under the direction of Shinik Hahm, on Friday, December 11 at 8 pm in Woolsey Hall. The concert highlights two works by David Lang: International Business Machine and Grind to a Halt.
International Business Machine, subtitled “an overture for Tanglewood,” was written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The Boston Globe called the piece “a brisk, elegantly-fashioned work depicting today’s post-industrial computer age.” Grind to a Halt is dedicated to the memory of Jacob Druckman, Lang’s composition teacher and a longtime member of the Yale School of Music faculty. According to Lang, “One of the things that interests me very much is how certain mechanical musical tasks force players – and listeners – into a kind of concentration that can be spellbinding. The intense concentration necessary to coordinate the ensemble in Grind to a Halt is a kind of virtuosity in itself.”
Lang, who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music, has said: “The world needs happy tunes. But for me, the interesting ideas are where those happy tunes aren’t. The interesting things are in the dark places, or in the ugliness, or in the noise or the grit.” (more…)
New Music New Haven 11/19 features composer Jack Vees
Program includes Vees’s “Party Talk” and premieres by other Yale composers
The Yale School of Music presents a New Music New Haven concert featuring composer Jack Vees on Thursday, November 19 at 8 pm in Sprague Hall. The highlight of the concert will be Vees’s Party Talk, a piece written in 1996 for narrator and mixed ensemble of winds, brass, percussion, piano, organ, strings, and electric bass. The concert will also premiere music by student composers, including excerpts from Chris Cerrone’s opera Invisible Cities, Jordan Kuspa’s Piano Trio, Adrian Knight’s Work for Sixteen Strings, and Feinan Wang’s Pisces Monodrama–Chapter VII. Christopher Theofanidis is the artistic director of the New Music New Haven concert series. (more…)
New Music New Haven features composer Bernard Rands
New Music New Haven presents a concert featuring composer Bernard Rands on Thursday, October 8 at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Hall. Rands, a professor at Harvard, is the winner of such accolades as the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award. The program will feature Rands’ virtuosic Concertino for solo oboe and mixed ensemble, and “now again” for mezzo-soprano and ensemble. Rands favors unconventional combinations of instruments: the ensemble for Concertino consists of flute, clarinet, harp, and string quartet, and that for “now again” includes flute, clarinet, trumpet, percussion, harp, violin, viola, cello, and soprano and alto singers. The text of “now again” compiles fragments of poetry from Sappho.
The concert will also premiere new works by two Yale School of Music composers. Jordan Kuspa’s Lemonade Battery for chamber orchestra will open the evening’s program. Following it will be Polina Nazaykinskaya’s Real April for soprano, baritone, and ensemble, based on the poetry of Jordan Jacks and Laura Marris. (more…)
New Music New Haven: Yale Percussion Group performs David Lang
Concert also features diverse music by eight other Yale composers
David Lang, renowned as the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music, is the featured faculty composer in the next New Music New Haven concert on Thursday, April 30 at 8:00 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. The world-renowned Yale Percussion Group will perform music by Lang, who was appointed to the Yale School of Music faculty in the fall of 2008. Other works on the program cover a broad range of media and thematic content, from Timo Andres’s Fast Flows the River for MIDI keyboard and cello, to Richard Harrold’s Two Studies for Guitar Duo. Themes of water and ice are explored in Naftali Schindler’s Water Tropes for string quartet, sampler, and Tuvan throat singer, and in Ted Hearne’s THAW for percussion quartet, a piece that imagines the sensation of being immersed in a block of ice. (more…)
New Music New Haven features Martin Bresnick’s multimedia, anti-war piece Caprichos Enfáticos
The Yale School of Music features composer Martin Bresnick in a New Music New Haven concert at 8:00 pm on Thursday, April 2 in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. The program highlights Bresnick’s Caprichos Enfáticos: Los Desastres de la Guerra (Emphatic Caprices: The Disasters of War), a piece that laments the excesses and tragedies of war by integrating devastating interpolated DVD projections, created by Johanna Bresnick, based on Francisco Goya’s book of etchings Los Destastres de la Guerra. Pianist Lisa Moore and the acclaimed ensemble So Percussion will perform this multimedia work. (more…)
New Music New Haven features Aaron Jay Kernis
The Yale School of Music features faculty composer Aaron Jay Kernis in a New Music New Haven concert at 8:00 pm on Thursday, March 5 in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall. The program features Kernis’s Two Movements (with Bells), performed by violinist Wendy Sharp and pianist Julie Nishimura. Also on the program is Arcadiana, a seven-movement work by British composer Thomas Adès which will be performed by the Jasper Quartet, the graduate quartet-in-residence at the School of Music. Yale graduate composers Jordan Kuspa and Richard Harrold are also featured, with Kuspa’s Flying Solo for solo flute and a guitar duo by Harrold. New Music New Haven is under the artistic direction of Ezra Laderman.
Admission to the recital is free. For more information, visit the Yale School of Music website, music.yale.edu, or call 203 432-4158.
Among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation, Grawemeyer- and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis has been on the faculty at the Yale School of Music since 2003. He has been commissioned by sopranos Renee Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, violinists Joshua Bell and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, guitarist Sharon Isbin, and institutions including the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Proms, Los Angeles, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History. Recent recordings include song cycles by soprano Susan Narucki (Koch) and orchestral works by the Grant Park Festival Orchestra (Cedille). He has received the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Stoeger Prize, Rome Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple Grammy nominations, and was Composer-in-Residence for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Public Radio, and American Composers Forum. He is New Music Advisor for the Minnesota Orchestra and chairman and co-director of its Composer Institute.
FOR CALENDAR EDITORS
Yale School of Music presents
New Music New Haven
Aaron Jay Kernis, featured faculty composer
Program: Kernis, Two Movements (with Bells); Thomas Adès: Arcadiana for string quartet; Jordan Kuspa: Flying Solo for solo flute; Richard Harrold: Guitar Duo. With Wendy Sharp, violin; Julie Nishimura, piano; and the Jasper String Quartet.
Date/time: Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Venue: Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall
470 College Street, New Haven
Tickets: Free
Phone/web: 203 432-4158 • music.yale.edu
Peaceable Kingdom by Ingram Marshall featured at New Music New Haven
Plus new music by seven other Yale composers
The Yale School of Music presents a New Music New Haven concert with featured faculty composer Ingram Marshall on Tuesday, December 16 at 8 pm in Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall (470 College St at Wall St). The program will feature Marshall’s Peaceable Kingdom conducted by Julian Pellicano, a conducting fellow at the School of Music. The program also includes new works for a broad variety of of instruments by Yale graduate composers, including Timo Andres, Home Stretch (a piano concerto); Feinan Wang, Flowing Clock for string quartet; Richard Harrold, Clarinet Quartet; Sam Adams: Aves Nostradamus for violin and piano; a solo violin work by Polina Nazaykinskaya; and Naftali Schindler’s Le Tombeau de…. Ezra Laderman, a member of the composition faculty, is artistic director of New Music New Haven.
The concert is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the Yale School of Music website, www.yale.edu/music or call 203 432-4158.
Ingram Marshall, composer, studied at Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts, where he received an M.F.A., and has been a student of Indonesian gamelan music, the influence of which may be heard in the slowed-down sense of time and use of melodic repetition found in many of his pieces. In recent years he has concentrated on music combining tape and electronic processing with ensembles and soloists. His music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras such as the Theater of Voices, Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, and American Composers Orchestra. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
www.ingrammarshall.com
