YSM composers “swim in the big sea” at NYC showcase
Composition student Theodore Haber ’26MMA
While living in New York City, Theodore Haber ’26MMA would regularly go to concerts at Roulette Intermedium. This week, he’ll get to play his own work, as part of the Yale New Music concert on Sunday, October 19. Joining him will be Forrest Eimold ’24MM ’30DMA, Maya Miro Johnson ’26MM, Ben Rieke ’30DMA, Jaebong Rho ’26MM, and composition faculty member Martin Bresnick.
“Some of the coolest music I’ve seen has been at Roulette,” says Haber. “I wanted to use this opportunity to explore something that could continue being part of my practice.”
That “something” takes shape in his piece, “Take your time” — an eight-minute song arranged for violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, horn, trombone, and electric guitar. In it, three minutes of vocals lead to an extended outro full of dreamy textures.
Haber explains his thinking process: If Beethoven or Mahler’s genius can be attributed to their abilities to work within, subvert, and expand the musical conventions of their time, what, then, would a similar pursuit look like now?
“What’s the [musical] idiom of today? What’s the kind of music that most people are familiar with?” he asks. “It’s recorded pop music. So, I thought it’d be interesting to play with form and have a song that dissipates and a coda that’s longer than the song itself.”
Founded in 1978 and reopened in Downtown Brooklyn in 2011, Roulette Intermedium has become synonymous with new music and experimental performance. The venue has hosted key figures in the world of contemporary music such as John Zorn, Frederic Rzewski, Kaija Saariaho, Henry Threadgill, Laurie Anderson, and Tyshawn Sorey. And, come October 19, a new crop of Yale composers.
Martin Bresnick, the School of Music’s Charles T. Wilson, Jr. Professor in the Practice of Music, sees pedagogical and professional value in such an excursion. “It’s salutary,” he says. “To not only see your own tiny patch of the garden, but the crop of potatoes at large — to see what else is out there. It’s good for us to see [New York], and for [New York] to see us.”
“We can’t wait to showcase the extraordinary talent of our musicians at Roulette. It will be a celebration of the imagination and artistry that define our community,” says José García-León, the Henry and Lucy Moses Dean of Music. “Providing opportunities for our students to have their works performed and shared beyond campus allows them to engage with wider audiences. The program will also honor our legendary faculty member Martin Bresnick, whose music continues to inspire generations of composers.”
For many of the composition students, the concert will be the first time their work is performed in New York. For his NYC debut, Jaebong Rho will present crowns with clowns, a new piece for string quartet he describes as “a waltz that never ends.” It grows evermore disorienting, eerie, even grotesque — “a reflection on the nature of power and the obsession of those unable to escape it,” he says.
Composing for string quartet presented a new challenge for Rho, who’s more comfortable writing large-scale works for orchestra. “With so many instruments, it feels like painting with many brushes,” he says. “But with a small ensemble, it’s like drawing with one very sharp, delicate pen.”
Alongside Rho, Maya Miro Johnson will present bruises (disambiguation) — the final installation of a five-part series exploring themes of trauma, pain, and healing across orchestral concerto, video, and solo piano works. For bruises, Miro Johnson opts for prepared piano; at the Roulette concert, the piece will be performed by one of the evening’s other composers, Forrest Eimold.
For his part, Eimold pulls on sources as disparate as the 3rd century work Lives of Eminent Philosophers, the music of Percy Grainger, and a list of Fortune 500 companies to arrive at his The Life of California, from which he’ll be performing “Maersk Hill-Song.”
Rounding out the group of student composers is Ben Rieke. His Outpatient Fragments is made up of interpolated excerpts of works by Chopin, Scriabin, and Beethoven — pieces he found solace in during a mental health crisis, but that ended up “stuck in [his] head, eventually permuted and transformed.”
The breadth of work being presented — the variety in themes, sounds, and instrumentation — is fitting for a venue known for pushing boundaries and embracing innovation. It also speaks to Bresnick’s teaching philosophy and legacy.
“My own teachers — George Ligeti, Gottfried von Einem, and John Chowning — were wonderful spirits and composers who did not demand any of their students imitate them or follow in their footsteps,” says Bresnick. “They encouraged their students to find their own pathway. And it’s their example of ingenuity, imagination, and courage in the face of neglect or criticism that’s inspiring to me. That’s what I inherited and what I would like to pass on to my students.”
In a nod to Schumann’s Waldszenen, Bresnick will showcase his own “Bird as Prophet” for violin and piano at the concert. Bresnick sees an enigmatic and prophetic spirit in Schumann, a “model of the kind of composer for whom music was sufficient, but not the end of the story.” In many ways, the kind of composer that this YSM cohort represents: composers whose interests in literature, philosophy, politics, and history don’t yield to their musical pursuit, but strengthen it.
“The New York City waves make their way to New Haven and remind us that we can’t dream our abstract dreams forever,” says Bresnick. “They remind us that there are tides that change and there’s a world out there. And to go into that world — to go to Roulette — is to go swim in the big sea. And I think we’re ready to swim in that sea.”
