This recording represents the best take from about 30 minutes of rehearsal and is not intended to be considered a polished performance, but it’s an excellent account of the piece. Following the reading session, I revised some of the orchestration and I’m in the process of completing the other four movements of the symphony. Stay tuned!

Did you know this is my third orchestral composition that’s been read and recorded by the NEC Philharmonia? Check out From the Faraway Nearby (2009) and The Sphinx and the Milk Way (2011).

Sextet for oboe, bassoon, trumpet, harpsichord, violin, and viola is a love letter to the textures and sound world of Baroque music (a subject I explored in a very different way with my recent piece for trumpet and electronics, San Marco). Although references to historical style are not continuous throughout this piece, Baroque music influenced my choice of instrumentation and certain compositional devices I utilized: hence the movement titles Canon, Ritornello, and Passacaglia.

This piece is also infused with a feeling for syncopation, groove, melody, harmony, and soloistic playing—as well as the sense of being taken on a journey through music—inherited from my favorite 1970s progressive rock bands such as Yes and Gentle Giant and contemporary indie band The Flaming Lips: hence the movement title Groove.

For this performance, Sextet is also a fond goodbye to my time as an undergraduate at New England Conservatory: this marks the 20th and final performance of my music on a Tuesday Night New Music concert, and the 28th performance of my music in Boston and at NEC since arriving here in the fall of 2008.

A painting of San Marco by Auguste Renoir

This piece combines live trumpet with digital processing and playback of pre-recorded samples controlled by the performer. This premiere performance is being featured on a recital of electro-acoustic music by students of composer John Mallia.

My goal with San Marco is to create a fluid, ambient atmosphere evoking the sound-world and spirit of the sacred instrumental music of the late Renaissance/early Baroque, especially Monteverdi (who I sample in the piece). The famous cathedral in Venice, Basilica of St. Mark’s (Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco), was a center for this music and the inspiration for my title, San Marco.

The piece features truncated, looped, and processed samples of late Renaissance music for voice and cornetto, a wind instrument with a sound not unlike a trumpet (although its construction is very different). The cornetto was highly regarded in the 16th and early 17th centuries for its similarity to the human voice, and has a delicate sound I find incredibly beautiful. The modern trumpet plays along with and around the samples, alternately imitating, dominating, and being dominated by the sound of the cornetto.

Proclaiming Pan concert poster

Nine Muses
Sunday, March 25, 2:30pm
Hunneman Hall
Brookline Public Library
361 Washington Street
Brookline, MA
Free admission with a suggested $10 donation.

My set of nine miniature movements for solo flute, harp, and violin referencing the muses of Greek mythology will be performed by Elizabeth Erenberg, flute, Maria Parker, harp, Ryan Shannon, violin, and Oriana Dunlop, narrator, at the Brookline Public Library.

This performance is part of Proclaiming Pan, a musical and literary experience with Greek Mythology curated and produced by flutist Elizabeth Erenberg (a fellow Entrepreneurial Grant recipient). The program also features music by Debussy, Schubert, and Purcell, and literary quotations from Isadora Duncan, John Lyly, Goethe, and ancient texts.

• Learn more about Elizabeth’s concert Proclaiming Pan.
• Learn more about my piece Nine Muses and listen to mp3s of the 2009 premiere.

Sarah Sullivan & Kristina Nyberg

Places in the Bay Area *Premiere*
Tuesday, March 6, 8:00pm
Tuesday Night New Music
Pierce Hall at New England Conservatory
241 St. Botolph St, Boston MA. Free admission.

Performed by Sarah Sullivan, flute and piccolo, and Kristina Nyberg, piano.

With this piece, I sought to capture feelings I have about places in and around my former hometown of San Francisco, CA.

The first movement, San Francisco Streets – Home, features a lively, rhythmically-driven ritornello section alluding to the sunny energy of the city. The first instance of the ritornello is followed by a more reflective mood—perhaps a gray day out in the Richmond District. After a truncated ritornello, the music shifts character again to evoke some of the nostalgia I feel for my childhood home, an Edwardian apartment near the Presidio where my family lived for about 16 years.

The second movement, The Marin Headlands in Fog, features piccolo in place of flute. It depicts the mysterious atmosphere of the foggy coastal scenery of the Marin Headlands national park across the bay from the city.

The Marin Headlands

I hope you can join me for Tuesday Night New Music!

Beyond the Notes: Music Inspired by Art will be presented at the New England Conservatory of Music on November 2nd, 2011, 6:00-7:30pm in Pierce Hall (241 St. Botolph St, Boston MA). Reception to follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Beyond the Notes website as seen on a mobile phone

The concert will be enhanced by an accompanying digital companion, which will be launched within the next couple of weeks. Visitors are invited to browse the website ahead of time, or before and after the concert in the hall or on their phones, and explore video clips, audio excerpts, photographs, and information about the artists and music.

The new website will highlight Watercolors, a wind quintet inspired by the paintings of Charles Burchfield, in addition to the portion of the website featuring the string quartet The Course of Empire, which was posted in July.

The section on Watercolors features video clips from a fascinating interview with Nancy Weekly, Curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center; Carol Steen, painter and co-founder of the American Synesthesia Assocation; as well as a movement-by-movement analysis of the connection between my music and the paintings, which is interspersed with audio excerpts and relevant images from the paintings.

While The Course of Empire and Watercolors are being highlighted on the website/app, every piece on the program has its own dedicated page and content. Other pieces featured on the program and the accompanying website include:

• Setsugekka for violin and piano, inspired by Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshige. The website will include videos introducing the genre of Japanese woodblock printing, and the traditional theme of setsugekka (snow, moon and flowers). This section features text and narration by independent print scholar John Resig (ukiyo-e.org).
• To Create One’s Own World for soprano, flute, bass clarinet, and marimba, and The Faraway Nearby video piece with chamber score, both inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe. The website will include audio clips, song text, and the online video of The Faraway Nearby.
• Revealed in Stone, a song cycle for tenor and piano inspired by the sculpture and poetry of Michelangelo. The website will feature an analysis of the English translation of the poetry used in the cycle.
• Triptych for solo guitar, inspired by the formal structure of triptychs (especially as seen in Medieval art). The website will include a comparison of different genres of triptychs.

Both the concert and website have received support from the Entrepreneurial Musicianship Department at NEC.

Rehearsal at PEM with projections of Thomas Cole's paintings

“The Course of Empire” at the Peabody Essex Museum on Saturday, July 30, was a success! The four performers (members of string orchestra A Far Cry), Liza Zurlinden, Ethan Wood, Jason Fisher, and Alexei Gonzales did a beautiful job of interpreting my string quartet. The group performed in Morse Auditorium beneath a large projection of the five paintings (provided by PEM), which were switched in real-time to correspond with each movement.

The music was preceded by a brief introductory video compiled from clips of videos I produced for Beyond the Notes, which provided context for Cole’s paintings and my musical “transmutation” of them (as curator Linda Ferber at the New-York Historical Society put it).

I made video and audio recordings of the performance, and will post clips online in the near future.

Article in The Boston Globe

We counted roughly 140 people in the audience between the morning and afternoon concerts. That’s a great turnout for an event of this nature, and was bolstered by some remarkable publicity: the concert received a preview in the Boston Globe (read a scan of the article or see it on the Globe’s website) by Classical Notes columnist David Weininger. The article took up a full-page spread on p. 5 of the Arts & Entertainment insert on Friday, July 29. Weininger had the following to say about my companion website, Beyond the Notes:

“Far more extensive than the usual site devoted to an event or artwork, it contains not only reproductions of the Cole paintings and program notes, but a full performance of the piece and loads of information connecting the music and art.”

The concert took place in conjunction with the opening of Painting the American Vision, a special touring exhibit of 45 paintings by 19th century American landscape painters of the Hudson River School. This was the kind of event I’m really passionate about producing–an event that brings together art forms in what is both an artistic expression and an educational experience for audiences. I look forward to developing similar collaborations with art museums in the future.

Nell with the performers. (L-R: Ethan Wood, Alexei Gonzales, Nell, Liza Zurlinden, Jason Fisher)

Beyond the Notes presents…

enter website

enter mobile website *

Beyond the Notes: The Course of Empire is an in-depth multimedia exploration of 19th century American painter Thomas Cole’s suite of five paintings The Course of Empire, and the string quartet I composed in response to the paintings. The site includes more than twenty documentary videos illuminating Cole’s paintings, my music, and the connections between them.

The website is meant to be freely enjoyed by anyone, whether or not you’re familiar with Cole’s paintings or my string quartet, but it was created specially to serve as a companion (a “digital program note”) for audiences of the live performance of The Course of Empire at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA on July 30, 2011, and an additional performance of the piece on an upcoming concert of my music inspired by visual art at New England Conservatory in fall 2011.

* The mobile website is optimized for iPhone and Android, and will work smoothly on most mobile phones. Users may experience problems viewing the website on iPad. If you experience technical glitches on any other device, please let me know.

For more information about the concert, the string quartet, and Beyond the Notes, please check out these relevant blog posts:

July 9
Announcement of Peabody Essex Museum concert, with an overview of Beyond the Notes.

May 30
Behind the scenes exploring and filming in the Hudson River Valley, Cole’s former home.

May 25
An introduction to Beyond the Notes.

Thomas Cole, Destruction (1836) from The Course of Empire

The concert is being presented by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA on Saturday, July 30, 2011, with two performances at 11:00am and 3:30pm in the special exhibit galleries (free with museum admission). The event is part of the Inspired by the Land festival, held in conjunction with the opening of national touring exhibit Painting the American Vision featuring 45 landscape paintings by Cole and his contemporaries.

A Far Cry (Photo: Yoon S. Byun)

The Course of Empire will be brought to life by four musicians who perform regularly with A Far Cry: Liza Zurlinden and Ethan Wood, violin; Jason Fisher, viola; and Alexei Gonzales, cello. Founded in 2007, the groundbreaking self-conducted string orchestra has enjoyed a heady ascent toward the highest ranks of today’s new generation of classical ensembles. Hailed by the Boston Globe as “thrilling,” “intrepid” and “brilliant,” A Far Cry explores the traditional boundaries of classical music, experimenting with the ways it is prepared, performed, and experienced. A Far Cry was recently appointed Chamber Orchestra in Residence at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Visit www.afarcry.org for more.

The concert will coincide with the premiere of multimedia companion Beyond the Notes, which I’m producing with the support of an Entrepreneurial Grant from New England Conservatory (my first E-grant supported the production of The Faraway Nearby). The Beyond the Notes website and mobile app for The Course of Empire will be up and running in the very near future, and I will be posting on my blog, twitter, and sending out a newsletter announcing its release. Please keep an eye out for that!

Screen capture of the upcoming multimedia companion

The website/app will feature a comprehensive guide to the paintings and music, featuring audio of the string quartet and 23 short videos exploring the historical, artistic, and intellectual contexts for Thomas Cole’s five paintings, and illuminating how Empire fueled my creative process and musical decisions.

The videos include extensive excerpts from my interview with the awesomely knowledgeable and articulate Linda S. Ferber, Vice President and Senior Art Historian of the New-York Historical Society (sponsor of the touring exhibit and permanent home of the Empire paintings). My favorite quote from Ms. Ferber: “A string quartet composed to The Course of Empire is very natural, when you think about it. Thomas Cole was very musical…I think he would be immensely pleased to find his paintings transmuted into musical form.”