San Marco *PREMIERE* Sunday, April 1, 8:00pm Performed by Ezra Weller, trumpet and electronics
Pierce Hall at New England Conservatory
241 St. Botolph St, Boston MA.
Free admission.
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.
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.
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 is live! Visit www.beyondthenotes.org now on your browser or mobile phone.
The online multimedia educational guide includes numerous videos, interviews with art curators, audio excerpts, and program notes. The site contains:
24 pages
47 audio clips
33 videos
29 images
“Far more extensive than the usual site devoted to an event or artwork, [Beyond the Notes] contains…loads of information connecting the music and art.”
After browsing the website, come check out the concert on November 2!
Beyond the Notes: Music Inspired by Art Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011 6:00pm-7:30pm
Free admission. Reception to follow.
Pierce Hall at New England Conservatory
241 St. Botolph Street, Boston, MA 02115
I’m very excited to announce my upcoming recital, Beyond the Notes: Music Inspired by Art. The concert will be a multisensory, multimedia experience featuring live chamber music performed by wonderful NEC student musicians coordinated with video and slide projections of the art that inspired it.
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.
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)
I’m thrilled to announce that I will collaborating with members of A Far Cry, Boston’s leading string orchestra, to present my string quartet The Course of Empire, which was inspired by the suite of five paintings by great 19th c. artist Thomas Cole. For the first time ever, the quartet will be performed directly in front of the paintings themselves! The performance will coincide with the unveiling of the first Beyond the Notes multimedia companion website, which explores the Course of Empire paintings and music in depth.
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 Grantfrom 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.”
Triptych for solo guitar (see this blog post for more about the piece) received a wonderful premiere performance by Devin Ulibarri on April 26th at Tuesday Night New Music. The recording of this piece is now online for your listening pleasure!
I am fascinated by the works of American painter Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), and was inspired by his visual world to compose a wind quintet and an orchestral tone poem (The Sphinx and the Milky Way). The premiere of my wind quintet Watercolors, the winner of NEC’s 2010-2011 Honors Ensemble Composition Competition, will be performed on Thursday, May 12th at 8:00pm in Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory (290 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115) by Andra Winds, who were selected this year as an NEC Honors Ensemble. I’m very honored to have my work performed by this talented group in beautiful Jordan Hall.
An April Mood, 1946-55. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Watercolors references four watercolor paintings completed during Burchfield’s late period (the mid-1940s-60s). Although the paintings were not created as a set, I selected them for their complementary contrasts and connections.
Burchfield’s dynamic style and almost psychedelic imagery are arrestingly unique. His haunting paintings speak of a spiritual world of transcendence, redemption, decay and renewal, and he depicted the wonders of nature (the patterns on a sphinx moth’s wing; moonlight filtering through the petals of a sunflower) in an artistic voice that is as distinctive as it is beautiful.
Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring), 1950. Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY.
Each movement of Watercolors reflects my impression of an individual painting. The paintings depict natural environments in different seasons or moods, from the barren rainstorm landscape seen in An April Mood to the luminous forest of Glory of Spring. At times, musical references to the visuals are direct (the bird or insect-like motifs in Autumnal Fantasy, for example), but more often than not, my music is an interpretation of the paintings’ overall atmospheres.
It is interesting to note that Burchfield himself was a passionate music fan (which helps to explain why his paintings are so suggestive of music). His copious journals reveal that he favored Beethoven, Wagner, and Sibelius, and created artworks inspired by his listening. Burchfield was sensitive to sound, especially the sounds of nature, and some of his paintings contain abstract patterns that directly represent sounds (see Autumnal Fantasy, The Insect Chorus [1917] or Song of the Telegraph Poles [1917-1952]). These images pulsate with energy, and imply a world of sensory experience.
Flutist Elizabeth Erenberg will be participating in a masterclass with the renowned flutist, composer, and conductor John Heiss this Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 6:00pm at New England Conservatory (in Jordan Hall room 118), presenting three solo pieces from my Nine Muses, a set of works inspired by the muses of Greek mythology (the other six “muses” were composed for harp and violin; listen here).
Elizabeth will be performing Nine Muses on a recital program centered on music relating to Greek mythology, which she will presenting in Los Angeles this summer, and Boston in the fall. Her recital program will be funded by an Entrepreneurial Grant from NEC (learn more about her project).
