May 23-24, 2019 Underwood New Music Readings

What are any changing issues in the copyright area? When and where are grand rights applicable? How do composers work on rights issues if working with other artists such as writers or visual artists? What is most important for a composer to keep in mind in delivering manuscript to a publisher or copyist What do professional orchestras look for in part production? How far in advance do they really need the parts for the musicians? What is the most common sticky situation that composers get themselves into with regard to copyright or parts production?

What are the pros and cons of self-publishing? What services does a publisher actually provide, and what other kinds of support systems are there for those who need them?

How do presenting and performing organizations decide what to program? What’s the best way to get noticed and programmed? How can my work at least be considered?

His craft has also been guided and informed by his mentors Leonardo Balada and Leo Brouwer and his most profound inspirations have come to him by way of Jean Sibelius, Alfred Schnittke, and Mikis Theodorakis. Rodrigo is always eager to bring the textures of his compositions to all who venture to hear the voice of his hands in a dialectal exchange that transforms musician and audience.

La gaviota– Essay no. 1 for orchestra

The song La gaviota (The Seagull), by Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, is used as a main theme for development in this orchestral essay. It is an hommage to this poet and musician, as well as a personal statement about my Cuban heritage and the sense of exile as a Hispanic. This is the first movement for an orchestral suite that will serve as a testament to my search for truth through identity; it offers a message about struggle vis-à-vis peace and reconciliation.

Silvio explained to me that he wrote the song La gaviota upon his return from Angola, where he lent his revolutionary efforts by providing music to the soldiers from the Cuban front that supported the natives in their fight for independence. He composed the song after his war experience and from having contemplated the flight of a seagull as a metaphor for the passing by of life. This piece is meant to convey an embodiment of the seagull by the orchestra. It grows from a thematic cell borrowed from Silvio and is then filtered through the prisms of personal experiences, which are conveyed through secondary musical quotations. The piece ends with an orchestration of the natural song of a seagull, giving proper form through a circular closing, as a journey that is distilled back to its purest essence.

The references heard throughout – such as Cuban songs that my grandparents sang, a piece by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer, and textures derived from Latin and African rhythms- are presented as spectral echoes that undergo the “textural” variations. The soundscape may be experienced similarly to how our memories come in and out of phase, or at times even overlap, at different points in our lives.

As a pianist, Chen Yihan has received recognitions such as being the Grand Prize winner of the Cincinnati World Piano Competition, the winner of the New World Youth Symphony Orchestra Young Artist Competition, etc.

Chen Yihan is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in composition at Princeton University and holds a master’s degree in composition from the Juilliard School and bachelor’s degrees in composition and piano from the Jacobs School of Music, having studied with Samuel Adler, Claude Baker, Arnaldo Cohen, Don Freund, P.Q. Phan, Christopher Rouse, and Sven-David Sandström, Aaron Travers, among others.

SPIRITUS
Breathing the spirit of this world,
I’m grateful to Heaven above.

呼吸萬物的氣息
感恩上天

Photo Credit: Li Qi

His music has also been performed by eighth blackbird, Quator Bozzini and members of Ensemble Dal Niente, among others. He began his musical studies on trumpet and piano in Reston Virginia and has also studied violin and viola with members of The Spektral Quartet in Chicago.

Needlepoint
This piece was inspired by the craft of needlepoint, in which different-colored yarns are stitched onto a stiff canvas to produce a pattern or image. What inspires me about this art form are the contrasts it contains: between the flexible strands of yarn and the rigid canvas and between the small complex patterns that combine to form larger shapes and images. Throughout the work, small melodic threads are stitched onto a slowly-evolving harmonic grid. Dynamic swells produce rapid changes between the foreground and background, while stark tempo changes create a sense of ebb and flow as the music sometimes surges forward and sometimes seems to be held back against its will. Essentially, this piece stems from my love for orchestral performance and from the sonic complexity that emerges when a multitude of small sounds come together to form a coherent musical whole.

Photo Credit: Phillip Sossenheimer

inti loves reading poetry, particularly Danez Smith and Joy Harjo. She also curates for score follower, an online archive championing universal access to contemporary musics. inti honors her Quechua grandmother, who was the only woman butcher on the whole plaza central and used to fight men with a machete.

Symphony for the Body
Dedicated to Pauline Oliveros 

Symphony for the Body focuses on the player. The principles of individual choice and agency are core to compositional structure, while the natural rhythms of each performer are highlighted throughout the work. The graphic nature of the score encourages free interpretation of articulation, register, and timing. The piece works to deconstruct hierarchies within the orchestra, creating opportunities written in for each instrumental family to facilitate or lead a movement. Players are encouraged to individually choose key elements of music, such as register, duration, and pitch within comfortable parameters while utilizing the natural resonant qualities of the instruments themselves. Inspired from the work of Pauline Oliveros, Symphony for the Body is driven by the rise and fall of breath, communal listening, and a freedom to choose your own path through its seven movements.

Photo credit: Ella Joklik

Recent honors include the American Prize in Orchestral music, Libby Larsen Prize, Otto R. Stahl Memorial Award, PUBLIQ Access, Florence String Quartet Call for Scores, Juventas Ensemble Call for Scores, RedNote New Music Composition Competition, among many others. Jihyun is currently pursuing DMA in Composition at Cornell University as a Sage Fellowship recipient. Jihyun previously earned MM degree in Composition from Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University while serving as an Associate Instructor in Music Theory, and BM degree in Composition from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.

A Tramp in the Assembly Line

The movie, Modern Times (1936), is a comedy film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin. The “Tramp” character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. In the movie, he suffers a nervous break-down from ever-so-hardworking machines, makes clumsy mistakes that got him imprisoned, then when he is out of the prison he participates in the worker’s protest, meets the love of his life which ends up on both fleeing out of town, and so on. Despite the satire is conveyed underneath, the story is filled with dance and humor and eventually ends with a hopeful message.

My intention is not about conveying the message of Modern Times. Rather, I wanted to depict the scenes that were left with me with strong impressions: the rotating motion of the conveyor belt; the regular-pulsed machinery sound from the factory; the clown-like walking gesture of the character “Tramp”; and black-and-white scenes without sound. Also, there were other inspirations I had from the movie, such as the old big-band version of the song “Caravan” (although it was never quoted in the actual movie), and the image of a person looking into the Kinetoscope. With these selected scenes, I wanted to create a musical panorama – enumerating it with equal importance and independence, instead of a single plot with a logical flow. As the musical ideas shift from one to another, a sense of discontinuity can be found between the sections.

In the movie, the character “Tramp” functions as a medium to put together different stories into single plot. In my work, a consistent pulse in the background, an oscillation of notes, and a limited pitch material act as apparatuses to bind the piece into a single whole.

Upcoming projects include a mono-opera based on the 2nd century poem Ornithogonia – a predecessor to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, about transformations of humans into birds – with the soprano and double bass duo Confluss, and an auxiliary percussion suite for Michael Barranco. This summer, Aaron will attend the Bowdoin International Music Festival where he’ll work with American Composers Orchestra Artistic Director, Derek Bermel.

Originally from St. Paul, Minnesota, Aaron earned his BA in music from Grinnell College in Iowa, where he studied composition with Eric McIntyre and John Rommereim. He will receive his MM in composition from the Yale School of Music this May, where his teachers included Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, Hannah Lash, and Christopher Theofanidis.

In Between

In Between takes its inspiration from movies about making movies, like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, or Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. In these films, the lives of fictitious filmmakers “off-set” often become intermingled with the film they’re attempting to make. In Between takes this premise as a jumping-off point, and approaches the orchestra like a crew of filmmakers. Specifically, the whip – a percussion instrument that makes a distinctive whack – stands in for the director’s clapperboard. Every time the whip is sounded, it signifies an “action” for the filming to begin, or a “cut” for the filming to stop. The musical characters that take place during the “action” and “cut” sequences come into conflict with each other, evoking the tension and inner turmoil that frequently accompany the artistic process. The title refers to what happens in between “takes,” and the inevitable merging of off- and on-set.  

Photo credit: Eric Snoza