The Composition Studio (Huck Hodge, director) and the UW Modern Music Ensemble (Cristina Valdés, director) present a program of works by Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Katherine Balch, John Cage, and student composers of the UW Composition Program.
Program
Ghastly Veneer of Benevolence (2023): Nicholas Mendonsa (b. 1984)
Nick Wees, trumpet, electronics; Nick Mendonsa, electric guitar, electronics
Durations 3 for Violin, Tuba, and Piano (1963): Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
Justin Zeitlinger, violin; Cole Henslee, tuba; Alex Fang, piano
Ext. En route — Evening for Computer-Manipulated Sound (2023): Arshia Ashari (b. 2001)
Composition No. 1 “dona nobis pacem” (1971): Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006)
Rachel Reyes, piccolo; Cole Henslee, tuba; Alex Fang, piano
INTERMISSION
musica spolia (2021): Katherine Balch (b. 1991)
Rachel Reyes, piccolo & flute; Justin Zeitlinger, violin; Alex Fang, piano; Melissa Wang, percussion
Composition for Three Voices (1934): John Cage (1912-1992)
Rachel Reyes, flute; Alyssa Hironaka, piano; Melissa Wang, percussion
Your Past Self (is Dead) for voice and percussion (2023): Melissa Wang (b. 1999)
Rose Martin, voice; Taryn Marks & Melissa Wang, percussion
Book One: Water for fixed media (2023): Taylor James Bellamy (b. 1993)
Four Systems (1953): Earle Brown (1926-2002)
Rachel Reyes, flute; Justin Zeitlinger, violin; Cole Henslee, tuba; Alyssa Hironaka, piano; Melissa Wang, percussion
Program Notes
Mendonsa, most often under his stage name Nick Nihil, has been active in the Seattle music scene in the past two decades as a songwriter, composer, producer, and guitarist, as a leader and a sideman in both original and cover projects ranging from avant-garde jazz to Prince tributes. His highlights include several KEXP appearances, a Tokyo tour, several solo releases, multiple 48 Hr film scores, and upcoming score for a film by members of UW's Lux Film Club. As such, he has also pulled tens of thousands of espresso shots and wishes to never do so again except for him and his wife, Julia. Therefore, after having to leave college twice previously, he has returned to finally finish his degree in Music Composition.
A Ghastly Veneer of Benevolence
O, that the slightest worm on the floor
of my immaculate den,
so meditative that the molecules themselves
levitate rather than strive,
Break
my hereto fore
un encumb 'rd
re pose
Be his countenance vivacious or
virulent
Should bloom inside of my
sleep's sleep
-Emily Sloughton
Durations (1960-1961) is a suite of five pieces for different instrumental combinations; in each, the instrumentalists begin simultaneously, then determine the duration of their interventions within a fixed general time. In each part very diverse qualities of timbre are explored. In Duration III (1961) for violin, tuba and piano, after a first chord played simultaneously by the three instrumentalists, the duration of each subsequent sound is left to the appreciation of each one. Numbers placed between sounds indicate times of silence. We can observe within section III a process which could be compared to a weaving process, and which we will find in the notion of pattern. During the first fifteen chords, three pitches (F sharp, G, A flat), in different registers, are exchanged in turn by the musicians, which causes both an impression of stasis (underlined by the repetitions of each sound) and subtle modulations brought about by changes in register and timbre. This piece differs from other Durations in particular in that it includes several movements, the last being marked “fast”, which always remains unusual for Feldman.
Jean-Yves Bosseur, extract from: Morton Feldman, Écrits et Paroles, L’Harmattan, 1998
Every now and then, I find myself at a particular place and time in which for a very brief period, the space between the me and the it disappears. I marvel at what is before me and I learn each time, as if for the first time, that this is all there is; whether in impression or in idea. This is the answer to Mr. Prufrock’s dreaded “What is it?”. This is the evening, morning, and afternoon. It is all beautiful, all frightening, at times serene, and sometimes, a little sad. And it is what I attempt to capture within this work in the form of an abstraction.
The sonic material within this piece are derived entirely from raw recordings of such commonly found sounds as that of cars traveling by, passing footsteps atop the pavement, and clattering dishes heard from a kitchen window facing a courtyard. Such sounds belong to the mundane. They comprise in part the minutiae of everyday life and function as the soundtrack to an ostensibly insignificant scene within some grand narrative. And yet, they are the very organic matter from which this work was born. Thus, in that regard, this piece serves as a recognition of the seemingly unimportant. It is an attempt to dilate the life within every fleeting moment, to prolong the presence of that which will inevitably come to an end, and to hear and maybe understand what is now—perhaps, in the hopes of evading an ultimate and irrevocable regret.
The sacred is explicitly manifested in Galina Ustvolskaya’s work through prayer, as reflected in Composition No. 1 — Dona nobis pacem… “The soul of orthodoxy is in the gift of prayer,” Vasily Rozanov once wrote. A prayer entirely imbued with a feeling of being powerless, limited. Symbolically, the motif flowing through Compositions No. 1 presents six notes corresponding to the silent inner pronunciation of Dona nobis pacem. Dona nobis pacem (“Grant us peace”) concludes the Mass: the litany of its first movement is based on the initial motif of the tuba, then disembodies through repetitions, contrapuntal superpositions, amplifications, reductions and compressions of the original theme. After the second movement, essentially entrusted to the tuba’s low C and to clusters at the piano, the third movement is very slow, interrupted by a short brusqueness, “espressivissimo”, briefly recalling the beginning of the work and presenting three harmonies on the piano, a tuba limited to low F# and a flute, trapped in the interval of a diminished fourth or major third, which defines the relationship between the extreme notes of the motif.
By Societe de Musique Contemporaine du Quebec
musica spolia seeks to capture the mischief, playfulness, and microcosmic world-building of childhood. I wrote this piece when living in Rome, Italy and found my own meanderings around the city as reminiscent of my dawn-til-dusk explorations of the desert canyon outside my house growing up in San Diego, California. The city of Rome is a pastel rendering of the brown and sage-green scraggly desert flora of my childhood. It is overgrown with spolia, like the campanula and ivy that spill out of the walls, statues and ornate treasures decorate the ancient monuments haphazardly, sometimes frantically. These found, recycled, or stolen materials and their misplaced, agitated energy find their way into this short piece, which I composed like my childhood hunter-gather self, collecting scraps and mementos from miniature adventures. This piece was co-commissioned by L’Instant Donné and Young Concert Artists, Inc., and exists as both a trio for flute, viola, and piano, and a quartet for flute, violin, piano, and percussion. It is dedicated with affection to Saori Furukawa and Anthony Trionfo.
By Katherine Balch
This piece was composed in Ojai, California, an idyllic San Fernando Valley community northwest of Los Angeles. The ranges of its instruments are specified as: I: d' - d"'; II: a - a"; and III: d - d". The title page of the manuscript score contains 24 measures of an unidentified work labeled "soprano-adagio," page 5 contains 7 measures of an unidentified work for brass along with two 12-tone rows used in its composition. Composition for 3 Voices is a chromatic composition dealing with the problem of maintaining extreme distances between the repetitions of individual tones of the twenty-five tone ranges of all three instruments.
By John Cage
Melissa Wang is a composer, educator, and percussionist. She received the Bachelor of Music with emphases in Percussion Performance and Instrumental Education at Northern Illinois University (NIU), under the direction of Dr. Gregory Beyer and Mr. Ben Wahlund. She received the Associate in Fine Arts in Music at the community college, College of DuPage (COD), under the direction of Mr. Ben Wahlund, Dr. Tom Tallman, Mr. Lee Kesselman, and Dr. Kenneth Paoli. Melissa is currently studying at the University of Washington (UW), focusing on Percussion Performance under the direction of Dr. Bonnie Whiting and Composition under the direction of Dr. Huck Hodge and Dr. Yiğit Kolat.
Your Past Self (is Dead) for three or more performers explores failing to let go of intrusive thoughts.
The score can be followed from here: tinyurl.com/WANGYPSID
Taylor is a 30 year old singer/chef/artist new to the Music Composition major at University of Washington. He has autism and fibromyalgia, which he feels are his superpowers when it comes to his creativity and unique perspectives in the many ways he approaches life.
His favorite things to compose so far have been film-style music and opera, and he dabbles in many other forms of art as well.
Program notes:
Spoken Word and Found Sound
“...to have elements exist in space...space as an infinitude of directions from an infinitude of points in space...to work (compositionally and in performance) to right, left, back, forward, up, down, and all points between...the score [being] a picture of this space at one instant, which must always be considered as unreal and/or transitory...a performer must set this all in motion (time), which is to say, realize that it is in motion and step into it...either sit and let it move or move through it at all speeds.” “[co-efficient of] intensity and duration [is] space forward and back.” The composition may be performed in any direction from any point in the defined space for any length of time and may be performed from any of the four rotational positions in any sequence. In a performance utilizing only three dimensions as active (vertical, horizontal, and time), the thickness of the event indicate the relative intensity and/or (where applicable instrumentally clusters. Where all four dimensions are active the relative thickness and length of events are functions of their conceptual position on a plane perpendicular to the vertical and horizontal plane of the score. In the latter case all of the characteristics of sound and their relationships to each other are subject to continual transformation and modification. It is primarily intended that performance be made directly from this graphic “implication” (one for each performer) and that no further preliminary defining of the events, other than an agreement as to total performance time, take place. Further defining of the event is not prohibited however, provided that the imposed determinate-system is implicit in the score and in these notes.
From Brown’s journal