Acclaimed new music group the Mivos Quartet, dubbed by the Chicago Reader“ one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles,” performs premieres by UW faculty composers Joël-François Durand and Huck Hodge and works by Ambrose Akinmusire and Chikako Morishita in this guest artist performance.
Program
Ambrose Akinmusire, “May Our Centers Hold” (2023)
Joël-François Durand, Quatuor à cordes no.3 (2023-24)
Intermission
Chikako Morishita, Doll Time (2019)
Huck Hodge, La gran soledad (2023)
in memoriam Francisco Iovino
I The sea devours our grids and our lives
II Monologue (in shadow)
III There’s a whispering immensity awake in these lifeless stones
IV Dialogue (with echo)
V1 Diacope (Anaphora / Anadiplosis) | V2 Burden | V3 Dactyls (en séance avec Rube Goldberg)
VI Epilogue (in apostrophe)
Program Notes
La gran soledad
in memoriam Francisco Iovino
I: I painted a motorcycle that I found on a beach half buried and covered with algae. I like how the things that people abandon deteriorate and become inhuman and beautiful. (Tomás Gonzalez, La luz dificil)
II: Death is a bad thing; that’s what the gods must think; otherwise they’d die too.
(Sappho, as quoted in Aristotle, Rhet.)
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
III: Lonely stillness / a cicada’s cry / seeping into the rocks (Matsuo Bashō)
IV: "From a mountain as high as this one," he said to himself,
"I shall be able to see the whole world at one glance, and all the people . . ."
But he saw nothing, save peaks of rock that were sharpened like needles.
"Good morning," he said courteously.
"Good morning--Good morning--Good morning," answered the echo.
"Who are you?" said the little prince.
"Who are you--Who are you--Who are you?" answered the echo.
"Be my friends. I am all alone," he said.
"I am all alone--all alone--all alone," answered the echo.
"What a strange planet!" he thought. "It is altogether dry, and altogether pointed,
and altogether harsh and forbidding. And the people have no imagination.
They repeat whatever one says to them . . .
On my planet I had a flower; she always was the first to speak . . ."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince)
There would be no love without echo. In myths, the guarantee of mercy was in the acceptance of sacrifices; but love, the after-image of the sacrificial act, pleads for this acceptance, if it is not to feel itself to be under a curse. […] Infatuated with technology, [people] project their hatred for the superfluous exertion of their existence onto the expenditure of the energy that pleasure requires as a moment of its being, all the way into its sublimations. In spite of the countless facilitations, their lives remain an absurd toil; and yet they have no patience for the squandering of energy in happiness, life’s secret. (Theodor W. Adorno, “Undeliverable” from Minima Moralia)
V: I’d like to see a forklift lift a crate of forks. It’d be so damn literal! (Mitch Hedberg)
VI: my vast solitude was suddenly filled with the entire universe (Tomás Gonzalez, La luz dificil)
La gran soledad — vast solitude — is a pervasive theme in La luz dificil by the Colombian writer Tomás Gonzalez. In the novel, David, an elderly painter rapidly descending into blindness, reflects on the death of his son some twenty years in the past. The narration shifts periodically across the decades in a way that disrupts the successive arrow of time and demonstrates that past memory and present experience continuously permeate one another. In his grief, David frames the world with a painter’s eye. At one point he recalls finding an abandoned motorcycle slowly disintegrating on a beach. This image of an inhuman beauty arising out of the conflux of rigidly mechanical design and fluid natural force is striking.
We might normally consider the capacity to experience beauty a distinctly human affair, what sets us apart from creatures whose only concern is mere survival. Similarly, we might think that strict, mechanical grids are characteristically inhuman. But nature does not show a preference for grids; it is we who find 90° angles to be somehow “right.” To celebrate the dissolution of grids is to come to terms with death, with the end of our distinctness from the world, with the return to inorganic nature. I suppose there is some beauty in this recognition, but it is a harsh beauty, a truly difficult light. I bring this up only as an attempt to work through the death of a close friend of mine. His death was sudden, and because his family could not access the contacts list on his phone, relying instead on social media platforms I had long since departed, I only learned of it after his funeral.
Michel de Montaigne, channeling Cicero, once wrote that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” The same could be said for composing music. Every piece is a life lived in miniature, an itinerary spanning the birth of new forms and their ultimate dissolution. And so it is with this piece, in which assorted musical grids pass over into oceanic textures. Along the way, the various movements resonate with writers who have been important to my life. Sappho’s shadow dwells in the fragment quoted by Aristotle and the meditations of Sylvia Plath, as the cello adumbrates the violin in the second movement. Movement three imagines stumbling upon the forest scene described by Bashō more than three centuries later, where if you listen closely, you might be able to hear the loneliness of the cicadas still murmuring in the rocks. The episode that follows reflects on the notion that love is as intangible as an echo, the presence of an absence, the “after-image of sacrifice.” Sappho’s shadow makes a final appearance in movement five; there is a certain pithy humor in her aphorism that reminds me of the laconic one-liner delivery of the late stand-up comic Mitch Hedberg. For me, the power of her words is in this elusive comedic quality, the way she wryly transforms the malaise of mortality into pleasure by virtue of the absurd. Perhaps Gonzalez had this sort of transformation in mind when he wrote “my vast solitude was suddenly filled with the entire universe.”
Biographies
Mivos Quartet
The Mivos Quartet, “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” (The Chicago Reader), is devoted to performing works of contemporary composers and presenting diverse new music to international audiences. Since the quartet's beginning in 2008 they have performed and closely collaborated with an ever-expanding group of international composers representing a wide aesthetic range of contemporary composition. Highlights during the 2022/23 season will include performances and residencies at Walker Arts Center with Cécile McLorin Salvant and Ambrose Akinmusire, UPenn, ECLAT Festival (DE), Columbia University, Peak Performances with Mary Halvorson, and the announcement of a new album of Steve Reich string quartets.
Mivos is invested in commissioning, premiering, and growing the repertoire of new music for string quartet, striving for rich collaborations with composers over extended periods of time. Recently, Mivos has collaborated on new works with Jeffrey Mumford (LA Philharmonic/Library of Congress), Michaela Catranis (Fondation Royaumont), Chikako Morishita (rainy days festival), George Lewis (ECLAT Festival Commission), Sam Pluta (Lucerne Festival Commission), Eric Wubbels (CMA Commission), Kate Soper, Scott Wollschleger, Patrick Higgins (Zs), and poet/musician Saul Williams. For this work and the continuation of it, the quartet was the recipient of the 2019 Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Prize for Interpreters of Contemporary Music.
Beyond expanding the string quartet repertoire, Mivos is committed to working with guest artists exploring multi-media projects and performing improvised music. Mivos has worked closely with artists such as Cécile McLorin Salvant (Ogresse), Ambrose Akinmusire (Origami Harvest), Ned Rothenberg, Timucin Sahin, Nate Wooley, and most recently guitarist, composer, and 2019 MacArthur Fellow, Mary Halvorson.
Mivos has performed to critical acclaim on prestigious series such as Noon to Midnight (USA), Lucerne Festival (CH), Jazz at Lincoln Center (USA), the New York Phil Biennial (USA), Wien Modern (AT), the Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (DE), rainy days festival (LU), Asphalt Festival (DE), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Shanghai New Music Week (CN), Música de Agora na Bahia (Brazil), Aldeburgh Music (UK), and Lo Spririto della musica di Venezia (IT).
In addition to their performance season, Mivos is committed to the education of young composers and string players, and is regularly the quartet in residence at the Creative Musicians Retreat at the Walden School (USA) and the Valencia International Performance Academy and Festival (ES). The quartet has conducted workshops at Columbia University, Harvard University, Boston University, UC Berkeley, US San Diego, Duke University, Royal Northern College of Music (UK), Shanghai Conservatory (China), University Malaya (Malaysia), Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Hong Kong Art Center, and MIAM University in Istanbul (Turkey) among others. Along with their work at educational institutions, Mivos grants the Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize, a yearly award to support the work of emerging and mid-career composers residing in the USA, and the I-Creation prize, a competition for composers of Chinese descent worldwide.
The members of Mivos are violinists Olivia De Prato and Maya Bennardo, violist Victor Lowrie Tafoya, and cellist Tyler J. Borden. Mivos operates as a non-profit organization dedicated to performing, commissioning, and collaborating on music being written today.