Modern Music Ensemble

The Modern Music Ensemble (Cristina Valdés, director) performs music by pioneering experimental composer George Lewis, faculty composers William Dougherty and Melia Watras, and world premieres by UW student composers Eddie Mospan, Nicholas Mendonsa, Justin Zeitlinger, and Arshia Askari in this year-end performance.

Program

[IIIIIIIIII] for quartet and mixed media -  Justin Zeitlinger (b. 2000)
Cameron DeLuca, bass clarinet; Cole Henslee, tuba; Taylor DeCastro, violin; Ella Kalinichenko, piano

Acadian Storm* - Eddie Mospan (b. 2001)
Rachel Reyes, alto flute; Cameron DeLuca, bass clarinet; Cole Henslee, tuba; Giulia Rosa, violin; Taylor DeCastro, viola; Olivia Hsu, piano; Tyler Smith, percussion

Overture of Unsupervised Logic* - Nicholas Mendonsa (b. 1984)
Cameron DeLuca, bass clarinet; Cole Henslee, tuba; Taylor DeCastro, violin; Chris Young, cello; Nicholas Mendonsa, baritone guitar; Ella Kalinichenko, piano; Tyler Smith, percussion

a splash quite unnoticed* - Arshia Ashari (b. 2001)
Cassidy Cheong, voice; Rachel Reyes, flute; Cameron DeLuca, clarinet; Cole Henslee, tuba; Taylor DeCastro, violin; Chris Young, cello; Ella Kalinichenko, piano

⎯  Intermission⎯

a stillness of zero sensation (2015) -  William Dougherty  (b. 1988)
Rachel Reyes, flute; Cameron DeLuca, bass clarinet; Giulia Rosa, violin; Chris Young, cello;   Olivia Hsu, piano; Tyler Smith, percussion

Schumann Resonances for clarinet and piano (2015/2025)* - Melia Watras (b. 1969)
Cameron DeLuca, clarinet; Ella Kalinichenko, piano

Hexis, for sextet (2013) - George Lewis (b. 1952)
Rachel Reyes, flutes; Cameron DeLuca, clarinets; Taylor DeCastro, violin; Chris Young, cello; Ella Kalinichenko, piano; Tyler Smith, percussion

* = world premiere

Program Notes

Acadian Storm
The concept for this piece emerged in the summer of 2024, while I was at the Pierre Monteux festival near Acadia National Park. While I was there, I had the opportunity to experience two remarkably intense thunderstorms. Having grown up in Seattle, I was used to rain, but I had rarely encountered a true downpour like the ones I witnessed that summer. I found myself looking and listening for patterns in the rain and thunder, as if an event of such magnitude had to be driven by a logical mechanism. There, of course, isn’t a mathematical pattern to rain, but it still seemed at times that the structure I was expecting was nearly discernible, just barely beyond the capability of my perception. I tried to recreate the experience of listening in this way with this piece. It is based on a rotating rhythmic pattern. If you listen carefully enough, you might be able to predict how the pattern will change. But you are also free to listen to the piece in a relaxed way, allowing your mind to wander freely among any of the sounds you hear.
-Eddie Mospan

Overture of Unsupervised Logic
Like my most recent pieces, I abandoned multiple preliminary iterations of the ideas herein before writing this version in the final two weeks before I aimed to submit it. Many of my colleagues have produced beautiful, impossibly deep and detailed renderings of concepts and narratives, and I honestly sometimes feel inadequate in comparison. But I’m ultimately about the sound and sensation, all this and nothing more. And I’ve continued to embrace the feeling that I don’t actually need an articulated concept in order to render my engagement with this world. I’m here to create spaces simultaneously tactile and ghostly. This piece is both conflict and a culmination, an embrace and a war with certain techniques my esteemed professors have been pushing me to develop, namely an organicist approach to thematic development. This piece is probably the least experimental I’ve done in this program, particularly after shelving its hyper-experimental second iteration. I went into this version with an organicist mindset, but it’s the 21st century, and I’m immutably digressive. Logic, instinct, pleasure, paralysis, meditation. Accessibility and inaccessibility, varying degrees of tonality, discomforted and unresolved, all existing for its own sake, its dualities threatening towards mutually assured destruction but, at least briefly, forming an uneasy alliance, the results ephemeral by their very necessity.
“Logic left unsupervised will eat itself” -someone
-Nicholas Mendonsa

a splash quite unnoticed
This piece was inspired by my exposure to William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ”a short poem based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of the same name. The music features this work juxtaposed with excerpts from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ”one of the most renowned poems of the twentieth century. This comparison of the two poems attempts to form a dialogue between Eliot’s first–person expressions of angst, as hidden in the corner of Bruegel’s frame, and Williams’ recounting of the painted farmer’s almost–comical indifference to them. While Eliot and Prufrock speak of having no choice but to make a choice, where every choice is ontologically just as (in)significant as the next choice, and ask for (but do not want to hear) an answer to their dreaded “What is it?”, Williams and Bruegel whisper in response that, perhaps, the answer is hardly of any importance at all, and that one’s sense of insignificance is far less significant than one would like to admit! Although this rebuttal is an attractive one, it can just as well be no more than a naïve romanticization. But, even so, I believe that in those moments when one reaches the realization that yet another life has been measured out with coffee spoons, Icarus’ neglected struggles can be a reminder of the consolation there is to find within the magnificent embrace of unimportance.
-Arshia Ashari

a stillness of zero sensation (2015)
Written specifically for Jan Krzywicki and the Temple New Music Ensemble in 2015, a stillness of zero sensation is a work that engages with delicate, imperfect, and unstable sounds. The title, taken from a particularly harrowing (and poetic) passage in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, describes the moment immediately before a drug addict, going through withdrawal from cough syrup, has a seizure on a subway train caused by a severe allergic reaction to the scent of fellow passenger’s deodorant: “He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.” The work’s harmony is based entirely on seven bars of J.S. Bach’s Fugue in A major BWV 864 from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier. This seven bar excerpt – one that lasts about 10 seconds in most recordings – was time-stretched to encompass the entire 13-minute duration of the piece. Each chord slowly melts into the next, subverting the inherently teleological nature of Bach’s harmonic practice. And yet, even at such extreme lengths, the sense of tension and release, which is so much a part of tonal harmony, is still subtly present. Rather than treating the arrival of each chord as a focal point though, it is the space in-between—a vast world unto itself—that this work most seeks to explore.
-William Dougherty

Schumann Resonances for clarinet and piano (2015/2025)
In 2025, Cristina Valdés, my extraordinary colleague and director of the Modern Music Ensemble at the University of Washington, asked me if I would like to work with her and her group. She suggested that I make a transcription of my piece Schumann Resonances (originally for viola and piano) for the clarinetist and pianist to perform. Cristina cited well-known shared viola/clarinet repertoire from the past. For violists, the Brahms transcriptions of his clarinet sonatas are a fulcrum of our canon. Resonating Schumann for the clarinet seems fitting. Dedicated to the marvelous musical explorers Cristina Valdés, clarinetist Cameron DeLuca and pianist Ella Kalinichenko.
-Melia Watras

George Lewis: Hexis, for sextet (2013)
This is the third in a series of pieces I’ve composed that, like Tractatus and Mnemosis (both 2012), explore notions of temporality and historical change. William Peterson interprets the 1st-century Roman rhetorician Quintilian’s use of the Greek word hexis as describing “the fixed tendency that results from repeated acts. ”As classical scholar Glyn P. Norton has observed, “Just as kairos, in the Aristotelian tradition, defines how we respond ethically to contingent events, so hexis retains a similar ethical value by showing how what we do, rather than paste itself to a kind of tensile, modular ethics recalling Stoic firmitas, is conditioned largely by our behavioral suppleness. ” In both the writings of Quintilian and Pliny’s Letters, hexis becomes a hallmark of superior rhetorical extemporization--improvisation. In Hexis, it is the listener who improvises rather than the performers; the work is meant to manifest a behavioral suppleness that encourages us to catch the bus and go along for the ride, unburdened by teleologies, motivic elaboration, or global form. All three pieces draw inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche’s classic 1882 conception of the eternal recurrence, and proposition 6.4311 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Both philosophers treat history, memory and experience as existentially recursive, allowing progress to coexist with stasis, an apparent paradox that this piece confronts.
-George Lewis

Director Biography