WIRED:
An Electroacoustic Evening
The Old Church
Monday, September 18
1422 SW 11th Ave, Portland, OR 97201
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Featuring a remarkable program of current composers, the brilliance and extensive range of electroacoustic chamber music is explored through works by composers Eve Beglarian, Hannah Ishizaki, Annie Gosfield, Kamala Sankaram, Adina Izarra, and Kaija Saariaho.
Composers (left to right): Eve Beglarian, Hannah Ishizaki, Annie Gosfield, Kamala Sankaram & Kaija Saariaho
PROGRAM
Kaija Saariaho - Vent nocturne (2006)
Kenji Bunch, viola & electronics
Hannah Ishizaki - Hymnus (2021)
Inés Voglar Belgique & Shanshan Zeng, violins; Kenji Bunch, viola; Nancy Ives, cello; Chris Kim, bass & electronic tape
Adina Izarra - Luvina (1992)
Amelia Lukas, bass flute
- INTERMISSION -
Eve Beglarian - In Huts and On Journeys (2017)
Kenji Bunch, spoken voice & mobile phones
Annie Gosfield - Burn Again with a Low Blue Flame (2011)
Nancy Ives, cello & electronics
Kamala Sankaram - The Tree (2019)
Amelia Lukas, flute; Kirt Peterson, clarinet; Inés Voglar Belgique, violin; Kenji Bunch, viola; Nancy Ives, cello; Monica Ohuchi, piano & fixed electronics
Clockwise left to right: Inés Voglar Belgique, violin; Michael Roberts, percussion; Kenji Bunch, viola; Amelia Lukas, flute; Nancy Ives, cello; Monica Ohuchi, piano
Program Notes & Artist Biographies
Vent nocturne
Kaija Saariaho
PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER
The idea for Vent nocturne (‘Night Wind’) first occurred to me while I was reading a bilingual edition on the poems of Georg Trakl. This synchronicity of the two languages - German and French - led me to muse on the relationship between the viola and electronics.
The work is in two parts: Sombres mirroirs (‘Dark Mirrors’) and Soupirs de l'obscur (‘Breaths of the Obscure’). These, as their names suggest, focus first on symmetrical thinking and then on the variation of the glissando, not unlike a sigh, that rounds off the phrases.
To me the sound of the viola has always suggested that of breathing, which, along with the wind, became a major element of the electronic part.
BIOGRAPHY
Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. She studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics.
Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-nineties she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as the operas L’Amour de Loin, Adriana Mater and Emilie. Around the operas there have been other vocal works, notably the ravishing Château de l’âme (1996), Oltra mar (1999), Quatre instants (2002), True Fire (2014). The oratorio La Passion de Simone, portraying the life and death of the philosopher Simone Weil, formed part of Sellars’s international festival ‘New Crowned Hope’ in 2006/07. The chamber version of the oratorio was premiered by La Chambre aux echos at the Bratislava Melos Ethos Festival in 2013.
Saariaho has claimed the major composing awards in The Grawemeyer Award, The Wihuri Prize, The Nemmers Prize,The Sonning Prize, The Polar Music Prize. In 2018 she was honoured with the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In 2015 she was the judge of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Always keen on strong educational programmes, Kaija Saariaho was the music mentor of the 2014-15 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and was in residence at U.C. Berkeley Music Department in 2015.
Saariaho continues to collaborate for the stage. Only The Sound Remains, her most recent opera collaboration with Peter Sellars, was premiered in Amsterdam in 2016. In the same year her first opera L'Amour de Loin was presented in its New York premiere by the Metropolitan Opera in a new production by Robert Le Page. The Park Avenue Armory and New York Philharmonic presented a celebration of her orchestral music with visual accompaniment. February 2017 saw Paris come alive with her work when she was featured composer of Radio France Festival Presences.
Her new opera, Innocence, will be premiered in July 2021 at Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix- en-Provence.
Hymnus
Hannah Ishizaki
PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER
Hymnus draws its inspiration by the chant, “Ut Queant Laxis,” famously employed by Guido de Arezzo to label the initial six solfege syllables: Ut (now commonly called do), re, mi, fa, sol, and la. In this chant, each of these syllables marks the beginning of a new musical phrase, rising one note at a time. This piece interweaves the original chant tune with electronic samples of stringed instruments. Throughout most of the composition, the chant remains hidden, then it emerges out of a chaotic cluster of notes. Ultimately, the full chant appears at the conclusion of the piece, played by soloists in the ensemble.
BIOGRAPHY
Hannah Ishizaki (b. 2000) is a composer and sound artist based in New York City. Her music seeks to foster connections between musicians and the audience through the explorations of the physicality of music performance. Hannah finds inspiration in the process of composition, leading her to experiment with a wide range of instruments and sound generating methods—from acoustic instruments in an orchestra to digital sensors to rocks and zippers. Immersed in the world of collaboration, Hannah has worked with dancers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists, to connect the seemingly unconnected and create innovative and multidisciplinary projects.
In 2017, she became the youngest woman ever to have a world premiere with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO). Since then, the PSO has continued to perform Hannah’s orchestral work, “City of Bridges,” and Hannah has frequently worked with the Musicians of the PSO. Hannah was a featured composer on the episode of PSO’s Front Row: “Finding Your Song,” which was nominated for a Mid-Atlantic Regional Emmy Award.
Hannah’s work has been recognized throughout the United States and Internationally, and her compositions have been performed by renowned musicians and ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, The Juilliard Orchestra, and the National Sawdust Ensemble, Karen Gomyo, Nathan Meltzer, Kevin Zhu, Mira Wang, Guy Johnston, Sterling Elliot, Carlos Jiménez Fernández, and Umi Garrett. Hannah is a National Sawdust Hildegard Commission Winner '23, generously made possible by the Onassis Foundation and the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. In 2022, Hannah was selected as one of four winners of Juilliard’s Orchestral Composition Competition, and her work, “Fractured Transformations” was premiered by the Juilliard Orchestra with Maestro Jeffrey Milarsky on April 18, 2022 in Alice Tully Hall. Hannah was an inaugural recipient of the Blueprint Fellowship with National Sawdust and the Toulmin Foundation in 2019, culminating in a performance of her collaboration with Cyrie Topete for Solo Dancer at National Sawdust in November of 2019. Hannah was also named a 2021 Toulmin Creator in collaboration with National Sawdust and the Center for Ballet and the Arts.
Recently, she completed a residency in the Henriquez (“The Boat”) Studio at Banff, where she researched and conceptualized for an evening-length work for the sounds of dance. In the summer of 2022, Hannah is the artist-in-residence for the Stiftung für Kunst und Musik, Dresden, writing a variety of chamber, orchestral, and vocal works based on the deconstruction of words and meaning. During her time in Dresden, she completed a String Octet that was premiered at the closing concert of the Moritzburg Festival.
In addition to composing, Hannah has also organized and created multidisciplinary arts performances and organizations. Recently, she organized the Amplified Currents Festival of the Arts Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 editions, which focused on highlighting the process of collaboration. She has also created “See Music; Hear Art,” a collaboration between Juilliard composers and Cooper Union visual artists to create collaborative works, which was presented in a sold-out performance and gallery.
Hannah also is an active violinist, producer, and conductor. Hannah has studied with violinists Areta Zhulla, Ronald Copes, and Hong-Guang Jia. At the age of 16, Hannah made her Heinz Hall conducting debut as the winner of the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra’s conducting competition, judged by Leonard Slatkin. Previous composition teachers have included Robert Beaser, David Ludwig, and Chris Massa. Hannah is currently in the studios of Andrew Norman for composition and Areta Zhulla and Ronald Copes for violin at the Juilliard School, where she is the proud recipient of and first composer to receive a Kovner Fellowship.
Luvina
Adina Izarra
PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER
Commissioned by the Venezuelan flutist Luis Julio Toro in 1992 for one of his recording trips into a cave, the title comes from Juan Rulfo's homonym short story and refers to the sound of silence. An excerpt is included at the top of the score:
- Qué es? - me dijo
- qué es qué? le pregunté
- eso, el ruido ese
- Es el silencio
BIOGRAPHY
Adina Izarra, a Venezuelan composer, living in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where she teaches at Universidad de las Artes. She is presently composing with live electronics and live visuals. She has a duo with Rubén Riera who plays plucked early music instruments and the guitar. They both do remixes of early music and also their own compositions. Adina just received a Magister in digital, postproduction of audiovisuals, at ESPOL, Guayaquil and she also has a B.A.hons and a DPhil from York University, UK.
In Huts and On Journeys
Eve Beglarian
PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER
In Huts and on Journeys is a piece for spoken voice and as many mobile phones as available. Everyone within sound range of the spoken voice performer can participate. Please play the sound file that corresponds to the month of your birth. If there is a playback system in the space, you can seed the space with an additional optional stereo mix I will provide. The sound files don’t need to be strictly coordinated: one person – perhaps the spoken word performer – starts, then the others can press play whenever they feel the urge to join in. The spoken word performer can play their birth month sound file, or if there is no playback system, they can play the stereo mix file.
In Huts and on Journeys is part of my ongoing project, A Book of Days. Please visit May 19th to hear a recording I made in thanks to Lainie and Herb Alpert on the occasion of receiving the Alpert Award in the Arts in 2017.
BIOGRAPHY
According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” A 2023 winner of the Arts and Letters Award for “a spectacular body of work that innovates and takes enormous risks,” she is also a 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” and has been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.”
Her current projects include a solo piano piece about Emily Dickinson responding to Ives’ Concord Sonata for the pianist Donald Berman, a project about Native-Settler relations growing from her replication by bicycle of an exploratory trip of the Great Lakes made by Henry Schoolcraft in 1820, and a piece for 24 basses in a grove of trees, composed for Robert Black and friends. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times)
In 2009, “Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity. [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration.” (New York Times)
Beglarian’s chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, loadbang, Newspeak, the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble and individual performers including Maya Beiser, Lara Downes, Lucy Dhegrae, and Thomas Feng.
Highlights of Beglarian’s work in music theater includes music for Mabou Mines’ Obie-winning Dollhouse, Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, Choephorai, and Shalom Shanghai, all directed by Lee Breuer; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater’s production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng.
She has collaborated with choreographers including Ann Carlson, Robert LaFosse, Victoria Marks, Susan Marshall, David Neumann, Take Ueyama, and Megan Williams, and with visual and video artists including Cory Arcangel, Anne Bray, Vittoria Chierici, Barbara Hammer, Kevork Mourad, Shirin Neshat, Matt Petty, Bradley Wester, and Judson Wright.
Burn Again With A Low Blue Flame
Annie Gosfield
PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER
Burn Again with a Low Blue Flame is a work that was originally intended to be played twice: once as a simple tape piece, and then again as a piece for cello and electronics. The recorded element of the piece is almost identical, but the cellist becomes the focus for the second version, in a fully notated part that in turn blends, contrasts, and stands out from a recorded orchestra of strings, winds, and mechanical sounds.
I used recordings that I had made of a string quartet and a wind trio performing my music, specifically pieces that featured slow, gradual microtonal glissandi. I made samples of these slowly shifting pitches, looped the sounds and arranged them across a sampling keyboard so I could, in essence, play them live. I further refined the piece, experimenting with density and shifting pitch, and added less traditionally “musical” sources: recordings of a giant noisy truck that siphoned water one block from my home on a windy night, and a quick snippet of an old analog synthesizer. The piece varies from a one-note drone to dense melodic and harmonic figures, all made up of these samples. The slow glissandi become varied melodic figures as the speed of each individual sample is altered, shifted in pitch, and layered.
This commission for the A*devantgarde festival was inspired by home recording. I wanted to bring my own notated music (in the form of sampled recordings) back to my home in order to approach it from a more abstract, textural context. I added mechanical sounds, and gave all of the musical materials equal importance, treating both orchestral instruments and street sounds as maleable sources in my home recording. Extraneous noise is an important element as well: there are crashes, bangs, and wind sounds in my home recordings that find their way into the finished work. Having the piece performed a second time with a cellist brings it back to the realm of notated music, but set against an abstract background of the sounds of a composer’s natural environment, a symphony of orchestral instruments, machines, and street noise.
BIOGRAPHY
Annie Gosfield is a New York-based composer dubbed "a one woman Hadron collider” by the BBC, and "a master of musical feedback" by the New York Times. Gosfield has created site-specific work for factories, researched jammed radio signals, and composed opera, chamber, and orchestral music. Recent projects include the multi-site opera War of the Worlds with Yuval Sharon, Sigourney Weaver, and the L.A. Philharmonic; a song cycle adapted from the opera, titled The Secret Life of Planets: Heavenly Bodies and Earthly Gossip premiered by the LA Phil; Detroit Industry, a large-scale chamber work inspired by and performed under Diego Rivera’s murals; and a residency sponsored by the League of American Orchestras.
Annie's music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of found sounds, noise, and machinery. The New York Times wrote "Ms. Gosfield’s choice of sounds — which on this occasion included radio static, the signals transmitted by the Soviet satellite Sputnik I, and recordings of Hurricane Sandy — are never a mere gimmick. Her extraordinary command of texture and timbre means that whether she is working with a solo cello or with the ensemble she calls her 21st-century avant noisy dream band, she is able to conjure up a palette of saturated and heady hues." Annie works closely with some of new music’s finest interpreters, and performs with her own group, mixing electronics with acoustic and electric instruments.
Gosfield has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy in Berlin, and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Annie has four ambitious portrait albums on the Tzadik label, which feature music that ranges from a chamber cello concerto, to EWA7, an industrial-inspired concert-length piece for her band. Gosfield was a visiting lecturer at Columbia University from 2109-2021, and has taught composition at Princeton University, CalArts, UT Austin, Indiana University, and held the Milhaud Chair of composition at Mills College in 2003 and 2005.
The Tree
Kamala Sankaram
PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER
The Tree is dedicated to the memory of my dear sister, Susheela Sankaram, who passed away on 9/19/19 at the age of 39.
BIOGRAPHY
Praised as “one of the most exciting opera composers in the country” (Washington Post), composer Kamala Sankaram moves freely between the worlds of experimental music and contemporary opera. Recent commissions include works for the Glimmerglass Festival, Washington National Opera, the PROTOTYPE Festival, and Creative Time, among others. Kamala is known for her operas fusing Indian classical music with the operatic form, including Thumbprint, A Rose, Monkey and Francine in the City of Tigers, and the forthcoming Jungle Book. Also known for her work pushing the boundaries of the operatic form, recent works include The Last Stand, a 10-hour opera created for the trees of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, Only You Will Recognize the Signal, a serial space opera performed live over the internet, Looking at You, a techno-noir featuring live datamining of the audience and a chorus of 25 singing tablet computers, all decisions will be made by consensus, a short absurdist opera performed live over Zoom, and The Parksville Murders, the world’s first virtual reality opera.
As a performer, Kamala has been hailed as "an impassioned soprano with blazing high notes" (Wall Street Journal). A frequent collaborator with Anthony Braxton, she has premiered his operas Trillium E and Trillium J, as well as appearing on his 12-hour recording GTM (Syntax) 2017. Other notable collaborations include Meredith Monk’s Atlas with the LA Philharmonic, The Wooster Group’s LA DIDONE (Kaaitheater, Brussels, Edinburgh International Festival, Rotterdam Schouberg, Grand Théâtre de la Ville, Luxembourg, St. Anne’s Warehouse, NY, REDCAT, Los Angeles), and the PROTOTYPE Festival’s production of her composition THUMBPRINT (Baruch Performing Arts, NY, REDCAT, Los Angeles). Kamala is the leader of Bombay Rickey, an operatic Bollywood surf ensemble whose accolades include two awards for Best Eclectic Album from the Independent Music Awards, the 2018 Mid-Atlantic touring grant, and appearances on WFMU and NPR. Awards, grants and residencies: Jonathan Larson Award, NEA ArtWorks, MAP Fund, Opera America, HERE Artist Residency Program, the MacDowell Colony, and the Watermill Center.
Dr. Sankaram holds a Ph.D. from the New School and is currently a member of the composition faculty at SUNY Purchase.
A special THANK YOU to Ronni Lacroute for sponsoring this concert season.
Fear No Music is also supported by grants from: New Music USA, Oregon Arts Commission, Multnomah County Cultural Coalition, and Regional Arts and Culture Council.