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Working Remotely with Katherine Young

"When does music happen if it's online?" For the past year, Katherine Young, like many other composers and musicians, has been wondering about the "liveness" of music when it cannot happen in a single physical space—but rather is fostered in multiple virtual spaces, often well beyond the moment of its performance. As an improviser as well as a composer, Young is attuned to the relational dynamics of music in real time, and her music, improvised, collaborated, and composed, often explores these dynamics in striking ways. During the past year, Young has explored many different modalities of working remotely that seek out new possibilities for asynchronous collaboration with fellow performers, commissioners, and ensembles. 

Although Young hasn't played music in person since March 2020, she has performed several streaming concerts—although, as she notes, the technology changes all the time. Several projects on which Young has been working for years have continued to evolve in the new landscape—often, Young notes, with surprising new possibilities afforded by working online. One example of this is Young's contribution to Long Beach Opera's "2020 Songbook" project, for which she composed a song that sets poetry by Chicago-based poet A. Martinez. Working on this project allowed Young to connect with many of the other composers who were also commissioned—a sense of virtual presence and community that Young says would not otherwise be possible for people so physically distant from each other. 

Young has also continued to work with violinist Olivia di Prato on her "I, A.M. – Artist Mother" project, in which di Prato has commissioned fellow artists who are also mothers to make improvisations and compositions that explore motherhood. Young says that unlike a traditional commission, for this work she has been receiving field recordings with di Prato, creating sequences in DAW software, and sending them back to di Prato to add more layers; working in this remote epistolary fashion, Young has created both a written score and fixed electronics. 

Young has also been working remotely with the saxophonist Patrick Statler on a new solo work for saxophone and electronics, commissioned with support from the Goethe Institut. For this work, Young and Statler have been working on a collaborative project in the DAW software Reaper, sharing audio files, arrangements, and other ideas back and forth. Young is also working on solo works for piano and accordion—possibly all of which could become a collection of solo works, or an ensemble piece for similar instrumentation. 

Young is also planning on a new kind of "live" performance that maintains social distance through the windows and speakers of a gallery in Chicago. For several years, Young has been developing a collaborative installation and improvisation performance, BoundaryMind, with violinist Linda Jankowska; it was set to premiere in May 2020 at Chicago's 6018 North. While the full performance will eventually happen once social distancing is not necessary, Young says that BoundaryMind will see a modified performance at Chicago's Roman Susan gallery, with visuals displayed in the gallery's window, and sound coming from speakers facing the street. 

Listening to Social (and Musical) Distance with Wang Lu

As the global COVID-19 pandemic continues to make live concerts with large audiences impossible, musicians and composers are faced with a unique opportunity to think carefully about the sociality of composition, performance, and listening: since sound can travel through physical space (and digital space), what can music mean, or do, in a time of social distance?

Wang Lu is a composer whose work has explored ideas of the distances of time, memory, and place—often evoking, recreating, altering, manifesting places and times from her own distant memories. The titular work on her recently-released album, An Atlas of Time, maps and remembers sound and space from her own past: the opening melody of a children’s television broadcast is reincarnated in the strangeness of the present; fragments of the ambitiously trans-historical "Internationale" struggle among instruments responding to its insistent reemergence. In this sense, Wang’s pre-COVID music was already exploring ideas of “social distance”: a kind of musical sociality between people that connects them through time and space. 

During the COVID era, Wang has had the opportunity to stage this kind of “distant musical sociality” through a residency as a Vanguard Young Composer in Residence at Chicago Opera Theater: a paradoxical residency that is at once physically present yet also largely virtual. The experience of working with music and theater is new to Wang, who says that it has changed the way she thinks about her role as the composer: not only is she working with performers and conductors, but now also a director and a dramaturg, all of whom increase the complexity of composing in musical time. Wang reflects: “Now I have to think about dramatic action, movement, breathing, how much time and space a person needs to express themselves… and to translate that into Sibelius, with its insistent metronome—it’s hard to translate time!”  

One example of how Wang is navigating this new dynamic is a series of four art songs she has composed for the singers of the Chicago Opera Theater—who, she reports, have been living in a “pod” and quarantining before rehearsals in order to continue their craft. In “The Everlasting Voices”, sung by bass-baritone Keanon Kyles, Wang translates the senses of time, distance, and memory she has developed in her works for chamber ensembles into a composition for a single voice—from extremely dense polyphony to the simple, modal writing of an a capella voce.  

Wang also brought this sense of a personal unfolding of time to her new work Like Clockwork, which was commissioned and premiered by the Seattle Modern Orchestra—entirely remotely. For this work, written with Beethoven’s 250th birthyear in mind, Wang created a score that includes guided improvisation, asking five performers to record themselves at home, listening to recordings of each other as they improvise, remembering what role Beethoven’s music played in their own musical development. “Some repertoire might be right on your fingertips, memories in your hands from training… each gesture moves through the next like a clock—it’s what retains a sense of time, clock and calendar.” In Like Clockwork, Wang meditates on her own memories: “like walking through an old conservatory building in china, where all of the practice rooms leak sound”, creating a spatial memory. 

In June 2021, Wang is scheduled to premiere a new work for The Crossing: a socially-distanced, outdoor performance for 24 singers, each equipped with their own personal microphone and speaker, allowing them to stand in a 170-foot-diameter circle. A concentric circle inside will contain loudspeakers, and inside that circle, pods of audience members will listen in the round. Wang says that this work, which will set poems from Forrest Gander’s 2018 Be With, will continue to explore topics of distance, connection, and mourning. “Intricate rhythm of response isn’t possible with physical distance. But like ‘mountain songs’ sung by distant lovers across valleys, with communication across physical distance, it makes private relationships become uniquely public.” 

 

Hub New Music Premieres New Works by Hannah Lash & Christopher Cerrone

How does one premiere a new work during a global pandemic? As composers, performers, presenters, and commissioning organizations adjust to the new landscape during COVID-19, there are many different ways to answer this question. Boston's Hub New Music, founded by flutist Michael Avitabile, has found their own path through the physical limitations of the 2020/2021 season by arranging for the videorecording and live premieres of several new works, producing recorded live performances for their season that are available to audiences online. 

One of Hub New Music's premieres this season was Hannah Lash's The Nature of Breaking, commissioned with support from Chamber Music America. According to Hub founder and flutist Michael Avitabile, this commissioning project began in 2017, and was scheduled to be premiered and performed several times in 2020; when live performance became unsafe during the COVID-19 pandemic, Avitabile turned to recording and broadcast technology to produce a sense of "liveness" in Hub's performances, which were filmed live in several venues in Boston.

Composed for Hub's instrumentation—flute, clarinet, violin, cello—and harp, The Nature of Breaking augments the unique timbral possibilities of winds and strings with the unique clarity of the harp, developing four musical ideas, including a fragment from a Bach chorale, throughout its four movements. Hub worked with presenters, including Ashmont Hill Chamber Music and the University of Texas & Texas Performing Arts, to present livestreamed performances of this work, together with Lash on harp. Recorded in Boston's Hibernian Hall, Hub New Music brings a "live" performance experience to virtual space, allowing them to continue commissioning and premiering engaging new works. 

Watch an excerpt of their performance of The Nature of Breaking below. 

Hub also worked with Christopher Cerrone on a new composition entitled New Addresses. This collaboration began in the summer of 2019, and was slated to premiere in October, 2020; instead of a live premiere, Hub produced a videorecording that was premiered during a special livestreamed event in January, 2021, for Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. To develop this piece in a time when working with the composer was physically impossible, Hub traded recordings, scores, MIDI-realizations, and other media with Cerrone in an intense, months-long process, during which Cerrone learned the intricacies and limits of Hub's unique instrumentation. This meant that New Addresses, to Avitabile, is incredibly well-crafted: it bears the mark of countless hours of both prescriptive and descriptive musical notation and thought.

New Addresses is inspired by a collection of poetry by Kenneth Koch of the same name; Cerrone and Hub worked intimately together to create this work, which reflects Koch's rapturous odes ("addresses") to abstract objects in Cerrone's writing for the unique instrumentation of Hub's ensemble. Watch the premiere of this work below. 

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