PSNY Welcomes James Díaz

by Ted Gordon on Jan. 18, 2021, 10:42 a.m.

Since he began composing music at age 17, James Díaz has often thought of his music as a portal through which one could explore ambivalence: radical moments of sonic possibility. Diaz's music generates multiplicity in order to manifest new sonic worlds, both for performer and listener, fostering a curiosity that transcends existing understandings of musical tradition, history, and referentiality. Díaz's goal in composition is, as he says, "finding multiplicity in the work and in the world." 

As a teenager in Soacha, Colombia, Díaz began to create music in his home recording studio, seeking out ambiguous, ambivalent sound worlds that mirrored the complexities of Colombian social life. Although at first he thought of music as an "escape" from the world, Díaz soon realized that music could rather serve as a tool for concretely altering the ways that we perceive the world, leading him to embrace the idea of "psychedelia": the  manifestation of the mind. And what led to these new manifestations were not chemical structures, but rather musical ones. 

Díaz's compositional process always begins with something on the page: a melodic line, a rhythmic pattern, or some other structural idea that may or may not even be audible. From this organizing element, Díaz continues to compose new possibilities for musical dimensions in performance, often obscuring the original structure, which leads to new kinds of musical manifestations. Díaz's conservatory training exposed him to composers for whom these kinds of musical citations carried the ideological weight of national traditions, especially within the fraught periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; for Díaz, however, the "meaning" of these citations has possibilities for multiple dimensions of music. 

"Infrastructures", Díaz's 2017 string quartet, was composed during the composer's first winter spent in New York City. The first and last movements are described as a kind of collage, sharing related musical materials but transformed through processes of inversion. Influenced by Díaz's study of the work of Morton Feldman, "Infrastructures" is a study in convolution—and as its title suggests, the many ways in which internal musical structures can play themselves out. 

James Díaz · "A song for..." for amplified violin and electronics [2018]

Díaz's 2018 "A Song For...", for amplified violin and electronics, continues this study with a very different kind of instrument. In this work, Díaz takes the sounds of the violin and convolves it with itself, producing a kind of reverberant sound world generated from the instrument and its player. The amplification of the instrument allows for small gestures to produce intense sounds, leading the performer to interact with her instrument in new kinds of ways. 

"in her dream song", for piano trio, begins with a melodic fragment from "A Song For...". But unlike that work, for solo violin and fixed media, "in her dream song" asks the three performers to listen to each other as unpredictable, reverberant partners, triggering cues and actions dictated in the score. 

"never was the way" continues Díaz's exploration of performative gestures of listening in a Pierrot ensemble, which also introduces the human voice. The score for this work is a fine example of the kinds of interactivity that Diaz wants to foster between his performers; the second movement, is written not in score format, but rather in independent parts (which you can see beginning around 5:55 above). 

James Díaz · "In times of passive voice" for amplified cello [2019] feat James Burch

"in times of passive voice", Díaz's 2019 work for solo cello, allows for even more flexibility by the performer, providing them with several germinal musical structures and instructing them to perform them in an order of their choosing. The cellist's instrument is transformed into a new kind of partner with the combination of a metal practice mute, which eliminates nearly all of the internal acoustic resonances of the instrument, and heavy amplification, which emphasizes the noisy timbres of bow, string, and bridge. 

PSNY is thrilled to publish these five interrelated works by Díaz, bringing his work to new performers who can continue to explore the mind-manifesting and ambivalent qualities of his work. 

Michael Hersch and Christopher Cairns Present New Concert Series: ...thus far and no further...

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 20, 2020, 4:06 p.m.

As the landscape of live musical performance continues to change in the era of COVID-19, composer Michael Hersch and his long-time collaborator, the sculptor Christopher Cairns, have planned an intimate series of concerts—each limited to 15 audience members—held in Cairns's studio in Havertown, Pennsylvania. Titled ...thus far and no further..., this series revives Carins and Hersch's practice of small, intimate, informal concerts held in Carins's studio among his work; both artists hope that this new five-event series will help (re-)imagine what live music can look, feel, and sound like in the current global climate. 

Featuring world premeires by Hersch, Missy Mazzoli, Christopher Fox, Alican Çamci, and Patricia Kopatchinskaja—who is increasingly augmenting her profile as a composer, in addition to her work as a violnist—this series will feature some of Hersch's closest collaborators, including Miranda Cuckson, Ah Young Hong, Emi Ferguson, Daniel Gaisford, and the FLUX Quartet.

Carins's sculptures, which were also featured in the set design of Hersch's monodrama On the Threshold of Winter, will surround the small audience, who will be presented with musical programs that pair world premieres with other works of our time by composers such as Rebecca Saunders, Meredith Monk, Georg Friedrich Haas, Anthony Braxton and Isabel Mundry, among many others.  Pre- and post-concert sound installations will also enhance the sonic experience of these five events, allowing audience members time and space to contemplate sculpture and music in a haptic, three-dimensional experience. 

The first of Hersch and Cairns's five programs falls on October 24th, and will pair early vocal music by Machaut and Josquin with three works by Hersch (including the premiere of unwrung, apart, always), book-ended by Morton Feldman's sparse, enigmatic Only, for solo voice. This program will be performed by violinist Miranda Cuckson and flutist/vocalist Emi Ferguson. 

Richard Carrick's "lanterne" Released on New Focus Recordings

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 6, 2020, 2:38 p.m.

Richard Carrick has often felt most at home composing music for intimate spaces. In his chamber music, Carrick brings his own sense of virtuosity and structure to the interaction between nimble performers, adding his own meticulous artistry to the act of small-scale musical performance. As a performer himself, and as co-director of the Either/Or Ensemble, Carrick seeks out the precarious nuance and subtlety of live performance, writing works for small instrumental forces that focus both performer and listener to the present moment. 

lanterne, Carrick's latest release with New Focus Recordings, brings several of his works together on an album that celebrates this kind of small-scale intimacy in a time when so many people have been forced into social isolation, and in a time when the reflection made possible by his music is all the more valuable. Though this album was conceived well before COVID, Carrick's music takes on even more meditative power. In the titular composition lanterne, for example, Carrick explores the intricate possibilities of the bass flute, creating a kind of "wall of sound" that emerges from its lower register and climbs rhythmically throughout the instrument's harmonics and even the performer's own voice. The gasping, breathy sonorities of lanterne also emerge metaphorically in Carrick's 2018 string quartet Space:Time, which imagines the physical barriers of space travel—from the claustrophobia of the interior spaces for humans, to the pull of gravity and acceleration "into the light", as its coda is titled. 

Like many composers, Carrick often works with the musicians for whom he has written many of the works on lanterne both in person and remotely—this latter method involving correspondence including scores, recordings, videos, and voice memos. The ability for Carrick and his collaborators to share sketches, ideas, and sounds together, even though they are not in the same space, enables Carrick to compose works that evoke liveness and virtuosity through careful craft and technique. Carrick often draws inspiration for this refinement of performative gesture from gugak, the traditional music of Korea, which often features highly controlled yet wildly expressive sounds generated on instruments intended for small spaces. On lanterne, three works explicitly incorporate structural and sonic elements from gugak: Danga, Seongeum, and sandstone(s), the last of which incorporates traditional Korean instruments put into timbral dialogue with flute, violin, and cello.  

Recorded before the current crisis, but mixed and mastered in the isolation of a global pandemic, Carrick's lanterne is a prescient reminder of the possibilities of smallness and intimacy that emerge from the interaction between composers, performers, carefully crafted as scoee and recording—even in a time when we all must remain physically alone. Check out an interview with Carrick by New Focus Recordings below.