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Posts tagged 'New Music USA'

Christopher Cerrone's "Liminal Highway" Released as Album and Film

Back in 2016, Christopher Cerrone continued his innovative exploration of new possibilities for musical composition with a work for the flautist Tim MunroLiminal Highway, for flute and electronics. Originally co-commissioned by Miller Theatre & New Music USA, this work continued to develop into more than a work for live performance: in 2018, Cerrone and Munro teamed up with Four/Ten Media to produce a film of the piece, shot aboard the decaying SS United States—a decomissioned ship that lives in the Philadelphia harbor. 

Like many of Cerrone's works, Liminal Highway takes inspiration from a poem: "Liminal Highway," by John K. Samson, known for his work with the indie-rock band The Weakerthans. In conversation with the Classical Post, Cerrone and Munro discuss the making of the piece, including Cerrone's amateur explorations of the flute, taking inspiration from the world's longest reverberation, and the process of "fixing" a piece in recorded media. In addition to the film, Liminal Highway is also released as an audio recording on New Focus RecordingsLiminal Highway joins many other of Cerrone's works as hybrid works that are simultaneously fixed and open, existing in multiple media yet also begging to be performed live. 

All five movements of Liminal Highway are now streaming on Bandcamp, where the album is also available for sale:

The Daedalus Quartet Premieres Fred Lerdahl's "Chaconne"

Fred Lerdahl's writing for string quartet has, since 1978, played with musical form and syntax to achieve strikingly dramatic and engaging works. Lerdahl's three string quartets can be heard on a pristine recording performed by the Daedalus Quartet, for whom Lerdahl's Third Quartet was commissioned in 2008, completing the trilogy.

Now Lerdahl, with support from New Music USA, has written another work for Daedalus—entitled Chaconne—which diverges from Lerdahl's asymmetrical "spiral form" and instead explores the symmetrical periodicities inherent in the form of the chaconne. Eight bars of paired symmetrical phrases spell out the name of the Daedalus Quartet in the names of pitch-classes, using the German spelling of Eb (D-A-E-D-A-Es); Lerdahl uses this motive throughout the work to make a piece that is, in his words, "outward and transparent, one that projects delight in playful patterns."

Listen to Lerdahl's first three quartets performed by Daedalus below. 

Tim Munro's "Recounting" Features Soper, Cerrone

The flutist Tim Munro has recently described his work as an artist as storytelling: communicating from one person to another using the media of instrument, sound, and performance. After a long tenure with the Grammy-award-winning ensemble eighth blackbird, Munro has been developing a solo performance practice which explores the boundaries of his instruments—flute, breath, voice, speech. His upcoming solo performance at Columbia's Miller Theatre, entitled "Recounting", focuses on the moments between wakefulness and sleep, featuring works that weave between these two states. 

Christopher Cerrone's Liminal Highway, commissioned by Munro with assistance from New Music USA to be premeired on November 10th, is written for flute and four-channel electronics, and begins from the moment of "falling asleep in transit." This work serves as the impetus for the entire program, which includes five additional works—featuring appearances by soprano and composer Kate Soper, vocal ensemble Face the Music, and lighting designer Mary Ellen Stebbins. Soper and Munro will perform her 2011 work, Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say, which sets text by Lydia Davis. Echoing Cerrone's evocation of an "altered state", Soper's work questions the one-ness of the performer, turning a single "instrument" into a site of multiplicity. 

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