Ensemble CONCEPT/21
Jorge A. Muñiz, Artistic Director
Carmen-Helena Téllez, Guest Conductor
Season Five 2018-2019: Philosophical Journeys
Program III: New Voices in Michiana. An Evening of World Premieres.
April 5, 2019, 7pm
Louise E. Addicott & Yatish J. Joshi Performance Hall
IU South Bend
Overture (2019) / Brandon C Stanley
Gol Gumbaz / Michael Van Bodegom-Smith
Variation Suite for Pierrot Ensemble
Undercurrent, for Pierrot Ensemble and Percussion /Alec J Radecki
At My Chamber Door, for Pierrot Ensemble and Percussion / Alex Brinkley
ROBIN’S POEM (Scintillans) /Carmen-Helena Téllez
for soprano and instrumental ensemble on a poem by Robin Kirkpatrick
BRIEF INTERMISSION
Sakurafubuki: El Silencio de las flores / Pedro González Álvarez
for chamber ensemble
Theme and Variations in 13/8
For alto flute, bass clarinet, and percussion / Eric Saroian
Latens deitas /Michel Petrossian
This project is made possible by the Indiana Arts Commission, the Community Foundation of St. Joseph Co., the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the Muessel-Ellison Memorial Trust Foundation.
Ensemble CONCEPT/21
Jorge A. Muñiz, Artistic Director
Carmen-Helena Téllez, Guest Conductor
Roster
Soprano: Jessica Roberts
Flute: Sherry Kujala
Clarinet: Christopher French
Violin: Jameson Cooper, Brendan Shea
Viola: Luis Vargas
Cello: David Machavariani
Piano: Jennifer Muñiz
Percussion: Ben Runkel
Composers’ Biographies
Eric Saroian is a senior at Penn High School. He is a percussionist and plays with the Penn Symphonic Winds, the Penn Symphonic Orchestra, and the South Bend Youth Symphony Orchestra. He has a strong interest in contemporary classical music, and plans to double major in percussion performance and music composition in college.
Theme and Variations in 13/8 is inspired by music from eastern cultures, namely Indian and Middle Eastern. The 13/8 time signature is comparable to the intricate time signatures present in Indian drumming patterns. The scale used, which is a natural minor scale with a raised seventh, mimics the double harmonic scale common in Middle Eastern music.
In writing each variation, I experimented with different subdivisions of the 13/8 time signature, which is usually 5 subdivisions of 2 beats and 1 subdivision of 3 beats. Usually this would mean changing the placement of the 3 beat subdivision, but at one point, I switch the feel to 3 subdivisions of 3 beats and 2 subdivisions of 2 beats for a more energized section of the piece.
Alec J Radecki is a composer currently based in his hometown of South Bend, Indiana. Alec’s music is pervaded by a sentimental cynicism that belies his diverse influences. He writes for a variety of ensembles, ranging from full orchestra to solo piano, including art songs and electro-acoustic music. His works have been performed by the Euclid Quartet and the Indiana University South Bend Philharmonic, of which he is a long-time member and principal cellist. He also performs with the university’s Audio-Visual Collective.
Alec is currently working on his Master of Music in Composition at Indiana University South Bend, where he studies composition with Jorge Muñiz. His past teachers include John Mayrose. He also holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He has also been active in his university’s Queer Straight Alliance in which he currently serves as a student adviser, and is an outspoken advocate against elitism and for diversity in the performing arts.
Undercurrent begins with a six-note motive that is established as an ostinato that runs throughout the piece. Other brief motives play over the ostinato, pulling it in many directions, with the quiet, plodding motion occasionally punctuated with sudden outbursts. The ostinato changes over time, further pulling apart from the textures above it, but as the notes that make up the ostinato change, so to do the notes making up the other material: no matter what direction these currents are going, they are all made up of the same stuff. When the currents finally align, a calm emerges from the busy texture. Motives that arose from the ostinato are stated without it before the ostinato gradually returns. The initial ostinato returns, but this time the currents converge and the piece ends.
Alex Brinkley is a composer and saxophonist from Seattle, WA. Growing up, Alex participated in school orchestras, concert bands, and choirs, all the while teaching himself songwriting and music production. After high school, he began working as a theater technician. During this time, he discovered the world of composing for media and shortly after began his studies at Columbia College Chicago. In addition to writing music in the classroom, Alex has scored ten short films, one video game, and has arranged for the college’s jazz band. Alex will be graduating this May with a Bachelors of Music in Composition.
At My Chamber Door is inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Raven. Throughout the work, there is a recurring theme of three, as heard through three triangle taps (measures 3 and 4), variations on three chromatic notes (measure 14), and three reiterations of the main motif (measures 1 through 10). The first of three sections starts off distant, but quickly develops into a rambunctious conversation between the instruments. The lyrical and contrapuntal second section is interrupted right before the final resolution by the raven “knocking,” as heard in the bass drum (measure 84). The raven’s knocking returns us to a reinterpretation of the riotous first section, which concludes with the main motif echoing in the high register of the piano as the music is consumed by the raven’s shadow.
Brandon C Stanley is an upcoming composer based in the heart of Chicago. He began his extended music studies at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign before moving to the city. He is currently honing his musical style at Columbia College Chicago where he studies music composition under Kenn Kumpf.
His first love for music was found in the jazz band, wind ensemble, and marching band at his high school in the suburbs. Director of Bands Matthew Kastor encouraged Brandon’s compositional ideas throughout his four years, having his works and arrangements performed regularly.
Proficient in clarinet and saxophone, his musical process begins with these two instruments in hand. Brandon’s musical style comes from certain aspects of classical, jazz, and film music.
Overture (2019). A child begins life; they develop and grow with each new experience as they question and explore their reality. They experiment and search for truth as they move through the world, but never forget where they came from.
Michael Van Bodegom-Smith is a multi-instrumentalist and composer currently residing in Chicago, IL. Michael is an active performer in the jazz, blues/soul, hip-hop, and classical scenes in Chicago as a Trumpeter and Pianist. He has scored many feature lengths films that have received recognition from organizations such as C-SPAN (awarded first place for The 1%: Crisis in the Great Lakes Documentary) and the Philip K Dick Film Festival (recognition for the film Beyond The Door). Coming from a background as an orchestral trumpet player, Michael has always had a place in his heart for the orchestra. He still finds himself working on arrangements and commissions for orchestral ensembles and finds a way to incorporate aspects of orchestration into all of his music.
Gol Gumbaz, Variation Suite for Pierrot Ensemble. When I sought out to write this composition I wanted to experiment with the expansion of an idea. The concept of “Variations” have become a bit of a primitive form during this age of music. To compose a variation without sounding too romantic, I decided to base the variations of a simple gesture ( a motive, if you will) of just 3 notes, all stepwise. The notes have a sort of echo in a boundless soundscape which reminded me of a very reverberant and hollow area. This lead me to the title Gol Gumaz. Constructed by the architect, Yaqut of Dabul, Gol Gumbaz is a dome with a diameter of 44 meters. It is supported by a series of interlocking arches without any columns. This not only gives a hollow appearance, but an extremely reverberant sound.
Pedro González Álvarez is a Spanish composer and guitarist. He has studied guitar in the “Conservatorio Profesional de Astorga” and was awarded with the “Premio Extraordinario de las Enseñanzas Profesionales.” Since he was a child, he was interested in all around composition and creative activities.
In 2015, he won the 1st prize in “I Concurso de Jóvenes Compositores de Música de Cámara” (Guadalajara, Spain). In 2017 he entered the “Conservatorio Superior de Música del Principado de Asturias” in the degree of guitar. He has received guitar lessons from people like Álex Garrobé, Laura Young, Rubén Abel Pazos, Jose Manuel Fernández and Miguel Trápaga.
In 2018, he began to study composition with the composer Manuel Martínez Burgos in this conservatory. In this first year he has obtain the prize in “II Concurso de Composición del Conservatorio Superior de Música del Principado de Asturias.
He also has received composition lessons from JoséManuel Fernández and Jose María Sánchez Verdú.
Sakurafubuki: El Silencio de las flores, is a piece for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. This composition is based on the cycle of the cherry blossom.
During “flowering” there is a textures game, search of different colors becoming increasingly dense. This is combined with ornaments and counterpoint imitations what gives them a clear flexibility to the tempo. All the instruments melt in a single mass. Harmonies are little sound landscapes with connections between each other that draw a floral image with Japanese taste.
Arriving at the first climax it seems that the petals of the cherry blossom fly nimble between harmonies and sound. Shortly after, jazzy touches announce the slow and constant flower fall, while some of them still travel through this scene. The musical thread transports us towards a devastating scene: The petals that are on earth are represented with a static harmony, with quarter tones that will continue until the music is extinguished. We are inundated by the silence that flowers contain.
Carmen-Helena Téllez joins EC/21 as the season’s guest conductor. She usually develops interdisciplinary works in the intersection of music with other arts, the humanities, current technologies and social issues. She focuses on the role of the art-music composer in society, and has commissioned, premiered and recorded dozens of works. She has conducted new music ensembles, choruses, orchestras and opera companies in the United States, Spain, Israel, England and most of Latin America. She is currently the music director for Aquava New Music Studio, a new music production group, and the founding artistic director of Kosmologia, a project for music and intermedia in Chicago. She is also the Professor of Conducting for the Sacred Music Program of the University of Notre Dame, where she has led a series of sacred music dramas with a grant from the Mellon Foundation, and has commissioned and premiered works by Robert Kyr, Sven-David Sandstrom, Gabriela Lena Frank, Cary Boyce, and Michel Petrossian. Before coming to Notre Dame, she was the Sonneborn Professor of Choral Conducting and the Director of the Latin American Music Center at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where she also commissioned and premiered works by James MacMillan, Ingram Marshall, Shulamit Ran, John Eaton, Mario Lavista and many others. (http://carmenhelenatellez.com)
Robin’s Poem (Scintillans) was composed after a suggestion by British scholar and poet Robin Kirkpatrick, who wrote the libretto for her new interdisciplinary work Journeying the Commedia (2016), based on Dante’s masterpiece, that included a new oratorio by Robert Kyr. Kirkpatrick was researching relationships between text and music. Robin’s Poem is constructed as a canon, a technique that suggests the concept of memory, while accompanying the soprano’s straightforward declamation of the words. The canon generates a sequence of pitches played by the instruments through their individual and independent pattern. Dissonances and consonances pass by in apparent randomness, until the moment when, like the fireflies of the poem, the patterns will come together, in a flash of fleeting synchronicity.
Michel Petrossian is a French-Armenian composer of classical music. Born in Yerevan, Armenia, Petrossian studied cello and guitar and then studied composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris, from which he graduated in 2001. In 1998, with Jérôme Combier, co-founded Cairn, a contemporary music ensemble of fellow students from the conservatoire.
He also has an interest in philology and ancient languages, and studied Ancient Hebrew, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Akkadian, Ancient Greek and Old Armenian at the École des langues et des civilisations de l’Orient ancien (part of the Catholic University of Paris) and at the Sorbonne, where he earned a master’s degree. His love of ancient texts and cultures is reflected in many commissions by the French Archeological School of Jerusalem, under the patronage of Princess Caroline of Hanover; the Grand Théâtre de Provence; and eminent conductor Alexander Lingas, among others.
In 2012, Petrossian won Queen Elisabeth Prize for Composition. His concerto for piano and orchestra In the Wake of Ea, inspired by his interest in ancient languages, was performed at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels by the twelve finalists in the piano competition and the National Orchestra of Belgium conducted by Marin Alsop. The premiere of his work for piano The Fiery Struggle for Green and Gold for piano was reviewed by The New York Times as having “such qualities of improvisation and such vivacity, that the third sonata of Scriabin, yet so furious, sounded homogenous and almost wise in comparison.”
Alongside his current project for the University of Notre Dame, he is fulfilling recent commissions for the University of Michigan, the Maîtrise de Radio France, the Musicatreize Ensemble, and Ensemble Cairn. (http://www.michelpetrossian.com/)
The text of Latens Deitasis the poem by St Thomas Aquinas, Adoro te, with the poetic glosses (commentaries) of Fr. Olivier-Thomas, as can be found in his book A Poetic Christ, chapter 13, “The Eucharist: the Exercise of Adoration – Glosses to Adoro te” (p. 396-412). The seven quatrains of Aquinas (sung in Latin) use seven chants inspired by different Christian traditions, old and new (Gregorian, Ethiopian, Byzantine, Slavonic, Armenian, French, and American). Each quatrain is then followed by a selection of the glosses of Fr. Olivier-Thomas, sung in English.
The music is based further on the analysis of the text by Fr. Olivier-Thomas. The first 13 verses of St Thomas’ text, in masculine rhymes in Latin, are sung by the countertenor, while the following 15 verses, in feminine rhymes, are sung by the soprano. The glosses become a mixture of both, an inner dialogue between the vocalists and the instrumentalists. The overall structure of the work could be seen as a Christian Talmud, the text of Aquinas functioning as a Mishna, and the glosses of Fr. Olivier-Thomas being the Gemara, the difference being that, in this case, we deal not with a compilation of legal opinions and debates, but with a poetic elaboration on a substance of the faith, in the manner of a father of the Eastern Church, and centered around the concept of the Word– the incarnated Logos, which is Christ. Given the literary form in Fr. Olivier-Thomas work, the music pursues this dialogue with its proper musical means, a polyphonic elaboration that takes the form of a multifaceted Tema con variazioni