WANG LU Ryan and Dan (2017)
To play as if only to create an alone space with oneself and a soulmate, in this piece, clouds of sonorities produced by the electric guitar and saxophone hover over and envelop one another. The microtonal and processed tones on the guitar and subtle sax multiphonics are interwoven into each other’s texture and harmony, combining to form a faint melodic trace that resembles the ancient Chinese seven-string guqin and the tranquility one experiences while playing it in nature for a soulmate. This piece is dedicated to my dear friends Ryan Muncy and Dan Lippel. – Wang Lu
Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a very natural identification with influences from traditional Chinese music, urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, and freely improvised traditions, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.
She is currently the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University, after receiving her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Wang Lu’s works have been performed internationally, by ensembles including the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Alarm Will Sound, Minnesota Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille,
Holland Symfonia, Shanghai National Chinese Orchestra, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Musiques Nouvelles, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Sound, Yarn/Wire, Curious Chamber Players, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Argento, the Aizuri Quartet, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Momenta Quartet and violinists Miranda Cuckson, Jennifer Koh, and pianist Joel Fan among others.
Wang Lu has received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (Spring 2019 residency) and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and she has received commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard. She won first prize at Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne’s Young Composers Forum in 2010 and shared the Tactus International Young Composers Orchestra Forum Award in 2008. She was selected for a Tremplin commission by IRCAM/Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2010 and the International Composition Seminar with the Ensemble Modern in 2012, and has also received two ASCAP Morton Gould awards.
Her music was programmed on festivals such as the 2014 New York Philharmonic Biennial, MATA Festival, Cresc. Biennale in Frankfurt, Gaudeamus Music Week, Tanglewood, Cabrillo Music Festival, Beijing Modern, Pacific and Takefu festivals in Japan, Mostly Mozart, Aspekte Festival in Salzburg, Mizzou International Composers Festival, and the Havana New Music Festival. She has also been a resident at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Collaborations have included an installation at Brown University’s Cohen Gallery with artist Polly Apfelbaum and an evening of poetry and music with poet Ocean Vuong. In 2019, her music was featured on portrait concerts at Miller Theater with ICE and Yarn/Wire, with Ensemble Recherche in Paris, and with Ensemble Mosaik plus soloists Ryan Muncy and Wu Wei in Berlin. Wang Lu’s recent compositions include a brass fanfare Code Switch for the opening of the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW 2019-20 season, a duet for Noh performer Ryoko Aoki and cello, a flute and electronic piece for Claire Chase’s Density 2036, a solo piano work for Shai Wosner in honor of I.M. Pei, a new work for the Longleash trio supported by New Music USA, and a new work for the Talea Ensemble commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University.
Wang Lu is the next Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer at the Chicago Opera Theatre starting in the Fall 2020. Her residency will conclude in 2022 with a full-length opera produced by the Chicago Opera Theatre.
Of her portrait album Urban Inventory, released in March 2018, Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker, “I’ve listened at least a dozen times to the composer Wang Lu’s new album, “Urban Inventory” (New Focus Recordings), and remain happily lost in its riotous maze of ideas and images. Every moment is vividly etched, drenched in instrumental color, steeped in influences that range from ancient Chinese folk music to the latest detonations of the European avantgarde… The sense of loneliness that emerges at the end of “Cloud Intimacy” lurks behind all of Wang Lu’s meticulous frenzies: it is of a piece with the essential solitude of composing, of sitting in silence and dreaming of a music that has never been heard.”
MARISOL JIMÉNEZ Yiríya aiteiya (2017) – US Premiere
This piece belongs to a series of works inspired by the concept of transformation as expressed by rituals of the Wixárika culture. The title is in the Wixárika language, which closest translation could be echoes and darkness. It is also the continuation of a piece for violin and electronics entitled “Yuaríya Vaicairi”. In Yiríya áiteiya the sonic entities created in the previous piece are echoed, transformed, expanded, and multiplied to the point of concealment. It is also, the part of the ritual where the senses dissolve into their most fantastic state. The Wixárica people are one of the only native cultures in Mexico that still have Pre-Columbian traditions that were not replaced by the Spanish, and continue to flourish. This work features some self-made electroacoustic instruments/sound sculptures called Noise Spring Harps. The piece is also conceived as a performative installation work, where the sound sculptures are physically connected to the instruments, which are transformed and extended in multiple ways acoustic and electronically.
Marisol Jiménez is a composer, performer and multi- disciplinary artist from Guadalajara, Mexico currently residing in Berlin. Described as “Fashioning a deep, original musical discourse.” Her work expresses an intense fascination with the tactile process of creating sound, an interplay of the entropic within the structured musical machinery, colliding the primeval with the technological to seek forceful sensuous and visceral energies. Her output includes numerous chamber and electronic works, as well as sound and intermedia installations. Most of her acoustic, electronic and mixed media works involve self-made sound sculptures, found objects, and collected sound materials from her own field recordings, improvisations, and performances. She completed a Doctorate degree in composition at Stanford University in 2011, and a Masters of Arts degree from Mills College, Oakland, CA (2005). Recently, she developed a project entitled SENSUOUS MATTER, a large scale performative installation for intervened autonomous machines and performers, which was selected for an inm-Funding grant for 2018 in Berlin. Jimenéz was a winner of the 39th Irino International Composition prize in Tokyo and has recently been a member of the National System of Art Creators in Mexico from the national Found for the Arts and Culture (FONCA). Her work has been performed and commission by leading ensembles and interpreters of new music throughout Europe, The United States, Japan, Brazil and Mexico.
KALEY LANE EATON Dissociation, or Self-Portrait (2020) – World Premiere
Dissociation is about self-censorship, and the fabrication (and eventual dissolution) of a public identity that steers observers away from wildness and vulnerability. The work puts pop and experimental idioms at war with one another as a metaphor for my own quest for authentic self-expression. This battle is ultimately fought and won by the explosively virtuosic speaking and singing percussionist, who transforms the initial chaotic, abrasive soundscapes into a beautiful song.
Written in late 2019 and early 2020, the composition of Dissociation was abruptly interrupted by the pandemic, which affected my approach to this composition in some deeply surprising ways – notably, the compulsion to strip everything down to its essence, to de-complicate my existence and my artistry. As such, I chose to end the piece with hope, simplicity, and beauty. I am grateful to this piece for helping me rediscover my origins as a songwriter, and I am ever indebted to the masterful speaking percussionist Bonnie Whiting for embodying the raw bravery, ferocity, and courage that I sought in its composition. – Kaley Lane Eaton
A conservatory-trained classical pianist and vocalist who fell into creating electronic music shortly after a stint playing Baroque lute, Seattle composer Kaley Lane Eaton’s music is colored by this eclecticism, expressing a preoccupation with harmony, nature, improvisation, storytelling, emotion, physical gesture, and vocal virtuosity. Her work has been performed across the US and internationally, in venues ranging from Hong Kong concert halls, to the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Her “disconcertingly lovely” (Seattle Magazine) compositions combine innovative digital processes with ancient performance practices, questioning humanity’s growing dependence on technology and the resulting exploitation of the planet.
Eaton’s work has garnered recent support from the Jack Straw Cultural Center (2020 Artist Support Program), New Music Gathering (2020 and 2021), ASCAP (2019 Plus Award), Seattle Office of Arts and Culture (2019 CityArtist Award), the Allied Arts Foundation (2018 Listen Up! Grants for Composers grantee), the International Alliance for Women in Music (2017 Pauline Oliveros New Genre prize for lily [bloom in my darkness]), the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences (2017 Distinguished Holland and Knight Fellowship), the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2017 Associate Artist), and 4Culture (2017 Tech-Specific Grant). In 2019, her work BIG DATA for clarinet, string quartet, and 3D electronics was commissioned and premiered by Derek Bermel and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra as part of the inaugural season at Octave 9.
Eaton is an Interim Associate Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts, and co-directs the improvisation-centric ensemble Kin of the Moon. She lives in a little blue house in Seattle with her partner Rian, dog Nikos, and the many, many plants, birds, bugs, and slugs in their garden.
FAUSTO ROMITELLI Professor Bad Trip, Lesson I (1998)
“At the centre of my composing lies the idea of considering sound as a material into which one plunges in order to forge its physical and perceptive characteristics: grain, thickness, porosity, luminosity, density and elasticity. Hence it is sculpture of sound, instrumental synthesis, anamorphosis, transformation of the spectral morphology, and a constant drift towards unsustainable densities, distorsions and interferences, thanks also to the assistance of electro-acoustic technologies. And increasing importance is given to the sonorities of non-academic derivation and to the sullied, violent sound of a prevalently metallic origin of certain rock and techno music.”
Born in Gorizia on 1 February 1963, Fausto Romitelli graduated in composition at the Conservatorio “Giuseppe Verdi” of Milan and subsequently went on to take part in advanced courses at the Accademia Chigiana of Siena and the Scuola Civica of Milan. In 1991 he moved to Paris to study the new technologies at the “Cursus d’Informatique Musicale” of Ircam, with which he also collaborated as “compositeur en recherche” from 1993 to 1995. Although his attention was directed to the principal European musical experiences (György Ligeti and Giacinto Scelsi, in particular), his main inspiration was drawn from French spectral music, in particular Hugues Dufourt and Gérard Grisey, to whom he dedicated the second piece of the cycle Domeniche alla periferia dell’Impero (1995-96, 2000). In EnTrance (1995-96) his writing encompasses the study of the voice, using a mantra from the Tibetan Book of the Dead: the resulting music is extremely compact, with a hypnotic and ritualistic flow, in which the sound, “like material to be forged”, is matched by a taste for technology and the search for new acoustic horizons.
Romitelli also pursued his personal research outside the cultured avant-garde, so his music also accommodates an expressive content of great eloquence and a violent sonic impact of considerable formal complexity. These qualities are featured in one of his most significant compositions: the trilogy Professor Bad Trip (1998-2000), based on a reading of the works written by Henri Michaux under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. In it, along with his taste for the deformed and the artificial, Romitelli added the sonic research of rock, with an electro-acoustic treatment of sound and instrumental gestures. As in Blood on the floor, Painting 1986 (2000), which emphasizes the violent and destructive aspect of the projection of reality onto fiction, the trilogy is also openly inspired by the work of Francis Bacon, particularly the series of Three Studies for Self-Portrait. With Flowing down too slow (2001), commissioned by Art Zoyd and Musiques Nouvelles, the compositional landscape of Romitelli’s musical writing is enriched by sonic suggestions borrowed from the experiences of artists like Aphex Twin, DJ Spooky and Scanner, though there is always a dominance of the hypnotic and ritualistic aspect, together with his taste for the dissimilar and the artificial. As for his interest in the social and artistic aspects of the contemporary world, and in particular in the means and processes of mass communication, this spawned works like Dead City Radio. Audiodrome (2003), the essence of which is encompassed in the Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan’s book The Medium is the Message. “Perception of the world is created by the channels of transmission: what we see and hear is not simply reproduced, but elaborated and recreated by an electronic medium that overlays and replaces the real experience” (Romitelli). Dead City Radio interprets the nightmare relationship between perception and technology and reflects on the techniques of production and reproduction of the electronic channels.
In his last work, An Index of Metals (2003), the musical experimentation and literary suggestions that accompanied his real-surreal approach to compositional work were fulfilled in a grand abstract narration. Based on the “desire to create a total perceptive experience, uniting with the musical aspect its visual double to immerse the spectator in an incandescent, enveloping material,” this work was conceived by Romitelli as “an initiatory celebration of the metamorphosis and fusion of matter, a light show, in which an extension of the perception of the self beyond the physical limits of the body is provoked by means of techniques of transference and fusion in an alien material. It is a path towards perceptive saturation and hypnosis, one of total alteration of the habitual sensorial parameters.”
After a series of successes at various international competitions, at Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Graz, Milan, Stockholm and Siena (first prize at the Casella in 1989), Romitelli’s music was routinely played at the main international concert venues. At festivals ranging from the Festival Musica of Strasbourg, the Festival Présences of Radio France and the Ars Musica of Brussels to the Saisons of the Ircam- Intercontemporain, the Venice Biennale, and the Festival Milano Musica, his works were performed by ensembles and orchestras that included Ictus, L’Itinéraire, Court-Circuit, Intercontemporain, Musiques Nouvelles, ensemble recherche, Alter Ego, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra and the Rundfunk- Sinfonieorchester Berlin, with commissions from institutions such as the French Ministry of Culture (Acid Dreams & Spanish Queens and Professor Bad Trip: Lesson II), Musiques Nouvelles (Professor Bad Trip: Lesson I), Ictus (Professor Bad Trip: Lesson III), la Musique et les Arts (Mediterraneo), Radio France (Cupio Dissolvi), Ircam (EnTrance), the Gulbenkian Foundation (The Nameless City), Milano Musica (The Poppy in the Cloud), L’Itinéraire (Blood on the Floor, Painting 1986) and the Royaumont Foundation (Lost and An Index of Metals).
Struck down by a fatal illness, Fausto Romitelli died in Milan on 27 June 2004 at the age of 41.
– Roberta Milanaccio