Ensemble Dal Niente at Frequency Festival
February 24, 2024
8:30PM
Constellation Chicago
Kari Watson — a door has no inside (2023. Arranged 2024)
For clarinet, cello, percussion, harp and electronic
Wang Lu — After some remarks by CW on his work (2018)
For harp and clarinet
Lei Liang — Listening for Blossoms (2011)
For flute, piano, harp, violin, viola, bass
— intermission —
Carlos Carrillo — Observaciones Obreras: Para observar los cielos (2021)
For violin and piano
Louis Goldford — Transom (2024)
For ensemble and electronics
World Premiere
Made possible by the Fromm Foundation
Performers
Emma Hospelhorn, flutes
Katherine Jimoh, clarinets
Andrew Nogal, oboe
Han Lee, piano
Kyle Flens, percussion
Ben Melsky, harp
Caitlin Edwards, violin
Ammie Brod, viola
Chris Wild, cello
Juan Garcia, bass
Michael Lewanski, conductor
Kari Watson, electronics
Louis Goldford, electronics
Acknowledgements
Fromm Foundation
Paul M. Angell Family Foundation
Program notes
a door has no inside
This piece was derived from a miniature composed for harpist Maaria Pulakka at the 2023 Darmstadt Harp Composition workshop with mentors Sarah Nemstov and Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir. This expanded, transformed version of the piece gets its name from a quote in the opening of Anne Carson’s translation of Antigone where Carson muses about the concept of a doorway as a non-place or an in-between. This led me to consider how doorways function as portals in our acoustic ecosystem, transporting us between different reverberant spaces, both between indoor spaces and between the indoors and outdoors.
Given that this piece was composed with a particular focus around controlled resonance, I was drawn to the concept of doorways when thinking about accessing and moving between different kinds of resonant spaces in the context of a chamber ensemble. This concept felt meaningful in my attempt to reimagine this piece as not just a little harp solo, but as a chamber piece with the harp embedded in a broader ecosystem. Many core aspects of the original concept - exploring expanded and augmented resonance and playing with the noise inherent to the harp’s pedal mechanism - evolved to transform these ideas into something very different. The transducers function as a counterpart to the harp pedals, activating various surfaces with resonant frequencies and playing back fragments of the original piece. The embedded recording of the premier speaks to the doorway as a portal, tying this transformed iteration of the piece to its first version, and in doing so, creating a sort of time crunch that is simultaneously both past and forward facing.
This version of the piece was commissioned by Ensemble Dal Niente and for premier on the Frequency Series at Constellation on February 24th, 2024 in Chicago, IL.
—Kari Watson
After some remarks by CW on his work
I recently attended a talk by Christian Wolff, the eminent elder statesman of American experimentalism and the last living link to the New York School. At 83, his unassuming wisdom and humor shine through, and the talk was a retrospective of a life marked by stylistic changes, priorities, and commitments, and a shifting relationship between art and politics, while still pointing to an unknown future. While I’m touched by the singularity of approach to sound, I’m mostly liberated by his belief in shared decision-making and breaking down the hierarchies of the creative act. This short piece, which lives moment-to-moment in a series of delicate sound objects and intimate dialogues between the clarinet and harp, was completed in the aftermath of this encounter. It is dedicated to Ben Melsky and Katie Schoepflin, whose music-making and collaborative spirit encouraged and inspired me during the writing process.
—Wang Lu
Listening for Blossoms
The sound of blossoms is a theme in both Chinese and Japanese traditional poetry, and it arose as part of the Taoist and Buddhist practice of meditation. If one contemplates in complete stillness, one can hear the blossoms. This piece was also inspired by the idea of layering of surfaces as well as an ambiguous and subtle world of time found in these poetic texts.
Listening for Blossoms was jointly commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music and Cicada Chamber Players. It was begun while I was in residence at Copland House, Cortlandt Manor, NY, as a recipient of the Aaron Copland Award, and was completed at the American Academy in Rome in September 2011. The Southwest Chamber Music Ensemble gave its world premiere at the Los Angeles International New Music Festival in Zipper Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA on January 26, 2013.
—Lei Liang
Observaciones Obreras: Para observar los cielos
Para observar los cielos (To observe the heavens) is the first movement of a piece that I plan to call Observaciones Obreras (Working or Workers' Observations). In conjunction with the other two movements, to observe the hands and to observe the earth, the pieces serve as a musical commentary on the working class. The structure of the piece is based on two folklore traditions from the coast and mountains of Puerto Rico, the Bomba and the Seis, which are commonly interpreted separately, but in this piece, they are intertwined as a symbol of solidarity. The piece is dedicated to the memory of Edgardo López Cotto.
—Carlos Carrillo
Transom
Transom for ensemble and electronics contemplates the site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis, my birth city. Now a vacant lot where 33 large apartment buildings once stood from 1954 until their widely televised demolition in 1972, Pruitt-Igoe’s demise was famously hailed by the architectural critic Charles Jencks as the so-called death of modern architecture.
Formerly home to low-income and primarily Black inner city residents who were vilified and blamed for Pruitt-Igoe’s failure, it is now understood that the project’s rapid deterioration throughout the 1960s had been due to racist policies within local government. Pruitt-Igoe was also the site of Cold War-era military testing, and is where zinc cadmium sulfide had been sprayed throughout the premises to measure toxicity on residents. Unsurprisingly, no one mentioned this awful stain on our city’s history when I grew up in St. Louis years later: not in our civics classes, nor any of the times I went to hear music in clubs like Spruill’s, nearby the former Pruitt-Igoe site. My generation was left to discover our city’s deep-seated racism in other ways.
In 2020, inspired by Catherine Liu’s contrast between Pruitt-Igoe’s modernism and postmodern bourgeois decadence, I set out to create a piece of music whose structure grew directly out of the Pruitt-Igoe blueprints and those of the Frank Gehry Residence in Los Angeles, a hallmark of postmodern architecture and its many excesses, including gentrification. Using virtual models to treat these buildings as large resonators, their geometry can be heard in the instrumental parts generated from synthesized textures. The Gehry House, constructed from asymmetrical plates of glass, framing wood, and various other materials, yield richly nuanced harmonic fields, while the larger window panes, long walls of brick cladding, and slabs of concrete several stories high that characterize the Pruitt-Igoe buildings, forge deep, dark resonances and low, broadband filtered noise bands.
—Louis Goldford