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Music of Hannah Lash Across the USA

Nov. 01, 2012

Music of Hannah Lash Across the USA

Hannah Lash’s music makes its way into concert halls across the US this month and throughout the 12/13 season, beginning with the Lawrence Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Lash’s Music for Loss on November 4 at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Composed in 2011 and premiered at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall, the performance of Music for Loss in Wisconsin was conducted by Octavio Más-Arocas.

In New York, Lash’s Fast Chords, the first installment of her new “Etudes Project,” receives its premiere by the esteemed pianist Lisa Moore on November 13 at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. The concert, titled “120 Years of Solo Piano,” is a part of Miller Theatre’s Pop-Up Concerts – an informal and free concert series that features new and adventurous programming.

Lash provides the following introduction to her “Etudes Project”:

The Etudes are a set of 10, totaling about 40 minutes of music.  I wrote them for Lisa Moore, because I am deeply inspired by her extraordinary musicality, finesse, brilliance, and fearlessness at the piano. Each one features a different technical or musical character. I constructed each etude like an obsession with its particular feature: pursuing one thing and one thing only in each piece.


Last month, Moore’s duo, TwoSense, with cellist Ashley Bathgate, gave the world premiere of Lash’s Friction, Pressure, Impact at Brooklyn’s Roulette. The duo presents this work two more times this month, first at the Detroit Institute of Arts on November 23 and again on December 1 for New York’s Spectrum Festival.

Friction, Pressure, Impact comprises three movements – each of which focuses on the question of musical metabolism in a different way. The first movement, Friction, has a moderately fast metabolism – working through the musical material between the instruments with some speed yet with a kind of compulsively controlled rate of evolution. Pressure has a much slower pace of working through its musical argument, which is relatively minimal. It moves heavily and sensuously through its course. Impact changes and shifts with a mercurial speed; although this movement has one single argument throughout, it is an argument that is constantly changing shape and perspective: phrase-lengths, local patterns, registers, and harmonic inversions are constantly in flux, pelting the music’s surface like a hail storm.


Other events this season for Lash include the world premiere of Glockenliebe with Talujon Percussion at New York's Dimenna Center on December 21; the world premiere of Secrets for solo trumpet and electronics by Andrew Kozar at The Stone in New York on March 28; and the world premiere of the new monodrama Stoned Prince with Loadbang at Symphony Space in Manhattan on April 8. 

For more information on Hannah Lash, please visit www.schott-music.com

To learn more about Lisa Moore and TwoSense, including information on upcoming performances, please visit www.lisamoore.org

Hannah Lash
Music for Loss (2011)
for orchestra
2.2.2.2-2.2.1.0-2perc(glsp, vib, crot, tam-t, brake d)-hp.cel-str
8' 

Fast Chords (2012)
for solo piano
ca. 40

Friction, Pressure, Impact (2012)
for cello and piano
12' 

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