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Yellow Barn Music Festival Features Music of Lerdahl, Pintscher, and Lei Liang's Verge

Jun. 25, 2013

Yellow Barn Music Festival Features Music of Lerdahl, Pintscher, and Lei Liang's <em>Verge</em>

Lei Liang’s Verge is the centerpiece of Yellow Barn Music Festival’s season finale concert on August 3. Written for 18 solo strings, Verge was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in 2009 under the direction of Magnus Lindberg as part of the orchestra’s inaugural CONTACT! new music concert series. Liang writes about Verge:

The work was composed on the verge of an exciting moment in my life: the birth of our son Albert Shin Liang. I started composing the work a month before his birth, and completed it the month after. Albert’s musical name, here rendered as A - B (B flat) - E - D (with the D equivalent to the “re” in solfège), asserts itself in different configurations and disguises as the basic harmonic and melodic material. His heartbeat (up to 168 beats per minute) also makes an appearance in the form of changing tempi and pulsations. In a sense, I composed the piece in order to make a musical amulet for Albert.

On a technical level, I was fascinated by the dialectical relationship between the convergence and divergence of musical voices found in the traditional heterophonic music of Mongolia. There, the functionality of a principal line and its accompaniment can interchange, and their unfolding is often unsynchronized. The 18 strings are divided into antiphonal groups: left versus right, front versus rear. They diverge into various sub-ensembles and quartets, and they also appear as 18 virtuosic soloists. Near the end, they converge into a singular voice.

Yellow Barn also presents the Peabody Trio performing Fred Lerdahl's Times 3 for piano trio on July 23 and on July 30, violist Pei-Ling and cellist Natasha Brofsky perform Matthias Pintscher's Janusgesicht.

For concert details and tickets, visit www.yellowbarn.org.

Find out more about Lei Liang at www.lei-liang.com or www.schott-music.com.

More on the work of Fred Lerdahl can be found at www.schott-music.com.

Visit www.bärenreiter.com to learn more about Matthias Pintscher. 

Lei Liang
Verge (2009)
for 18 solo strings
8vn.4va.4vc.2db
ca. 12’

Matthias Pintscher
Janusgesicht (2011)
for viola and cello
10'

Fred Lerdahl
Times 3 (2012)
for violin, piano and cello
18’

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