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Chaya Czernowin’s Winter Songs II: Stones Featured by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

Dec. 01, 2006

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players perform Chaya Czernowin’s Winter Songs II: Stones on December 4 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. David Milnes, Artistic Director of the ensemble and conductor for their performance of Winter Songs II: Stones, noted:

“Chaya Czernowin is one of the most prominent and interesting composers working today.  Her resourceful music sounds completely fresh, bringing instruments together in new and ingenious ways.  She challenges listeners to open themselves to unusual aesthetic experiences.”

 

Winter Songs is composed for an instrumental septet of very low instruments and has three different manifestations Winter Songs I: Pending Light, Winter Songs II: Stones, and Winter Songs III: Roots. The three versions are comprised of the same instrumental septet, with variations beyond that in supplemental music and temporal modifications. In Winter Songs II: Stones, the instrumental septet is augmented by the addition of three amplified percussionists, which, Czernowin notes, creates “a very low and slow counterpoint-piece to the instrumental septet.” On the larger themes of the work, Czernowin adds:

“The whole cycle reflects on the aspect of winter which has to do with one being pulled into the cave of one’s own interior, into the passivity of long sleep. At the same time, underneath, in the earth, roots of vitality slowly solidify and start to blindly search for a way between the stones.”

 

To learn more about Chaya Czernowin and her work, please visit www.schott-music.com.

For more information on the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, please visit www.sfcmp.org.

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