European American Music Distributors Company is a member of the Schott Music Group

New Works by Chaya Czernowin in Munich, New York and Bamberg

Sep. 01, 2015

New Works by Chaya Czernowin in Munich, New York and Bamberg

Chaya Czernowin’s new work for solo voice, Adiantum Capillus-Veneris I (Maidenhair fern I), receives its premiere at the Munich Prinzregententheater by participants of the ARD International Music Competition on September 10. Following the performance, Jeff Gavett gives the U.S. premiere on September 11 at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY as part of the Resonant Bodies Festival. Adiantum Capillus-Veneris is subtitled Etude in fragility and employs a contrapuntal relationship between the breath and the voice. Czernowin explains:

In this piece, the voice and the breath play an equal role in executing the musical text, as the breath is (at times) independent from the voice and equal to it in an almost contrapuntal relationship. This is not an expressive piece in the more standard way in which a singer employs all of his personality in an attempt to express emotions or other expressions of the ‘self’. It is rather a sketch using the voice and the breath like a small brush painting a line. Even though it is only a line made out of water (breath) with some color (voice), this line is actually transmitting a whole landscape.

On October 10, Jonathan Nott leads the Bamberg Symphony in the premiere of Czernowin’s Once I blinked nothing was the same, a large-scale miniature for orchestra. The work, which was commissioned as part of the Symphony’s Encore! Project, receives its premiere at the Bamberg Concert Hall’s Joseph-Keilberth Hall. Through the work, Czernowin explores “vast changes in what one is listening to and how the attitude of listening shifts and reshapes itself.”

This is my shortest piece ever: around three minutes. Yet in this short time the piece covers huge transformational shifts especially in its dimensionality. Can you imagine turning your ear into a huge microphone and listening to an amalgam of noises like the noises inside one’s body, then at once listening to a huge crowd of thousands of people then perhaps shifting to ones own breathing ... and so on…

Later this season, Czernowin receives the world premiere of a new work for 10 instruments, Knights of the Strange, with Ensemble PHACE at the Wien Modern Festival. Knights of the Strange receives its US premiere as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series on March 1. In January, Sweden's Norrbotten NEO present a portrait concert along with the premiere of a new work by Czernowin, and on April 29 the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston hosts the JACK Quartet and IRCAM for the U.S. premiere of Czernowin’s monumental work for string quartet and electronics, HIDDEN. 

For more information on Chaya Czernowin visit schott-music.com.

Chaya Czernowin
Adiantum Capillus-Veneris I (Maidenhair fern I) (2015)
an etude in fragility for voice and breath (ad lib. amplified)
8’

Once I blinked nothing was the same (2015)
a large-scale miniature for orchestra
3.3.3.3-4.3.3.1-timp.2perc-str(14.12.10.8.6)
3’

News