Kate Soper's "IPSA DIXIT" Now Available on PSNY

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 12, 2017, 12:41 p.m.

Kate Soper's ambitious and multi-faceted project, IPSA DIXIT ["She, Herself, Said It"] is now available on PSNY. A finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, IPSA DIXIT is a six-movement chamber music theater work for soprano, flute, violin, and percussion that explores the intersections of music, language, and meaning. In addition to being performed as a full work, each of the movments may be performed as a standalone piece, or in any combination with each other. 

The work was developed by Soper with musicians from the Wet Ink Ensemble during a residency at EMPAC, and later premiered in a fully staged version at Dixon Place. Writing in the New Yorker, Alex Ross calls IPSA DIXIT a "twenty-first century masterpiece", and an example of Soper's unique genre of "philosophy-opera."

Steve Smith reviewed the work's premiere at Dixon Place as "a dazzlingly varied six-part sequence of quartets and duets spanning a stylistic range best described as broad and eclectic, but never unapproachable, employing texts concerning matters of intellect and sentiment, cognition and persuasion, perception and awareness."

Now, in addition to the full score and performance materials, each individual movement of IPSA DIXIT is also available on PSNY: Poetics, Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say, Rhetoric, The Crito, Metaphysics, and Cipher. 

A complete studio recording of the six movements of IPSA DIXIT is forthcoming, so stay tuned for more news!

Check out video excertps of each movement below. 

A Busy Weekend for Timo Andres

by Ted Gordon on Sept. 29, 2017, 3:45 p.m.

(Illustration by Dadu Shin for The New Yorker)

Timo Andres has had a busy run of recent performances across the country, including concerts in New York, Jacksonville, and Big Sur. On September 26th, Andres participated in a marathon performance of Erik Satie's Vexations—a four-line piece for solo piano that tells the performer to repeat it eight hundred and forty times. Among a roster that included Christian Wolff, Philip Corner, and David Del Tredici, Andres performed Vexations at 2.20am on September 27th, commenting to the New York Times that though he thinks about all music sculpturally, "vexations takes on a very dark presence". 

Two days later, Andres' piano concerto The Blind Banister was performed by the Jacksonville Symphony featuring Jonathan Biss, for whom it was written and dedicated. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, The Blind Banister respnds to Beethoven's second piano concerto, and is part of Biss' Beethoven/5 project with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which asks composers to respond to Beethoven's piano concerti. 

And to cap off the week, in idyllic Carmel-By-The-Sea, California, Andres performed his own piano music as a part of Philip Glass' "Days and Nights" Festival, in a program that also featured Claire Chase, Jennifer Curtis, Pauchi Sasaki, and the Philip Glass Ensemble. Andres has frequently performed with Glass, and has performed Glass' complete Piano Etudes around the world. 

Wet Ink Opens 19th Season with Works by Alex Mincek

by Ted Gordon on Sept. 15, 2017, 1:16 p.m.

Wet Ink opens their nineteenth season of performances with a concert that extensively features the work of their current Artistic Director and PSNY composer Alex Mincek. The concert, on September 26th at Scholes Street Studio, celebrates the release of Torrent, Mincek's latest album, which inaugurated Sound American's Young Composer Portrait series. We wrote previously on the blog about this album release, which coincided with a special issue of Sound American entirely dedicated to Mincek's music, including an extensive profile by George Grella. 

Torrent includes recordings of several works performed by members of the Wet Ink Large Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, and the Mivos Quartet. These works were all composed in the past seven years, and include Pendulum VII, which is available from PSNY. Check out an excerpt below: 

To celebrate this new album, Mincek will see the premiere of new pieces from his ongoing Harmonielehre cycle for violin and piano, written specificaly for Wet Ink's Joshua Modney and Eric Wubbels, who will be performing alongside other members of Wet Ink. String Noise, comprised of Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim, will perform Mincek's new violin duo, and experimental trumpeter Nate Wooley will perform works by Anthony Braxton with other musicians from Wet Ink.