Kate Soper's "Ipsa Dixit" Named Finalist for Pulitzer Prize

by Ted Gordon on April 18, 2017, 10:14 a.m.

Kate Soper's Ipsa Dixit has been named a Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music, along with winner Du Yun for her work Angel's Bone and fellow finalist Ashley Fure for Bound to the Bow.

Ipsa Dixit, which synthesizes several of Soper's compositions into a seamless theatrical performance, was developed during a residency at EMPAC, and premiered in a fully-staged version this February at Dixon Place. The piece, as Alex Ross writes in The New Yorker, is a "twenty-first century masterpiece" and "an awesomely wide-ranging intellectual journey." Soper's nomination also marks an important event in the seventy-four year history of the Pulitzer Prize: it is the first time that all three nominees are women. 

Three of the movements of Ipsa Dixit are available on PSNY, and each can also be performed as a standalone work: Cipher, for soprano and violin; Only The Words Themselves Mean What They Say, for soprano and flute; and Rhetoric, for soprano, flute, violin, and percussion. The remaining movements will be published soon, making each individual movement available for study and performance, as well as a score and set of parts for Ipsa Dixit in its entirety.

Below, check out an excerpt from Ipsa Dixit from the recent live staged performance at EMPAC with Soper and the Wet Ink Ensemble:

Anthony Cheung's "The Real Book of Fake Tunes" in Chicago and New York

by Ted Gordon on April 13, 2017, 11:37 a.m.

Players, students, and enthusiasts of jazz will be familiar with the many iterations of the "fake book"—a collection of lead sheets that has seen many versions throughout the 20th century, even an "official" edition as The Real Book in the 1970s. Anthony Cheung, no stranger to the long stylistic and compositional traditions of jazz, takes the "real book" as a starting point for his The Real Book of Fake Tunes, written for fellow Chicagoans Claire Chase and the Spektral Quartet. Cheung takes the architecture of a "Real Book" and designs his own plans for the classical instrumentation of string quartet and flute, recalling the dance or compositional suites of the 18th century while catapulting the listener into the 21st. 

On Thursday, April 13th, Claire Chase and the Spektral Quartet will perform The Real Book of Fake Tunes at Northwestern University, as a part of Chase's "Density" project, alongside a new commission by fellow PSNY compoer Marcos Balter. Later in the month, the ensemble will travel to New York to present The Real Book of Fake Tunes at National Sawdust, in a program that features a new quartet by George Lewis and Katherine Young's arrangement of Arthur Russell's Hiding Your Present From You. 

"Law of Mosaics" Live with A Far Cry at the Gardner Museum

by Ted Gordon on April 5, 2017, 11:55 a.m.

A Far Cry's acclaimed 2014 album The Law of Mosaics pairs two works by Andrew Norman and Ted Hearne: Norman's A Companion Guide to Rome and Hearne's Law of Mosaics. Both works are synoptic: they stitch together the composer's experience with some kind of landscape (or soundscape), creating compositional wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

In an interview with musicologist Ryan Dohoney from the liner notes to the album, Norman writes: 

I really like the idea that music can contain layer upon layer of refer­ence, and that those references can add up to a potentially rich experience that goes beyond the notes and rhythms on the page. I think this is something I share in common with Ted, though I’m not using direct quotation and sampling to create that web of reference in the way that he does.

Similarly, Hearne notes:

I wanted to play with sampling’s ability to access our shared histories in different ways. […] And by giving the movement an arbitrary formal restraint (“Palindrome’’), I hoped to create a space where the listener could hear each sample in a new context while still interacting with their historical ramifications.

A Far Cry will perform the album in its entirety at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on April 6th, a rare opportunity to hear what WQXR calls "an aural View-Master worth peering through". Above, check out Hearne's "Palindrome for Andrew Norman", a movement from Law of Mosaics that uses Norman's music as its source material. You can find A Far Cry's album via Crier Records.