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Awards Season for PSNY Composers

by Ted Gordon on May 10, 2016, 10:16 p.m.

Four of our PSNY composers—Kate Soper, Timo Andres, Andrew Norman, and Anthony Cheung—have recently been honored with generous and prestigious awards from some of the most well-regarded organizations in America. We're proud that our composers are getting the recognition they very much deserve, and are honored to make their compositions available to the public. 

Timo Andres, well-known for his works for piano, was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his work "The Blind Banister," a piece for piano and orchestra that reimagines the cadenza in Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto. Andres writes: "the best way I can describe my approach to writing the piece is: I started writing my own cadenza to Beethoven's concerto, and ended up devouring it from the inside out." Starting from a seemingly simple scalar motive, Andres' composition flows like a hand leading itself on a banister in the dark, echoing Beethoven's sense of purpose-driven confidence but in a world of total sound. 

Kate Soper, as we've mentioned on the blog, has recently won the Virgil Thomson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This marks the second time this young award has been given; Soper's opera Here Be Sirens is now available on PSNY. Check out a highlight reel below: 

HERE BE SIRENS: Highlight Reel from Kate Soper on Vimeo.

And last but certainly not least, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has recently released their 2016 list of fellows, which includes PSNY composers Andrew Norman and Anthony Cheung. The Guggenheim Fellowship is awarded to artists and scholars "who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Norman and Cheung will use their Fellowships to support the composition of new works, and will join the ranks of fellow PSNY Composers Marcos Balter, Richard Carrick, Lei Liang, Keeril Makan, Alex Mincek, and Kate Soper, all of whom have been Guggenheim Fellows in the past decade.  

Tags: Andrew NormanAnthony CheungGuggenheim FoundationKate SoperPulitzer PrizeTimo AndresVirgil Thomson

Upcoming Performances of Wollschleger, Cerrone

by Ted Gordon on May 6, 2016, 10:22 a.m.

Schumann's Dichterliebe famously begins: "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai"—in the wonderful month of May. What follows is a masterful collection of discrete, yet interrelated compositions: a chain linked by its proximity to rebirth and spring. Schumann's song cycle is nice metaphor for what's happening with two of our PSNY composers this month: over the next few weeks, Scott Wollschleger and Christopher Cerrone will see a blooming and bountiful group of performances, all up and down the East coast. A wonderful month of May, indeed! 

Kicking things off in a lower register, Scott Wollschleger's trio for marimba, bass clarinet, and bassoon, Density is a Kind of Love, will see its New York Premiere at ShapeShifter Lab on May 9th, performed by Transient Canvas and Chris Watford. Keep an eye out for Density is a Kind of Love, which will soon be published on PSNY. 

Watford will also be performing Timothy McCormack's monumental BODY MATTER, which Watford commissioned in 2015—a nearly thirty-minute long exploration of the bassoon that pushes the instrument and its player to their limits. 

The very next day, Wollschleger's second string quartet, "White Wall", will be performed by the MIVOS Quartet alongside Helmut Lachenmann's String Quartet No. 3 ("Grido") at Roulette, as a part of the Darmstadt Institute New York's 70 Year Anniversary Celebration. Performing on a packed program that also includes the International Contemporary Ensemble performing works by Ashley Fure, Chaya Czernowin ,and Luigi Nono, MIVOS's performance of "White Wall"—a piece they commissioned from Wollschleger—will offer a "brontal" meditation on the process of becoming-sound, with quiet but intense energies circulating among the quartet members, sounding their own time. Check out MIVOS performing the first half of this quartet: 

If Wollschleger's "White Wall" plunges us into the sound-world of the instruments themselves, Christopher Cerrone's "Memory Palace", which sees two performances in the same week, brings us to the sound-world of the composer firmly rooted in space. Or, more properly, as the movement titles suggest, spaces: Harriman, the Long Island Expressway, Foxhurst. On May 8th, the Metropolis Ensemble, featuring percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, performs the Washington, DC premiere of "Memory Palace" at the Phillips Collection. Moving up the coastline, Rosenbaum will also perform the work in Baltimore at An Die Musik on May 10th, with Cerrone giving engaging in an intimate pre-concert conversation. The following week, on May 16th, Rosenbaum will again perform "Memory Palace" at the American Irish Historical Society—an innovative concert program that asks, "what would a house sound like if it could sing?". Check out Rosenbaum performing "Memory Palace" below. 

Tags: An die MusikChristopher CerroneChris WatfordDarmstadtmarimbaMetropolis EnsembleMivos QuartetPhillips CollectionRouletteScott WollschlegerShapeShifter Lab

Joan La Barbara Joins PSNY

by Ted Gordon on April 19, 2016, 10:52 a.m.


(Joan La Barbara; photo credit: Aleksandar Kostic)

Joan La Barbara knows what it means to sing. And in the process of singing over the past forty years, she has redefined the possibilities of the term itself. Using her voice as an instrument, she has developed a vocal style that transcends convention, extending the technology of her voice to wildly new places of discovery and creativity. Since the early 1970s, La Barbara has been composing and performing works for her own voice and other collaborators: electronics, video, environments, dancers, synthesizers, and instruments. Each of these works blends the singularity of her voice with the wider world of sound.

PSNY is honored to publish four works by La Barbara that span several decades of her career. These highly evocative and unique works range in instrumentation from solo violin to chamber ensemble, but all involve La Barbara's voice in some way or another—either her compositional voice or in her scoring for live human voice.

This is perhaps easiest to hear in her work in the shadow and act of the haunting place (1995), for voice and chamber ensemble, which La Barbara calls a "sound painting in the style of some of my multi-track vocal works." This work sees La Barbara's extended vocal techniques translated to instruments—an act which La Barbara says evokes "moments of mystery and strange beauty with some hints of danger."

This work served as a model for a larger composition for the Nai-Ni Dance Company, titled Calligraphy II/Shadows, where several of the Western instruments were exchanged for close equivalents in the Chinese classical tradition.  


 La Barbara's talent for translation is also shown in Vlissingen Harbor (1982), a composition that evokes her time spent in the seaport village of Vlissingen in southern Holland. Scored for voice and ensemble, this piece reimagines the harbor soundscape in an instrumental realization, calling on all eight players to use their breath to evoke the sonic seascape.

Flash! (2005), a virtuoso piece for solo violin, again translates the composer's voice into the language of string instruments, evoking the thrilling potentialities of the solo violin in the tradition of film scoring. Challenging the performer to keep up with the score, Flash! is a showstopping piece that extends instrumental technique in the service of extending our sonic imaginations of what a violin is capable of. 

We look forward to publishing more works by Joan La Barbara in the near future, so stay tuned!

Tags: avant-gardeJoan La BarbaraVocal Music
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