Kate Soper Wins Virgil Thomson Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters; "Here Be Sirens" now on PSNY

by Ted Gordon on April 12, 2016, 10:11 a.m.

Kate Soper, known for her cutting-edge vocal works that fuse together voice, instruments, and text, has just won the second ever Virgil Thomson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. First given in 2014, this award "recognizes an American composer of vocal works," and is endowed by the Virgil Thomson Foundation. True to the award's namesake, Soper continues Thomson's tradition of radically new vocal music, her texted works echoing Thomson's avant-garde compositions such as Four Saints in Three Acts, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. 

In announcing the award, composer and Academy member John Harbison writes of Soper:

Soper's vocal music is bold, varied, and forward-looking. Its advanced qualities are never dutifully or modishly present, but stem from a rich exploration of Voice, answering many imperatives—theatrical, textual, technological, social. There is joy, wit, shock, and allure in her pieces, all grounded by something meticulous and exacting.
 

(excerpt from Soper's Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say)

Perhaps most well-known of Soper's vocal works is her opera, Here Be Sirens, which follows the daily lives of three sirens on their well-trafficked island. First premiered in 2014, this work ranges from "ethereal medieval chant, gentle otherworldly melody, and the terror of the sublime"—what the Wall Street Journal calls "audacious, genre-bending music theatre" and The New Yorker hails as "an erudite, hilarious, furiously inventive meditation on the siren myth."

And now, Here Be Sirens, as well as a suite taken from the opera, are available via PSNY. In Soper's words, the Suite "presents an exquisite corpse-like portrait of these beloved and familiar monsters in all their murderous and irresistable glory."

Check out some excerpts from the opera below. 

New Works by Ann Cleare

by Ted Gordon on April 7, 2016, 3:59 p.m.

PSNY is happy to announce that two new works by Ann Cleare, one of which is in two arrangements, are newly available this week on PSNY.

Cleare's work has often explored concepts of presence, becoming, and immanence, dwelling in sound-worlds made manifest by her maserful use of instruments and electronics. Cleare's Inner, in a new version for violin and piano, "probes the subcutaneous space within sound", positing sound as a body with porous boundaries. Inspired by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Cleare writes: "the internal is given a multidimensional quality, fragmenting the outer surface", a metaphor for her compositional interplay between instruments and sound. 

(page 1 from Inner) 

In Cleare's On Magnetic Fields, the ensemble is split up spatially and sonically on stage: two "whirling" ensembles, featuring violins, flank the left and right sides, while a separate ensemble of harp, piano, and percussion creates a "box of light" in the center. We have published both this version for full ensemble, as well as a version for two violins and loudspeaker. The interplay between the two magnetically-charged ensembles on either side and the "piercing, alien light" of the center ensemble forms the basis of the composition. Check out a recording excerpt below. 

Hannah Lash: Portrait Concert at Miller Theatre

by Ted Gordon on April 5, 2016, 11:01 a.m.

The music of Hannah Lash is, as composer Martin Bresnick writes, infused with a "high seriousness"—a burning, disciplined seriousness, dedicated equally to the composition of new works and to the long musical tradition of the works' instruments, lineages, and intensities. An upcoming Portrait Concert at Columbia University's Miller Theatre features three works, two of which are world premieres. 

The program begins with the world premiere of Music for Eight Lungs, commissioned by the Miller Theatre and performed by loadbang. As the title would suggest, the performers in this ensemble—trumpet, trombone, bass clarinet, and baritone voice—are rendered as breathing bodies, each lung equal to the next regardless of instrument. (The voice, too, is an instrument here, woven in to the fabric of the piece.) The phonemic material of this composition is drawn from Purcell's aria, "When I am Laid in Earth" (known as "Dido's Lament," 1688).

Six Etudes and a Dream follows, written for and performed by pianist Lisa Moore. Each etude is dedicated to an aspect of Moore's piano playing, which Lash praises for its "musical laser focus." Check out a video of Lisa Moore, joined by cellist Ashley Bathgate, performing the first movement of Lash's Friction, Pressure, Impact:

The program will end with Lash, also an accomplished harpist, joining the JACK Quartet to perform Filigree in Textile, a work she composed for JACK and harpist Yolanda Kondonassis in 2011. This work shows Lash's capacity to work in several compositional paradigms, all of which have formed an integral part in the fabric of her compositional tradition—a metaphor implied by the piece's title and movement titles, each named after a material used in the weft of medieval tapestries. "Gold" features an organic, unfolding melodic "cell" which transforms throughout the movement; "Silver" is "a formal and somber dance in rhythmic unison"; "Silk" is through-composed, with the harp emerging as a figure against the ground of the ensemble. Check out an excerpt below.