Andrew Norman Premieres "Switch" at Utah Symphony

by Ted Gordon on Nov. 9, 2015, 11:57 a.m.

On November 6th, percussionist Colin Currie and the Utah Symphony premiered Andrew Norman's new work for solo percussion and orchestra, Switch. Norman's works for orchestra have been called some of the "best orchestral works that the 21st century has seen thus far", and we couldn't agree more. His landmark 2008 piece, Unstuck, has already become a staple of orchestral repertoire around the country; 2011's Try, for chamber orchestra, was commissioned and premiered by the LA Philharmonic to critical acclaim; and 2013's Play premeired to critical acclaim in both traditional and social media. 

So what has Norman composed this time? Switch, like its sibling works for large groups of musicians, explores the ludic possibilities of play between soloist and ensemble. Quite literally, the music acts like a "switch" between percussion instruments positioned in front of, and behind, the orchestra; these instruments act as "switch[es] that control other instruments in specific ways, making them play louder or softer, higher or lower, freezing them in place and settng them in motion again."

The Salt Lake Tribune, which called the premiere "electrifying" and "hyperkinetic", conducted a video interview with Norman and Toby Tolokan, the Utah Symphony's Vice President of Artistic Planning. Check it out below: 

PSNY Around America

by Ted Gordon on Nov. 5, 2015, 3:53 p.m.

It's an exciting week for new music in America. Though plenty of concerts will be happening on both coasts, this week boasts three events in Nebraska, Chicago, and Miami that showcase the works of PSNY Composers outside of their normal haunts. Premieres of new works, master classes, and presentations will be given by five PSNY composers over the next several days in both the urban centers of Chicago and Miami, as well as the regional center of Kearney, Nebraska. Who says new music only happens in New York? 

Kicking off this weekend of new music in America's heartland is a performance on November 6th by pianist Karl Larson at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. Larson, who has premiered several works by PSNY composers, will perform Scott Wollschleger's Secret Machines No. 6 and Adrian Knight's Death of Paneloux, alongside Morton Feldman's Palais de Mari. Larson recently premiered Wollschleger's Meditation on Dust with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and has played all of Wollschleger's works for piano. The University of Nebraska Kearny recently wrote a preview of the concert, which calls Larson's playing "adventurous," and includes a short interview with Dr. Anthony Donofrio, UNK assistant professor in music theory and composition. Get a taste of Larson's program with a sample of Adrian Knight's Death of Paneloux: 

The following evening, Adrian Knight's hour-long piece Obsessions will be performed by pianist R. Andrew Lee at the FETA Foundation in Miami, Florida. Obsessions, commissioned by Lee, will be heard again at the University of Central Florida on November 10th. The piece is described as "a fifty-minute work which explores stubborn habits, routines, patterns, and, well, obsessions."

During the same weekend, Northwestern University's second annual New Music Conference and Festival will take place at the Bienen School of Music. This hybrid conference and festival brings together scholars, composers, performers, and students for a free weekend of workshops, performances, master classes, and presentations. Participating ensmebles include Ensemble Dal Niente and Third Coast Percussion, and participating composers include PSNY composers Ann Cleare, Kate Soper, and Ted Hearne, among others. 

On Saturday, November 7th, Northwestern's Contemporary Music Ensemble (co-directed by Alan Pierson) will perform excerpts from Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads, as well as Ann Cleare's on magnetic fields, which will be published soon on PSNY. The following afternoon, Hearne, Cleare, and fellow PSNY composer Kate Soper will present on their work as a part of the conference. A complete schedule of events is available here.

New Works on PSNY: Wollschleger, Ueno and Cerrone

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 27, 2015, 11:31 a.m.

PSNY is pleased to announce the addition of several major works from three of our composers, ranging from pieces for solo clarinet to a new work for piano and string orchestra. Four of these new works by Scott Wollschleger, Ken Ueno and Christopher Cerrone were composed and premiered within the past year. 

Scott Wollschleger's Soft Aberration No. 2, for piano and viola, explores Wollschleger's concept of a "broken echo"—imitation between instruments that is refracted and softened by the act of communication in performance. Meditative and insightful, this work illustrates the diffusion of tonality with expressive, lyrical harmonies in the piano that are echoed in the viola's muted melodies. 

As in Soft Aberration No. 2, Wollschleger's Meditation on Dust presents the listener with a transfigured aural landscape of tonality through expressive, gestural motifs—though in this piece the piano is accompanied by a full string orchestra. Wollschleger imagines Straussian tone-poems petrifying in the desert, taken out of their fin-de-siècle Viennese context and into the future, where they still sound through a layer of dust. This isn't a "dusting" of tonality; rather, it is expressive tonality rendered into granules—pulverized, decayed, transfigured into an enigmatic refrain. Check out a video of pianist Karl Larson with the String Orchestra of Brooklyn premiering the work in June: 

In addition to these works by Wollschleger, we're very happy to make available three works by Ken Ueno, all of which embody Ueno's innovative use of extended techniques, multiphonics, and bold compositional voice. Ueno's Watt, for baritone saxophone, percussion, and CD Boombox, is an early example of Ueno's journey into multiphonics. Taking inspiration from John Coltrane's late albums such as Interstellar Space (1967), Watt shows Ueno's reconciliation of multiple symbolic, timbral, and functional systems into a kind of "flow", which he likens to a "manifold—like playing Scrabble and Mahjong at the same time."

Another work that features a reed instrument, this time a solo amplified Bb clarinet, is I screamed at the sea until nodes swelled up, then my voice became the resonant noise of the sea. The title of this piece comes from lore from the Korean tradition of Pansori singing, in which it is said that singers develop their trademark vocal timbre by screming at the sea until they develop nodes in their vocal chords. Ueno's work explores this idea through the clarinet, developing new techniques for overblowing, multiphonics, and the limits of humans and machines. 

Ueno's interest in reed instruments, multiphonics, extended techniques, electronics, and the limits of sound, all come together in his stunning 2015 concerto for violin and chamber ensemble, Zetsu. This work not only asks its performers to push the boundaries of what is possible with their instruments—it also asks them to play new instruments designed by the composer, such as percussion idiophones tuned to the microtonal intervals particular to the piece's harmonic spectrum, and the "hookah sax"—a saxophone with a 7-ft length of plastic tubing that extends its range. Check out a video of the premiere below:  

Finally, we are pleased to publish Christopher Cerrone's new song cycle, The Naomi Songs, in two versions: for voice and piano, and voice and 11 players. This cycle sets the poetry of Bill Knott, an enigmatic poet whose works were often short, metrical, and deeply self-depricating. In 1968, two years after announcing his own death, he published The Naomi Poems, a short volume that he often gave away for free and circulated via mimeograph. Cerrone's settings of these deeply personal poems matches their affect: the Naomi Songs are unified by the key of F, though their mode switches, and each song expresses a different aspect of joy, melancholy, longing, and desire. Check out an excerpt below: