Composer Spotlight: Keeril Makan

by Ted Gordon on April 4, 2013, 2:02 p.m.

We are proud to announce that all of Keeril Makan’s chamber works are now available through PSNY! Keeril’s been having a great year: a recent essay in the New York Times, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, upcoming performances across the country, and a forthcoming portrait album on Mode Records, including six works available on PSNY: Mercury Songbirds, Afterglow, Husk, Becoming Unknown, and After Forgetting, all performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble. We had a chance to catch up with Keeril to talk about his compositional process, the influence of his meditation practice, and his relationship with tonality, which is much more complicated than you might think.

  “The rhythm of my life is determined by the process of composition,” says Makan: this might be a familiar sentiment to many composers. But to be completely subsumed in the creative process, for each day to inform a composition, is something unique to Makan; he writes one work at a time, generating musical ideas from nothingness. Nothingness, or “Mu” in Japanese, is a concept borrowed from Zen: it is the condition of reality that is unknowable, that does not exist. Makan’s works emanate from a place of nothingness, constructing new sonic spaces one element at a time; they explore stillness, rather than the paralysis of non-movement. Makan’s work has always been pre-occupied by the same formal concepts: “drones, pulse/energy, and stillness”, but as a result of his explorations into “Mu”, the “quality of the stillness has changed.”

Makan’s chamber music, especially his works for solo instrumentalists, offer the performer a remarkable level of control over her performance practice. One such piece, “Resonance Alloy”, for solo percussion, was written for Makan’s close friend, David Shively. “We’re often taught,” Makan comments, that “percussion is all about the subtleties of color and timbre.” But for most performers and audiences, this doesn’t often hold true; “you hit a cymbal and it sounds like a cymbal. […] The best way to get the sounds that I liked out of instruments, I discovered, was by putting them in an unstable relationship with each other.”

 “Resonance Alloy,” then, becomes a meditation on (in)stability, timbre, and performance both for the performer and for the audience. The ethics of Makan’s solo works, also including “Mu” (for violin/viola), “Zones d’Accord” (for cello), and “Voice Within Voice” (for baritone saxophone) focus on bringing the attention to the materiality, temporality, and physicality of instruments. Not in service of musical Modernism or formalist experimentation (as in the music of Helmut Lachenmann, for example), but rather in the service of a radically subjective, personal approach to being in the world through sound.

 “The solo pieces are the most direct example of the way I work, but I think most everything comes about in the same way: an exploration of sound, of the musical instruments we’ve inherited, and a structuring of time that reflects my current experience.”

 If Makan’s chamber works seem like they have undergone some kind of constant evolution through the past ten years or so, it’s because they have: the goal for Makan is to write music that is true to his experience, and open to change. In this sense, he is one of the rare composers who is completely honest about his aesthetic compositional goals, informed by his daily life rather than by tradition, guilt, or fantasy. This may stem from his meditation practice; he comments, “part of what my practice has helped me with is acceptance, and openness, to change. My tastes do not stay the same over time. It would be more convenient if I was consistent, but I’m not. If I’m being aware of my experience, I will notice how different I am now from how I used to be.”

 “I learned the hard way that I am not a formalist. My mind is naturally and somewhat compulsively drawn to patterns and formal structures, but when I try to compose from that standpoint, the music is totally sterile. My mind and body need to be more aligned in the compositional process…”

Makan’s works can be sampled with the Soundcloud player above, and also heard on his forthcoming album on Mode; “Target”, released on Starkland records; and “In Sound”, released on Tzadik Records. 

New Works from Ingolf Dahl, Pierre Jalbert, Fred Lerdahl, and More...

by Ted Gordon on March 26, 2013, 11 a.m.

For the first time ever, the full score for Ingolf Dahl's "Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Wind Ensemble" is available for sale! Previously only available as a piano reduction, the full score for this work can now be purchased and used by conductors, educators, and scholars alike. Dahl's concerto-- among the most performed of his repertoire-- was commissioned and premeired in 1949 by Sigurd Raschér, who was instrumental in integrating the Saxophone into the classical repertoire. After escaping Nazi persecution, Dahl had settled as an ex-patriot in California, among many other European composers and intellectials, including Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Ernst Krenek, and others. His students-- including Michael Tilson Thomas-- carry on his legacy as a composer, conductor, pedagogue, and all-around Musikant. We are extremely happy to make this full score available, and hope that it fosters more awareness and performances of this masterwork for saxophone. 

Pierre Jalbert's "Icefield Sonnets" for soprano, baritone, and ensemble, and "Trio" for clarinet, violin, and piano are also now available. This new version of Jalbert's "Icefield Sonnets" includes settings of these poems to spectacular effect: 

Fred Lerdahl's "Time After Time" and "Fantasy Etudes" are also now available. "Time After Time", which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2001, employs Lerdahl's signature process of expanding variations on singular musical units, often to surprising new multiplicities. Throughout these processual, inevitable-sounding evolutions and mutations, melodic lyricism remains a vital part of this piece, especially in the second movement. 

Also among new works now available on PSNY: Douglas Cuomo's "A Far Playground" for cello and piano, and his work for solo cello, "...and Disbelievers". The first of these works was originally written for viola, and is now expanded; listen to an excerpt of the original here: 

And, last but not least, are three works be Lei Liang (bringing the total number of his works available on PSNY to twenty-seven!): "Lakescape Trio", "Lakescape II", and "Dialectical Percussions"; Hannah Lash's "Glockenliebe"; Joseph Schwantner's "Dream Drapery"; and Keeril Makan's "Cut" and "Bleed Through". Keep an eye out for more on Makan's music later this week! 

Springtime for PSNY: Awards! String Quartets! Opera!

by Ted Gordon on March 13, 2013, 10:53 a.m.

Great news for our PSNY composers: The American Academy of Arts and Letters has just announced its 2013 awards, and Kamran Ince and Kate Soper are among the recipients. Kamran Ince is awarded a 2013 Arts and Letters Award in Music, which includes both a general award and a specific award toward the composition of a new work. Kate Soper is awarded the 2013 Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, given to "mid-career composers of exceptional gifts." 

And if that weren't a good enough omen, March is shaping up to be a busy month: the JACK Quartet recently performed Ann Cleare's moil at Harvard University's Paine Hall. Listen to an excerpt of this piece here: 

Lei Liang's string quartet, Serashi Fragments, was also recently performed on March 8th by the Calder Quartet at the University of California San Diego. Listen to an excerpt of this work here:

We are also pleased to announce the premiere of Christopher Cerrone's opera, All Wounds Bleed, now available from PSNY. That's right: an opera available on PSNY! This staged premiere, on March 23rd, is produced by Tulsa Opera, and is directed by Kostis Protopapas. We were thrilled to be present at the premiere of Cerrone's Invisible Cities, and look forward to this next venture...