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Posts tagged 'piano'

New Works on PSNY: Wollschleger, Ueno and Cerrone

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: 

Adrian Knight: Performances in New York, Upcoming Long-Form Piano Composition

San Francisco's Mobius Trio, a classical guitar trio composed of Robert Nance, Mason Fish, and Matthew Holmes-Linder, is coming to New York to perform Adrian Knight's Bon Voyage, a work for three guitars that was composed specificaly for these players. The trio will perform this work in three venues: November 5th at Spectrum in Manhattan, November 6th at Shapeshifter Lab in Brooklyn, and November 7th at Van Dyke Park (AKA New Amsterdam Records' space in Brooklyn). Check out a video of them performing this work on some beautiful, vintage guitars: 

Also, be on the lookout for a new, long-form composition for Piano by Adrian Knight, commissioned by pioneering new music pianist R. Andrew Lee. The piece is a result of Lee's commissioning project for new works "of considerable duration" by Knight and Randy Gibson. The new work is set to be performed at the Wayward Music Series in Seattle, WA, in 2015, and will also make its way to the East coast. Lee said he was inspired by Knight's composition Unruhe, from his 2008 Ricky Bruch Album. Check it out here:   

Beat Furrer in New York

Beat Furrer, the Swiss composer and founder of Klangforum Wien, has just ended a week-long residency in New York with the Talea Ensemble. The residency included lectures, open rehearsals, and several concerts, including a non-staged performance of Furrer's opera, FAMA, which included the vocal ensemble Ekmeles, at the Bohemian National Hall. The week also included the US premiere of Furrer's 2011 Studie für Klavier, available from PSNY, on May 14th at the Austrian Cultural Forum. We're excited to be able to make available several of Furrer's works, which are notoriously difficult to get a hold of. In addition to the Studie für Klavier, Furrer's a due for violin and piano, presto for flute and piano, and Spur for string quartet and piano are all available for download. 

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