Kate Soper's "Ipsa Dixit" Named Finalist for Pulitzer Prize

by Ted Gordon on April 18, 2017, 10:14 a.m.

Kate Soper's Ipsa Dixit has been named a Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music, along with winner Du Yun for her work Angel's Bone and fellow finalist Ashley Fure for Bound to the Bow.

Ipsa Dixit, which synthesizes several of Soper's compositions into a seamless theatrical performance, was developed during a residency at EMPAC, and premiered in a fully-staged version this February at Dixon Place. The piece, as Alex Ross writes in The New Yorker, is a "twenty-first century masterpiece" and "an awesomely wide-ranging intellectual journey." Soper's nomination also marks an important event in the seventy-four year history of the Pulitzer Prize: it is the first time that all three nominees are women. 

Three of the movements of Ipsa Dixit are available on PSNY, and each can also be performed as a standalone work: Cipher, for soprano and violin; Only The Words Themselves Mean What They Say, for soprano and flute; and Rhetoric, for soprano, flute, violin, and percussion. The remaining movements will be published soon, making each individual movement available for study and performance, as well as a score and set of parts for Ipsa Dixit in its entirety.

Below, check out an excerpt from Ipsa Dixit from the recent live staged performance at EMPAC with Soper and the Wet Ink Ensemble:

Lerdahl and Carrick Performed by Sound Icon in Boston

by Ted Gordon on Sept. 26, 2016, 10:06 p.m.

Fred Lerdahl, composer, music theorist, and long-time professor at Columbia University, will be the composer-in-residence at the Boston University Center for New Music twice in the upcoming season: first in September, and later in January 2017. To kick off the residency, Boston's new music sinfonietta Sound Icon will perform Ledahl's Time after Time in their season opening concert on September 30 at Boston University's CFA Concert Hall.

Bridge Records, which has released numerous recordings of Lerdahl's work, including Time after Time, calls Lerdahl "one of the least known among "major" American composers." Of his singular style, Bridge writes that "a Lerdahl composition might at any moment be tonal or atonal, it might luxuriate in Lerdahl's rich melodic and harmonic gifts, or it might make reference to various musics of our past." 

            
(pages from Time after Time)

Time after Time, scored for Pierrot ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion), was commissioned and premiered by the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society in 2000 and a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The work employs Lerdahl signature "spiral form", in which simple ideas become deeply elaborated and more complex with each cycle. Listen to an excerpt:

Sound Icon's program also includes a performance of PSNY composer Richard Carrick's dark flow, a double quartet for saxophone, trombone, acoustic guitar, percussion, violin, piano, cello and cibalom. Carrick takes inspiration for this work from the "hypothetical and unexplained flow of galaxy clusters toward a particular point in deep space," a phenomenon described as "dark flow." Carrick elaborates: 

In astrophysics, dark flow refers to the hypothetical and unexplained flow of galaxy clusters toward a particular point in deep space.  Interestingly, some speculate this influence on galaxies comes from a part of the universe that no longer exists, but somehow still carries an influence on matter.  This "invisible pull" is something that exist deep in music as well, something strongly felt but not easily defined.

Check out a performance of dark flow with the Either/Or Ensemble: 

The program, presented by the Boston University Center for New Music on September 30, also includes performances of works by Rick Burkhardt and features soprano Jennifer Ashe.

Timo Andres's "The Blind Banister" at Caramoor

by Ted Gordon on July 7, 2016, 10:51 a.m.

After becoming a Pulitzer Prize Finalist this year, Timo Andres's third piano concerto, The Blind Banister, will finally premiere in New York at Caramoor on Sunday, July 10th. Dedicated to and composed for pianist Jonathan Biss, The Blind Banister is Andres's response to Beethoven's second piano concerto, echoing Beethoven's own late revision to this early work. Biss will perform the piece along with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Joshua Weilerstein.


(Illustration by Dadu Shin for The New Yorker) 

In a brief profile for The New Yorker, Russell Platt calls Andres "a modern modernist", and hails The Blind Banister as "a deeply complex tribute to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2". He writes:

Like John Adams and the late Steven Stucky, Andres has succeeded in carrying forward the mainstream tradition of orchestral modernism [...] in a way that is no less distinctive for seeming so ironic and abashed: the piece is at once gently private and powerfully communal in its gestures and devices.

Check out a video of Andres performing his recent completion of Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto: