Catching Up with Richard Carrick

by Ted Gordon on July 27, 2021, 10:07 a.m.

PSNY recently caught up with composer Richard Carrick to discuss how he's been adapting to the changing landscape of composition, collaboration, and performance during the ongoing pandemic. Carrick has seen several ongoing projects continue, despite the challenges, to fruition—including his evening-length work for music and dance Sea, a collaboration with the choreographer Miro Magliore, which includes the premiere of Carrick's composotion The Mill along with his Piano Preludes and "in flow". Sea premiered physically on May 28th, 2021, performed by the New Chamber Ballet, and was also premiered as a dance film which can be viewed below: 

We also discussed Carrick's ongoing "Graphic Series" of scores, which Carrick conceptualizes as "lead sheets" for virtuosic improvisers. Constructed as large, physical scores with open instrumentation, these works were first workshopped with Carrick's Neither/Nor Ensemble at the Berklee School of Music in 2018, and since have been written for and performed by ensembles such as the Mivos Quartet, String Noise, Either/Or, and many others. 

Richard Carrick · Graphic Series

Richard Carrick's "lanterne" Released on New Focus Recordings

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 6, 2020, 2:38 p.m.

Richard Carrick has often felt most at home composing music for intimate spaces. In his chamber music, Carrick brings his own sense of virtuosity and structure to the interaction between nimble performers, adding his own meticulous artistry to the act of small-scale musical performance. As a performer himself, and as co-director of the Either/Or Ensemble, Carrick seeks out the precarious nuance and subtlety of live performance, writing works for small instrumental forces that focus both performer and listener to the present moment. 

lanterne, Carrick's latest release with New Focus Recordings, brings several of his works together on an album that celebrates this kind of small-scale intimacy in a time when so many people have been forced into social isolation, and in a time when the reflection made possible by his music is all the more valuable. Though this album was conceived well before COVID, Carrick's music takes on even more meditative power. In the titular composition lanterne, for example, Carrick explores the intricate possibilities of the bass flute, creating a kind of "wall of sound" that emerges from its lower register and climbs rhythmically throughout the instrument's harmonics and even the performer's own voice. The gasping, breathy sonorities of lanterne also emerge metaphorically in Carrick's 2018 string quartet Space:Time, which imagines the physical barriers of space travel—from the claustrophobia of the interior spaces for humans, to the pull of gravity and acceleration "into the light", as its coda is titled. 

Like many composers, Carrick often works with the musicians for whom he has written many of the works on lanterne both in person and remotely—this latter method involving correspondence including scores, recordings, videos, and voice memos. The ability for Carrick and his collaborators to share sketches, ideas, and sounds together, even though they are not in the same space, enables Carrick to compose works that evoke liveness and virtuosity through careful craft and technique. Carrick often draws inspiration for this refinement of performative gesture from gugak, the traditional music of Korea, which often features highly controlled yet wildly expressive sounds generated on instruments intended for small spaces. On lanterne, three works explicitly incorporate structural and sonic elements from gugak: Danga, Seongeum, and sandstone(s), the last of which incorporates traditional Korean instruments put into timbral dialogue with flute, violin, and cello.  

Recorded before the current crisis, but mixed and mastered in the isolation of a global pandemic, Carrick's lanterne is a prescient reminder of the possibilities of smallness and intimacy that emerge from the interaction between composers, performers, carefully crafted as scoee and recording—even in a time when we all must remain physically alone. Check out an interview with Carrick by New Focus Recordings below.

New Works from Richard Carrick, Anthony Cheung, and Christopher Cerrone

by Ted Gordon on Oct. 24, 2017, 10:48 a.m.

On October 27th, Richard Carrick will see the world premiere of his new work, sandstone(s), at the Pacific Rim Festival in Santa Cruz, CA. Pairing flute, violin, and cello with traditional Korean instruments, sandstone(s) is inspired by the temporary, unstable structures created by sand, which the composer explored making at Kenya's Diani Beach during his residence in Rwanda in 2016. Sandstone(s), which will be published by PSNY, is inspired by Carrick's involvement with different iterations of traditional Korean pansori, which he has explored in his solo violin work Seongeum, published by PSNY. It will be premiered by the New York New Music Ensemble alongside the Gugak Contemporary Orchestra of Seoul. For a taste of Carrick's relationship with traditional Korean music, check out a recording of Seongeum below.

On November 18th, Anthony Cheung, in collaboration with Wang Lu, will see a new work for solo piano premiered by Joel Fan at the Open Source Music Festival at New York's Abrons Art Center. A few weeks later on November 29, the Longleash piano trio will perform a new version of Cheung's 2006 work, Flyaway Detours, in addition to the US premiere of Ann Cleare's 93 Million Miles Away. To get a sense of Cheung's writing for solo piano, check out his performance of his own work, Running the (full) Gamut), from 2008.

In addition to performances of his work across the country, Christopher Cerrone will see the world premiere of his new string quartet, can't and won't, on December 7th at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Co-Commissioned by the LA Phil and the Calder Quartet, this new work is Cerrone's second string quartet, after 2016's How to Breathe Underwater, which was originally written for male voice, bass clarinet, trumpet, trombone, and electroincs, in 2011.