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Posts tagged 'Roulette'

Erin Gee Featured at the Resonant Bodies Festival

Now in its fourth year, the Resonant Bodies Festival showcases contemporary vocal performers who curate their own concert programs—allowing for a wide variety of repertoire and musical styles. Held this year at Roulette, Resonant Bodies' closing night features the premiere of a new work by PSNY Composer Erin Gee, performed by soprano Charlotte Mundy alongside the TAK Ensemble. On the Resonant Bodies Podcast, Mundy discusses her curatorial choices with festival director and soprano Lucy Dhegrae. Check out the podcast below. 

Alvin Singleton on PSNY

Alvin Singleton has been one of the leading compositional voices in America since the 1960s, as a member of a cohort of American composers who fused the inheritance of European Modernism with a unique style of American individualism. Raised in Brooklyn and trained at Yale, Singleton resided in Europe for most of the 1970s, returning to become the composer-in-residence at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 1985, and has since become an acclaimed American composer. For the first time, a selection of Singleton's music is now available for immediate download via PSNY. 

Though Singleton has worked extensively with orchestras, he has also written works for chamber ensembles, theatrical pieces, and vocal ensembles. Two early works from 1966—Mutations for solo piano, and Epitaph for double SATB chorus—show Singleton's own unique take on the transformations of melodic material, nodding toward the Serialist tradition but going his decidedly own way.


(Singleton composing in his Atlanta studio, late 1980's)

In the 1970s, Singleton's writing for solo performers and small chamber groups pushed on that tradition even further: 1974's Be Natural, for any trio of bowed string instruments, includes ludic and improvisational elements that emphasize the creativity inherent in musical performance, and 1978's Argoru IV is a fiendishly difficult piece for solo viola, meticulously notating music to the point of it sounding improvisatory during performance. Both pieces were recently performed as part of a portrait concert at Brooklyn's Roulette — check out a video of Be Natural from that concert, below: 

[Be Natural performed by Stefanie Griffin (va), James Ilgenfritz (db) and Meaghan Burke (vc)]

Singleton's signature playful, enigmatic style is also heard in other chamber works from this period, including the solo harpsichord work Le Tombeau du Petit Prince (1978) as well as Necessity is a Mother...!!! (1981), for three female actors and amplified double bass—a piece which calls for extensive improvisation by all four performers, and nods to the tradition of spoken word performance.

            
(pages from Le Tombeau du Petit Prince, listen to a recording here)

His more serene, mysterious aesthetic can be heard on pieces such as Et Nunc (1980) and Through it All (2007), both of which feature wind instruments. A truly versatile composer, Singleton's work over the past forty years has varied widely by instrumentation and ensemble, but has retained a fascinating, important compositional voice.

World Premiere of Mario Diaz de Leon's "O Ignis Spiritus" by the TAK Ensemble

The TAK Ensemble, an ambitious young group from New York, will premiere Mario Diaz de Leon's new composition, "O Ignis Spiritus", alongside a performance of Ann Cleare's "Unable to Create an Offscreen World (C)", at Roulette on May 25th. Supported by a Chamber Music America commissioning grant and the GENERATE program at Roulette, this performance follows a busy month for Diaz de Leon, who recently has performed in venues as diverse as Brooklyn metal mecca Saint Vitus, the Donau Festival in Krems, Austria, and the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow, alongside the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and frequent collaborator Nate Young, of the noise group Wolf Eyes. 

Diaz de Leon's new work, "O Ignis Spiritus", shares its title with a medieval sequence of the same name by Hildegard von Bingen; the text, which translates to "O Holy Fire", compliments Diaz de Leon's compositional aesthetic, which explores the extremities of timbre, texture, color, and form. 

Diaz has written about fire before: check out "The Flesh Needs Fire", a 2007 composition for flute, clarinet, and electronics. 

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