European American Music Distributors Company is a member of the Schott Music Group
Katherine Balch Joins PSNY
2018 announcement (blog size)
Soper IPSA banner USE
Subotnick Greenroom banner
Norman Trip to the Moon Greenroom

Composers

Blog Archive

2023202220212020201920182017201620152014201320122011

Newsletter

Posts tagged 'viola'

Josh Modney Performs at Spectrum NYC

Josh Modney is one of the leading interpreters of contemporary music for the violin, and there is certainly not a lack of music for him to play. As the executive director of the Wet Ink Ensemble, a member of the Mivos Quartet, and a frequent performer with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Modney's calendar is packed with premieres and performances. So it's a rare treat to see him perform a solo recital, with some help from fellow Wet Ink instrumentalists, at Spectrum NYC, on New York's Lower East Side. 

On Saturday, January 16th, Modney will perform six works featuring the violin, including pieces by PSNY Composers Mario Diaz de Leon, Kate Soper, and Scott Wollschleger. Diaz de Leon's piece, ii.23, is scored for viola and electronics, and the score calls for extra subwoofers to make the bass felt in the space. Check out a clip: 

Modney will also be performing Kate Soper's Cipher, a work Soper commissioned for him, along with the composer herself. One of Soper's signature works, Cipher explores the limits of language, sound, and performance in the intimate connection between instrument and voice. Check out a video of the pair performing Cipher below. 

Again picking up the viola, Modney will also perform Scott Wollschleger's Soft Aberration No. 2, for viola and piano, alongside pianist and fellow composer and Wet Ink member Eric Wubbels. Wollschleger's work evokes what he calls a "broken echo" between instruments—a fine pairing with Soper's work—exploring the shared sensibilities of sight and sound experience between two performers. Check out an excerpt below: 

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: 

Three Works by Lei Liang

Live from Rome! New York City's WQXR airs an interview with Lei Liang, live from the American Academy in Rome, on January 25th, 2012. Check out the livestream here: http://www.wqxr.org/#/articles/q2-music/2012/jan/25/interview-lei-liang/. Lei's interview is a part of WQXR's "China in New York" series, an innovative and fresh look at Chinese-American composers. 

Lei's recent signing with Schott has been a huge thrill for us, and we've been hard at work getting all of his materials ready for publication. Three new works are now available on PSNY: "A Journey into Desire," for solo guitar; "In Praise of Shadows," for solo flute, and "Gobi Canticle," for violin and viola or cello. Check out an excerpt of "In Praise of Shadows" here:

 

Tag Cloud