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Posts tagged 'New Focus Recodings'

FLUX Quartet Performs Michael Hersch's "Images from a Closed Ward" with Live Video Projection

The music of Michael Hersch often addresses some of the most intense of human emotions and events: loss, suffering, pain, and darkness, what frequent collaborator Patricia Kopatchinskaja calls "this dark side, this shadow and blood." Indeed, the work that inspired Kopatchinskaja to work with Hersch was his 2010 string quartet, Images from a Closed Ward, which emerged from Hersch's encounter with the visual art of Michael Mazur, whom Hersch met in 2000 at the American Academy of Rome. This 13-movement string quartet responds directly to Mazur's gripping series of etchings and lithographs that depict the lives of residents—many of whom were committed against their will—at a Rhode Island mental institution in the early 1960s. 

The isolation, pain, and sorrow of Mazur's work is directly evoked in this masterful string quartet's movements, which transition between what the New York Times has called "creeping dread and desperate urgency." Hersch's gestural language seamlessly moves through texture, timbre, and harmony, using the four instruments of the string quartet as an organic being that convulses and laments, both statically and dynamically. In evoking the pain of disabled people treated with injustice and violence from a broken institutional system, it also allows listeners to imagine possibilities for restitution, justice, and ultimately peace.

A Lithograph by Michael Mazur  A Lithograph by Michael Mazur 

Originally commissioned and premiered by the Blair String Quartet in 2012, Images from a Closed Ward was recently recorded by the FLUX Quartet and released on New Focus Recordings in 2018. In addition to this new recording, the FLUX Quartet has also performed Images from a Closed Ward with a new live video projection, designed by James Matthew Daniel, which superimposes images of Mazur's works, excerpts of poetry, documentary photographs from mental institutions in the mid-20th-century, and other documentation related to those institutions on the performing quartet. The result is an even more powerful event that combines Hersch's sonic language with the visual work and poetry to which it responds, contextualizing and placing the quartet in the middle of a multi-sensory field. 

This video, taken from a performance at Philadelphia's Icebox Project Space, documents the FLUX Quartet's masterful performance of Hersch's work, and serves both as a compliment to their recent recording and also as a standalone work with its own unique combination of audio-visual poetics. Watch the full performance below.

Michael Hersch's "Carrion-Miles to Purgatory" Released on New Focus Recordings

The music of Michael Hersch is direct, powerful, and expressive: it makes the pulsing nerve of the human condition audible, laying bare some of the most intense and powerful human emotions. Hersch's new album, Carrion-Miles to Pugatory, released May 31st on New Focus Recordings, documents three works—each composed for two musicians—that address what frequent collaborator Patricia Kopatchinskaja calls "this dark side, this shadow and blood." Indeed, for this album, Kopatchinskaja commissioned a new work by Hersch, "...das Rückgrat berstend," which takes its title from the poetry of Christopher Middleton, translated at the violinist's request into German. Throughout the piece, Kopatchinskaja speaks selected fragments from Middleton's poetry in a fervent, carefully-notated declamation, without excessive dramatization. This spoken, scored text, echoing and simultaneously transcending techniques such as Sprechstimme, accompanies highly charged gestural writing in high and low strings—violin and cello—that mirror, ilustrate, react to, and metabolize the poetry in music. While Middleton's poetry has long played a role in Hersch's poetic compositional imagination, appearing frequently in the written matter of his sketches and scores, das Rückgrat berstend—"the spine exploding"—is a powerful sonic expression of Hersch's voice.

Carrion-Miles to Purgatory takes its name from an excerpt from the American poet Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle, his second book of poetry, published in 1947. Hersch's work, for violin and cello, meditates on themes of loss, death, and tragedy in thirteen short movements that resemble "thirteen fragments of a single shattered geode," as David Plylar writes in the album's liner notes. Here, Carrion-Miles to Purgarory is exctingly performed by violinist Miranda Cuckson and cellist Jay Campbell. Each movement develops its own musical logic in the dimensions of pacing, harmony, gesture, and rhythmic complexity; the movements form a gestalt of emotion, each reflecting and refracting the same ineffable subject. 

Also included on this album is a rare performance by Hersch himself, alongside violinist Miranda Cuckson, recorded during a live performance at National Sawdust in 2018. "Music for Violin and Piano" incorporates nearly thirty short movements from five of Hersch's works, along with new material composed for the concert, influenced by the poetry of Christopher Middleton, Phillip Schultz, Primo Levi, and Chesław Miłosz. The resulting performance is eleven kaleidoscopic minutes of exactingly-notated music, pushing Cuckson and the composer himself to technical extremes, seamlessly creating a new narrative that is driving, engaging, and always intense. 

The Music of Wang Lu



The music of Wang Lu (b. 1982) incorporates delicate instrumental textures, field recordings, live electronics, and a wide instrumentation to evoke and enchant scenes of contemporary life on a global scale. Born in Xi’an, China, Wang studied at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music and at Columbia University in the City of New York, before joining the composition faculty at Brown University; she was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2014, and will spend 2019 in Berlin as a recipient of the Berlin Prize. Her music evokes, documents, and transforms all at the same time: it sounds the echoes of possible future soundscapes in real time. 

Nowhere is this more evident than in her 2015 work Urban Inventory, which seamlessly weaves together the sounds of the urban environment, explorations of linguistic intonation, and traditions of free improvisation into a complex fabric of extended techniques and textures. As Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker, “every moment is vividly etched, drenched in instrumental color [...] the flow of events is so rapid and so variegated that nothing settles into the groove of the familiar.” 

Wang describes this piece as "a way for me to try to redefine and expand a specific period in recent history, as well as convey popular public spaces bustling with activity—which are both dear to my heart." Wang included field recordings of a public park she visited every day in her youth; clips from The Red Detachment of Women, a 1964 propaganda ballet; and the voice of 1990s pop icon Yang Yuying (杨钰莹), putting the listener inside the firing synapses of a composer whose ears are always open to possibilities.

In her 2016 work Cloud Intimacy for ensemble and electronics, Wang moves from urban soundscapes to virtual soundscapes, exploring the sounds of tweets, swipes, and skeuomorphic camera shutters to imagine sound of “cloud intimacy” in the age of Tinder. The listener is inserted into the aural flow of Wang’s imaginative and unpredictable compositional consciousness, creating new sonic and affective connections between increasingly everyday sounds. The delicacy of Wang’s writing for acoustic instruments is matched by her mastery of electronic processing: sound is presented in a seamless, transformative fabric of many colors.

Patrick Castillo chose the premiere of Wang's Cloud Intimacy at the Mostly Mozart festival as one of his "top new-music moments of 2016" for WQXR. Castillo writes, "Wang’s music provides poetic and deeply personal commentary on the whole of modern civilization, meditating with equal gravitas on Tiananmen Square and Tinder. The results are in turns cheeky and devastating, and the sheer sound of it is utterly her own."

Wang's new album, "Urban Inventory," which contains recordings of that work as well as Cloud Intimacy is available from New Focus Records and may be purchased from Spotify or Bandcamp

Not all of Wang's music points outward: it can also reference the inner struggle that we must all face with a world accelerating into the anthropocene. In 2017, Wang composed Unbreathable Colors, a work for solo violin, commissioned by and dedicated to the celebrated violinist and violist Miranda Cuckson. Unbreathable Colors takes its name from the daily air quality report that represents the beige-and-gray smog of air pollution in a rainbow of color. When she composed the piece, "it had been purple for days, which means it has exceeded the [health] index." Though the pollution Wang describes is most often prevalent in Chinese cities, it is also a global problem, and Unbreathable Colors is a meditation on the inescapability of struggle, whether the skies, or their representations, are gray or purple or blue. 

Since its premiere at Brooklyn's National Sawdust in April 2017, it has been performed by the Niew Ensemble in Amsterdam, as well as Nunc's 2018 residency at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music in Houston. Check out an excerpt from Cuckson's performance below.

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