Robert Blocker, Dean

october 6, 2011Morse Recital HallThursday at 8 pm

artistic directorChristopher Theofanidis

featured composerDavid Lang

and music ofPaul KerekesHannah LashLoren LoiaconoGarth Neustadter

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN

New Haven Counterpoint

Garth Neustadter, soprano saxophone

connecticut shift

Edward Tan and Sung Mao Liang, violinJessica Li, violaQizhen Liu, cello

Waking Rhythm

Paolo Bortolameolli, conductorHyun Sun Sul, violinSoo Jin Chung, celloPeng Zhou, fluteCaroline Ross, oboeSoo Jin Huh, clarinetCraig Hubbard, hornLarry Weng, piano

sweet air

David Radzynski, violinJurrian Van Der Zanden, celloAnouvong Liensavanh, fluteDavid Perry, clarinetEsther Park, piano

Intermission

Garth Neustadter

Paul Kerekes

Loren Loiacono

David Lang

Hannah Lash

David Lang

Hush

Yang Jiao, conductorHolly Piccoli and Tammy Wang, violinJane Mitchell, violaShinae Kim, celloMatthew Rosenthal, bassKyeong Hoon Seung, fluteHsuan-Fong Chen, oboeWai Lau, clarinetLauren Yu, bassoonPatrick Jankowski, hornPaul Futer, trumpetHana Beloglavec, tromboneCristobal Gajardo-Benitez, Jonathan Allen, and Leonardo Gorosito, percussionYue Guo, harpMichael Noble, celeste

cheating, lying, stealing

Hannah Collins, celloGleb Kanasevich, bass clarinetMichael Compitello, Victor Caccese, and Adam Rosenblatt, percussionWayne Weng, piano

October 6, 2011 · Sprague Memorial Hall

As a courtesy to others, please silence all cell phones and devices. Photography and recording of any kind are strictly prohibited. Please do not leave the hall during musical selections. Thank you.

PROFILES + NOTES

DAVID LANGcomposer

Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms. In the words of the New Yorker, “With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” Many of Lang’s pieces resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His cata-logue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling, and emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music.

the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Theater of Voices, was awar- ded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Other recent projects include the concerto world to come, premiered by cellist Maya Beiser and the Norrlands Operans Symfoniorkester; darker, premiered by Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles; plainspoken, a new work for the New York City Ballet; writing on water, for the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and visuals by Peter Greenaway; the difficulty of crossing a field, a fully-staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist

Evelyn Glennie; and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe.

David Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Rome Prize, BMW Music-Theater Prize (Munich), and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, NEA, New York Foundation for the Arts, and American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also received a Bessie Award and a Village Voice OBIE Award for Best New American Work.The recording of The Passing Measures (Cantaloupe) was named one of the best CDs of 2001 by The New Yorker. His recent CD Pierced, on Naxos, was praised both on Pitchfork and in Gramophone and was called his “most exciting new work in years” by the San Francisco Chronicle. The recording of the little match girl passion on Harmonia Mundi received the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance.

Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of the legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His work has been recorded on the Sony

Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, and Cantaloupe labels, among others. His music is published by Red Poppy Music (ASCAP) and is distri-buted worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc.

sweet airnotes

During a trip to the dentist my oldest son Isaac was given laughing gas. The dentist called it “sweet air,” a gentle name to take the fear out of having a cavity filled. It worked. My son expe- rienced something—a drug—so comforting that it made him ignore all signs of unpleasant- ness. This seemed somehow musical to me. One of music’s traditional roles has always been to soothe the uneasy. I must say I have never been that interested in exploring this role. It is much easier to comfort the listener than to show why the listener might need to be comforted. My piece sweet air tries to show a little bit of both. In sweet air, simple, gentle musical fragments float by, leaving a faint haze of dissonance in their wake.

sweet air was written for the ensemble Sentieri Selvaggi for premiere at the Settembre Musica Festival in Torino, Italy, in 1999. It is intended as a birthday present for Louis Andriessen – Happy sixtieth birthday, Louis!

cheating, lying, stealingnotes

A couple of years ago, I started thinking about how so often when classical composers write a piece of music, they are trying to tell you something that they are proud of and like about themselves. Here’s this big gushing melody, see how emotional I am. Or, here’s this abstract hard-to-figure-out piece, see how complicated I am, see my really big brain. I am more noble, more sensitive, I am so happy. The composer really believes he or she is exemplary in this or that area. It’s interesting, but it’s not very humble. So I thought, What would it be like if composers based pieces on what they thought was wrong with them? Like, here’s a piece that shows you how miser-able I am. Or, here’s a piece that shows you what a liar I am, what a cheater I am. I wanted to make a piece that was about something disreputable. It’s a hard line to cross. You have to work against all your training. You are not taught to find the dirty seams in music. You are not taught to be low-down, clumsy, sly and underhanded. In cheating, lying, stealing, although it is phrased in a comic way, I am trying to look at something dark. There is a swagger, but it is not trustworthy. In fact, the instruction in the score for how to play it says: Ominous funk.

Composers Award, and ASCAP fellowship for Film Scoring Studies at Aspen, as well as multi-ple awards from the National Federation of Music Clubs. Most recently, he was selected as the second-prize winner in the Transatlantyk Film Music Competition (Poland). He cur- rently studies with Martin Bresnick.

NEW HAVEN COUNTERPOINTnotes

New Haven Counterpoint, for solo soprano saxo-phone and pre-recorded saxophone ensemble, is loosely inspired by concepts used in Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint. Although the three-movement work is not overtly “minimalist,” it uses certain repetitive rhythmic devices to manipulate perceptions of pulse and meter.

PROFILES + NOTES

GARTH NEUSTADTERcomposer

Garth Neustadter is an Emmy Award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist. He has composed feature-length scores for PBS, Turner Classic Movies, Warner Bros., and China’s CCTV. The Baltimore Sun says, “The guy’s a natural, as his soaring theme makes plain.”

In 2011, Neustadter received a Primetime Emmy Award for his score for the PBS American Masters documentary “John Muir in the New World.”

Neustadter gained international attention in 2007 when he was selected by Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer as the First-Prize Winner in the Turner Classic Movies Young Film Composers Competition. He was subsequently commissioned by Turner Classic Movies and Warner Brothers to com-pose and produce the feature-length musical score for the film The White Sister, which pre- miered on the TCM channel.

Neustadter has been recognized as a five-time DownBeat Magazine award winner in the areas of composition, classical violin performance, and jazz saxophone performance. His achieve- ments have been profiled in USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, Film Music Magazine, The Chro-nicle of Higher Education, DownBeat Magazine, the National Federation of Music Clubs Review, and NPR. He recently received an ASCAP Morton Gould Award, ASCAP Young Jazz

PAUL KEREKEScomposer

Composer and pianist Paul Kerekes (b. 1988, Huntington, NY) is currently pursuing a mas-ter’s degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, where he studies with David Lang. His music draws inspiration from a wide va-riety of sources, including free improvisation, early music, repeating patterns, and visual art.

In July 2010, Paul worked alongside eighth blackbird as both a composer and performer at the festival Music10 in Blonay, Switzlerland. He also attended notable programs such as the Stony Brook Summer Music Festival, the Young Artists Piano Program at Tanglewood, California Summer Music, and Yale’s New Music Workshop in Norfolk, Connecticut.

Paul received his undergraduate degree in piano performance and composition from Queens College, where he received numerous awards, including the Gabriel Fontrier Award and the George Perle Award for achievement as an undergraduate composer. He has worked

closely with David Fulmer and the Second Instrumental Unit, who have premiered many of his works. Paul has also had the privilege of hearing his music performed by TwoSense, the Stonewall Chorale, Mannes Preparatory Division Choir, Norfolk Contemporary Ensemble, cellist Nicholas Photinos, flutist Kelli Kathman, and saxophonist/composer Ed Rosenberg in such venues as (le) poisson rouge, Symphony Space, Centre de musique Hindemith, Lefrak Hall, and Central Park.

CONNECTICUT SHIFTnotes

Connecticut Shift was written for the 2011 Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. While writing this piece, I thought a lot about the environ-ment in which it would be premiered. The piece opens with a tender melodic line in chorale texture – the opening is my musical perception of Connecticut.

This melody undergoes a series of progres- sive transformations, taking what was once gently tonal and distorting it into something brutally atonal. The initial presentation of the melody and its degenerate form are then juxtaposed. It is my hope that the listener, knowing what transpired, will find the return- ing tonal melody lifeless.

PROFILES + NOTES

LOREN LOIACONOcomposer

Loren Loiacono (b. 1989), a native of Stony Brook, New York, is currently pursuing her master’s degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, where she is a student of Ezra Laderman and Christopher Theofanidis. She received her B.A. in music from Yale University, where she was a student of Kathryn Alexander and Michael Klingbeil. While there, she was the recipient of the 2009 Abraham Beekman Cox Composition Prize. She is also the recipi- ent of the 2010 Susan and Ford Schumann Fellowship from the Aspen Music Festival, and was a Composer Fellow at the 2011 Bennington Chamber Music Conference. She has received awards from ASCAP’s Morton Gould Awards and the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, among others. Her works have been performed by the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, Yale Symphony Orchestra, 5th House Ensemble, Argento Ensemble, Berkeley College Orchestra, Jonathan Edwards College Philharmonic, and soprano Rachael Garcia, among others.

WAKING RHYTHM notes

Between sleep and wakefulness, there is a state of consciousness known as ‘hypnopompic sleep.’ Unlike the vivid narratives of dreams, the sounds and images of this state, sometimes called ‘dreamlets,’ are usually static, regular,

even mundane. A common phenomenon is ‘sleep thought,’ where the sleeper will hear frag- ments of conversation, or even work through a mental argument, following what the sleeper believes is sound logic. It’s not until fully awake that the sleeper realizes the incoherence of his or her thoughts.

It is this state of intense, but misinformed, focus that I was trying to recreate in Waking Rhythm. The musical materials are simple and direct: the slow woodwind chorale that pro- vides the underpinning for the first half of the piece, or the staggered arpeggiations of the piano. The music is both clear and consistent in its harmonic and rhythmic materials. However, these elements come together in an uncertain, hazy way, coming in and out of focus like a dreamer awakening.

obtained her bachelor’s degree from Eastman, her Ph.D. from Harvard, and a performance degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music. She studies at at the Yale School of Music.

HUSHnotes

Relentless canons propel Hush forward towards its inevitable catastrophe. This catastrophe or climax is followed by a kind of post-traumatic response: secondary canons, and an unrelated piece of material that enters—alien to the piece, like scar tissue—within a hushed surface. This alien material is a quote from the old English lullaby, “All the Pretty Little Horses,” emerging in the horn: a call—suggested by the melody’s opening fifth, but not a triumphant or military horn call. The horn is left in a no-man’s-land after a disaster to sing to itself, to try to find solace—or perhaps to try to forget. The return of the opening material that follows acts as a memory rather than a resolution. Its accumu- lation is simply an arc of activity, silenced by repeated notes that also recall an earlier spot in the piece. These notes ring as the last of the string pizzicati fade in the viola and cello: a gentle sleep. In my mind, the lullaby is an apt choice for suggesting the reaction to a violent destruction or trauma. A lullaby is itself a false world, an invitation to dream…to escape…to hush.

PROFILES + NOTES

HANNAH LASHcomposer

Hailed by the New York Times as “striking and resourceful…handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been performed at (le) Poi- sson Rouge, Chelsea Art Museum, Harvard University, Tanglewood Music Center, Times Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Commissions include the Fromm, Naumberg, and Howard Hanson Foundations, Orpheus Duo, Circle Wind Ensemble, MAYA, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. Lash has received the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship, a Yaddo Artist Colony fellowship, Barnard Rogers Prize, Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize, and numerous academic awards. She was selected by the American Composers Orchestra for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings. Her chamber opera, Blood Rose, was presented by NYC Opera’s VOX. God Music Bug Music has been selected by the Minnesota Orchestra for performance in 2012. Lash

NEW MUSIC NEW HAVEN

artistic directorChristopher Theofanidis

managing directorKrista Johnson

assistant Benjamin Firer

music librarians Cristobal Gajardo-BenitezTimothy HilgertWai LauHolly PiccoliMatthew RosenthalKathryn SalfelderKaitlin Taylor

stage crew John AllenJonathan AllenLandres BryantColin BrookesTimothy HilgertMichael LevinMatthew RosenthalAaron SorensenGerald Villella

Thursdays at 8 pmMorse Recital HallFree admission

NOV 3Featuring Martin Bresnick’s Going Home - Vysoke, My Jerusalem, with Double Entendre, and Ingram Marshall’s September Canons, with Todd Reynolds.

FEB 2Featuring faculty composer Ezra Laderman’s Piano Sonata No. 5.

MAR 1Featuring Aaron Jay Kernis’s Ballade out of the Blues and Christopher Theofanidis’s Flow, my Tears.

MAR 29Featuring guest composer Steve Reich’s Proverb (1995). With members of the Yale Camerata and Yale Schola Cantorum.

APR 12Featuring guest composer Kaija Saariaho’s Serenatas and Terrestre.

COMING UP

Janna Baty, Peter Frankl, and FriendsOct 9 | Sun | 4 pm | Sprague | FreeFaculty Artist RecitalJanna Baty, soprano, and Peter Frankl, piano, with Ani Kavafian, violin; Ole Akahoshi, cello; and Allan Dean, trumpet. Songs by Schumann, de Falla, Shostakovich, and Beethoven, and Ivan Fischer’s Eine Deutsch-Jiddische Kantate.

Brian Lewis, violinOct 11 | Tue | 8 pm | Sprague | FreeFaculty Artist Recital Sonatas by Milhaud, Schumann, and Robert Avalon (Connecticut premiere); Bennett: Hexapoda: Five Studies in Jitteroptera; Copland: Hoedown from Rodeo.

Lucas Wong, pianoOct 13 | Thu | 8 pm | Sprague | FreeDoctor of Musical Arts RecitalHector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, transcribed by Franz Liszt; George Crumb: Makrokosmos, Volume II: Twelve Fantasy Pieces after the Zodiac.

Brentano String QuartetOct 18 | Tue | 8 pm | Sprague Tickets $25–$35 | Students $10Oneppo Chamber Music SeriesString Quartets by Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert; Ginastera’s Piano Quintet, featuring pianist Ignat Sozhenitsyn.

concerts & public relationsDana AstmannDanielle HellerDashon Burton

new mediaMonica Ong ReedAustin Kase

operationsTara DemingChristopher Melillo

piano curatorsBrian DaleyWilliam Harold

recording studioEugene Kimball

Yale School of Music203 432-4158concerts@yale.edumusic.yale.edu/media