The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Music Department at Stanford University will be hosting Helen Bledsoe in a concert of works for flute featuring composers at Stanford.
Tuesday, April 3rd, 8 pm
CCRMA, 660 Lomita Drive, Stanford, CA
Program:
Strata 2* for flute and interactive computer programming (2001)
Charles Nichols
Entre Funerailles IV** for solo flute (2000)
Mark Applebaum
Fictions for solo flute (2000)
Christopher Jones
Unseen Similarities* for flute and tape (2001)
Ketty Nez
One Voice for solo flute (1991)
Melissa Hui
Fra i testi dedicati alle nubi for solo flute (1989)
Salvatore Sciarrino
Carceri d'invenzione IIb for solo flute (1984)
Brian Ferneyhough
* world premiere
** US premiere
Strata 2, flute and interactive computer programming (2001): Charles Nichols
(Chris Burns, computer)
Strata 2, for flute and interactive computer programming, is a study in obscuring and defining harmonic motion, obstructing and establishing rhythmic pulse, animating surface detail, and signal processing with modulation techniques.
The piece is divided into four sections, with an additional introduction and two brief interludes. Each section is further divided into seven subsections, each of which are based on one of three harmonies, eight- and nine-pitch groups, which extend through the range of the flute. The four sections move from obscured to defined harmonic motion, through the use of greater or fewer auxiliary pitches, which revolve around the primary pitches of the harmonies.
These sections also move from obstructed to established rhythmic pulse, through the use of greater or fewer rhythmic interruptions and grace notes, and expansion and contraction of sustained notes.
The sustained notes are animated with trills and vibratos of three different speeds, flutter tongues, and sung pitches, which create interference with the timbre of the flute.
The timbre of the flute is further processed with computer programming, using amplitude- and ring-modulation, and spatialized around four speakers.
Charles Nichols received his Bachelor of Music degree in violin performance from the Eastman School of Music, and his Master of Music degree in composition from Yale University. Composing and performing interactive computer music, and researching digital synthesis and musical instrument design, he is currently working towards a Ph.D., and serving as interim technical director, at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
Entre Funerailles IV, solo flute (2000): Mark Applebaum
Brian Ferneyhough's Funerailles for seven strings and harp requires that its two versions be performed on the same concert but not consecutively. In this regard my series of solo works, Entre Funerailles, are hypothetical interludes to his two versions; as autonomous compositional improvisations, they may also be performed independently. These pieces are a sort of dual homage and whimsical aesthetic intrusion.
Entre Funerailles IV for flute is dedicated to Helen Bledsoe who premiered the work in Amsterdam on February 26, 2001. The form of the piece is a continuous variation in which each measure can be heard as a transformation of the previous one. However, in the ultimate work, much of the narrative is missing: measures were removed and although the remaining pieces were sewn together in time, a discursive gap remains. The gap increases incrementally (up to five adjacent unheard transformations), and then shrinks until no gap remains. The process is repeated but with a degenerating maximum gap of four, then three, then two, and finally one unheard transformation.
The idea then is that the narrative distance between adjacent measures expands and contracts, producing moments of logical consequence as well as incongruous, surreal ones. As the maximum gap contracts, so decays the ambit of narrative incongruity. In response to the assumption that music changes either gradually or suddenly, this piece oscillates progressively from gradual changes to sudden ones.
Mark Applebaum was born in Chicago, 1967, and holds a B.A. from Carleton College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at San Diego. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, electro-acoustic, and electronic work has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia with notable premieres at the Darmstadt summer sessions, Italy's Festival Spaziomusica, and ICMC in Beijing. He has received commissions from Betty Freeman, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, Zeitgeist, MANUFACTURE, the Illinois State University Contemporary Players, the Jerome Foundation, and the American Composers Forum, among others. His music has been performed by the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Arditti String Quartet, Musica Nova, Zeitgeist, newEar, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, MANUFACTURE, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, players under the direction of Harvey Sollberger, and members of Speculum Musicae. In 1997 Applebaum received the American Music Center's Stephen Albert Award and an artist residency fellowship at the Villa Montalvo artist colony in Northern California.
Since 1990 Applebaum has built electro-acoustic instruments out of junk, hardware, and found objects for use as both compositional and improvisational tools. Mousetrap Music, A CD of sound-sculpture improvisations can be heard on the Innova label. Also on Innova is The Janus ReMixes: Exercises in Auto-Plundering, a CD of electronic works whose source material is derived exclusively from recordings of his acoustic compositions. Applebaum is also active as a jazz pianist. He has concertized from Sumatra to the Czech Republic. In 1994 he received the jazz prize of the Southern California Jazz Society and in 1999 the Mark Applebaum Trio performed in the first Mississippi arts event broadcast live over the World Wide Web. At present he performs with his father, Robert Applebaum of Chicago, in the Applebaum Jazz Piano Duo.
Applebaum has taught at Carleton College, UCSD, and Mississippi State University. He is currently assistant professor of music at Stanford University. Additional information is available at www.markapplebaum.com.
Fictions, solo flute (2000): Christopher Wendell Jones
I first encountered Jorge Luis Borges' labyrinthine fictions while I was writing this piece. Intricate networks of relationships are sketched in many of these stories, implying worlds extending far beyond the confines of a few pages of prose. I found this technique to be an extraordinarily compelling way to solve some of the problems inherent in working with small forms. Just as Borges' stories reveal individual facets of a much larger fictional world, I attempted to create brief musical forms through the implication of musical processes rather than their exhaustive exploration.
Composer Christopher Jones was born in 1969 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His works have been performed in numerous places in North America, including recent performances at Stanford University and at the University of New Mexico Composer's Symposium. He has also had works presented by New Works Calgary (Calgary, Alberta) and L'Orchestre a vent de l'ecole Cure-Mercure (St. Joviete, Quebec).
As a pianist, Christopher is very active as a performer of contemporary music. He is a former member of the Indiana University New Music Ensemble, and has performed with New Works Calgary, The University of Washington Contemporary Group (Seattle, WA), and the New Vienna Ensemble (Indiana University). He has premiered numerous solo and chamber works. Performances at the New England Consevatory's Jordan Hall led to recordings of works by Bela Bartok and Elliott Carter for WGBH radio in Boston.
Currently, Christopher is pursuing a DMA in composition at Stanford University where he has studied with Jonathan Harvey, Brian Ferneyhough and Jonathan Berger. He has completed a Master of Music in composition at the University of Calgary, a Master of Music in piano at Indiana University, and a Bachelor of Music in piano at the New England Conservatory.
Unseen Similarities, flute and tape (2001): Ketty Nez
Written for flutist Helen Bledsoe, Unseen Similarities is an extensive essay on timbral treatment of (only!) flute samples, and the possibilities of morphing between two or more sonorities and rhythms. The tape part was generated using CLM; spatialisation was effected using the Spatialisateur library in Max/MSP, developed at IRCAM. Compositionally generated from the figuration of Ravel's Lever du Jour from Daphnis et Chloe, Unseen Similarities also includes a restless flute solo, carving out trajectories of pitch and rhythm between a series of slowly-changing clusters which simultaneously saturate all levels of the porous musical texture.
Having returned to the States after living for several years in Europe, Macedonian-born Ketty Nez is presently a visiting composer at CCRMA. Prior to attending the course for computer music at IRCAM in Paris during 1998-99, she worked for two years with Louis Andriessen in Amsterdam, and co-founded there a composers' collective. While she was in Amsterdam, several of her chamber works were premiered by Dutch ensembles, including her orchestral piece Machaut Mirrored, commissioned by the Orchestra Insomnio. As part of the finals of the 1997 Toru Takemitsu Composition Award, Afterimages was performed by the Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra. Her chamber work Pir-Ondine was premiered in 1996 as a commission by the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group. Her orchestral work Multi-Masking was read by the Women's Philharmonic at their New Music Reading Session in 1993.
Her music has been played by ensembles at festivals in England, Finland, Holland, Germany, and Japan, where she spent a year studying privately with Michio Mamiya in 1988, during which time she began writing for traditional Japanese instruments. She has participated as fellow in the 1998 June in Buffalo Festival, the 1997 Britten-Pears School Composition Course (Aldeburgh, England), the 1996 California State University Summer Arts Composition Workshop, the 1995 Tanglewood Music Center, the 1989 and 1991 Aspen Music Festivals, and the 1990 Pacific Composers Conference (in Sapporo, Japan).
After having completed her doctorate in composition at the University of California at Berkeley in 1994, she taught at San Francisco State University. While in San Francisco, she also co-founded two groups, the Brodo/Nez cello-piano duo and the Composers' Coalition, and performed as pianist with Earplay and Composers, Inc. She also completed a master's degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, a bachelor's degree in piano performance from the Curtis Institute of Music, as well as a bachelor's degree in psychology from Bryn Mawr College.
One Voice, solo flute (1991): Melissa Hui
This set of three pieces were composed while I was learning to play the flute at Yale University. I found that all manners of extended techniques, including pitch bends, whistle tones, multiphonics and cross-fading between registers, came so much more naturally to the novice flutist than any traditional flute technique. It occurred to me then that learning to play the Western flute the "correct" way involved training to eliminate from one's playing those very properties of the flute's tonal and timbral palette that were intrinsic to the instrument and to which I was most attracted. In this work I wanted not so much to exploit extended techniques than to make use of the instrument's entire range of colours. It was the result of time spent not practicing what I was supposed to.
Melissa Hui was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. She received her D.M.A. from Yale University and M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Her mentors include Jacob Druckman, Earl Kim and Mel Powell. Recent commissions include works for the Oregon Symphony, National Arts Centre Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (Montréal), New Music Concerts (Toronto), and a soundtrack for the Oscar-nominated documentary, Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square. Her works have been performed at Gaudeamus Music Week (Amsterdam), L.A. Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series, Focus Festival and MoMA Summergarden (NYC), and by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, California EAR Unit, Esprit Orchestra (Toronto), Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, and the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, among others. Upcoming premieres and current projects include commissioned works for the Kronos Quartet, Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec, the St. Lawrence String Quartet and New Millenium (NYC). Her compositions have been released on Centredisc, UMMUS and CRI. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1997 as well as grants from the Canada Council, Meet the Composer and Fromm Foundation, she has been Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University since 1994.
Fra i testi dedicati alle nubi, solo flute (1989): Salvatore Sciarrino
Fra i testi dedicati alle nubi is the elusive title ("between the texts/lines dedicated to the clouds") of the seventh and last piece from the Opera per Flauto, a series of works for flute solo, dedicated to Roberto Fabbriciani, which each explore a separate field of textures employing advanced extended techniques. Fra i testi, for example, uses multiphonics, whistles, and various, often rude-sounding noises. In Sciarrino's own description, Fra i testi is "morphogenic music, which turns to another song, which in the quantity and rapidity of its mutations resembles a cloud."
Salvatore Sciarrino was born 1947 in Palermo. A precociously gifted child, he started painting at age four, and at twelve was drawn to experimenting with music under guidance of Antonino Titone, making his compositional debut at the 1962 Palermo New Music Week. Essentially self-taught, he worked briefly with Turi Belfiore in 1964 and left his native city in 1969 to go to Rome, where he attended the course on electronic music at the Accademia de S. Cecilia taught by Franco Evangelisti. Moving to Milan in 1977, he taught at the Conservatory there, and in 1982 withdrew to the Umbrian town of Citta di Castello, though has continued to teach at the Conservatories in Florence, Bologna, and in his native town. Though he has written six operas and other numerous large-scale works, and has won several international awards, his broader international reputation has been established on a range of works for soloist or small ensembles, especially his works for flute, often written for Roberto Fabbricciani, for solo strings, and for piano.
Carceri d'invenzione IIb, solo flute (1984): Brian Ferneyhough
In the published score to Carceri d'invenzione IIb (premiered by its dedicatee Roberto Fabbriciani in 1985), Ferneyhough notes that: "Although somewhat shortened, this work is a literal presentation of the solo flute part of Carceri d'invenzione II. . . . The solo flute version does not form part of the Carceri d'invenzione cycle."
The seven-part cycle (1981-86) includes Superscriptio (solo piccolo) - Carceri d'invenzione I (sixteen players) - Intermedio all a ciaccona (solo violin) - Carceri d'invenzione II (solo flute and twenty players) - Etudes transcendantales (Intermedio II) (mezzo-soprano, flute, oboe, violoncello, harpsichord) - Carceri d'invenzione III (fifteen winds and three percussion) - Mnemosyne (bass flute and tape). One of the main inspirations was the series of etchings Carceri d'invenzione ("Dungeons of Invention") by Giambattistei Piranesi, "re-encountered" in 1981. As noted in the composer's sketchbooks in Richard Toop's article in Perspectives of New Music:
The irrational world of the "Prisons" dizzies us not from its lack of measurements (for never was Piranesi more of a geometrician) but from the very multiplicity of calculations which we know to be exact and which bear on proportions which we know to be false. . . .
We almost never have the impression of being in the main axis of a structure, but only on a vectorial branch. The preference of the Baroque for diagonal perspectives inevitably gives us the feeling one exists in an asymmetrical universe.
The frail catwalks, the drawbridges in mid-air which almost eveywhere double the galleries and the stone staircases, seem to correspond to the same desire to hurl into space all possible curves and parallels. This world closed over itself is mathematically infinite.
Finally, this void is sonorous: each "prison" is conceived as an enormous ear of Dionysus . . . and this sense of total exposure,total insecurity perhaps contributes more than all else to making these fantastic palaces into prisons.
Ferneyhough comments on the Carceri d'Invenzione cycle as a whole in his book Collected Writings:
Several patterns connect the individual compositions, so that a dynamic network of trajectories if suggested. From the point of view of instrumental forces, the three (large chamber orchestral) worksCarceri d'Invenzione I-III form a clear central axis, around which the remaining, smaller pieces are disposed. . . . [The] flute concerto, Carceri d'Invenzione II, occupies the central panel of the triptych. . . .
[T]he solo flute part of this 14-minute piece was through composed in its entirety before any of the orchestral accompaniment was determined. My intention was to allow the ensemble textures to comment more freely on the rigorously pre-determined modular patterns of the soloist ina way which would sometimes suggest competition, at others amplification of specific tendenciesin the solo line.
The solo part consists of 48 internally invariant modules, which are cyclically permutated so as to suggest the gradual growth of tendential perspective and, in particular, the architectonic nature of registral deployment. At the beginning, only the the extreme upper and lower registers of the flute are used; little by little other registers are blended in so as to finally focus on the central minor third of A and F#, all events and detailed elaborations suddenly being confined to that pitch-band, with the exception of sudden outbursts in the original registral extremes signalling the cyclically-determined recurrence of modular elements already heard. As more and more cycles are overlapped, the variational techniques employed become increasingly extreme and registrally rich, the entire tendency flowing into a quasi una cadenza,wherein all registral and articulational aspects of the flute are exploited to the full. The final section consists of a progressive subtraction of material and a descent into the lowest register, placed against a string texture itself derived from the eight basic chords polyphonically 'diffracted' through glissandi.
Brian Ferneyhough is William H. Bonsall Professor of Music at Stanford. Prior to his appointment in 1999 he taught at UC San Diego and (1974-86) at the Musikhochschule, Freiburg, Germany. Born in Coventry, England, he received his formal musical training at the Birmingham School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music before moving to continental Europe to undertake advanced studies with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam and Klaus Huber at the Basel Conservatoire, Switzerland. Since 1974 his music has been extensively performed and recorded. Ferneyhough has been active as a pedagogue in many countries worldwide, including a 20-year period as lecturer and coordinator of the Darmstadt Summer Courses. Recent commissions include an opera for the Munich Biennale and a large orchestral work for the Donaueschingen Festival.
Flutist Helen Bledsoe was born 1965 in Aiken, South Carolina, and since 1994 has been based in Europe. A full member of the MusikFabrik , a contemporary music ensemble based in Dusseldorf, she is a regular guest with Amsterdam's Nieuw Ensemble and the ASKO Ensemble, and has appeared with the Klangforum Wien.
As a soloist, Helen has won the top prizes from the Myrna Brown Competition, the Banff Concerto Award, and the International Gaudeamus Interpreter's Competition for Contemporary Music. She has performed as soloist in North America with, among others, the Dallas Chamber Orchestra and the Calgary Philharmonic. In Europe, she has performed at the Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Gaudeamus Music Week. Under the direction of Heinz Holliger at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, she performed to critical acclaim his Scardanelli Zyklus for solo flute, chamber orchestra and chorus. She has also appeared at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Philharmonies in St. Petersburg, Berlin and Cologne, Settiembre Musica in Torino, Cite de la Musique in Paris, the Gulbenkian Festival in Lisbon, and the Zurich Tage fur Neue Musik.
Helen holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh (B.A. summa cum laude), Indiana University (M.M.), and the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam (Artist Diploma, with Distinction). Her teachers and sources of inspiration have been Bernard Goldberg, Peter Lloyd, Kate Lukas, Harrie Starreveld, Aurele Nicolet and Robert Dick. She has won numerous scholarship awards, including the William Kincaid Scholarship. During the winters of 1992 and 1993, Helen held residencies at the Banff Centre, Canada, where she persued her passion for avant-garde chamber music and improvisation.
Although considered a "specialist" in contemporary music, Helen comes fom a broad educational and professional background. While studying the traverso, she performed with the University of Pittsburgh Collegium Musicum. As an orchestral player, she held positions in the Charleston Symphony (SC), the Pittsburgh Civic Orchestra and the Owensboro Symphony (Kentucky). Helen has also studied Jazz with David Baker in Indiana and Carnatic (South Indian) music with Rafael Reina in Amsterdam, worked with singer Jahnavi Jayaprakash in Bangalore during the summer of 2000.
In addition to private teaching, Helen has taught at the University of Pittsburgh and was a graduate assistant to Peter Lloyd and Kate Lukas at Indiana University. Upcoming CD's include the solo flute works of Hans Zender, and the Windsequenzas of Peter Eotvos.