Screeching Violins and Raspy Cellos: Some Alternative Favorites

You Go / Single [2012]

Uns-Apparatus [2013]
for brass quintet
Ensemble Apparat

Being part of my "apparatus" series, Uns-Apparatus is concerned with creating a sound-body and a bodily sound. However, its bodily condition is extremely volatile, as if shape-shifting, involuntarily. The protean body may at one moment attain a manageable form, only to bud an unwieldy appendageal growth the next. [Imagine your body. Now imagine that your arm, or a single toe, is suddenly ten times its size.] The instruments themselves are connective tissues, constantly forming and reforming their collagenous coupling to one another as subcutaneous organs comprised of tendrils and dendrites. They are mutating bodies within the mutating body. [Imagine your body. Now imagine that your lungs, a single lung, or one chamber of the heart, or just your internal carotid artery, swells up to twenty times its size.] The skin does not break; it bulges. 

More info <a href="http://www.timothy-mccormack.com/unsapparatus" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>.

Image: Jason Elewski, still from "Uns-Apparatus" (Dancers: Monica Thomas, Matthew McMunn)

Uns-Apparatus [2013]

Study Score: http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p1918_Tramespace-I.html

Asko|Schönberg Ensemble
Clark Rundell, cond.

Geertekerk, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2013, Opening Concert
September 2, 2013

Live recording made by Richard de Gruyl for Concertzender/VPRO during Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2013

=========
Tramespace is a hybrid word composed of two French words, “trame” (woof, or weft in English), meaning the crosswise threads on a loom over and under which other threads (the warp) are passed to make cloth, and “espace” (meaning space). The metaphorical loom is a context from which the musical materials are woven. Just as each thread is carefully placed and integrated to create a textile, each sound gesture, each musical impulse is threaded with precise intention. As the musical filaments are carefully interlaced – heterogenous, yet collaborating to become one – the surface becomes rich with patterns while depth is made by the multitude of interacting strands. At times, the weave is loosened and a thread becomes entangled, exposing the threads as merely threads just momentarily and no longer as fabric, shifting perspective and seeing things anew, even altered once the yarn becomes rejoined.

In tandem, the concept of space and its elusive quality is something Onishi became interested in during conversations with close friend, composer Mahir Cetiz, most notably regarding the “compositional space” in his work, Départ dans… As space is inexorably tied with time, with an elapsing sense of immediacy and memory, the awareness of physical and metaphysical space is fluid. As music passes with time, it fills a space, interacts with it and leaves it. It makes you aware of the room you are sitting in, yet your sense of inner space has expanded limitlessly. For Onishi, “…it lingers to the territory of the unknown…” and for him, this piece “is, in a sense, an attempt to circumscribe this metaphysical space using the sound that is developed over time.” His work is also informed in part from the philosophical discussion of “self” that is put in the context of the world as a space by Japanese philosopher Shizuteru Ueda in his “Two-Fold Being-in-the-World.”

Tramespace I was commissioned by Gaudeamus Muziekweek as a result of receiving the Gaudeamus Prize in 2011. Tramespace II, still a work in progress, is commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris.

Tramespace I and II can be played separately, although playing them together forms a coherent whole as a diptych.

- Program notes by Michelle Lou

Tramespace I (2012-13)

for Contrabass-Clarinet, Cello, Prepared piano and Percussion
Carol McGonnell, Contrabass Clarinet
John Popham, cello
Russel Greenberg, percussion
Chris Goddard, piano

Inhibited Momentum

This Azure Day by Seo Jung-ju (trans. Chae-Pyong Song and Anne Rashid)

On this blindingly azure day,
let us long for those we miss.

There, where autumn flowers sit,
green has given in to red.

Let the snow fall.
Let spring return.

What if you are alive when I die?
What if I am alive when you die?

On this blindingly azure day,
let us long for those we miss.

푸르른 날/서정주(1915~2000)

눈이 부시게 푸르른 날은
그리운 사람을 그리워하자.

저기 저기 저, 가을 꽃 자리
초록이 지쳐 단풍 드는데

눈이 내리면 어이하리야
봄이 또 오면 어이하리야

내가 죽고서 네가 산다면!
네가 죽고서 내가 산다면?

눈이 부시게 푸르른 날은
그리운 사람을 그리워 하자.

azure day (푸르른 날)

From the new Dum Dum Girls record, 'Too True', out January 29th on Sub Pop Records

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Too True

Lost Boys and Girls Club

Dum Dum Girls - Lost Boys and Girls Club

Note: video footage of this performance can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/89395213

Nieuw Ensemble
Yoshiaki Onishi, cond.

An Evening of Today II
January 16, 2014
Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Départ dans... (2010, rev. 2013)

Score: http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?language=en&info=p1903_Tr--epilogue-.html

Recording of the new, definitive version

Kevin McFarland, violoncello
Ryan Streber, recording engineer

Columbia Composers Concert
Cary Hall, DiMenna Center (New York)
April 14, 2014
======
When I wrote my Culs-de-sac (en passacaille) for string quartet in 2009, it was evident to me that I should develop the sonic soundscape that I have created in that piece. I have decided that I write a cycle of compositions for string quartet and its subsets.

Tr (épilogue) marks the second piece that I completed in this cycle. Its title has a precursor; Tr for violoncello and piano, of which I took the formal scheme as a point of reference for the solo piece. I took the duo piece, stripped away the piano part, and enlarged the piece by adding musical commentaries.

As the title may suggest, I intend that this piece conclude the cycle. In the spirit of concluding the cycle, my focus in this piece was to illuminate the gestures and situations of ‘farewell,’ in the sense that the envelope of the phrases has the conscious trajectory of fade-out.

Many thanks to Patrick McGuire who, in the symposium Creative Dialogue V, premièred the work-in-progress version as a part of Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Also thanks are due to Anssi Karttunen and Magnus Lindberg, whose commentaries and feedbacks were crucial to the development of the piece. For the revised version, a rather extended coda (Coda (à Séverine)) was added. I am indebted to Séverine Ballon, who kindly demonstrated a technique utilized in this coda.

Tr (épilogue) is dedicated to Pierre Morlet and Mark Andre.

- Yoshiaki Onishi

Tr (épilogue) - for violoncello solo (2012, rev. 2014)

Rebuild (Baths Remix)

limit of correction

for cello

composer: Kristian Ireland

years of composition: 2009-2010

performer: Séverine Ballon, cello

performance: Tankhalle, Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf. Land Brandenburg, Germany, 2012.

http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p69_limit-of-correction.html

© 2009 Kristian Ireland

www.kristianireland.com

limit of correction

'i did not see it to the end' was written by Jessie Downs for Academy.  This is a performance from December 15 2011.  visit Jessie's website at http://jessiedowns.tumblr.com/

'I did not see it to the end' (2011) by Jessie Downs

Produced and Composed by Jonathan Pfeffer
Engineered and Mixed by Jeff Zeigler @ Uniform Rec in Philadelphia, May-Jun 2013
Mastered by Ryan Schwabe

Personnel:
Ricardo Lagomasino - SPD-SX
Eric Slick - Acoustic Kit
YIKES the ZERO - Vocals
Lushlife - Vocals
Jeff Zeigler - Mono/Poly

"Bodega" was made possible with generous support from the American Composers Forum.

Unmanned Bodega feat. Lushlife, YIKES the ZERO, Jeff Zeigler, Eric Slick, Ricardo Lagomasino

ACADEMY IS ON PERMANENT HIATUS, WHILE THE SOUNDCLOUD PAGE WILL STAY ACTIVE FOR LISTENING TO TRACKS, WE WILL NOT LONGER BE UPDATING IT :)  ALL OF US ARE STILL DOING INDIVIDUAL THINGS, AND SOMETIMES COLLABORATE WITH EACH OTHER.  PLEASE CHECK OUT OUR INDIVIDUAL SOUNDCLOUD CHANNELS BEST WISHES, CHRISTIAN DAVID EUGENE 

'I did not see it to the end' (2011) by Jessie Downs

ACADEMY Ensemble

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