Adrift (2021) for flute, piano, and electronics

Commissioned by Duo Axis
Performed by Duo Axis at UC San Diego, May 2022
Zach Sheets, flutes; Wei-Han Wu, piano

Adrift

Performers: Steven Schick, conductor; Wilfrido Terrazas, flute; Ellen Hindson, oboe; Grace Talaski, clarinet; Kosuke Matsuda, percussion; Kyle Adam Blair, piano; Miguel Zazueta, Natalia Merlano Gomez, Alex Taylor, voice; Amir Norouz Nasseri, Ilana Waniuk, violins; Myra Hinrichs, viola; Peter Ko, cello; Matthew Henson, bass

Production assistance from Alex Stephenson, David Espiritu and Jessica Flores 

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Stylistically, Interviews resembles a collage: materials borrowed from Josquin, spectralism, Leonard Cohen, high modernism, elevator music, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Kyle Adam Blair, Appalachian folk singing, bits recycled from my own pieces, the recorded voice of my mother, my own songs and poems. But collage is generally creating something new out of things that come from different places, disparate things; this feels more like a multifarious reflection of my own musical and personal world – things that all come from, or at least have been absorbed into, the same place, a musical inheritance or accumulation. I’ve always felt slightly unsure of the relationship between all of the many aspects (personas?) of my music making – sometimes they feel far away from each other, held in different compartments – but here I feel I’ve found a way for many of them to coexist in one place.

Conceptually, I think of Interviews as more concerned with storytelling than with aesthetics. Or at least, Interviews represents an intersection between musical and personal concerns. In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, I undertook ethnographic research as part of my PhD coursework. For this I interviewed both my parents, Vicki and Trish, asking them all kinds of questions about their lives: what it was like for them growing up, how they came to terms with their sexuality, what it was like living through the politically tumultuous 1980s in New Zealand, how they went about starting a family, how it was for them when I came out. 

At the time, this was a really rewarding process of discovery and documentation, a way to learn new things about my family and where I’d come from, a way to feel connected to them across the Pacific during the enforced separation of the pandemic. Now, those interview recordings have other resonances. Trish was diagnosed with early onset dementia several years before we made the interviews; by the time we recorded them, her dementia had started to really affect her short term memory. Now, nearly four years later, her dementia is quite advanced, and many of those memories are gone for her. Looking back, the documentation of those memories is precious. 

The making of this piece has been both a way for me to hold on to that preciousness, those past perfect moments of connection, but also a way to process grief, the ongoing present of loss and change. In many ways Interviews occupies a threshold, between looking back and looking forward; it is both at once, acknowledging the messiness and multifacetedness of memory, not singular, smooth, or linear. I also see it as a small way of showing gratitude for both of my devoted, supportive, sensitive, beloved parents, and of celebrating Trish’s life.

Interviews (Live Recording)

Composer Alex Stephenson (b. 1990) has recently collaborated with artists including the New Fromm Players, the Flux Quartet, Duo Axis, HOCKET, and the La Jolla Symphony. He has received significant commissions from the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Breckenridge Music Festival, and the Royaumont Voix Nouvelles Festival, and his music has also been featured at the Tanglewood Music Center, the ISCM World New Music Days, the Composers Conference, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, among others. His work has been praised as "masterfully orchestrated" and exhibiting "sonic beauty" (San Diego Union-Tribune).

Alex’s music stems from a deep-rooted lyrical impulse, combined with a keen interest in the ways we perceive sound and in musical repertoires both old and new. With each project, he seeks to intertwine these diverse influences in novel ways, curating sonic worlds that feel simultaneously fresh and familiar. He works in a variety of contexts, from the acoustic to the electronic, from concert music to sound installations and interdisciplinary collaborations.

His string quartet Bloom—which was selected to represent the United States at the 2021 ISCM World New Music Days and was a prizewinner in competitions through the League of Composers, Hausmann Quartet, and Charles Ives Music Festival—places vigorous, passionate bursts of energy into dialogue with sonorous, gently pulsating harmonies. His alternately playful and meditative Chamber Concerto, exploring new methods of combining microtonal synthesizers and electronics with an acoustic ensemble, was premiered by colleagues at UC San Diego under the baton of Steven Schick. Most recently, the San Diego Union-Tribune described Alex’s orchestral work An Elemental Music—commissioned and premiered by the La Jolla Symphony under conductor Michael Gerdes—as a “wonderful new work” that “could be easily programmed by any American orchestra.”

A committed educator, Alex currently teaches theory and analysis, composition, orchestration, and electroacoustic music as an instructional assistant professor at Illinois State University. Previously, as an instructor at UC San Diego, he received the university-wide Barbara and Paul Saltman Excellent Teaching Award.

Alex’s recent music analysis article, on harmony and politics in contemporary music, appears in Music Theory Online.

Alex holds a Ph.D. (2023) in composition from the University of California San Diego. He was a US-UK Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar (2014-15), studying at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, and earned a master's degree (2017) from the Eastman School of Music and a bachelor's degree (2012) from the University of Chicago.

Adrift

Alex Stephenson

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