commissioned & premiered by the JACK Quartet during TIME:SPANS 2021

note| mayu: the great river is inspired by Andean (South American Indigenous) cosmology & iconography through the lens of queerness, diaspora, and separation. The score works as an ecosystem for connecting living constellations, musical materials, and the individual/collective experience of time. The piece is a reflection on the multiple temporalities experienced and harnessed by displaced, erased, and structurally excluded peoples. These layers of time, the material and immaterial, are sources of joy | resilience | survival, and perhaps, future.

mayu: the great river [2021] | JACK Quartet

Brian Simalchik’s music is nuanced and captivating, always demonstrating a highly sensitive treatment of the continuum between sound and silence. We have felt a close connection to Brian’s artistry ever since working together on his Seven Songs at nief-norf Summer Music Festival in 2016. As such, we are beyond thrilled to present the world premiere of Brian Simalchik’s Finite Things, written in 2021 for our duo. Elusive, ruminative, and dream-like, this four-movement work resists easy categorization and unilateral meaning. Simalchik speaks eloquently about the piece’s conception and possible interpretations thusly:

"The title for the piece comes from a line in the last stanza of Theodore Roethke’s poem ‘The Far Field,’ a meditation on death and the ends of things. This poem was on my mind a lot during the Fall of 2020, when the many losses and absences of the pandemic hung all around us. The line reads: ‘All finite things reveal infinitude.’ Much of this piece is made up of dream-like progressions of sparse, irregular melodic fragments, suspended in both time and the decaying resonance of the piano. These little fragments reminded me of the dead and decaying things that fill the fields of Roethke’s poem, as well as the abandoned fields on an old farm near my childhood home that I used to explore. You could think of them as being like pieces of rusted machinery, or a decaying fence - overgrown with weeds, fallen down or rusted out, but with the original form still visible beneath the overgrowth, the rust, or despite the pieces being broken apart. 

One other possible argument the piece makes, to me, is how beautiful it is to put so much care into a temporary thing, or into a series of moments which are gone as soon as they arrive. That's really all we can do with our lives—chase beauty, truth, goodness, etc.—without understanding what that might mean in any larger sense. We do it in spite of knowing that we will pass; you might say we do it because we know, deep down, that we will pass, and we want to do everything we can to make meaning during this one, all-too-brief time that we know is ours.”

Brian Simalchik - Finite Things (world premiere)

Facing Death - Louis Andriessen 
live @ concertgebouw, recital hall

Facing Death - Louis Andriessen

"I Will Not Be Sad in This World" by Eva Beglarian

Yoshi Weinberg, alto flute

I Will Not Be Sad In This World by Eva Beglarian

Excerpt from the chamber music cycle "Rituals For Forgotten Faces" - This is movement 4b for string quartet composed in 1999.

Ndodana-Breen Music 

Rituals For Forgotten Faces No. 4b (string quartet)

For electronic gamelan ensemble and string quartet. Performed live at MASS MoCa during  the Bang on a Can Summer Institute 2011.

Bubblegum Grass Peppermint Field

a round to parts of a poem by Li-Young Lee

Persimmons

innova 036
Aizuri Quartet and Adrienne Kim: The Bells Bow Down — Chamber Music of Ilari Kaila
https://www.innova.mu/albums/ilari-kaila/bells-bow-down

The Bells Bow Down: Chamber Music of Ilari Kaila

Ilari Kaila: The Bells Bow Down (Kellojen kumarrus)

For two microtonal keyboards (2019)
Duration: 7 minutes
Commissioned by the Ray-Kallay Duo (Vicki Ray & Aron Kallay)

Program note:
I wrote "hush" during a time when I wanted nothing more than a hug.  The uncannily saccharine sounds of the piece are meant to surround and envelop the listener as similar to how an infant might be swaddled when held in their mother’s arms.  The piece is scored for two microtonal pianos using alternate tuning systems reminiscent of a music box.  Over time, the tuning is further warped, creating a haunting and unearthly emotional affect.

Though lullabies are generally used to soothe a child to sleep, they are often even more meaningful for the mother who sings them, and the lyrical content of many historical lullabies is dark and lamentful.  "hush" tries to capture this duality, portraying the sweet, yet eerie nostalgia of childhood.

hush

for viola & piano

i. Anthony's Nose
ii. Taconic
iii. Adams

Overlooks is comprised of eight short movements, each named after a specific geographical location. An original set of three (recorded here) was written in the summer of 2009, and the following five were written in between other projects over the years, acting as a kind of journal of places I've been and memories I have of being in those places with specific people.  Any number of movements may be played in any combination or order.

Though one can certainly be struck by the physical beauty of a certain landscape, our memory of place is much richer than just a recollection of physical attributes. In this way, Overlooks is not an attempt to represent or depict landscape literally: rather, it is an attempt to capture moods, emotions and the pace of passing time I experienced in these places, my interior life mapped onto the wider, indifferent geography.

Overlooks 1 - 3

Our Built Environments

Atrium

Brian Simalchik (b. 1988, Danbury, CT) writes music for a wide range of performers, instruments and ensembles. His music embraces emotional nuance and directness, evocative sounds and structures, and the expressive potential of silence and space.

He has had premieres by Roomful of Teeth, the Slee Sinfonietta, Wild Shore New Music, the Berkshire Symphony, UVA Percussion Ensemble, Williams Percussion Ensemble, I/O Ensemble, Opus Zero Band, Foot in the Door, Performance 20/20, Matthew Gold, Andrea Violet Lodge, I-Jen Fang and Casey McLellan. His music has been presented by organizations such as the Talea Ensemble (at The Stone in NYC), June in Buffalo, Yarn/Wire, nief-norf, Wild Shore New Music, Close Encounters with Music, the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, the I/O New Music Festival and Mass MoCA. His piece Seven Songs was a winner of the nief-norf Summer Festival 2016 International Call for Scores. His piece Overlooks was a winner of the Wild Shore New Music 2016 Call for Scores and was performed in Alaska, New York City and Washington, D.C. on a program celebrating the National Park Service's centennial. He has been in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (in 2013 and 2020) and at Mass MoCA, and has participated in June in Buffalo and the Yarn/Wire International Institute.

He has degrees from The Hartt School (M.M.), where he studied composition with Robert Carl, and from Williams College (B.A.), where he was the recipient of the Hubbard Hutchinson Memorial Fellowship in Music and studied with David Kechley and Ileana Perez-Velazquez. He has also studied with Jennifer Higdon and Judith Shatin at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He currently lives in Charlottesville, VA, where he hosts A New Sound, a radio show on WTJU focusing on contemporary classical music.

Overlooks 1 - 3

Brian Simalchik

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