Performance by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble
Tim Weiss, conductor
Christian Paquette, flute/piccolo
Amer Hasan, clarinet/bass clarinet
Colin McCall, percussion
Derek Wang, piano
Nathan Lowry, violin
Jacob Schafer, violin
Catherine Chen, viola
Otávio Manzano Kavakama, cello

Harris Concert Hall
August 19th, 2021

Program Note:
¬Hollows takes as its subject a sense of separation, distance, and “in-betweenness.” These aspects are dramatized in the music formally as periods of stasis and quiet between active, busy sections, as well as registral separation of the instruments—piccolo and bass clarinet moving in parallel perpetual motion, and bare, wide dyads in the mid-low register of the piano. These two principal ideas alternate over the course of the piece, however, the piccolo and bass clarinet music from the piece’s opening returns each time wispier or more hollowed out than the last. The first repetition is a mercurial, quicksilver solo for clarinet and the second a blurry recollection of the opening with fluttertongue piccolo and tremolo strings. I was interested in framing or contextualizing the static sections between breathless fast music. As a result, the slow music serves as the expressive core of the piece, while also influencing and transforming the fast music until these contrasting moods reach a kind of equilibrium in the coda.

Hollows (2021)

Reading by the Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra
Maurice Cohn, conductor
Benedict Music Tent; Aspen, CO
August 14, 2021

Fracture / Mosaic (2021)

Live Performance by the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble; Barbara Schubert, conductor
Emma Hospelhorn, flute(s)
Zachary Goode, clarinet(s)
Myra Hinrichs, violin
Chris Wild, cello
John Corkill, percussion
Daniel Pesca, piano

February 4, 2018
Fulton Recital Hall

Program Note:
Into the empty sky encompasses many of the themes and ideas that are important to my work as a composer: stillness, vanishing, epiphanies, momentary flickers of warmth or intensity, and different modes of singing. The piece is cast in three large sections, each beginning with a cold, brittle texture in the upper register. From this common starting point, the three sections proceed to trace different paths in their unfolding. The first features a long, winding melody in the alto flute and clarinet with interjections from the marimba. The second is more rhythmically active, with an obsessive insistence on short, uneven descents. The third stretches these descending gestures into expansive phrases of strained lyricism, with a melody divided between all the members of the ensemble. Over the course of the piece, an oscillating two-note motive rises from the middle register to join the repeated icy refrain in the upper register.

Into the empty sky (2017)

Live Performance by the Eastman Graduate Composers' Sinfonietta; Boon Hua Lien, conductor
Kilbourn Hall, Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY
April 11th, 2015

Program Notes:
The title and poetic impulse for Unravelings come from a line of poetry in Martin Crimp’s libretto to Into the Little Hill, a chamber opera by George Benjamin. The Pied Piper character says, “With music I can open a heart as easily as you can open a door and reach right in, march slaves to the factory, or patiently unravel the clouds.” This image of unraveling the clouds was the starting point for my piece. It begins with a gentle melody, in an otherworldly combination of vibraphone and piano harmonics. The idea of unraveling also suggested to me a kind of degradation or falling apart. Violent outbursts from the rest of the ensemble rend the delicate texture and eventually obscure it completely. At the end of the piece, the ensemble reforms in a different relationship: instead of working against the piano and vibraphone melody, the other instrumentalists support and blend with it. Unravelings was composed for the Eastman Graduate Composers’ Sinfonietta and premiered in April 2015.

Unravelings (2015)

Live Performance by the Univ. of South Carolina Symphonic Winds; Jayme Taylor, conductor 
University of South Carolina; Koger Center for the Arts
April 23rd, 2015

Program Note:
The inspiration for this piece came from my first visit to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in March 2014. I walked into the church and was amazed to find two enormous metal birds suspended in the nave. They were an installation called “Phoenix” by the Chinese artist Xu Bing. The hundred-foot-long birds were assembled from scraps and rubble scavenged from construction sites in Beijing. “Phoenix” was first displayed in Beijing and Shanghai in 2010 and traveled to the United States in 2012.

I was particularly struck by the contrast between the regularity and heaviness of the church’s pillars and the floating birds. Despite their immense combined weight of twelve tons, the two birds managed to “fly”. My Kinetic Dance is a response to this juxtaposition and an exploration of the unique sound world that the installation suggested: industrial metallic clinking enters into dialogue with the tolling of bells and organ-like timbres. The piece opens with an alternation between heavy bell sounds and punctuating chords played by the entire ensemble. Rhythmic pulsation and melodic strands gradually emerge, and the weight of the bells and punctuations begins to dissolve as forward momentum accumulates. After a final moment of heaviness, the weight and timbre of the opening bells and clanging metal is completely transformed. Quiet bells ring out, like tiny points of light suspended in darkness, and the energy of the piece gathers into an ecstatic dance.

The title is a reference to the sixth movement from Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps: “Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes” (“Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets”). The rhythm from the opening two bars of this movement is the basis for the repeating rhythmic pattern in the final third of my piece. Like the installation at the Cathedral, Messiaen’s music is a unique synthesis of Western religion and Eastern mythology. Kinetic Dance, for two scrap metal birds was commissioned by Adam Kehl and the Elon University Wind Ensemble (once the Elon “Fighting Christians” and now the Elon “Phoenix”).

Kinetic Dance, for two scrap metal birds

Live Performance by Joe Connor, Steven Jordheim, and Sumner Truax
Sumner Truax Faculty Recital
Lawrence Memorial Chapel, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI
September 26th, 2015

Program Notes:
I first became acquainted with and fascinated by the works of Flannery O’Connor, especially her short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, during my undergraduate studies at the University of South Carolina. O’Connor frequently presents characters whose limited understanding of their world or social circumstances draws them into grotesque situations or conflicts. Almost all of the stories are marked by slowly mounting tension, leading to a sudden outburst of violence that precipitates some kind of awareness or revelation—the self-righteous come to know their hypocrisy, the strong are made weak, and the traditionalists, clinging to their ideas about the old South, are swept aside by upheavals in socio-economic and race relations. These inversions, as well as the general idea of convergence, are the subjects of my piece.

Throughout, the identities of the three soprano saxophones merge, stretch to the point of breaking, and then separate again. At some points, they speak as three individuals, while at others they join together to elaborate a single melodic line. These brief convergences in rhythm, register, or pitch anticipate the climax of the piece. I was particularly interested in inverting the relationship between the purity of traditional saxophone playing and rougher, timbrally complex multiphonics. Instead of using multiphonics as exclamation marks—culminations of angst, ugliness, or tension—I wanted them to represent something rich, beautiful, and transfigured. Everything that rises was commissioned by Tyler Flowers, Justin Rollefson, and Samuel Detweiler. 


Everything that rises (2014)

['tactus] Young Composers' Forum
Brussels Philharmonic;
Franck Ollu, conductor
Flagey Studio 4
November 25th, 2015

Program Notes:
"Sleeping I am carried..." is based on a melodic fragment from Alban Berg's Mombert setting "Schlafend trägt man mich," Op. 2, no. 2. I scatter references to this melody throughout, but perhaps most noticeable is the poetic connection between Mombert’s imagery and the atmosphere and form of my piece. In a dream, Mombert’s speaker traverses a great distance to return home, passing over a landscape whose rough outlines and blurry forms appear only in peripheral vision. My piece transports the listener through a hazy sonic landscape of overlapping musical ideas. One idea emerges and comes into focus, only to disappear again, as another comes to the fore. Wispy lines in the strings and flutes wind around each other, and rumbles ascend from the depths of the orchestra. In a moment of clarity near the end, Berg's vocal line appears complete as the bass line of a radiant chorale. This subsides, and the piece comes to rest on an extended melody in the strings, concluding with a final evaporation of the dream world.



"Sleeping I am carried..." (2014) ['tactus] Recording

Live Performance by Zach Sheets (flute) and Wei-Han Wu (piano)
Zach Sheets and Wei-Han Wu Commissioning Project and Recital Tour
Firehouse 12, New Haven, CT
April 21st, 2016

Recital tour and commissioning project supported by the Tallon Perkes Scholarship Fund, the Eastman School of Music Professional Development Committee, and New Music USA.

Program Notes:
Many of the musical figures in Fire-fangled are a response to images and ideas in Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Of Mere Being.” Booming bell chords in the piano open up a vast expanse, suggested by Stevens’s “bronze décor” and the palm tree standing “at the edge of space.” Within this space, the flute delicately warbles like the “gold-feathered bird” singing “without human meaning…a foreign song.” Over the course of the piece, the strict division of roles and characters begins to erode. The flute joins and enhances the clangorous bell chords with multiphonics, and the piano becomes almost insubstantial in order to participate in the flute’s foreign song. Fire-fangled was commissioned by Zach Sheets and Wei-Han Wu and premiered in a six-city concert tour during the spring of 2016. 

Fire-fangled (2016)

Civitas Ensemble (Yuan-Qing Yu, violin; Kenneth Olsen, cello; J. Lawrie Bloom, clarinet; Winston Choi, piano)
Valparaiso University Duesenberg Recital Hall
October 9th, 2016

Program Notes:
Tangled lines, luminous tangents was commissioned by the Civitas Ensemble for a performance at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the 2016 Ear Taxi Festival. At the venue, light shines through the 38-foot Tiffany glass dome and glitters off the mother-of-pearl mosaics surrounding the curved ceiling. Vines and floral designs snake through the mosaic in ornate curves and branches. The piece features flickering melodies traced by subgroups of the quartet, and textures woven from string pizzicati and piano harmonics. At various points, the music becomes obsessed with a particular idea—a “tangent” wandering off in its own direction—before returning to the prevailing tangle.

Tangled lines, luminous tangents (2016)

Live Performance by the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble
Fulton Recital Hall, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
November 6th, 2016

Jessica Aszodi, soprano; Emma Hospelhorn, flute; Katie Schoepflin, clarinet; Doyle Armbrust, viola; Russell Rolen, cello; Daniel Pesca, piano;  Doug Perkins, percussion; Barbara Schubert, conductor

Program Note:
This setting of a poem by Mary Kaiser explores contradictions between opaqueness and clarity, tangible experience and insubstantial memory, and inky, black night  and morning light. The ensemble begins in a homogenous, blended mass. Individual instrumental strands emerge as the singer begins to question the solidity of the vision she describes. After the dreamy haze completely dissipates, the ensemble reforms into a new kind of homogeneity: a single melodic line punctuated by chimes unfurls during the speaker’s final reflections.

"He Dreams a Mother" by Mary Kaiser, from The Paradiso Shuffle, © 2011 Mary Kaiser�. Poem used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

He Dreams a Mother (2016)

Contempo at University of Chicago 
Logan Center for the Arts Performance Hall, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
May 5th, 2017

Emma Hospelhorn, flute
Doyle Armbrust, viola
Russel Rolen, cello
Kyle Flens, percussion
Ben Melsky, harp
Michael Lewanski, conductor 

Program Note:
Without Air is based on a short story from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. In this collection, each story takes as its premise a scientific conceit ranging from astronomy and physics to geologic time. My favorite is set on Earth before the atmosphere had formed. Calvino describes this theoretical landscape as an undifferentiated grey expanse (much like our Earth’s moon), occasionally transfigured by bursts of color resulting from the contrail of a meteorite filtering the Sun’s light as it passes by. I love Calvino’s fanciful contrast of grayness and color, and have sought to render that opposition in music with dryness and resonance. The piece begins with short, brittle sounds: pizzicato strings, high harp, and a consort of wooden non-pitched percussion instruments. Over the course of the piece, small bursts of resonance accumulate into increasingly sustained music, culminating in a sonorous climax and coda. These final sections cast each of the musical ideas from the beginning in a new, resonant light.

Without Air (2017)

In this world (2017)
I. Did he appear
II. Like a ripple

July 3rd, 2017
2017 soundSCAPE Festival
Maccagno, Italy

Tony Arnold, soprano
soundSCAPE Festival Sinfonietta
Michael Lewanski, conductor

This pair of short songs is part of an ongoing song cycle featuring settings of English translations of 9th and 11th century Japanese poetry by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. Their poems focus on love, loss, aging, and the harsh differences between the real world and an idealized dream world. The phrase "in this world," or variations of it, appear frequently in the texts. One characteristic usage is:

Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things—
the swift rapids, 
a flowing river,
or this human world?

In this world (2017)

New York Virtuoso Singers
Harold Rosenbaum, conductor
St. Ignatius of Antioch Church
New York, NY
October 29th, 2017

Program Note:
This piece simultaneously presents two sacred texts—one in English and one Latin. The music for the English text is a soft, persistent, dissonant stain. The Latin text enters as a jarring interruption, attempting to cover up the stain with loud, consonant music. The Latin text never completely succeeds in abolishing the dissonance, but instead, the two kinds of music reach an equilibrium. The stain isn’t washed away, but approaches a kind of harmonious co-existence with the interruptions.

Text:
Though your sins be as scarlet, 
they shall be as white as snow; 
though they be red as crimson,
they shall be as wool.
- Isaiah 1:18

Vidi aquam egredientem de templo,                                               
a latere dextro, alleluja:  
Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. 

[I saw water flowing from the temple,
On the right side, alleluia:
Thou wilt wash me, and I shall be washed whiter than snow.]

Though your sins — Vidi Aquam (2017)

Gilt (2018)

Yarn/Wire
Logan Center for the Arts Performance Hall, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
October 13th, 2018

Program Note:

Graft borrows its title from a series of works with the same name by the artist Glenn Kaino, which I first encountered on a visit to the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Museum. Kaino’s striking, uncanny pieces feature animals taxidermied in the skins of their predators—an ostrich robed in the dappled patterns of a python or a salmon covered in matte grey shark skin. I saw dramatic visual parallels to my recent interest in layering highly contrasting, even seemingly incompatible, musical ideas.Familiar musical ideas or textures can be rendered unfamiliar or new through polyphonic simultaneities, just as Kaino's jarring juxtapositions revivify staid conventions like taxidermy or snake skin patterns.
 
The word “graft” refers to nature-defying medical or scientific interventions, and my work explores unnatural phenomena from several perspectives. I make use of a technological augmentation of the pianos to allow them to sustain notes indefinitely, subverting a cardinal rule of piano-playing—that every note struck must immediately decay. In fact, this intervention completely divorces certain aspects of the piano’s resonating capabilities from what is played on the keys, allowing for the kinds of polyphonic textures hinted at earlier.
 
This polyphonic grafting produces a dramatic contrast between stasis and motion throughout the middle of the piece. Dense, cloudy harmonies emerge and recede seemingly independent from the glittering, propulsive music played by the entire ensemble. Gradually these two strands merge and the hazy, sustained harmonies support a spacious ascending line that slowly transforms into a series of rising bell sonorities.
 
Near the conclusion, a formal graft layers the glittering, propulsive music from the second section of the piece onto the bells, leading to a return to the piece’s opening. The first section of the piece is not replayed exactly, but rather with appendages and figures from the rest of the piece tacked on, like a series of vestigial limbs collected over the form’s evolution. A short coda reverses this process of accumulation, stripping the moto perpetuo music from the second section to its barest, skeletal outline.
 
Graft was written for Yarn/Wire, for their performance at the University of Chicago in October 2018.

Graft (2018)

Reading by the Chicago Civic Orchestra
Cliff Colnot, conductor
Symphony Center
February 3rd, 2019

Program Note:
Gilded Scenes comprises a series of musical panels, each one a study in various kinds of layering, concealment, and elaboration. In the first, a veiled faux-fauxbourdon of three part cello and bass harmonies emerges and recedes from a pointillistic, angular foreground. A transition from dry, brittle points to sustained harmonies leads to a glittering, scintillating chord that grounds the climax of the piece. The final panel distends and elaborates an early 17th century canzonetta by Tarquinio Merula within a hazy, dream-like texture of string cluster chords and fluttering trills. For a moment, the initial fauxbourdon and angular music re-appear, transformed, before the piece evaporates.

Gilded Scenes (2018)

Un-Masqued by David "Clay" Mettens
University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music Wind Symphony
Kevin Holzman, conductor
November 26th, 2019
Corbett Auditorium 

Program Note:
I wrote Un-Masqued over the summer of 2019, in a high-water moment of LGBTQ representation in mainstream media and corporate advertising campaigns for June Pride month. More than ever, it seemed like society at large was eager to participate in commemorations of the 1969 Stonewall Riots that precipitated our modern celebrations of Pride. However, this year’s anniversary also coincided with major Supreme Court cases that will rule on issues of workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Even as corporate culture embraced aspects of the LGBTQ community, our job security and material stability teeter precariously in the balance of the court’s new conservative majority. 

Precarity is hardly a new experience for the queer community. The history of LGBTQ activism is fractious and messy, tangled with competing agendas and methods of protest. In modern retellings, we have oversimplified and tidied this history by claiming Stonewall as its foundational moment. While the riots were critical in bringing this cause to the attention of a wider public, a number of activist groups—East Coast Homophile Organization, Janus Society, and Daughters of Bilitis—were already advocating for change throughout the 1950s. One such organization, the Mattachine Society, took its name from the French Renaissance Société Mattachine, a group of masked performers who used their anonymity to stage theatrical protests against oppression. Throughout the early twentieth century`, police raids on mafia-owned establishments that catered to queer patrons were commonplace. Police arrests—often singling out patrons who didn’t dress according to gender norms—were a constant threat to those who couldn’t (or refused to) hide behind a mask of heteronormativity.

My piece explores these past and present precarities. It begins as a party, with bright, ecstatic music for large groups of the ensemble. One by one, smaller groups of instruments refuse to conform to this music’s rigid harmonic and rhythmic structures. They emerge from behind figurative masks—the rapidly moving triadic harmonies and rhythmic grid—to reveal unusual tunings and tone colors, and the piece careens towards a riot. A slower middle section features solo instruments weaving together to create a chameleon-like melodic line. The unmasked instruments regroup into new consorts that play in closer and closer alternation, eventually reprising the opening idea in a multicolored collage of their unique identities. The alternate tunings and timbres that once threatened to tear the piece apart return in a more harmonious coexistence. For the coda, a new set of timbral transformations renders the opening music distant and diffuse, like an echo of a far away (or long ago) celebration. 

Un-Masqued was commissioned by Kevin Holzman and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music Wind Symphony in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

Un-Masqued

The Chicago Tribune has praised the music of David “Clay” Mettens (b.1990) as “a thing of remarkable beauty,” displaying a “sensitive ear for instrumental color.” His recent work seeks to distill the strange and sublime from the familiar. He reflects upon the experience of wonder in music that ranges from rich and sonorous to bright and crystalline, seeking expressive immediacy in lucid forms and dramatic shapes.

His work has been recognized with a 2020 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Ithaca College’s 2018 Heckscher Foundation Composition Prize, first prize in the 2018 Salvatore Martirano Composition Competition, a 2016 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and the 2015 SCI/ASCAP graduate student commission. He received a commission from the American Opera Initiative for a one-act opera, which was premiered in December 2015 by the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center. His orchestra piece “Sleeping I am carried…” was selected for the 24th Annual Underwood New Music Readings with the American Composers Orchestra and the 2015 [‘tactus] Young Composers Forum with the Brussels Philharmonic. Subsequently, the Brussels Philharmonic, led by Stéphane Denève, performed the piece in December 2016. The piece was also the winner of Eastman’s 2014 Wayne Brewster Barlow Composition Prize, and received a premiere with the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra in October 2014. Other orchestral performances include Chicago Civic Orchestra, L’orchestre philharmonique de Radio France at ManiFeste 2018, and with the Austrian Tonkünstler Orchestra as part of the Grafenegg Festival’s Ink Still Wet workshop in 2017 and 2018.

Additionally, his works have been performed by Grossman Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, Yarn/Wire, the New York Vituoso Singers, soprano Tony Arnold and the soundSCAPE Festival Sinfonietta, on the Contempo Series at the University of Chicago, by Ensemble Dal Niente at the 2017 SCI National Conference, and the Civitas Ensemble on Chicago’s inaugural Ear Taxi Festival. Saxophonists Chien-Kwan Lin, Timothy McAllister, and Otis Murphy performed his trio Everything that rises at the American Saxophone Academy Faculty Recital in July 2016. At Eastman, his works were featured on OSSIA, Composers’ Forum, Graduate Composers’ Sinfonietta, and Computer Music Center concerts.

His music appears on recordings by the Grossman Ensemble (Fountain of Time, 2020), Fuego Quartet (Migration, 2019), Lotus (Rogue Lotus, 2018), and American Wild Ensemble (Music in the American Wild, 2018).

He is currently a PhD candidate in music composition at the University of Chicago, studying with Anthony Cheung, Sam Pluta, and Augusta Read Thomas. He earned his masters degree at the Eastman School of Music, where he studied composition with David Liptak, Robert Morris, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, and computer music with Allan Schindler. A native of Covington, KY, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of South Carolina with a degree in music composition and a clarinet performance certificate. He was a recipient of the McNair Scholarship, the top award USC gives to out-of-state students, and the 2013 Arthur M. Fraser Award from the School of Music. There, his composition teachers were John Fitz Rogers and Fang Man.

He has presented his research on the music of Thomas Adès at the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition 30thAnniversary Conference hosted by the University of Louisville and the first annual THEMUS graduate-student music theory and musicology conference at Temple University. In 2012, he was awarded a USC Magellan Scholar Grant for a research project involving pipe organs, spectral music, and computer music under the guidance of faculty mentor Reginald Bain.

Contact Information:
E-mail - mettensmusic[at]gmail.com
Phone - (859) 912-2676

David Clay Mettens

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