Vocal works with ensemble

French Premiere. April 5th, 2015. Ensemble 2e2m. Pierre Roullier, dir. Shigeko Hata, sop.

Program Note:

Act is a work that is concerned with the way musical ideas are heard and seen, and how the form emerges from shifts in attention from one to the other. A theatre of relationships emerges in this musical context, whereupon each performer’s physical presence and sounds are weighed against poetic, spatial, technological and physiological circumstances.

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Initially, the soprano is silent, contrasting with an ensemble that appears unified as one mass. Gradually, however, sub-groups emerge. The way the players are spatially arranged divides the instrumentalists into four heterogeneous sub-groups; at other points, the two percussionists cooperate as a duo, the strings as a quintet, and the trombone and woodwinds as a quartet. There is a special trio that consists of the trombone, clarinet and baritone saxophone equipped with laryngophones (a sort of throat microphone, of military origins), thereby isolating vocal utterances that originate in the larynx. With this special tool, the utterance of these three players engenders a sort of argument with the soprano, and her singing becomes increasingly expressive. This animates the entire group, and the work gradually opens up towards an end which is familiar yet unresolved.


Act (2014), for soprano and 12 players, Ensemble 2e2m

(Culminating version, Oct. 21st, 2017 at the Gabriela Lena Frank Academy of Music -  subsequent tweaks expected.)

Please Me, Place Me is a work that calls into question 'who?' without further explanation.

Our soprano is at once in the process of storytelling and recollecting, both directing and reflecting, while at the same time communicating with the string quartet and you, the audience. Her identity is unknown, her experience of time is unsure, and she is grasping hold of what she can say with certainty. These words are those of Gertrude Stein: Stanza in Meditation, Part 3, no. 3. John Ashbery, speaking of this collection of poems, states:

'Perhaps the word that occurs oftenest in the Stanzas is the word "they," for this is a poem about the world, about "them..." Less frequently, "I" enters to assess the activities of "them," to pick up after them, to assert his own altered importance. As we get deeper into the poem, it seems not so much as if we were reading as living a rather long period of our lives with a houseful of people.'

The joy of making music is that there is never a 'me' alone. Music exists between people– and thus, I wonder who the 'me' is that I'm referring to in the title.

Tony Tony Tony

Please Me, Place Me (2017), for soprano and string quartet. Tony Arnold and Third Angle

Inferno (2002/2005) for amplified soprano, flute and trumpet, 12’
(this performance Gaudeamus Music Week '05) 
Jannie Pranger, sop.
Rik Andriessen, fl.
Willem van der Vliet, tr.

The connection in this piece rests in its treatment of the text (two lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy). Not only until the end is it regarded as simple, direct communication. For this reason it is always spoken in the language of the given country.

O cieca cupidigia, o ira folle, Che sì ci sproni nella vita corta, E nell’eterna poi sì mal c’immolle!
Perchè mi schiante? Perchè mi scerpi? Non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno? Uomini fummo; ed or sem fatti sterpi.
O blind greed and insensate anger, Which incites us so in this brief life, and then Cruelly plunges us in the eternal!
Why do you break me? Why do you tear me? Have you no feeling of compassion at all? Once we were men, and now we are stumps of trees.

Vocal works with ensemble

davidcoll