Performed by the unmatched CHROMA Ensemble as part of an annual workshop-collaboration between CHROMA and the Royal Academy of Music's Composition Department. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe for more info on the inspiration. 
The score: http://goo.gl/cxWmy6
The program notes: http://goo.gl/FaEypp

Heat Death

Written for the Espacio Cultural "El Tanque" in Tenerife, Canary Islands. The Tank is a huge renovated oil tank that has been turned into a cultural space. Because of the unique shape, size, and material of the Tank, the acoustical features are spectacular, with a reverberation decay-time on the order of 12-14 seconds for sounds easily produced by an instrument. The space is magical. This piece is an exploration of this space, using the position of the performers, the directions they face, and the pitches they produce as a way to alter the perception of the sounds they produce. This is a live recording from the Tank, made on 13 February, 2014.

The performers are: José Nareme - Trumpet and Maria Ángeles - Voice

The Score: http://goo.gl/ifGGCC
The Program Note: http://goo.gl/Hl91tn

Enjoy!

33,4 Billones De Gramos De Sonido

This is the premiere performance of my Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano. The performers are:
Richard Watkins - Horn
Alexandra Wood - Violin
Huw Watkins - Piano. 

The piece is structured as 6 Variations on an unstated Theme and then a Coda of those variations. During the Coda, live electronics record and loop segments of the music, creating an ever denser accumulation of sound. This culminates with six loops and live ensemble playing simultaneously, creating the effect of seven horns, seven violins, and seven pianos on stage. 

Score: http://goo.gl/cfZ2CD
Program note: http://goo.gl/2tnY3Q

Trio For Horn, Violin, And Piano

The three pieces that comprise Filaments are conceived of as a single unit, although the order of listening is arbitrary. Each of the filaments is of a certain idea or experience. Filaments of Ecstasy is minute fragments of personal expression (marimba) yelled into the void (vibraphone). Filaments of Antiphony rotates the antiphonal axis by pi/2 so that the interaction happens perpendicular to your perceptual hearing axis. This allows the delay in sound from one player to the other and back again to be heard clearly as the piece progresses. Filaments of Memory takes melodic fragments from Im Salzkammergut and presents them as radiating from the void (vibraphone and crotales). These are heard by the individual (marimba and tam-tam) and are responded to. 

Filaments Of Memory

Filaments Of Ecstasy

Filaments Of Antiphony

Me conducting the April 10th, 2016 performance of the Ride of the Valkyries with the Ocala Symphony Orchestra. 

Wagner - Ride Of The Valkyries - Kassof Conductor

Premiered on 4 November, 2016 in Old South Church, Boston, Massachusetts by the Sound Energy String Trio (http://www.sound-energy.org/). It was commissioned as part of their new works commissioning process. 

A brief program note:
Turbulence is about the physical phenomenon of turbulent flows. Imagine the smoke rising from a cigarette, first it is smooth and narrow, then it begins to swirl, then billow, and ultimately it dissipates into an amorphous cloud. This transition from an orderly flow into a dissipative cloud is a well-understood physical process. Using Russian physicist Andrey Kolmorgorov’s 1941 Theory of Turbulence, I have sought to map the physical phenomena that create turbulent flows into musical phenomena that both sonify the physical relationships and make compelling music. This piece of music is, as close as one can reasonably get, a sonic manifestation of a turbulent flow evolving in time. It is also, I hope, a dramatically compelling piece of music. It is dedicated to my undergraduate physics adviser, mentor, and teacher Dr. Yoonseok Lee, who was instrumental in encouraging me to investigate a future in music. 

I hope you enjoy! 

http://www.evankassof.com/

Kassof - Turbulence - Premiere Performance

Premiered by Ensemble Mise-En (based in Brooklyn) at the Rock Hall Auditorium at Temple University on 18 April, 2017.

The performers were:
Kelley Barnett (flute)
Vasko Dukovski (clarinet)
Mark Broschinsky (trombone)
Josh Perry (percussion)
Yumi Suehiro (piano)
Hajnal Pivnick (violin)
Tristan Krause (contrbass)
Carl Bettendorf (conductor)

Program Note:
Cosmos 3 – or – a Succession of Fascist Clowns 
This work is a set of variations on the theme from Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Built from utterances of almost-silence to unbearably loud, the music orbits precariously around infinitesimal fragments of Barber’s famous melody. One can imagine floating through interstellar space (the density of which was used to govern the distribution of events), or a more terrestrial (perhaps political) discourse. Ultimately, Cosmos 3 is – hopefully – an engaging framework for your imagination, pushing you to impress your own reality onto the music. Or not. Apologies for the pretense, though! Please enjoy!

Kassof - Cosmos 3 - Or - A Succession Of Fascist Clowns

Premiered by Sound Energy (http://www.sound-energy.org/) on April 15, 2018 in Rock Hall Auditorium at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Performers: 
Micah Brightwell – Violin
Sam Kelder – Viola
Benjamin Swartz – Cello


Program Notes from the Premiere:
Excerpts from the Sea is a work of excerpts sewn together in a through-composed way. The piece is marked ever-so-often by “clock bells” tolling (in the viola) the afternoon hour, while simple musical structures unfold, foldup, and linger. Imagine you have just swum in the sea, still wet and drying on the rocky shore. That sensation, of the salt drying your skin, the chilly breeze, the hot sun – is where this music probably comes from. Where it will lead is (hopefully) a larger work putting the various excerpts into a more robust, complete, and thorough structure. Important to note: the strings of the each instrument in the trio are tuned down to match exact partials of the overtone series based on the low-A to which the cello tunes its C-string down. Accordingly, the work uses microtones of various kinds.

Kassof - Excerpts From The Sea (LIVE)

A piece based on an excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. The text is:
"Consider again, that Pale Blue Dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." 
The performance was given by the University of Florida Concert Choir under the direction of Dr. Will Kesling. For more information on the Pale Blue Dot, see this post on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

Thanks for listening!

Kassof - Pale Blue Dot - UF Concert Choir

Performed by the 2018 Temple Composers Orchestra and conducted by Adam Vidiksis.

---Program Note---
Collective Bargaining is the process used by unions and their employers to come to negotiated, binding agreements on the terms of work for members of the union. The process is complex, slow, and rarely leads to a contract either side is happy with. Both sides are tasked with submitting proposals and counterproposals ad nauseum to slowly force the other side into accepting their terms. Collective Bargaining, this work for chamber orchestra, is a musical mapping of this obtusely convergent process. A slow convergence of harmoniousness (partials of the overtone series slowly converging on the fundamental E) is juxtaposed with wild gestures equally slowly converging into a singular voice. Indifference from management (microtonal chords in the winds and brass) is met with increasingly organized responses from the workers (aleatoric gestures in the strings) until inevitably something close-to-but-not-quite-right is reached. This work is based on my own experiences negotiating for the Temple University Graduate Student Association – the AFT local union tasked with representing the graduate employees (e.g. Teaching Assistants) at Temple University. Although not intended to give voice to the plight of any specific group of individuals negotiating – often under great duress – for reasonable working conditions, health care, and a living wage, Collective Bargaining is about how every little bit of good working conditions is hard-won. It is dedicated to my friends on the TUGSA Contract Negotiation Team whose tireless efforts have delivered a good (but not one we’re completely happy with) contract.

Kassof - Collective Bargaining (LIVE)

Commissioned by the 2016 HASS Festival in Yerevan, Armenia and recorded here in a reading session by the absurdly good, generous, and talented JACK quartet. The reading session was organized by ACF Philadelphia (thanks Gene!) and SoundLab (thanks Katherine and Robert!). 

Recorded in room 108 of the Philadelphia Free Library on October 15, 2018. 

More information about the work and Gagik Babayan, the artist who painted Bunte Struktur at http://www.evankassof.com/buntestruktur

Thanks to everyone involved for making this a really wonderful day of new music!

Kassof - Bunte Struktur (JACK Quartet)

This is a short structured improvisation for solo cello, performed by the composer at the conTemplum Sound Prints 1 concert on October 16, 2019 in Klein Hall at Temple University, 

The piece is for a de-tuned cello and uses the new, clear resonances of the tuning to generate lush, empty sounds. 


Sorry about the annoying buzz in the recording...

Kassof - Deserts 1 For Solo Cello

10  Tchaikovsky Serenade IV

This is a recording made of all nine Bruckner Symphonies. Each was time stretched (or shrunk) to be the average length of all the symphonies (thus minimizing changes in length). Then they're mixed at equal levels, and washed in reverb like chocolate sauce on a sundae. All processing was done using defaults in Audacity, thanks Audacity!

Considering the ways in which this track fluctuates in volume, I find there is a lot to that old saying 'Bruckner didn't write nine symphonies, he wrote the same symphony nine times.' Maybe. They're all good.

Look out for that drop, too! #coda

Bruckner - All Symphonies

This is an excerpt from the premiere of Ganymede 5 - an opera in three acts by Aleksandar Hut Kono and Evan Kassof. 

The premiere was produced by ENAensemble at the Plays and Players Theater in Philadelphia, September 18, 2019.

In this excerpt, from Act 3 Scene 1, Seven (tenor) and Rava (soprano) are experiencing the smell of hay for the first time while a video of sheep grazing in a meadow plays in the background. Seven then recounts a glorious moment from his last visit to Europa. 

On Ganymede 5, a space colony from the far-future, all forms of terrestrial nature are banned. Those who live on Ganymede 5 have access to every pleasure imaginable, and so all they want for is the "licentiousness of nature." To them, sheep grazing in a field is the most sensual, erotic imagery imaginable.

Ganymede 5 Excerpt - A3S1

This is a short excerpt from the flute concerto Blue written for the amazing flutist Chelsea Meynig. This recording was made by Paul Hutchings in a last minute attempt to record our final rehearsal before our ensemble, Temple Composers' Orchestra had to shut down due to COVID-19. This was the second rehearsal on this work, which is partially why this is such a short excerpt. 

Thanks to all the amazing TCO musicians who made a far-too-short rehearsal process so fantastically wonderful!

We are both looking forward to a premiere of the entire piece in the future!

Kassof Meynig - Blue - Concerto For Flute And Sinfonietta - Excerpt

The three songs presented here are part of a project to complete a song cycle started by Charles Koechlin that uses a set of 24 poems by Theodore de Banville. The project was developed by Professor of French, David Evans of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In a collaboration with him and Tania Holland- Williams, a profession singer and performing artist, we explored diﬀerent interpretations for each of the remaining three poems. In particular, it is important to note that each of the poems is in a very old form called a Rondel, which has 13 lines, a speciﬁc rhyming scheme, and a collection of repeated lines including the repetition of the ﬁrst as the last. 

The ﬁrst poem I set was Le Feu, which I found to be the most serious and emotionally intriguing poem of the three. Because the poem discusses the idea of immolation and disgust with the world, I was inevitably drawn to the parallels with Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen. I chose to draw the harmonic material for this song from the Magic Fire leitmotif that occurs throughout The Ring. Additionally, I thought that there was a sense of almost stately resolve apparent throughout the poem, so I tried to create a texture within both the piano and vocal lines that captured the resolve with which the narrator is describing their own (literal or not) immolation. Formally, the song takes on a fairly standard ternary form with an added coda at the end. The ﬁrst and third sections have similar textures while the middle section most closely captures the ’Magic Fire’ sound of this poem’s destructive desires. The coda is harmonically separated from the other sections by redistributing the poly-tonal structures that are consistent throughout the rest of the song. In the ﬁrst three sections, the left and right hands of the piano operate in diﬀerent ’keys’ that are always rotating but never identical, while the voice jumps between either ’key’ as needed. In the ﬁnal section, the piano occupies a single ’key’ while the voice occupies the other. 

Le Caf´e is a much more trivial poem and as a result, I was inclined to set it in a humorous manner. The narrative arc I ﬁt over the poem was that of the experience of coming oﬀ a caﬀeine high. The opening tempo marking is ’Caﬀeinated’ and the ﬁnal tempo marking is ’Post-Caﬀeinated’. To achieve the sense of inevitable exhaustion setting in, I employed a continuous canon that has rests inserted each time the subject of the canon is repeated. To capture the sporadic nature we’ve all experienced while under the inﬂuence of caﬀeine, there are also, inserted in a somewhat unpredictable fashion, two other sections of music. These sections are designed simply to be diﬀerent from the canon and are employed at points in the text where the rhythm of the poetry changes slightly. 

The ﬁnal song, Le Soir, is the most adventurous of the three. Imagine you’re in an opium den in late-19th century Paris. The host of the den (the singer) approaches you and begins to talk to you about what is simply the most trivial matters. This experience becomes evermore intense as the opium seeps through your veins and soon the sounds you hear in the background and her voice have morphed into one overwhelming sonic experience. Just when the intensity is at its maximum, the music returns to its quiet and calm opening

The performers are Tania Holland-Williams and Nicholas Wearne. The recording was made at the Royal Academy of Music in May of 2013.

Le Feu

Evan (b. 1988) is an opera maker, composer, conductor, based in Philadelphia. His most recent opera – libretto by Aleksandar Hut Kono – Ganymede 5 premiered in the 2019 Philly Fringe Festival. Elevator, a short chamber opera, premiered in March as the first episode of the 2019 Serial Opera Project. His operas Colony and Greenland were performed in London at the Royal Opera House, and Greenland was revived in 2018 in the Philadelphia Fringe in an ENAensemble production. He is the Music Director of ENAensemble and Temple Composers Orchestra and served as President of the Temple graduate employee labor union TUGSA. 

With a background in physics, Evan’s compositions often use science as source material, collaborating with physicists on Heat Death and Turbulence. Since becoming involved in labor organizing, some of his music has taken a more political turn. Cosmos 3 – Or – A Succession of Fascist Clowns and the mock-tone poem Collective Bargaining each are based on his experiences in labor organizing. His recent orchestral works include FS and the flute concerto Blue, written in collaboration with flutist Chelsea Meynig. As co-founder and Music Director of the contemporary music theater group ENAensemble, his recent projects have included the 2019 Serial Opera Project (where ENA premiered six new chamber opera ‘episodes’), a fully-staged production of Pierrot Lunaire, and a serialized musical. As Music Director of the Temple Composers’ Orchestra, a sinfonietta which only premieres new works, he has developed and conducted the premiere of over a dozen new works.

Evan Kassof

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks