In the Fall of 2019, I went to Andy Warhol’s exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.I was particularly fascinated by his creative process in 1973 Mao prints. In this work, Warhol instructed his collaborator Julia Martin to make 300 Xerox copies of his hand-traced drawing of Mao Zedong’s face progressively enlarging and distorting each subsequent copy using the previous copy as a source. The resulting copies starting with numbers following 200 show just abstract lines that can be recognized as elements of the original image only if presented back to back with the original. I felt that this can be an idea for a piece of music. In Impressions, I followed Warhol’s idea of image distortion using musical means of rhythmic, timbral, registral, and melodic “distortions “to change the opening theme of the piece. The piece ends with one short sound of the bass drum; a single dot remains from the original image after all the manipulations.

Ensemble EC 21, Nancy Menk, conductor, Jacob Murphy, violin; David Machavariani, cello; Rebecca Hovan, flute; Christopher French, clarinet; Jennifer Muñiz, piano;Ben Runkel, percussion.

Impressions EC 21

The missing title track from my album. A remastered version of a song written for the last Global Folk Traditions concert held at Columbia College Chicago. 

Another Country (Remaster)

The piece was written for the 2016 edition of the Composition Master class under the auspices for the Altitude University and is heartily dedicated to the members of the ensemble MULTILATéRALE.  The emergence of gestural interactivity pointing to an idiomatic stream of sonic behaviors captures the dramaturgical framework of the piece, highlighting a network of distinguishable sonic objects all perceived in a unified sonic fabric. The musical ideas derive from the behavior and directionality of the materials with close attention to their nature, sound structure, sonic porosity and density. My ideas about musical flow and dramaturgical formation are related to the characteristics of each musical moment that is connected with its surroundings, this results in a musical flow with heterogenous or homogenous elements resembling that of a living organism.

Impressions EC 21

Ilya Levinson

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