Name: hollower | for string quartet and phone speakers (2021) by Isaac Roth Blumfield
Duration: 10 min 1 s
Description: premiered by Quartetto Maurice on October 10, 2021 at the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik

premiered by Quartetto Maurice on October 10, 2021 at the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik

hollower | for string quartet and phone speakers (2021)

Géranomachie (2021)
pour grand ensemble et électronique
Commande de l'Ensemble Intercontemporain et de l'Ircam-Centre Pompidou

3 December 2021, Cité de la Musique-Philharmonie de Paris 

Direction: Léo Margue
Rim: Carlo Laurenzi

Géranomachie (2021)

Chamber piece for clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello & piano performed by Apartment House. Composed during Covid 19 pandemic, finished and recorded in 2022. Thanks to Simon Reynell.

Mira Benjamin, violin
Bridget Carey, viola
Anton Lukoszevieze, cello
Heather Roche, clarinet
Raymond Brien, bass clarinet
Kerry Yong, piano

My Mind Is Twelve Bells - Apartment House

Commissioned and performed by Prague Quiet Music Collective

Part of a project called 'Five Uncertain Situations' with Prague City Gallery. Exhibition and concert at Dům U kamenného zvonu (Stone Bell House), Old Town Square, Prague in December 2022.

Bass clarinet - Anna Paulová
Baritone electric guitar - Ian Mikyska
Violin - Milan Jakeš
Double bass - Luan Goncalves

Mixed by Juraj Mišejka

This piece was written in response to a set of photograms from Aleksandra Vajd’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, which features two parallel lines, each changing colour halfway. To me this work is about things in flux, things moving toward or away from something else. In my piece, I am interested in how players might focus on periods of instability and change within and between sounds. By leaving the score more open, I hope to provide more space for the players to follow their curiosity and their ears, to be responsive to the sounds and to each other in the moment. - SL

"Sylvia’s piece is a rare occurrence: a simple, relatively undefined score that does not provide instructions for formal development over the entirety of the piece, yet immediately, the first time we rehearsed it, it was clear that the piece had a clear-cut character and a complex web of internal relationships. The simplicity and directness of Vajd’s photograms is here transformed into a focus on all the chaotic and noisy shadows, interferences, and byproducts that appear when players are tasked with exploring well-chosen, fluctuating effects and various transitions between them. Here, instability is always present at multiple levels — perhaps we could even speak of an interaction between instabilities, a dusty sonic layer covering the simple material play of the photograms." - Ian Mikyska

Overlapping Transformations (2022)

BREAD [2021], from "interbeing"

score: www.wubbelsmusic.com/bread_score.html

written for and performed by TAK:
Marina Kifferstein, violin
Laura Cocks, flutes, wine bottle
Madison Greenstone, clarinet
Charlotte Mundy, voice, wine glasses, beer bottles, autoharp
Ellery Trafford, mixing bowls, beer bottles, wine glasses, autoharp

BREAD [2021], from "interbeing"  (w/ score)

Please, use headphones or good loudspeakers.

echo from afar (ii)(2022), for six musicians and electronics
commissioned by hand werk 

Live Recording, hand werk, 29 November 2022, Köln

echo from afar (ii)(2022), for six musicians and electronics

An arrangement of one verse from 

'Song Composed in August' by the Scottish poet and lyricist
Robert Burns (1759 - 1796)

Voice and guitars, arrangement - Fredrik Rasten

Recorded April 20, 2022

Video:

https://youtu.be/D6oJYBopFT0

Song Composed in August (one verse) by Robert Burns

for chamber ensemble, electronics, and lighting

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this piece is inspired by the devastating beauty of nacreous clouds. these clouds are both very rare and hauntingly beautiful, with luminous pastel colors streaking across the sky. 

despite their beauty, these clouds are irrevocably harmful to the atmosphere. while their beauty comes from the diffraction of light as it passes through tiny ice crystals in the air, their appearance acts as a catalyst for the reactions of toxic chemicals that deplete the ozone layer and contribute to the ozone hole in the antarctic. 

this piece is a meditation on the beauty and destruction of the world we’re making. 

+++

premiered by collective lovemusic at Paine Hall at Harvard University April 28, 2023

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performed by collective lovemusic:
Emiliano Gavito - bass flute
Adam Starkie - bass clarinet
Emily Yabe - viola
Christian Lozano - e-guitar

volatile horizon

volatile horizon (2023) | collective lovemusic

beyond the barrens - for mixed sextet [2023]

• Written for Schallfeld Ensemble and Pierre-André Valade. 
Zinajda Kodrič, flutes (concert and bass)
Stephanie Schoiswohl, baritone sax and prepared tube
George Lolas, accordion
Patrick Skrilecz, piano and objects 
Lorenzo Derinni, violin and boxes
Myriam García Fidalgo, cello and boxes 

Pierre-André Valade, conductor

• Premiered at the Klangspuren Schwaz Future Lab 2023.
@ SZentrum Knappensaal, 18 September 2023, Schwaz, Austria.
Recorded by The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation.

• Program Notes:
It is in the pursuit of a resilient catalyst spark,
one that will transcend the unsound cyclic nature of uncertainty,
that the afterlight reveals a retaliating barrenness adorned with thorns.
(responsorial)
Bottomless mudcracks penetrate the viscera of the imagined world. 
Yet, in absence, life treads forwards, whispers rise as unwavering chants.
The beauty of the scorched land lies in the abundance of juxtaposed 
impossibilities.
Still, the soul wanders amidst harsh epiphanies that unfold their coarse
truth.
Fate, for now, is adjourned.

beyond the barrens [2023]

Commission: Südwestrundfunk for the Donaueschingen Musiktage 2022

Live recording of the world première, Musica Nova Helsinki, 3 March 2023.

Performers:
Mattie Barbier, trombone
Weston Olencki, trombone
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Janne Nisonen, conductor

Photo: Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra

where the dark earth bends (2022, rev. 2023), for RAGE Thormbones, orchestra, and electronics

Troglodyte Angels Clank By (2015), for amplified ensemble
Commissioned by Radio France.
Ensemble 2e2m conducted by Pierre Roullier

Live Recording, Radio France, Festival Présence, 10 February 2016, Paris

Clara Iannotta : Troglodyte Angels Clank By (2015), for amplified ensemble

contact: isaac.blumfield@gmail.com

Isaac Roth Blumfield is a composer from Saint Paul, Minnesota, currently based in Basel, Switzerland. He writes experimental music for acoustic and electronic instruments which explores resonance, materiality, and memory through expanded sonic approaches towards instruments and objects. His music looks for the strange spaces between subjective and unconscious experience, exploring uncanny places between beauty, pain, and strangeness.
His music has been influenced through  through work with performers such as ensemble sonic space basel alumni, Schallfeld Ensemble, violinists Austin Wulliman and Chris Otto, line upon line percussion trio, Ensemble Modern, Barcelona Modern Ensemble, guitarist Francesco Palmieri and Jamie Monck, and Quartetto Maurice at programs such as the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, the Banff Centre for Creativity, Yellow Barn Young Artists Program, New Music on the Point, Valencia International Performance Academy, Ticino Musica Festival and Freie Universität Berlin im Sommer.  
His music has been broadcast on Swiss Public Radio and supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Fondation Nicati - De Luze, and the Hirschmann Stiftung. He graduated with his Bachelor's degree in composition at New England Conservatory in Boston and a Master's degree in composition at the Hochschule für Musik FHNW in Basel, Switzerland and is currently pursuing post graduate studies at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. His primary teachers have included Stratis Minakakis, Timothy McCormack, Caspar Johannes Walter, Svetlana Maras, and Clara Iannotta. In fall 2024, he will begin a PhD at Harvard University, studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku.

hollower | for string quartet and phone speakers (2021)

Isaac Roth Blumfield

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