L'appel du vide for string quartet (2016)

Richard Narroway premiered this brief but virtuosic cello solo in Aspen, Colorado on August 12, 2016. Thank you to Richard for the wonderful interpretation, and to Adam Borecki for recording the performance.

Repeat, Descend, Recede - Richard Narroway, cello

performed by Philippe Koerper (Ensemble L'Imaginaire), St John's Smith Square, London, 16 October 2016. The original version of this piece for oboe (Redgate-Howarth system) was commissioned by Christopher Redgate who gave the first performance in 2012.

fold (2016) version for soprano saxophone

dead wasps in the jam-jar (ii) (2016)
for string orchestra, objects, and sine waves

Commissioned by musica femina münchen e. V.
Münchener Kammerorchester conducted by Clemens Schuldt
Photo credit: Florian Ganslmeier

dead wasps in the jam-jar (ii) (2016), for string orchestra, objects, and sine waves

Upon first hearing the music of Anton Bruckner, I felt a deep reverence for the composer and his work. His Eighth Symphony in particular, with its immense harmonic landscapes, its devastating silences, and its profound “darkness-to-light” narrative, continues to be one of my greatest influences – no doubt, in more ways than I am even aware of. Lux in Tenebris explores these elements of the Eighth Symphony by placing the primary theme of the first movement within a dense micropolyphonic fabric and allowing a glimpse of Brucknerian light to pierce through. 

Peabody Symphony Orchestra - Jisoo Kim - April 21, 2017

Lux in Tenebris

Performed by and composed for Longleash in April 2017 at Hunter College.

Aleph-1 [2017]

Jisoo Kim conducts the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in a reading of "...this mortal coil, Must give us pause..." in Baltimore, MD on May 2, 2018.

Program Notes:

“…this mortal coil, Must give us pause…” is a nod toward the infamous soliloquy of the third act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I’ve long been fascinated with both the metaphor of life existing as some sort of string, strand, or cord, along with the characters depicted across mythologies and literatures that weave, stitch, and sew these fibers of destiny.

The orchestral composition features the harp prominently, an instrument that (in my mind, at least) exists most directly as a visual and sonic representation of the coiled threads of life and death, along with the coiling and unraveling of musical textures across each family of the orchestra. Throughout the work, motives unfold, often canonically at minute intervals, diverging across independent modulatory processes. 

These energetic and chaotic gestures are often intertwined with moments of stasis—brief but notable pauses of a markedly homogenous character; the periods of quiescence, albeit with a melancholic sheen, mark in our narrative the inevitable junctures of our lives. These unceasing coils oscillate between moments of indecision (or more accurately, the paralyzation from the onset of choice) and moments of inescapable development, cyclically returning to outgrowths of our earlier understandings and experiences, and culminating in bittersweet placidity.

—Richard Drehoff Jr.

Roc Xu, Recording Engineer

...this mortal coil, Must give us pause... (2018)

Performed live by Alarm Will Sound with members of Peabody's Now Hear This ensemble

Syzygy

Claroscuro (2019) 

Performed by JACK Quartet

Recording and Mix by Jacob Sachs-Mishalanie

L'appel du vide for string quartet (2016)

Jonathan Hugendubler