Featuring Indigenous Edmonton poet Jason Bourgeois as he shares his journey from the depths of despair to the doorstep of hope.

DEC 7 ITAV FULL

Performed by:
Herine Coetzee Koschak
At Roosevelt University, Ganz Hall on March 26, 2015

Program Note:
A little cloud lazily floats across the sky. 
Suddenly, a rainbow is cast upon the cloud.
Brilliant, beautiful, spectral, the cloud wears these colors.
They dance like flames as they engulf the cloud.
As fast as it came, the rainbow disappears.
The cloud moves on...



Fire Rainbow Cloud

Apr. 7, 2018 Studio Z
St. Paul, MN

Alto Flute: Yoshi Weinberg [RenegadeEnsemble]

This work, sometimes/not without 1 for alto flute, is a work which explores the multiple streams of material interactions that occur when playing the flute. The variety of bodily/mechanical processes which coalesce in the production of sound on the flute are pitted against each other to create a situation where novel sonic materials arise from the contingent interactions of multiple parameters. This piece synthesizes prior explorations of mine into the nature of repetition with a current interest in the choreographic possibilities of performing an instrument.

I dedicate this work to Joshua Weinberg. It would truly not have come into being without our years of friendship and music-making together.

This work was composed as part of Minneapolis-based RenegadeEnsemble's 2018 composer/curator in residence program.

sometimes/not without 1 for alto flute [Yoshi Weinberg]

Performed at "New Music Ensemble: Imani Winds" Concert
By Imani Winds
Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
May 12, 2018

The piece, "On Light and Birds", was inspired by Elizabeth Jennings’ poem "Bird Sunrise in Winter":

Close eyes. Stay still and you can hear
Rising of sun, ferocious cries
Speaking of birth about your ear,
An eloquence of skies.

Winter perhaps but this is spring
Wrung from cold earth. Harsh life asserts
Its pressure on the air, will sing
Until the singing hurts.

Open your eyes. The light is birds
They bear the sun and clip it round.
Almost they break out into words
In this impulse of sounds.

While composing the work, I imagined the quintet as a flock. The music takes on a flight with free, fluctuating, sometimes unified, and sometimes chaotic movements — movements of lights and shadows, of moments and memories, and of an invincible and vigorous vitality within all living creatures.

On Light and Birds (2017) - for woodwind quintet

M. Contraveos, Op. 1, No. 2.
Recorded on Grace St. in Chicago.
2007 Yamaha C6.

Contraveos - Poem - Op. 1 No. 2

For two percussionist and one musician on No Input Mixer.

Premiered June 22 in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the Nief-Norf Music Festival.
Winner of the Gaudeamus Award 2019.

Talk Circus (2018)for 2 percussionist and 1 musician on NiPM.

Live and Unedited from October 2018 performance @ Green Mill

Ursa at Green Mill 10-29-17

Ursa Quartet - Jeff Kowalkoski

Performed live by Joeseph Rebman on September 8, 2018 at Nroth Kentucky University. 
This recording is live and unedited.

Junshi for Solo Harp (live)

performed by Mivos Quartet May 2, 2019 at Northwestern University

1. 
In 2015, musician Nick Cave’s son Arthur died suddenly at age 15. Below is an excerpt from Cave’s response to a fan’s letter asking whether he and his wife felt that Arthur was still somehow in contact with them.
 
"… Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed."
 
2.
In the wake of a traumatic or negative experience, we often engage in counterfactual thinking in which we imagine how changes in our own behavior might have resulted in a different outcome. Although this can seem futile (dwelling on the past cannot change it), counterfactuals can provide an opportunity to consider how we can change our future behavior in order to avoid negative outcomes.   
 
3. 
Each time we recall a memory, that memory is rewritten. This allows imperfections in the recollection to be incorporated into the new version of that memory. The more we recall a memory, the more opportunities that memory has to be corrupted so that our most-frequently revisited memories can also become our most-heavily revised. 
 
My piece Trails Bright Phantoms explores these ideas of imagined alternate outcomes and rewritten memories, dwelling on a musical object as its wake takes different forms across repeated iterations.

Trails Bright Phantoms

Northwest Winds

Jonathan Hannau, pianist
Constellation, Chicago
January 12, 2020

"My Mira" (2019) toy piano

I am a composer/pianist in the Chicago area who loves working with other musicians, writers, and artists. 
You can email me at: jahannau@gmail.com

Fire Rainbow Cloud

Jonathan_Hannau

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