Paul Novak - a diagnosis (2024/25) for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and sextet
performed May 8th, 2025 by Mycelium New Music at Fulton Street Collective

Mycelium New Music
Justin Weiss, conductor/co-artistic director
Paul Novak, flutes/co-artistic director 
Michael Tran, clarinets
Dylan Feldpausch, violin
Isidora Nojkovic, cello
Jonathan Hannau, piano/keyboard
Rebecca McDaniel, percussion
with guest artists:
Kristina Bachrach, soprano
Emily Price, mezzo-soprano

"a diagnosis" is a catalog of bodily aches, a list of symptoms which grows strange and resonant. It will eventually be the opening piece in my in-progress song cycle when i was nine i couldn’t walk, which draws from my recollections of a childhood diagnosis with a psychosomatic illness. a diagnosis focuses on the body and the things it unknowingly stores: memory, trauma, ache, desire. The text is adapted from my poem “a diagnosis.”
Paul Novak

Art: Max Ernst, "the Triumph of Surrealism"


a diagnosis (2024/25) for voices and sextet

This composition’s title is derived from a work by the 20th century Catalan visual artist Joan Miró. The piece captures the experience of looking at the strikingly beautiful painting for the first time and gradually taking it all in in: first, as an incredibly rich and colorful composite, then honing in on specific shapes.

Benjamin T. Martin: Ladders Cross the Blue Sky in a Wheel of Fire

Beyond Color There is Light ACE - for pierrot sextet (2025)

Beyond Color There Is Light draws on my experience at the massive Rothko Retrospective at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris in January 2024.  It was truly surreal to see 115 Rothkos in a single space and there was a beautiful, enigmatic, and luminous aura among the entire space. Seeing so many of these paintings, and seeing them so closely, one starts to realize how one-sided it is to characterize these paintings as still or suspended; these are incredibly active paintings filled with magnitude of tiny details in color, brushstrokes, and shapes that add so much to the vibrancy of the work. These micro-activities also helped create the sense of inner illumination that Rothko sought to create from within the paintings themselves. In Beyond Color There is Light, I try to capture this duality of stillness and create a sense of luminosity through the orchestrational and harmonic worlds. Through passages of driving melodic lines and rich harmonic webs, a passage of dreamy, floating, and rustling chords with a lyrical cello solo, and an animated, mixed-meter passage, the experience of this piece is as if we notice all of the tiny details flash before our eyes, but we still maintain this shimmering and suspended world in our presence. Beyond Color There Is Light was written with appreciation and admiration for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Tim Weiss. 

Tim Weiss, conductor
Antonina Styczen, flute
Ian McEdwards, clarinet
Laura Gamboa, violin
Miles Reed, cello
Seth Schultheis, piano
Xin Yi Chong, percussion

Beyond Color There Is Light - for pierrot sextet

St. Hildegard of Bingen – the 12th century abbess, writer, composer, and mystic – spent much of her life in her monastery’s herbal garden. She wrote several volumes on botany and natural medicine, and her understanding of the natural world was deeply linked with her spiritual practice and visions. In this work, I imagine the orchestra as a garden, blooming from a solo viola solo into a colorful ecosystem teeming with life. It is orchestrated to suggest the reverberance of a single voice in a cathedral, singing in the floridly ornamented style characteristic of Hildegard. The seed of the piece from which the piece sprouts is the first two phrases of Hildegard’s antiphon "O rubor sanguinis" for St. Ursula: “O bloody red/that flowed from the height/divinity has touched: you are a flower/that the wintry breath of the serpent/has never touched.”

hildegard dreams of a garden was commissioned by the Orchestra of St. Luke's as a part of the 2025 DeGaetano Composition Institute. Performed by Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Brad Lubman.

hildegard dreams of a garden (2025) for chamber orchestra (excerpt)

Loved with Everlasting Love

PROGRAM NOTE

This piece, a collaboration between Yenhsing Chen and Dooree Kang, was written for the 3rd Synesthesia Show, "Differentiation" (Peabody X MICA). It contains two parts: a sculpture and a musical composition.

We delve into moments of organic dialogue among different cultures, where established identities blur and transformation brings profound ambiguity. This effort to connect inevitably creates a challenging "gray zone," an uncertainty that sparks true understanding—especially when our communication in a foreign language doesn't quite meet our intention.

Dooree's work reimagines a traditional canvas as a sculptural installation where painting, video, and space converge. By projecting fragments of her daily life in the U.S. onto creased canvas and mesh screens, she investigates the "gray zone" between cultures—an ambiguous, fluid space where misunderstanding, humor, and moments of dissonance coexist and evolve.

Yenhsing's composition explores the interplay between two domains: language and music. The composer first recreates spoken language through meticulous instrumental writing, orchestrating the pitch contour, formants, and consonants of the speaking voice using the ensemble. Subsequently, this rendered speech is developed and transformed into musical material, thereby questioning the precise boundary between language and music. The initial material comes from the transcription of the composer's voice saying, "I hope you enjoy."

PERFORMANCE

Date: October 11-18, 2025
Location: Making Space Bmore, Organized by Synesthesia Spectrum
Opening Performance Oct. 11th, Saturday, 7:00PM
synesthesia-bmore.com/event/

Conductor: Ying Lam Eva Chu
Flute: Ivan Smaltsuga
Clarinet: Renzo DeCarlo
Bassoon: Jonathan Mokry
Violin: Isabel Rushell
Viola: Seoyeon Jun
Cello: Theo Geonhoon Kim
Double bass: Sunwoo Kim
Percussion: Cherri Chen
Percussion: Michael Liu

Recording: Yoonjung Lee
Directors: Yoonjung Lee, Dooree Kang

Speaking on the Threshold "I Hope You Enjoy It" (2025) for large ensemble

For two saxophonists, shells and live electronics. Written for Erin Rogers and Antonin Bourgault. Performed at l'Édifice Wilder, April 30th 2025.

Full video performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekO0geVkjgo

Limpidités VI

Justin Weiss is a composer and conductor whose music explores relationships between the visual arts and music through the intersection of lyricism, textural play, and transformational forms. Justin’s music has been recognized with a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix Langage Musical from Les Écoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau, the Walter E. Aschaffenburg, and awards and recognitions from institutions such as ASCAP, Society of Composers, Inc., and The American Prize, Tribeca New Music, and YoungArts. 

Justin’s music has been performed internationally by ensembles including Quatuor Diotima, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Grossman Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Sandbox Percussion Quartet, and ~Nois Saxophone Quartet. Justin is the conductor of the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble, a co-founder and conductor of the new ensemble, Mycelium New Music, and has premiered dozens of pieces internationally. Justin studied at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Royal Academy of Music in London, and is a PhD Fellow at the University of Chicago where he studies with Augusta Read Thomas.

Beyond Color There Is Light - for pierrot sextet

Justin Weiss - Composer