Ken Ueno's Music for Korean Instruments

Ken Ueno's Concertos

Composed for and performed by the Korean master of the daegum (Korean bamboo flute), Kim Jeong-Seung, and recorded on his CD, Contemporary Daegum.

Notes: 
from a single calligraphic stroke, a vision of N’Shima emerges (2010)
for daegum, viola, and cello

Five years before writing this piece, when I wrote a piece for kayageum, the Korean zither, I was confronted with two main possible approaches: either to compose music that adapted stylizations of traditional Korean repertoire, or to manipulate the traditional instruments to speak in the grammar of the contemporary music of the West.  What I decided to do instead was to create a middle ground by imagining a fictitious folk tradition.  In writing this piece featuring daegum (Korean transverse bamboo flute), I returned not only to this approach, but also to the image of the cosmology I invented when I composed my earlier piece for kayageum.  The myth of N’Shima follows.

On the island of N’shima, native Ainu people play instruments imported from Korea.  The people of N’shima are tree weavers (in fact, the whole island is a boat whose hull is the complex woven roots of the Gingko trees – the fruits of which are the only export of the island).  The natives, living on such an island (the island constantly floats between oceans and time) have developed a great sense of memory, but have no sense of beginning or end (or East or West) or chronology.

From A Single Calligraphic Stroke, A Vision Of N'Shima Emerges

Alation (2017)
Commissioned by Geori

My body is inscribed with texts.

Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.

The epigraph to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is tatooed on my left forearm. Joyce invokes the moment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the inventor Daedalus “turns his mind to unknown arts,” the moment when he was inspired to invent flight. The magic of that instant speaks to all creative moments, the transcendence of terrestrial boundaries. This tattoo reconciles seemingly opposed kinds of knowledge that my art practice seeks to balance: one that is mediated through our bodies and the other that is firmly anchored to logos, that is, knowledge acquired through language. The aesthetic tradition of the West has long privileged the headiness of logos and sublimated notions of the body. I want to inhabit--I do inhabit--a democratic landscape where both can inform each other. On my body, the canvas of my flesh is as much part of the message as the Latin that floats on its surface.

“Alation” is the condition of having wings. Besides the Joycean connotations of striving for flight, there was something about pitting a piano against a Korean instrument, in this piece an ajaeng, which also aligned with how I have come to think of different performance traditions as representing different kinds of thinking. The piano is the non plus ultra of equal-tempered structural hearing, whereas East Asian instruments represent a more embodied kind of thinking. What I wanted to investigate were ways in which the piano could be coopted into what I think of as an earthier mode of sounds – natural overtones and the highlighting of what are usually thought of as artifacts of production noise - pedaling as a sound and key noise (without letting it strike a note!) – in the hopes that that space of earthier sounds would also be a space where the ajaeng and piano might mutually be foreign.

Alation

Wendy Richman, viola; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor

Talus (2007)
a concerto for viola and string orchestra
for Wendy Richman

In the spring of 2006, my friend Wendy Richman fell off the stage at MassMOCA during rehearsals for a David Lang opera, Anatomy Theater, and broke her ankle (the talus, tibia and fibula bones).  When she sent around a jpg of her x-ray, the horizontal lines of the bolts in her ankle immediately suggested harmonic possibilities to me; some of the harmonies in this piece are, in fact, generated from analysis of the x-ray.  Seeing her courage as she worked to recover from the injury reminded me of my mother’s courage during her recovery after tearing three ligaments in her knee from a skiing accident (I deferred a semester of college to take care of her during that time).  My mother was determined go back and ski down the same hill in Park City where she was injured and accomplished this feat in two years’ time. 

Talus

Ken Ueno, extended vocals; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor

On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis (2008)
Commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

This piece was made possible by a grant from the JebehiahFoundation: New Music Commissions. 
It is dedicated to Rob Amory

The composing of On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis represents my first attempt to reconcile the multiplicity of my being a "classical" composer and "experimental" improviser. It is one of the most personal pieces I have composed to date.

In a manner akin to the way some contemporary visual artists make site-specific works, many of my works derive their structural aspects from considerations of the special instrumental skills of the performers with whom I have collaborated, in a manner I term "person-specific.' First, I imagine the sounds and then worked them out with collaborating performers to realize these sounds on their instruments. Then, I analyze the sounds using software in order to derive parametric data that will inform the structure of the music. (I am also inspired by the way contemporary architects use modern materials and computer-aided strategies to create structures that are more organic than what was previously possible).

On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis is person-specific to myself. As a vocalist, I specialize in such techniques as: overtone singing (straight bi-tonal style), throat singing (a style with laryngeal straining), multiphonics, circular breathing, sub-tones and extreme high register. During the composition of this piece, I subjected my singing to the aforementioned process of analysis, deriving harmonies (e.g. acoustic resynthesis of my vocal multiphonics) and orchestrational strategies from the analysis of my singing.

To further engage with my personal history in this piece, I employed two other strategies. First, the title of this piece comes from an article on computer science written by another Ken Ueno (I found it doing a "vanity" search in Google). In usurping the title of a work by my doppelganger, I thought of Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius in which an encyclopedic reference to a fictional universe begins to infiltrate reality. Second, the piece begins with a boombox playing a recording of my voice from when I was six. When I was six, my favorite object was a tape recorder. I used to walk around documenting my mom yelling at my brother, as well as sounds I made vocally (some evocative of sounds I still like to make today). By incorporating these recordings in the beginning of the piece makes it a kind of recapitulation of performances from my childhood over thirty years ago. My plan is to make another version of this piece thirty years from today by incorporating vocal sounds I can make today mixed with those from my childhood. My greatest hope would be able to make two more iterations of this process during my lifetime.

On A Sufficient Condition For The Existence Of Most Specific Hypothesis

Kifu Mitsuhashi, shakuhachi; Yukio Tanaka, biwa; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor

Kaze-no-Oka (2005)
Commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation and is dedicated to Toru Takemitsu in memoriam.

In writing this piece, I faced several challenges. The first challenge was to write a “concert opener” for a commission on the occasion of what would have been Toru Takemitsu’s 75th birthday – he passed away when he was only 65.  Since one often thinks of a “concert opener” as being fast and upbeat and a memorial piece as being slow and somber, I was faced with a crisis of opposing metabolic inclinations.  In my struggle to find a solution, I thought of Hiroshige and how, especially in his sketchbooks, he could imply a subject without really presenting it.  For example, in The Third Princess’s Cat, he gives the viewer only the border of the princess’s robe under a bamboo curtain.   Inspired by this non-sachlichkeit approach, my piece begins with two bars of fast, loud music, music that never returns or relates in any structuralist way to the rest of the piece.  It merely functions to introduce potential energy.   In this way, I freed myself to be able to concentrate on the “memorial” character in the rest of the piece. 

When I was commissioned to write this concerto for two traditional Japanese instruments, the biwa and shakuhachi, I was informed that, besides the orchestral concert, there would be a chamber music recital featuring the biwa and shakuhachi players, and was encouraged to have a piece that these performers could play on that occasion.  So, here was my second compositional challenge: to write a duo concerto with orchestra and a chamber piece.  My solution was to create a modular form with an extractable cadenza.   In the orchestral context, the biwa and shakuhachi only play in the cadenza, which can also be a stand-alone chamber piece.  In thinking of this solution, I was inspired by an architectural work by Fumihiko Maki, one of Japan’s leading architects.   Kaze-no-Oka (‘Hill of the Winds’), his structure from which my piece borrows its name, is a crematorium consisting of three separate buildings, the grounds of which incorporate recently unearthed ancient burial mounds.  I liked the separate-but-incorporated-ness of the ancient mounds with the modern buildings, and this became the structural impetus for my piece: the extractable cadenza for the biwa and shakuhachi are poetically related to the ancient mounds.  I also liked the image of the wind over the hills, two systems interacting together, but still remaining separate.  The fact that Maki’s building complex is a crematorium fit perfectly with the memorial character of my piece.

In designing the main section of my piece, I sought to concentrate on transcribing the Japanese concept of sawari for the western orchestra.  Sawari roughly translates to “beautiful noise” or “touch” and speaks of the prioritization of sound in Japanese traditional music in contrast to the emphasis on harmony and the elimination of noise in Western music.  Artifacts of sound production are foregrounded in my music.  Microtonal harmonies are employed to create specific beatings to enrich this sonic landscape, as well as to acoustically resynthesize specific multiphonics in the contrabass clarinet and in the bass saxophone.  Multiphonics function like ideograms – they represent complex signifiers that are not reducible to simpler components. The effect I wanted to create was one of reversed memory of the music in the cadenza.  

Kaze - No - Oka

Frances-Mairie Uitti, two-bow cello; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor

Hapax Legomenon (2013)- note by Robert Kirzinger
Concerto for two-bow cello
For Frances-Maire UittiCommissioned by the Harvard Musical Association and composed at Civitella Rainieri

Premiered on January 17, 2014 by Frances-Marie Uitti and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project at Jordan Hall, Boston, MA.

Commissioned by the Harvard Musical Association and dedicated to the cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, Ken Ueno’s Hapax Legomenon is one of a series of works exploring the unique abilities and personalities of highly individual performers. Several of these pieces have been performed and recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project: On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis, for voice and orchestra; Talus for viola and strings, and Kaze-no-Oka for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra. The first of these featured the composer himself as vocal soloist and incorporated throat-singing as well as other extended techniques. Further, it was based on a recording of himself vocalizing that Ueno had made as a child, and is thus a double-self-portrait fundamentally unperformable by any other musician. Talus was composed for violist Wendy Richman, and—to oversimplify an intricate origin—was developed from acoustic properties of her scream as well as from the structure of x-rays of her broken ankle. In Frances-Marie Uitti, Ueno has written for a performer whose career has been founded on the untransferability of her technique, particularly as she developed her artistry in collaboration with the composer Giancinto Scelsi.
            Among Ueno’s most significant influences is the electric guitarist Jimi Hendrix, whose inimitable and seemingly boundless technical and sonic invention served a similarly limitless musical passion. After being derailed from a very different career track by an injury (paralleling Hendrix’s own life), Ueno became obsessed with the electric guitar and ultimately enrolled in Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Encounters with Bartók led him to more contemporary works, and he went on to study music composition at Boston University, Yale, and Harvard, where he earned his doctorate. He was awarded both the Rome and Berlin prizes and has been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, the Jebediah Foundation, Meet the Composer, the American Composers Forum, Kim Kashkashian, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and many others. He has taught at the Berklee College of Music, the Boston Conservatory, and UMass Dartmouth, and since 2008 has been on the faculty of the University of California–Berkeley, where he is an associate professor of music. He wrote Hapax Legomenon primarily while in residence in Italy on a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
            Ueno has long examined questions of identity and defining properties of self: being Japanese in the United States, an artist in society, a musician among artists, an avant-garde composer among the broader community of musicians. Points of confluence and divergence in the contact between the individual and society are translated into relationships in sound and form. Ueno’s aesthetic and intellectual interests range widely; philosophy, anthropology, and other artistic media and often provide specific sources for his work. Kaze-no-Oka, for example, derives part of its structure and soul (and, for that matter, its name) from contemplation of funereal architecture designed by Fumihiko Maki. Samuel Beckett and the filmmaker Wim Wenders have also provided models. Hapax Legomenon, as the composer relates below, takes its title from a seven-part film by the American experimentalist Hollis Frampton (1936-1984). Frampton’s early work was known for its focus on process and structure obviated by a limited use of materials, suggesting a connection with American minimalism (in fact the painter Frank Stella was a close friend). Frampton’s later films, no less formalist in technique, acknowledges the inevitable presence of human relationships and complexities, positive and negative. There is a balance of discomfort, delight, mystery, and poetry in this work. Regardless of the degree of technical or metaphorical correspondence between Frampton’s Hapax films and Ueno’s piece of the same name, the artistic concerns are sympathetic.
            Many of these ideas, of course, have been part of the “concerto” discussion from its inception, asking us to contemplate the relationship between the individual (or minority ensemble) and the larger group. Along with other elements, Ueno suggests continuity with this tradition in his quotation of a hymn melody in his piece, recalling, perhaps, Berg’s quotation of Bach in his Violin Concerto.
            Ueno’s Hapax Legomenon requires not only that Frances-Marie Uitti be Frances-Marie Uitti but in many cases that every individual in the orchestra perform beyond the ensemble concept—the string players are hyper-divisi, each with their own part. Much of the time the orchestral texture is designed as the end result of individual action—the effect is that of an aggregate of the “personal” reactions, at times, of each individual to the action of the soloist. Elsewhere, particularly as the piece goes on, blended complexes of instruments as a kind of harmonic/rhythmic blossoming of the cello’s presence.
            The composer’s comments on the piece appear below.


[composer note format]
Hapax Legomena are words that occur only once in a given context. Most of my pieces are written person-specifically – they are meant to be, initially, only be performed by one person. Therefore, in the title, I found a poetic analog to my musical praxis of person-specificity. This piece is also person-specific. It is written for the great cello virtuoso, Frances-Marie Uitti. Frances-Marie is well known for having invented a technique for playing with two-bows, allowing her to play all four strings of the cello at once. The featuring of this technique considers a non-traditional view of virtuosity, a virtuosity that is of vertical harmony, rather than horizontal speed. Much of the piece is created from harmonies that mix temperaments (equal tempered notes are mixed with natural overtones as well as quarter tones). 
            The end of the piece quotes a hymn called, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, the end of the first line of which says, ”tune my heart to sing thy Grace,” which I thought appropriate to a piece dedicated to exotic harmonies. The end of the piece is also dedicated to the liminal space between melody and sound, noise and harmony, and between imagined sound and silence. The virtuosity is in that fragile delicacy.
            People are unique and are hapax legomena. The title is borrowed from a series of experimental films by Hollis Frampton, and as such, honor my friendship with P. Adams Sitney, the greatest scholar of American Experimental films. The incorporation of Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing honors the poetess with whom I fell in love during the composition of this piece. It is her favorite piece.—KU
[end composer note]

Hapax Legomenon

(X)igágáí (2011) 18min
(fl, ob., 2 cl, bsn, Bb trpt, hrn, trmb, 2 perc, piano, vln, 2 vla, cello, bs)
Premiere: April 11, 2011. Le Poisson Rouge, NY, NY. Alarm Will Sound. This piece was commissioned by Meet The Composer for premiere performance by Alarm Will Sound.

(X)igágáí

Del Sol String Quartet

Peradam (2011)
Commissioned by Other Minds for the Del Sol String Quartet
At one formal dinner function at the American Academy in Berlin, where I was a fellow for the 2010-2011 academic year, I was seated next to the filmmaker, Tacita Dean. Getting to know her films through my own research after that initial contact, I was struck by her work, The Green Ray. The title refers to an optical phenomenon of the highest frequency light appearing as the last rays of a sunset. I found it beautiful that in Tacita’s work the green ray is visible in the film, but cannot be isolated on any single frame: It champions faith and belief in what you see. Her commitment, over years of effort, to go to extraordinary means to capture this light resonated with what I have been striving to achieve in my work as a composer. 

I believe that a sound, in and of itself, can have communicative power that one cannot translate into anything else. My favorite sounds deliver a similar feeling of the transcendental power of natural phenomena that Tacita Dean’s film delivers to me visually. 

In a quest to discover sounds that speak to me on that level, I often conduct tests on instruments for which I am composing. These independent tests are augmented by what I learn through intense collaborations with performers for whom I am composing. Many of my works derive their structural aspects from considerations of the special instrumental skills of the performers with whom I collaborate, in a manner I term “person-specific.” Peradam is person-specific for the Del Sol String Quartet. Having heard them play a number of times, I was particularly inspired by the fact that all the members can sing and play beautifully, as well as the fact that they are whole-heartedly invested in the performance of microtones (which is important to me since my harmonic world mixes equal tempered notes, quarter-tones, justly intoned notes, and microtonal harmonies derived from formant analysis of sung vowels). These aspects are prominently featured throughout my piece. 

The most person-specific aspect of this piece is dedicated to what the violist, Charlton, can do. He can throat sing. As a composer who lives a double life as a vocalist specializing in extended techniques including throat singing, I was blown away when Charlton showed me he could throat sing. It was at that moment that I knew I had to write a piece for him and the Del Sols! 

The title of my piece, Peradam, refers to a rare mythical diamond-like stone that is the invention of René Daumal and appears in his novel, Mount Analogue. The novel is an allegorical spiritual quest in the guise of an alpine ascent. In Daumal’s novel, peradam is found on the slopes of Mount Analogue and appears to whomever “seeks it with sincere desire…it reveals itself by its sudden sparkle, like that of dewdrops.” Peradam is a metaphor for a rare, beautiful, natural phenomenon, an object that stands for discoveries we can attain over a lifetime of searching for them, much like Tacita Dean’s Green Ray. Spending my life looking for musical peradams, I feel blessed whenever I meet and have the opportunity to collaborate with musicians like Charlton and the Del Sols, where together we journey toward the summits of our Mount Analogues. Musicians such as these help expand my imagination for what might be possible, and make it real in performance.

Peradam - a string quartet

Greg Oakes, clarinet

I screamed at the sea until nodes swelled up, 
then my voice became the resonant noise of the sea (2006)
for amplified Bb clarinet  							
For Greg Oakes. 

As I began the process of composing this piece, I first compiled a catalog sounds on the clarinet which interested me.  These evolved out of my own empirical experiments on my childhood plastic Buffet Crampon instrument (which included overtone singing into the instrument, difference tones, humming effects, multiphonics, and an arsenal of microtonal inflections around middle G), and also included the encyclopedic list of multiphonics that Greg Oakes compiled, performed, and sent to me.   What I was interested in embodying in this piece were sounds that could only be specifically made on the clarinet, sounds that are non-transportable to other instruments, sounds that I find beautiful.  Around the time I was about to finish the piece, someone told me that in the Korean folk-tradition of Pansori-style singing, in order that their voices have the right sound, women go scream at the sea until they develop permanent nodes.  


I screamed at the sea until nodes swelled up, then my voice became the resonant noise of the sea

Two believers, on opposite sides of the same ocean, transcribing the same sky, at the same time, one at sunset, the other at sunrise
for sho and Bb clarinet.	 10min

Premiered Oct. 23, 2003. Rumor 31 Japan-o-rama festival, Utrecht, 
the Netherlands - Duo X.

Two believers...

The Hilliard Ensemble

Shiroi Ishi (2001)
Text and music by Ken Ueno 
Composed for the Hilliard Ensemble

 TEXT:					TRANSLATION:

SHIro i   iSHI					White stone				

Tsukiyo  no  umi   ni  SHIzumu		Sinks into a moon-lit ocean

Sono toki hamon wa				That moment, the ripples are

Nagare boSHI  no  kage			shadows trailing a shooting star.

 
The first syllable "SHI" of the word "shiro" (white) has multiple meanings: 

1): Four - for the number of performers.
2): Death.
3): Poetry.

This syllable acts as a link between the worlds of pitch and noise/timbre, 
as well as word and sound.  Structurally, each successive occurrence of this syllable opens a window of evocation to previous occurrences - the white stone passing into another existence synchronistically being related to another transient moment, that of a shooting star.  

The relationship of the stone and the ripples (and the shooting star and its shadows) is akin to the relationship between consonants and vowels in the Japanese language.  The whole language is built upon five basic vowels (a, i, u, e, o) which are arranged with different consonants in front of the vowels (ex.: ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, ga, gi, gu, ge, go, etc.).  This means that the same five formants create meaning according to what noise elements (consonants) are affixed to the attack of the sound (every sound has three components: an attack, a middle, and a decay).  There is a modular quality to Japanese language since the phonological aspects are so limited.   In changing the rhythm of words and phrases, in stretching phrases, it is possible to derive or hear different meanings from one phrase.  Even without understanding the Japanese, it is hoped that one can follow the statistical prevalence of certain consonants as a way to following the text (as opposed to following melodic phrases).  It is some kind of common ground between Eastern incantation and modern electroacoustic sounds that I am seeking presently as a discourse in setting my text.

My tumblr blog account of seeing the Hilliard Ensemble's last performance in North America: http://kenueno.tumblr.com/post/74923162326/last-night-in-los-angeles-the-hilliard-ensemble


Shiroi Ishi

Bang on a Can All-Stars

...blood blossoms...(2002)
For amplified sextet 

This piece was written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

“The old junky found a vein...blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower..” pg. 84, Naked Lunch, William F. Burroughs

The Burroughs text made me think that beauty can be found in a medium full of potential power and destruction.  In writing for an amplified ensemble, I sought to create delicate textures that played against the insipient power of amplification and distortion.


...blood blossoms...

...a.m... (2002)
For So Percussion Group and digital alarm clock radios 

The morphology of sounds through evolutionary stages from digital white noise to acoustic white noise, to membranophones, to woods, to metals.  A morphology that traverses various stages of the activation of sounds - sustaining sounds, to rolls, to beats, to silences, ritualized in theatric space.  


...a.m...

Frances-Marie Uitti, cello

Ken Ueno - Age of Aircraft (2002)
for amplified cello and electronic sounds

The cello is amplified with Big Muff distortion box throughout.

My first instrument was the electric guitar. I used to spend countless hours standing in front of my Marshall stack, just feeling the physicality of the sound of sustained, distorted power chords. It rattled my bones. It was at once powerful and strangely calming. And I remembered how different intervals and multiphonics impacted my body variously. This piece seeks to reclaim that memory of those sounds.

Age of Aircraft

Boku no Idaho (ボクのアイダホ) (2023) by Ken Ueno
for solo shakuhachi (any size)
Recorded by Reison Kuroda

In May 2022, I began working on a documentary about Paul Chihara, the only senior role model I have as a Japanese American composer. During that same month, my crew and I took Paul to revisit Minidoka, where he was incarcerated as a child during World War II. While there, my crew and I shot B-roll footage of the landscape, the remains of the internment camp, the dormitory area, and the mess hall. For these scenes, I felt it was most appropriate to use traditional Japanese instruments.
Earlier, I had made a short film featuring the dormitory area and the mess hall, for which I composed a piece for solo shō (mouth organ). There was one particular scene I knew I wanted to highlight: footage of the railroad tracks near Minidoka. These tracks are where Paul, as a young child, was brought to the camp by train. The image of these tracks has been ingrained in his psyche, haunting him with recurring nightmares throughout his life. I originally wrote a piece for solo shakuhachi to underscore this scene. However, after completing the composition and meeting the young virtuoso Reison Kuroda, who has since recorded this piece, I have greater hopes for the piece as a stand-alone concert work.
The title uses the pronoun "boku," the Japanese first-person singular diminutive possessive, implying "my Idaho" from the perspective of a young boy. The title also nods to the Keanu Reeves movie My Own Private Idaho, where beautiful footage of America's expansive landscape is ironically contrasted with the reality of it being a site of trauma.

Boku no Idaho (ボクのアイダホ)

WATT

Zetsu (2015)- note by Robert Kirzinger
For Rob Amory and Steven Schick

Ken Ueno’s music sets up systems of multivalent resonance, combining sympathetic sources of expressive energy to catalyze new artistic possibilities, some predictable (by the composer), some serendipitous. These systems, or situations, or amalgams, begin with sound itself: Ueno pushes instruments beyond traditional performance methods to achieve sonic realities of visceral and evocative power. As a performer himself, a one-time rock guitarist and now a vocalist using extended throat-singing techniques, he anchors the musical gestures of his music in an awareness of the intense physical and emotional demands of performance. Ueno’s extraordinarily broad cultural interests, which include architecture, film, and other visual arts, literature, sociology and philosophy, and cuisine (the latter suggesting a concern for “applied” art), enrich the already lively musical details of his work. He continually seeks out, and is sought himself by, performers and collaborators who share his sense of challenge and exploration.

Music of this kind is not without risk; in fact it cultivates and channels the energy of risk. Virtuosity, the necessity of close communication among players in an unusual musical environment, learning and artistically performing perhaps never-before-encountered techniques (and even pitches) creates a sense of living on the edge that positively energizes the players to strive beyond complacency. This energy is in turn transmitted, again positively, to the listener, who reaches a new level of understanding of the work’s joy and challenge. Zetsu takes its title from a 2003 art ceramic by the Japanese sculptor Nishida Jun (1977-2005), now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. TenFourteen Project commissioner Rob Amory alerted Ueno to this piece, in which Nishida Jun createad a work of protean form, combining careful structure the chaotically amorphous results of experimental material and kiln techniques. The beautiful, enigmatic resulting pieces analogize processes of the formation of the earth itself. Nishida Jun’s willingness to push traditional ceramics beyond what could be considered failure was not only artistically but physically dangerous. At age twenty-eight, two years after the creation of Zetsu No. 8, he was killed in a kiln explosion while working with traditional potters on Bali.

In addition to a solo violin part that celebrates Diaz’s relationship to the violin—her extensive experience as a performer of new music as well as of standard repertoire—Zetsu generalizes the situation-specific idea with the creation of new instruments: percussion idiophones using microtonal tunings unique to the harmonic spectra of the piece, and the “hookah sax,” played via a tube inserted in its bell. Knowing his performers, Ueno taps into their senses of humor as well as of adventure. Formally, Zetsu pushes and pulls gestures and textures to extremes: the slowly evolving shimmer in the solo violin of the opening gives way to discrete, rhythmically clarified polyphony for the ensemble. The soloist returns with an intricate part ranging widely in articulation and tessitura, microtonal contours lending an organic, improvised, very human intensity.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6E-sN8RhgQ

Zetsu

Trumpet concerto performed by Philippe Brunet and the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra

During the summer of 2013, I met Philippe Brunet at the Atlantic Music Festival, where I was composition faculty and he was an instrumental fellow. He led a remarkable group of brass players in a performance of my brass quintet, which greatly impressed me. I also heard him play Berio’s Sequenza X and he showed me that he could throat sing (this was of special interest to me, since I lead a double life as a throat singing vocalist). The core of my compositional praxis is person-specific music, music that is (at least initially) composed in such a way to highlight the extraordinary sonic potential of remarkable musicians. Often, my person-specific music integrates techniques that are, as of yet, unique to a specific performer. When I heard Philippe and got to know his repertoire and the range of sounds he could make, as well as his fierce artistic integrity, it seemed to me that we were meant to collaborate together. 

We planned on collaborating together ever since that summer of 2013, and the logistical realization came in the form of a commission from the Henry Mancini Institute, which graciously helped support the project in the fall of 2015. The spring before the premiere, Philippe came to visit San Francisco to play a recital at the Center for New Music. During that trip, I was able to further pick his brain about techniques and hear him demo them for me. For example, the combination of low, double pedal tones with throat singing. It worked astonishingly well. It is also exactly the kind of sound that exemplifies what I mean by person-specific - I don’t yet know of any other person in the world who can deliver these sounds. 

Compositionally, however, the combination of throat singing and double pedals delivers to me a sound that gives me a visceral, and emotional, feeling that no other sound communicates. The expressive end of person-specific means is this: the expansion of expressive potential mediated through new musical techniques. Around the time I was composing this piece, I was reading the facsimile of The Getty Apocalypse Manuscript, Medieval illuminations of the Book of Revelations. I was inspired by the portrayals of angels heralding the end of times with trumpet fanfares. I feel something eschatological in the zeitgeist today, and this piece ruminates on that sense of danger and consequence. The piece, if I may be so bold, is also a kind of “apocalypse” for the trumpet, one that hopefully heralds a new world of possibilities. One final tidbit.  The end of the piece features several minutes of microtonal inflections on a circular-breathed note. Physio-valence, that is, the empathic revivification of a physical feat, observed in the body of the performer and recreated in the body of the listener, curates local fluctuations of tension and release, that is meant to balance the hyper-physicality of earlier sections (alas, a denouement), as well as create a space for mindfulness. That virtuosic exhalation is my hope for exorcising the tensions in the world that read in the current zeitgeist (as the Medieval world must have at times) as eschatological. 

Fanfares For The Apocalypse

Contemplation on Little Big Muff (2000)
for amplified - cello and percussion
Odd Appetite duo: Nathan Davis, perc., Ha-Yang Kim, amplified cello.

...can you tell me about the title?  i was thinking about the quality of sound of the amplified cello.  distorted.  distorted through a Russian guitar pedal (it’s called a “Big Muff”).  what’s cool is that amplification works to make more apparent the inherent qualities in the physicality of sound which, without amplification, we are less aware:  it brings out the internal beatings (and therefore the tempos) within certain intervals; it allows for the possibility of bringing out different overtones from changing only the bowing position; it brings out the artifacts of production noise.  these qualities I find beautiful and in contrast to the hierarchical dominance of pitch/harmony in western Classical music.  and there is a temporality necessary to make these elements cognitively focused, therefore the “contemplation.”

This pieces was written for the ‘cello + percussion duo, Odd Appetite (Ha-Yang Kim + Nathan Davis).

Contemplation on Little Big Muff

Pharmakon (2001)
For eighth blackbird
I.               XOX
II.           XXO
III.      OXX
IV.       Main Movement

Pharmakon is a work in  four movements, but three are “pre-movements” which present exact windows  into sections of the main movement.  The “pre-movements” are designed to be played in any order (including before or after the main movement – it is preferred that OXX is played sometime before the main movement) and are labeled "XOX, XXO, OXX," which reflects the rotational mobility of the ordering in performance. All four movements together create a multiple-movement form that is actually part of one movement, cut-up.  This structure is influenced by the phenomenological experience of interacting with the internet and cable television – a structure of non-linear modularity which disrupts the larger, linear narrative.  The pre-movements are dramatically short in duration (2min., 58 secs., and 28 secs. long), which makes them more memorable, a gambit on which levels of referentiality in the main movement relies.  Clear profiling of texture is another agent of referentiality.  There are three basic textures which each of the pre-movements present - XOX is fast music, XXO is slow-sustaining music, and OXX is about syncopation.  OXX is also presented on a boombox, reversing the role of mechanical representation of memory, in that a recording is heard before a live representation of the same music in the main movement.

Pharmakon XOX

Pharmakon XXO

Pharmakon OXX

Pharmakon Main Movement

A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who is currently a Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music. Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival. Ken’s piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. In 2012, he was a featured artist on Other Minds 17. In 2014, Frances-Mairie Uitti and the Boston Modern Orchestra premiered his concerto for two-bow cello and orchestra, and Guerilla Opera premiered a run of his chamber opera, Gallo, to critical acclaim. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and California. Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A monograph CD of three orchestral concertos was released on the Bmop/sound label. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Ken Ueno Composer

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