Ken UENO

creepy vibes, even unsettling

Ken Ueno's Concertos

Project Grants Fall 2014

Lou Harrison - Fugue for Percussion

Performed June 9, 2013, by red fish blue fish

Lou Harrison - Fugue for Percussion

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

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

From the PRISM Quartet recording, Heritage/Evolution, Vol. 1

PRISM Quartet with Rudresh Mahanthappa

I Will Not Apologize For My Tone Tonight by Rudresh Mahanthapa

"The miracle of concrete music is […] things begin to speak by themselves, as if they were bringing a message from a world unknown to us and outside us"

"Sound is the vocabulary of nature... noises are as well articulated as the words in a dictionary... Opposing the world of sound is the world of music"

"Take a sound from whatever source, a note on a violin, a scream, a moan, a creaking door, and there is always this symmetry between the sound basis, which is complex and has numerous characteristics which emerge through a process of comparison within our perception"


Objets Juxtaposeé (Un Hommage À P.S.)

GrowingNowhere

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

from — Faithful "Truthless Repro Faith"  — ANM040

“Nothing more than faith in powers implanted in me” - Philip K. Dick, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Truthless Repro-Faith

Truthless Repro Faith

ANM040 Faithful "Ora"

From ANM041 Rotary ECT — Coming Out Soon

Rotary ECT

ANM041 Rotary ECT "Multiplying Antagonist"

Derek Bermel, composer
Performed by Alarm Will Sound

Canzonas Americanas I. El Dude

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.

Talus

Ken Ueno Composer