Fiddler's Hall of Fame

Georgiana Moon

"Lead Me Home" (2021) is a reflective piece that draws material from Thomas Dorsey's hymn, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." Written for strings and electronics, the pieces features a shimmering texture that gradually unfolds as ethereal electronic harmonies weave in and out of moving cluster pads in the strings. Lead Me Home was commissioned by The JACK Quartet for the 2020 JACK Studio.

Performance
2021 Time:Spans
Performers: The JACK Quartet
Venue: Mary Flagler Cary Hall at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music
Date: August 19, 2021

Lead Me Home

Composed by Annika K. Socolofsky with interpolations by Iarla Ó Lionáird

This work was composed through a HARVEST Commission, an initiative of Copland House’s CULTIVATE emerging composers institute. It was written for and premiered by the Music from Copland House ensemble, and is made possible by generous support from Leslie Cecil and Creighton Michael.

This piece features electronics samples of my own hardanger fiddle and accordion playing, and more prominently recordings by Irish sean‐nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird. For this collaboration with Iarla, I wrote several original melodies and recorded myself playing them on the piano. I then sent these piano recordings to Iarla in Ireland for him to learn by ear. Iarla then added Irish lyrics to the melodies and recorded them in his own magnificently Iarla way—complete with gorgeous inflections, delicate ornamentation, and a free‐flowing meditative sense of time. At that point, I got to work composing and orchestrating musical textures for Music from Copland House to perform with these recordings. I hope I did these recordings justice!

The text for this piece comes from an old spiritual poem “Caoin ar dtúis do pheachaidhe féin,” or “Lament your own sins.” I am so thankful to Iarla for his heartfelt performance in this piece, and for years of wonderful friendship that lead to this piece. A more astounding musician I have never met.

to sing of sins (2021) - EXCERPT // Iarla Ó Lionáird & Music from Copland House

This is an version of the solo ukulele piece 'What Rhymes with Life?'. This version uses two echoes of the ukulele's audio at a time interval of one and two seconds. The first echo is transposed up one octave while the other echo is transposed down, thus filling the textural and registral space in a way the solo uke couldn't on its own. Other techniques include campanella fingerstyle plucking of the uke and percussive techniques upon the top of the instrument. 

The joke of the title is that when you look up 'Life' in a rhyming dictionary there's actually not much that actually rhymes with life.

Precarious Music for Ukulele

What Rhymes with Life for Electric Ukulele - Délétude No. 2 - Live from Baldwin Auditorium

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I'm Kenneth Stewart. Please call me Ken. Thanks for reading. I'd say I'm a bit of a ‘renaissance man’. If I'm playing, it usually has strings. If I'm in the role of curator or composer, a background in performance becomes useful in other ways.

In a previous utterance, music assisted by physical interfaces and sound processing played heavily on my work, however once I finished school my desire to stay behind the desk dwindled. I took to acoustic genres. I'd say for a couple of years I became fascinated with the subtle differences between Jazz and Bluegrass, yet the vast differences in the harmony, sets and motifs specifically in Old-Time and New Acoustic show that what you hear is not always what you expect.

Using the instruments I play I seek to explore the roots of the music that happens around me here in Durham, NC.

The scholarly study of composition prepared me by to use the tools of a composer to develop musical ideas far beyond my own. I took to standards as experimental tools for learning how to create works with rich, melodious textures and romantic harmony.

I'd like to think that the time away from school helped me enhance my original obsession with weaving into my work an underpinning of the ambient electronic music and that of the avant-garde. Or my insistence a perversion for unusual sounds and peculiar timbres somehow coalescing into something familiar and hopeful.

While I do musical research that engages concepts of instrument modification and design and his non-compositional creative work of signal processing (linear and digital) and the hacking and modifications of electronic and acoustic musical instruments and their electronic effects, sometimes what's necessary is putting that all away and singing a simple song.

As a quasi-alumnus member of the Slippage Lab formerly at Duke University now at Northwestern, under the directorship of professor Thomas DeFrantz. Most of my time with Slippage was when I was a graduate student at Duke..
Some other things of note: I was one of Gordon Epperson's final cello students. Nancy Green, and protege, Nelvimar Neves and two summer festivals of lessons and masterclasses as a teenager with Brinton Averil Smith and countless lessons via conversation with colleagues. 

My composition mentors, whom shaped my vision for music creation: Daniel Asia, Pierre Jalbert, Durham’s Scott Lindroth and as well as a summer in Berlin with Samuel Adler; ditto on the colleagues.

Ph.D. from Duke University, and additional degrees from Rice University, The University of Arizona and Pima College in Tucson, AZ.
KennethDStewart.com

What Rhymes with Life for Electric Ukulele - Délétude No. 2 - Live from Baldwin Auditorium

Kenneth D. Stewart

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