Elegy of the Rasping Masses (2024) is a Mass sung by the dead. Attempting to sing with voices now divorced from their living selves, the dead are unable to articulate their old songs and instead speak in rasps reminiscent of their previous hymns. The piece begins with a solitary voice on route to a cathedral, merging with others along the way to coalesce in a cacophony of similarly muted singers. Upon arriving the parishioners listen quietly to a line of chant before beginning to hum and sing on their own. Briefly they are imbued with the natural voices of their living selves, reveling in the lushness of their impossible sound before a low bell tone cuts them short. This announces the end of the Mass, signaling the time for their departure, and the return to their graves.  

This piece makes extensive use of natural harmonics. Natural harmonics are nodes on each string that follow the harmonic series, and can be played by lightly pressing each string at the appropriate place, characterized by a hollow flutelike timbre. Most string instruments’ harmonics sound in a high register, but due to the Double Bass’s low range its harmonics sound within the range of the human voice. Elegy of the Rasping Masses utilizes this unique combination, the low range and harmonic timbre, to evoke the sound of ghostly voices. 

This piece was recorded by Kolten Heeren in Bloomington, IN.

Elegy of the Rasping Masses

This piece began as a simple exercise to write a piece with four 'blocks' of sound: quiet with a condensed cluster of pitch, loud with an expansive spread of pitch, quiet with an expansive spread of pitch, and loud with a condensed cluster of pitch. Some of these blocks are meterless/aleatoric, being being interrupted by strict pillars of sound. The end result is a juxtaposition between wayward tunes skittering across waves of glassy strings and colossal columns of overpowering loudness. Here we oscillate, between introspection and interruption, the refined and the raw, the gentle and the sublime. 

This piece was originally recorded in a reading session in Sarasota Florida, with members of the Sarasota Opera.

Violin I – Kim Hain
Violin II – Yulia Price
Viola – Linda Numagami
Cello – Paul Swenson
Bass – Ryan Bassett

Block Play

Program Notes:

Tiptoes Home, for String Quartet, depicts the distance that time places on our idea of 'home'. While 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' is typically applied to those separated by physical distance, a distance from one's own past elicits similar romanticization, particularly when associated with childhood memories. 

This oftentimes leads to an ethereal feeling when returning. Everything is the same, but different. Parents have grown older; your elementary school feels smaller; and most jarringly, you might no longer fit into that world. It elicits the sense of being an intruder on some hallowed, personal ground. 

For a brief moment, this piece presents the gift of a true return home. After a buildup of foreboding, we arrive to see everything just as we remember, unchanged, as if we have returned not only to the place but the time of our cherished memories. Initially unsure, we settle in, content to appreciate this divine mercy without questioning its source.

Premiere Information: 

This arrangement of Tiptoes Home was recorded on November 25th, 2024 in Oberlin, Ohio by the Cyrus Quartet. 

Violin I: Gabriel Winograd Nichols
Violin II: Annika Waples
Viola: Eli Mumuya
Cello: Ma'ayan Kertcher



Tiptoes Home

Watercolor Lens is a work for solo piano that depicts the process of creating a watercolor painting. The resonance of the piano is used to create a sense of blurring reminiscent of pooling paint, allowing shapes to maneuver and transform as the come in and out of focus in the painting's growing complexity.

The work begins with pins of sound, like droplets of paint dripping onto a wet canvas and spreading across the empty paper. This transforms into smooth brushstrokes, ill-defined but vibrant in color, growing more bold. But strokes turn to smears, bursts of color start to splatter as the artist grows frustrated. Once elegant colors now bleed and blend in unsavory ways, and attempts revert these changes fail, causing the artist to crumple the paper and throw it in the wastepaper bin. Cathartic, the artist begins anew in the same meditative manner, letting each drop of paint fall upon a fresh canvas. 

Watercolor Lens was premiered by Francesco Granata on November 27, 2024 in Bern, Switzerland.

Watercolor Lens

Retrospection, for large ensemble, illustrates how we can look back on our memories, and how the experiences in our life alters our perception despite the fact that the actions in the memory stay the same. We may look back on the same memory, and find joy or sadness, anger or apathy, as we process them. Through retrospection, we may make these memories more clear and accurate, and give them more meaning, or conversely we might dilute the memory and lose whatever meaning it may have once carried.  Retrospection emulates this by repeating the same motive throughout the piece, each time cast in a different soundscape that alters its perception. Over the course of the piece, this gradually becomes clearer, as the confusion is gradually replaced by clarity, and the memory is put firmly in place.  

Performed by the Illinois Modern Ensemble at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Special thanks to Stu Martin for conducting this piece.

Retrospection

Glass Embrace​ (2019) depicts the evolving, crystalline structures of a kaleidoscope. Normally, when looking through a kaleidoscope we can only observe the overall process, flitting through a wide range of colors before the eye has a chance to catch them. However, in ​Glass Embrace​, only a small rotation is depicted, maybe only a millimeter of movement, but it is slowed down so we can hear how these colors slowly unfold, and the spectrum appears as a dappled light through a crystal canopy. Rather than being part of the larger fanfare we normally see, these changes now appear delicate, with each shade given its time to flourish, before inevitably fading away.

Glass Embrace was premiered by Ensemble Linea in 2019 as part of the Etchings Festival, taking place in Auvillar, France.

Conductor: Jean-Philippe Wurtz
Flute: Keiko Murakami
Clarinet: Adam Starkie
Piano: Ieva Dūdaitė-Radžiūnė
Violin: Winnie Huang
Viola: Elodie Gaudet
Cello: Johannes Burghoff

Glass Embrace

Arietta is the shorter form of an Aria, a song for solo voice. Of course, this term doesn't apply for a solo piano work. Rather, this piece seeks to embody the fragile lyricism of a solo singer that is oftentimes consumed by the sound world around it, waiting for a clearing of the air to finally sing. 

Commission and Premiere Notes:

This piece was commissioned as part of a collaboration between the Indiana University Composition Department and pianist Jihye Chang as part of the "IU Composition Premiere Project".

Arietta

Kolten Heeren is an American composer whose work centers around diverse soundscapes and organic storytelling. His music blends modal polyphony with aleatoric soundmass, always with an emerging undercurrent of vocal lyricism evoking echoes of memory, nostalgia, and wistful dreaming.

For more information and a full bio, please visit my website at www.koltenheerenmusic.com

Kolten Heeren

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