Surreal, but wonderful.  Great work, Kurt.

1 - 6/7ths. of the way to the end of the world  0:00-4:35 
2 - engendering [a]round [a]n end of gender  4:50-9:11 
3 - queer chant [shadow subsong with chorus]  9:17-15:10 

I have been thinking about the end of the "world" since childhood. Since then, I have been thinking about the end of my desires, my dreams, my oddnesses - the end of beauty, the end of the body, the end of sex, the end of truth (or at least the end of the use for truth), the end of love, the end of music, the end of queerness (which is in large part about ending things). All these spaces approach endings – when one ending is reached, there is always another ending beyond it waiting. Endings can be beautiful. And aching.
 
Alternative scenarios fascinate me. Something that has been very seductive to me is imagining micro-cultures where a community that otherwise has never been allowed to thrive to flourish in the light of promise. I ponder: An eco-pessimist culture that honestly embraces the reality of full eco-collapse, also known as the end of the world, but without having lost hope entirely. A fully gender-rich, or emptied, range of countless identities. A world where valuing the truth is the most prized of currencies, or the least. An understanding that some of us possess an endless urge to control, to place everything into an order, to spin in place. A time when queerness is not quite normative (then it would be, by definition, not queer), but kind of being there "just because." And I imagine if all these "cultures" had their own folksongs. 
 
At times, it feels very hard to imagine new realities. These imagined folksongs for these existing micro-cultures have not existed until now. The songs are very easy to sing if you know the words. The words are not easy to remember. The music that goes along with the tunes and the words - well, that is the hardest part of all! 
 
In short, these are pieces conceived for cultures that I want to have folksongs. The words are mine - the prosody, the tunes, all mine. The songs are theirs, whether they want them or not. In these folksongs, the human voice and the words are rarely heard, and only emerge as if unable to be contained.
 
This piece is dedicated to the ever kind and deeply conscientious Gusty, and with deep gratitude to the highly collaborative Grossman Ensemble musicians, the marvelous and thoughtful conductor Tim Weiss, to the visionary Dr. and Mrs. Grossman, and the University of Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition and its dedicated partners and donors. Thank you for being so very kind to me (to all of us on this program, in fact) in a field where it is very easy to do things for some but not for many. Your generosity and consideration is gratefully recognized by many of us. And it matters.

A video of the premiere can be found at: https://youtu.be/1JetPck0b5Q?si=rMa7itv5a5jccdyr

The Hardest Folksongs Never Written (2023) - Grossman Ensemble, with Tim Weiss (cond.)

"Newtown Odyssey" is a fantastical opera about our relationship to our environment. We want to engage what is historically and presently apparent if one slows down, looks, and listens closely. It is both celebratory and cautionary, both serious and satirical. This on-the-water experiential performance is built to accommodate the happenstance of live performance on an industrial waterway. - Dana Spiotta, librettist

Scene 3 - The Developers: Inside the actual opera, this scene is filmed and viewed as audience members travel along the site during the performance. Heard here is this film's soundtrack. The music/sound is meant to simulate and abstract antiquated recording technologies for playback and/or amplification for the sung text (possibly Victrola players, Sony Walkman, etc.).

VIDEO OF FILM: https://youtu.be/OIxjjpT5rWA?si=bxE2g2lRhJQOOhuV

Singers:
Charlotte Mundy, Developer 1
Kyra Sims, Developer 2

TEXT
Developer 1 
(spoken/sung)
Welcome to One Creek One, site proposal #0352-A!

Developer 2
Pull over for a moment!
Hang with us, chill out
Have a micro, a nitro
a brine, a biotic 
a switchel, a shrub, 
a feral-strained, forage-forward
slightly fizzy semi-hard 
kam-bu-cha!

Developer 1
Natural yeast, grown in the creek
Local, indigenous! 
 
Developer 2					 
Bio-fermented, right from the creek
Organic, unfiltered!

Developer 1 
Unfiltered!

Developer 2
Fermented!

Developer 1
From the creek

Developer 2
From the creek

Developer 1
We have a proposal, 
Pending community rezoning

Developer 2
Pending an environmental review

Developer 1
Pending city approval

Developer 2
Pending tax incentives!

Developer 1							
Hear us out! Here us out!

Developer 1 
(spoken/sung)
Hit ‘em with the pitch deck! 

Developer 2
Luxury lofts 
Lavish views, roof decks
Reclaimed oak flooring
Basaltina stone counters
Sleek, smart 
Kohler bidets
Luxury lofts,
Lavish views, roof decks
Wall of windows gleaming
private Peloton gyms
full height
Soaking tubs

Developer 1
5000 units
All sustainable, of course	
With limited community beach
and green space 
Don’t be a NIMBY 
Rezone, rezone, 
Re-zone

5000 units
All market-rate, of course
With a public art walk
with upcycled pavers
Don’t be a NIMBY
Rezone, rezone, 
Re-zone

Developer  1 
(shout singing)										
Wait, wait
Rich people need housing too!						
							
Developer 2
We haven’t even told you about the floating, glass-bottomed 
gastro-pub!
Developer 1
Or the roof-top
Skate park!

from "Newtown Odyssey" - (scene 3) The Developers

Equal magnitude for fl, cl, perc, pn, vn and vc (2023)

Ensemble Ipse
Matt Ward, conductor
Margaret Lancaster, flute
Christa Van Alstine, clarinet
Molly Morkoski, piano
Colleen Bernstein, percussion
Esther Noh, violin
Caleb van der Swaagh, cello

Equal Magnitude (2023)

live performance by:
James Garlick, violin
Richard O'Neill, viola

more about the piece: https://lembitbeecher.com/site/music/the-happiness-of-two-salmon-returning-home/

The Happiness of Two Salmon Returning Home

"Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style... or a way of life... and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon 'trying and trying again.' In fact, if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards." -Judith Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure

Premiered April 2024 at the Ann E. Pitzer Center at the University of California, Davis by Nick May as part of the I Exist Project.

jouissance, or learning to let go

seeking all that's still unsung - a collection of musings on circles & songs & tunes & speeches

I chorale canons 00:00-06:24
II 504 Wood Street (remix 1) 06:25-09:35
III blah, blah, blah (after Greta Thunberg) 09:36-17:30
IV I'm Going Home (remix 2) 17:31-21:52
V the rub: die Torschlusspanik 21:53-25:49
VI Can I Leave You? (remix 3) 25:50-29:42

The Lydian Quartet
Clara Lyon & Julia Glenn, violins
Mark Berger, viola
Joshua Gordon, cello

"seeking all that’s still unsung" is dedicated to the members of the Lydian Quartet, past & present. This piece is inspired by the world, its "current" present, both visible and acknowledged and unseen and unacknowledged. It contemplates what is missing from our world, because the passage of time has brought about evolution, extinction, forgetting, erasure, and obliteration. It imagines what changes are possible as we move into our future. If any piece of music of mine can "be" about something in my life, then this piece pretty much tells my story; it is, in effect, my life in music. "chorale canons" is a new way for me to begin a piece. In part, because this quartet has partially existed in so many forms over the last few years, and a lot has happened to me and my work during that time, it struck me as I began working on this work for the final time that the very writing of the piece needed to take all that I had created previously for this piece (the "visible and acknowledged") and undergo...perform...those acts of evolution, extinction, forgetting, erasure, and obliteration. "chorale canons" opening chord progression is typical of much of my music: non-functional, more modal than tonal, rife with symmetries and near-circular qualities, and very connected to the properties of endless voice leading. This progression is the music for the entire piece; a series of chords that melt into one another, containing all the qualities of multi-part vocal writing from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, while being nothing like that at all. The quartet contains three “remixes” of songs from The Sacred Harp songbook; "504 Wood Street," "I’m Going Home," and "Can I Leave You?" I participated in an Old Time Music Festival in upstate New York in the Summer 2010. I came upon a group of about 30-40 people jamming on "The Sacred Harp" songs, music I had seen and heard a number of times before, but never live. It was miraculous. This set in motion many things that to this day I find myself re-examining again and again: skill, desire, purpose, utility, intention, vulnerability, beauty, memory, absence, belonging. Ever since that encounter, I have been involved in this community of musicians. Two interstitial movements connect the remixes: "blah, blah, blah (After Greta Thunberg)" and "the rub: die Torschlusspanik." "blah, blah, blah (After Greta Thunberg)" takes the rhythms and pitch material from Thunberg’s speech at the 2021 Youth4Climate Conference in Milano. It was this speech where her version of the “blah, blah, blah” moniker took hold. For me, the world of new music has a lot of “blah, blah, blah” occupying it; most creative fields do. The words of Thunberg's that strike me most potently are: "We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope it. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people." In recent years, I've moved away from playing and focused on making...writing...the music I have wanted to make first and foremost and doing so with others. I don't want to be passing through this gate of life and wonder “what if,” and regret the possible realities I never even allowed to take shape. "Can I Leave You?" is a return. My remix of this touching song on the altered instruments is in a formation where all four voices are equal and different and one, looking forward...ahead.

seeking all that's still unsung (2024) for string quartet

"power is everywhere" is an assemblage of various writings/talks by Foucault. The singer is observer, actor, and deliverer of the message. She is not there to simply sing the text – she is there to instigate the way the music unfolds by way of what the words tell us. She is powerful, taking note of what happens and how to move forward. She is everywhere all the time. My piece is influenced by opera, song cycles, theater, and might even be considered a surreal singspiel.

Left Coast Ensemble, with Nikki Einfeld (soprano)
video: https://youtu.be/75lAqvPOLjQ

TEXTS (indicates omitted words)
Power (is everywhere.)

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it "conceals." In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.

Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it... We must make allowances for the complex and unstable process whereby a discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
 
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions. The judges of normality (are present everywhere.) We are in the society of the great teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.
 
The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order. What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something, which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one, perhaps, nearing its end.
 
But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. (Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power - the idea of their responsibility for "consciousness" and discourse forms part of the system.) The intellectual's role is no longer to place himself "somewhat ahead and to the side" in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of "knowledge," "truth," "consciousness," and "discourse."

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

Power exists only when it is put into action; it does not require your consent.

If no one knows who you are, can you be forgotten? If memory is power, are those who are forgotten powerless? The powerless are everywhere.

power is everywhere, an observed distraction for soprano & ensemble on texts of Foucault (2017)

Dorris and Ophelia, two iconic women destined to self-destruction and death, lost their lives for nothing in the order of a solidly masculine world. This piece dramatically gives voice to Doris and Ophelia, in their new form of parallel apparitions, physically resonate their misfortune, amplify their psychology with the power of music, tells us their story of self destruction, aftermath of sadness, and question of the order we are in. I have deeply engaged with the text with musical techniques such as prosodic analysis and word painting, to create the affect behind the wonderful poem, Doris at the River (in Far District), written by Poet Ishion Hutchinson whom I have shaped my composition in collaboration with, and manifested by beautiful performance of Rachel Calloway and Xak Bjerken. [CB]

Doris at the River
by Ishion Hutchinson

There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds 
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke -Shakespeare, Hamlet

Her melody broke through a shell
Over the town that August we found 
Her in the arms of native Ariel,
Strands of hair and leaves in her mouth.

Who knew she lived in such troubled 
Branches in the corners of daydreams, 
Singing the perfect epitaph:
All things that you possess, possess their death.

The river streaked into a brown mirror, 
The tail of her slime green dress bushed 
Fallen woods in decay as we pulled her out. 
Her hands were clasped on her chest.

This was the work of devotion, 
Not art - the silver of love cracked. 
Ants draped her eyelids, indifferent 
To the sun and us staring down.

Doris at the River: An Apparition of Ophelia

In Turkic folklore, Jinn (Cin in Turkish) are invisible and sometimes visible other than human persons with free will, superior to humans. There is not much known about them, nevertheless, they live in a parallel universe with an access to our own. They appear in grotesque forms in human interactions. This piece is about a Jinn embodiment under the midnight soundscape of the 15 July Military Coup Attempt in Ankara, in 2016.

Coup d'Etat: Cin in the Machine

Finalist of the New England Philharmonic 2023 call for scores. Commissioned for the Cornell Symphony Orchestra as the composer in residence of the 2019 season. Program notes: KATIK represents my first generation immigrant and diaspora experiences in the U.S. Katık literally means additive, a sort of catalyst in a process of synthesis, which does not dissolve or merge the predominant entities into each other. Katık carries multiple simultaneous meanings within it. Kat is layer or level, and adding. Katı is solid, stiff, something that cannot be easily breakable or penetrable. Atık is disposal. But there is much more about this word.
“Katık yap!” is a phrase that has been associated with the ordinary day life in households for so long. When there is not enough food, it means “eat with,” the cheapest product that a person can buy in certain places. It is an embodiment of the food insecurity and financial plunge of working and middle class families, which is a situation of growing global precarity, exceeding the framework.
Besides the intertwined contextual meanings of the word and the inspiration behind Katık, this piece incorporates multiple techniques that discard the elements of conventional orchestral language. Katık includes abstractions of complex sound relations, through Tritone paradoxes, Doppler effects, dynamic pitch cycles, inharmonic and harmonic spectral processes, combinational tones, missing fundamentals, and so on.
The perceptive codes in Katık are subjective, and the sound world and meanings that come out of it are unrevealing. [CB]

.KAT.I.K

This is from my collection of Etudes for Mixed Ensemble, which is an ongoing set a pieces for the Schubert Octet instrumentation, plus piano. 

These works try to capture what appears to be the commonly understood idea of virtuosity, and apply it to an otherwise inherently awkward musical affect; Saturation is the idea behind "A(u)nti Mazurka." 

In total, these pieces are as much studies for the ensemble as they were for me when I composed each of them. This performance is from the 2019 Composers Conference, as performed by the Conference Ensemble, conducted by James Baker.

from Etudes for Mixed Ensemble - III. A[u]nti Mazurka

This an easy way to get quick access to recent (& not-so-recent) works of mine. Contact me with any queries. REQUEST: Should you wish to play my work, I ask you include it on a program that reflect the values of belonging, and make an honest effort to be fully inclusive. Thank you.

(pronounced Road-HEE or Rhoad-DAH)

power is everywhere, an observed distraction for soprano & ensemble on texts of Foucault (2017)

Kurt Rohde

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