Fracture: five miniatures for solo clarinet

Chris Kim, Cornell Festival Chamber Orchestra

Lonesome Traveler was largely inspired by a book of short stories of the same name by the American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. I was particularly struck by Kerouac’s beautifully haunting, and often hallucinatory, descriptions of night throughout these stories. In this short work I tried to imagine a sonic realization of these surreal and highly emotional nocturnal images. 


Lonesome Traveler (2014/15) for 14 musicians

John Storgårds, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra

Adrift (2014) - excerpt: Anguished

John Storgårds, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Premiered February 6th, 2015

The restless and fluid nature of the music in Adrift tends to keep any real sense of stability out of reach. From the start, this is a piece on the move: always unfolding with a sense of impending arrival. Three distinct types of music emerge: an obsessive ostinato, a warped melody, and an interruptive flourish. Throughout the piece these figures reappear in shattered, stretched, and distilled forms, often layered over each other in varied configurations. 

Adrift was commissioned by Kaija Saariaho through the Saariaho 60th Birthday Fund administered by Chester Music. The piece is dedicated to Kaija Saariaho, with admiration and gratitude. 

Adrift (2014) - opening: Fluid, Turbulent

Rainer Eudeikis, cello
This cello piece takes its inspiration, and its title, from M.C. Escher’s geometrically informed series of transformational prints. In these puzzle-like images, interlocking patterns of one or two simple figures are gradually and seamlessly transformed into larger shapes. These configurations create a visual illusion that draws the eye to the patterned smaller figures and the resulting larger shapes simultaneously. In my piece I translate this visual paradox into a musical one. Highly contrasting fragments of music are patterned and gradually transformed, drawing the ear in several directions at once. Out of this localized chaos broader musical shapes and trajectories emerge. Despite the piece’s sharp juxtapositions and dizzying array of ever-fluctuating surface detail its larger shape simply unfolds a slow descent, beginning about as high as the cello can possibly play and ending (thanks to the scordatura tuning) below the ‘normal’ range of the instrument.

Circle Limit

...and again...

Louis Chiappetta (b. 1989) is a New York based composer. His works have been performed across the United States and abroad in venues such as London’s Wigmore Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and at festivals including the Aspen Music Festival, Dartington International Summer School and Aldeburgh Music Festival. His recent projects have included "Fracture", a series of clarinet miniatures written for clarinetist Mark Simpson as part of a collaboration with the London Contemporary Dance School, "Chroma" which was performed by the American Composers Orchestra as part of the 2013 Underwood New Music Readings, a newly revised version of his quartet "…and again…" for Music from Copland House as part of the Copland House’s 2013 CULTIVATE workshop, and "Lonesome Traveler", a piece for large ensemble which was premiered at the 67th Aldeburgh Festival by members of the Britten-Pears Orchestra. In March 2012 Chiappetta participated in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute professional training workshop lead by Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen which included the premiere of his trio "Loops, Clocks, and Shadows" at Zankel Hall.

Chiappetta’s work has been recognized with several awards and accolades including an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2010), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Scholarship (2011), and the Cleveland Institute of Music Donald Erb Prize (2011). In 2012 he was awarded a Fulbright grant by the U.S. Department of State and spent a year in London as a Fulbright postgraduate scholar. He began his formal composition training at the Mannes College of Music Preparatory Division at the age of thirteen, and holds degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music (BM'11) and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (MMus'12). Chiappetta’s principal instructors have been Julian Anderson, Steven Stucky and Keith Fitch. He has also taken part in workshops and courses mentored by Kaija Saariaho, Oliver Knussen, Joan Tower and Derek Bermel amongst others. Currently, he is a D.M.A. candidate at Cornell University under the tutelage of Steven Stucky and Roberto Sierra. 

Chiappetta’s latest work is "Adrift", a ten-minute piece for large orchestra commissioned in celebration of Kaija Saariaho’s 60th birthday. "Adrift "is published by Chester Music and will be premiered at the 2015 Musica nova Helsinki festival by John Storgårds and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.


Louis Chiappetta

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