Dillon Robb, Hallie Smith, Veronica Riner, violins
Michael Gruender, clarinet

Performed on February 16, 2017 at 8PM at the Boston Conservatory, 31 Hemenway St., T-401

Perpetuum, estranged is a piece concerned with varied repetitions of the same musical material, harmonic fields and alienation of individuals. Every player listens to their own metronome for the course of the performance and each player’s own tempo is based on a number in the Fibonacci sequence. The piece is split into six phases and the same four musical cells are used in the first five phases. The cells rotate between players from phase to phase so that ultimately, every player performs each cell, varied to a degree, and then returns to a variation of their original cell in Phase V. The transitions between sections is always initiated by Violin 1 and each player follows consecutively so that an overlap occurs between materials from one phase to the next phase. However, since the materials remain the same with variations throughout, it becomes hard to discern what phase is occurring due to the timbral similarity of the violins and use of the same music.

Perpetuum, estranged

Performed by Transient Canvas on March 7, 2017 at the Boston Conservatory, 132 Ipswich St.
Amy Advocat, bass clarinet
Matt Sharrock, marimba

flowers in bloom
in the Jack Daniels bottle down in There
somewhere
in the hole
down in There
I hear the church bells and the sirens
of the transitory past. cast out of
Nostalgia.
the sounds in
There
a vibration's
skeleton bones
reshapes
thy human flesh
to comfort thy needs

flowers In bloom down in There somewhere

Skeletal Figures in the Flooded River (2017) by Lucas Ty Ranieri (USA, 1995)
Commissioned by the VIPA Festival for the Brouwer Trio
Premiered July 5, 2017 in Valencia, Spain
Recording Engineer/Mixed by Jason Thorpe Buchanan

Brouwer Trio
Jenny Guerra, violin
Elena Solanes, violoncello
Carlos Apellániz, piano

PROGRAM NOTES
Skeletal Figures in the Flooded River  is based on a surrealistic text of the same title written in January 2017. Much like in the text, the piano trio strings together various images of death, (re)birth, religious imagery, spiritual renewal and natural forces in an abstract and dream-like manner. Conceptually, the images and music reside within a lucid dream that is surreal and abstracts images of The Great Flood from the Old Testament. All of the musical material is derived from Johannes Brahms’ Wiegenlied: Guten Abend, gute Nacht, Op. 49, No. 4, most commonly known as Lullaby,  to expound on the images of sleep and dreaming. In the end, the music lulls the listener away into a sleepy space absent of the rhythms and motivic development employed earlier in the piece. 

I-“in a lucid dream”
II (1:12)- “in the 30 day flooded river” 
III (2:15)-“doing jumps for Noah”
IV (3:53)-“a chorus of celebration exhaling a reborn flesh”
V (5:04)-“the 30 day flooded river blackens the land”
VI (5:39)-“skeletal figures laugh and laugh until death from the flood was imminent”
VII (5:58)-“be without the blackest remains left flickering”

Skeletal Figures in the Flooded River

Yu-Han Chen, flute
Shannon Williams, clarinet
Grant Bingham, bassoon
Chris Boulais, trumpet
Kris Leslie, trombone
Fu-Jung Chen, violin
Mariya Ksondzyk, viola
Marguerite Salajko, cello
Thatcher Drake, double bass
Ismael Sandoval, conductor
Performed on October 16, 2017 at the Boston Conservatory, 132 Ipswich St. 
Featured photo: Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Boston, MA

PROGRAM NOTE:
A Ripple in the Thread comes from a meditative place that works to observe dynamic changes in what may first be perceived as static. This piece is like water. Always the same thing, the materials appear so clear and simple. A ripple starts in one place and radiates throughout the surface and depths of the water. This simple, but powerful change concerns the shifting of materials and perception of the entity as a whole. The ripple subsides and changes in the thread of sound leave a lasting impression.

A Ripple In The Thread

Performed by the Boston Conservatory Composers Orchestra
20 October 2017
Judson Evans, narrator/The Benefactor


PROGRAM NOTE:
La Petite Mort for orchestra and fixed electronics is a “dystopian orchestral fantasy” that arose out of a reading of WE, a novel written by the Soviet author Yevgeny Zamayatin during the Russian Revolution that inspired the likes of canonized dystopian novels like Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Akin to the Zamayatin novel, La Petite Mort interrogates authoritarian power structures and mechanisms of control—contextualized in the world of classical music. The narrator, named The Benefactor, booms overhead, instilling fear with demands and making aloof commentary on the action below. The orchestra serves as a representation of society: citizens toiling through their work exactly as they are told through musical notation and the conductor, dictated by The Benefactor. 

In La Petite Mort, the orchestra has one job: to churn out music “from the music factory”. The music is in three well-established styles: march, dance and dirge--all highly evocative and imitative of Dimitri Shostakovich’s compositional style. The orchestra, or the One State, remains subject to The Benefactor’s commentary and desires. Nothing creatively new is attempted or expressed, rather the past is consistently imitated and repeated. The climaxes of each section come to quick closes without any further expansion, and any hope of more ecstatic release is quickly dismissed with cold commentary from authority.


Quotations from WE by Yevgeny Zamayatin:
1. “The pipes of the Music Factory rang out the March harmoniously- the everyday March. What indescribable charm-the everydayness, repetitiveness, this reflectivity.” 
2. “...By simply turning this handle, ANY of you could produce up to three sonatas an hour. What a struggle this was for our ancestors. They could create ONLY if they drove themselves to fits of ‘inspiration’, a strange form of epilepsy.” 
3. “...to be original means to somehow stand out from the others. Consequently, being original is to violate equality...And that which in the idiot language of the Ancients was called ‘being banal’, for us just means doing your duty...” 
4. “...a mouthful of burning-hot poison was poured into me-and then more-and more, and more and more...”
5. “...everybody stood up and the solemn, slow canopy of the Hymn, the hundreds of pipes of the Music Factory and the millions of human voices swayed above our heads...” 
6. “What magnificence! What unwavering predictability! And how pitiful that whimsical music, delimited by nothing except wild fantasy...”.

La Petite Mort

David Angelo, clarinet/bass clarinet
Alec Norkey, violin
Ben Baker, cello
Kevin Madison, piano
Performed on December 8, 2017 at the Boston Conservatory, 132 Ipswich St.
Image- St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness, Joshua Reynolds, 1776

PROGRAM NOTE:
i. Modus Operandi
ii. Joie de Vivre 
iii. In the earth 
iv. Infinite Wail
v. In sleep, in time

A noble savage is a recurring literary character that exemplifies a wild human or “Other” that has not yet been exposed to and corrupted by civilizations and its laws of order. In this piece, I am comparing this stock character to the qualities of a child- the piece is personified as a human and each section represents a different stage in the entity’s development, trying to reclaim lost or fading qualities. This piece/character looks back on memories of the history it is embedded in, quoting “memories” of music by Olivier Messiaen, Gustav Mahler, George Crumb, Gerard Grisey and Igor Stravinsky. The frame in which these flashbacks to historically significant musical passages are placed outline the development of Western music. The manner they are presented in and reimagined aim to question and challenge codified notions of “old” and “new” music.

Regressions to the Noble Savage

Commissioned and premiered by En Root ensemble on October 13, 2018 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City.

Brian Dunbar, flute/piccolo
Kristina Treuschler, clarinet
Emma Terrell, percussion
Alan Snow, violin
Gabrielle Skinner, viola
Kamyron Williams, cello
Lucas Ty Ranieri, electronics

PROGRAM NOTE:
0:00- I. Generational Particle
1:08- II. Cloud Pillar and Chariot
1:54- III. Rusty Fife-Trinket Box
3:20-IV. A Trinity of Voices, Raptureless
4:54- V. Voice of the Eternal Mother at the Burning Sea

The Flood of Ancestral Ruins is a piece for ensemble inspired by ideas of post-coloniality, diasporic fragmentation, traditional Puerto Rican music, and imagery of ruins. Composed after Hurricane Maria’s 2017 landfall in Puerto Rico, the piece’s concept was inspired by the political, historical, and cultural discourses that arose from a post-Maria Puerto Rico.  This piece marked a decidedly more direct exploration of my own ancestry through music and text. 

The piece is structured into five sections that intertwine religious imagery from the Book of Exodus and recalls to Colonial American music. There are echoes of traditional Puerto Rican music throughout, contrasted with images of fragmentation. The first four sections function as discrete parts of a whole, strung together with an abstracted personal narrative that musically explores Puerto Rico in relation to my own identity.

Ruins escorts the listener from sounds of the Puerto Rican Bomba, to early American Colonialism, and then to musical Euro-Romanticism, a quasi-journeying from one place to the next without certainty of belonging. The sound of women’s voices welcome the listener at the piece’s fifth and final section, Voice of the Eternal Mother at the Burning Sea. With ancestral voices contrasted against the image of the warming sea, the piece closes with an abstracted familial folklore that reverberates across imagery of land, time, and generations.

The Flood of Ancestral Ruins

Commissioned and premiered by Nick Stevens on 14 April, 2019 at the Boston Conservatory

Artwork- "Study for Sentimental Colloquy" by Salvador Dali (1944)
“In 1944 Dalí...designed the sets for Sentimental Colloquy, a ballet loosely based on one of Verlaine’s poems. Staged in New York, Sentimental Colloquy was a Surrealist extravaganza featuring dancers with underarm hair hanging down to the floor, a large mechanical tortoise encrusted with coloured lights, and the manic cyclists commemorated in this painting of the event. Sentimental Colloquy design was used as the backdrop for the ballet. Images of the piano and cyclists parody Spanish provincial customs and the bourgeois culture of an elite public. In this design, the cyclists balance rocks on their skull-like heads.” -www.dalipaintings.com

Video of the performance (preferred form of viewing/listening)-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrsPcmKxCuk&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR2TQgbV4JEUCXstwcD1GGUPJL6IRBkGEvk5LYjgyO0OXhTvsQE1YMxCZrk

PROGRAM NOTE:
Module 1-0:00
Module 2 (shortened)-3:20
Module 3-4:15
Module 4 (shortened)-7:27

"Museum Quality" for solo percussionist reimagines the archetypal solo recital into a series of exhibits that deconstructs and examines the performer, audience, and distribution of art. While this is a musical piece, it also employs staging and theatrical components that extend it into a conceptual piece of work as well, one that seeks to take apart, make fun of, but still embody the supposed perfection and fine-tuned details a well-educated regular museum goer might seek. An abridged and slightly condensed version was created for this first performance. 

Said exhibits are realized as four separate, consolidated assemblages of percussion that are only used for that section, for the most part. For this performance/interpretation, there are three modules with modified instrumentation. As noted in the setup, Salvador Dali’s painting "Sentimental Colloquy" is used in Module 3 as a quasi-graphically notated score the performer to improvise off of, gazing at it while doing so. The concert space emulates and elicits the physicality and sensation of being located in a museum, and highlighting the dynamics observed in high-brow creative spaces and inaccessibility (i.e. a conservatory). The performer acts as a distant technician, thoroughly engaged in his work. Old music is stuck in a museum or an art gallery, and so is new music sometimes. Where should we go now?

While the piece deconstructs images of perfection, it strives to emulate symmetry that can be understood. While the piece critiques classical music and concert norms, it still engages with these traditions. And while the piece is a sort of series of fragmented technical excerpts, it is also aiming for the performer to link these together and reach an expressive voice not found in the other sections to ultimately highlight the importance of interpretation. Given the will to create and alter proportions of the piece, the performer asks us "Is this how to make art?" as he gazes at the Dali painting, still confined to certain parameters written into the music before moving to the final section comprised of a single repeated note, imitative of a metronome or clock.

Museum Quality (abridged version)

Premiered as part of New Music on the Point 2019 at Salisbury Congregational Church in Salisbury, Vermont on June 17, 2019.

Mary Bonhag, soprano
Daniel Schreiner, piano
Chris Otto, violin

PROGRAM NOTE:
A Beginner's Encounter With Nothingness is music that traverses through a fractured universe and spacetime with fragments of history, old music and scientific fact. The piece is conceptualized to exist in the spaces between concert music, performance art, ritual and conceptual theater. The music is in a constant state of flux and evolution, alternating between aleatory, traditional notation, and musical quotation to create a psychological and emotional sense of indeterminacy and questioning. Where are we going? What is next? Where am I? 

The music sets a poem of the same title written in November 2014. The black eye masks worn by the pianist and violinist are evocative of scientific goggles and dark ritual. The masks are handmade and laden with human symbols of religion and nature in homage to the late George Crumb's chamber piece Vox Balanae and Alexander McQueen's 1996 fashion show Dante. The singer's black veil and black lace gloves set the tone of a sense of protection and ritualistic mourning for what has passed, and for what is yet to come. The mood is curious, environmental, mournful, ominous, spacey, and accentuates an anxious void-like feeling for an undetermined future.

TEXT:
The plenum vacuum seethes with activity, the full vacuum, the empty space in outer space, which cosmologists tell us is full of potential activity, of particles and anti-particles coming in and out of existence, every microsecond with one imbalance perhaps starting our universe. Lost in space, you are found in spacetime. You open the door into The Garden. You enter. The idea for this area of The Garden grew in our mind as a primeval wilderness, the place of Death and Rebirth. For the human, evolutionary history culminates where it started, with bacteria. What should we do with the leftover soil, a gift from the hole in the bacterial ground?

One imbalance perhaps ends the Universe. 

Particles and anti-particles going in and out endlessly, full of activity in the empty and full plenum vacuum. Close the door to The Garden. You are in Spacetime. 

Lost in space, Death and Rebirth die as an idea in our minds. A gift is leftover. It is bacterial, so we close the door.

A Beginner's Encounter With Nothingness

Maximum Swimming Speed
A mini music comedy for saxophonist

Commissioned by New Music on the Point
With Support from the Robert Black Foundation
Premiered virtually on July 11, 2020
Garret Klauss, saxophonist

PROGRAM NOTE:
Maximum Swimming Speed is a miniature musical comedy for saxophonist created in collaboration with Garret Klauss. The piece takes its title from the poem above by the poet Matt Vekakis. While the piece doesn’t refer to the emotional content of the poem but rather the images of sharks swimming swiftly, I adapted the title to see how much was possible for one player in the small performance time frame we were given (2-3 minutes) and the relatively small time frame to compose the piece, as if the piece was written and performed at the maximum speed possible.

The music depicts a shark swimming from deep in the water to the surface of the water, and then away in the end. The saxophonist moves from tenor to alto and then finally soprano sax, with sounds starting in lowest range which then moves to the highest range of the sax trio in the end. The chromatic and gestural pitch material derived from the Jaws theme with a sense of campiness. The audible gasps of air, movement of the performer and extended forms of playing create a more comedic, entertaining atmosphere that depict a shark flipping to the surface of the water and then away, while the foghorn that ends each saxophone’s passage depicts a boat at the surface of the water.

Maximum Swimming Speed

TOP PICKS:
The Flood of Ancestral Ruins (2018)
La Petite Mort (2017)
A Beginner’s Encounter with Nothingness (2019)
Skeletal Figures in the Flooded River (2017)
A Grain of Sand (2016)

Lucas’s work explores themes such as transformation, post-structuralism, psychology, childhood, totalitarianism, religion, sexuality, intersectionality, and technoculture. Lucas’s work ranges from chamber, vocal, and orchestral works to electronic music and experimental theater. 

His piece for solo cello “...be washed, pure white.” was performed in the Boston Sculptors Gallery in January 2017, and he worked with the Brouwer Trio in Valencia, Spain on a new piano trio in July 2017 as part of the VIPA Festival. “RED LIGHT”, a 45-minute music theatre piece for performer and ensemble was performed in April 2018 at the Boston Conservatory. In October 2018, he was commissioned by the En Root Ensemble at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan for the premiere of “The Flood of Ancestral Ruins". In 2019, Lucas was a participant at New Music on the Point in Leicester, VT with the premiere of his piece “A Beginner’s Encounter With Nothingness” for soprano, violin, piano and electronics.

In recent years, Lucas has produced and released electronic music under a separate pseudonym, including the QUANTUM (EP) from May 2022 featuring tracks such as “FUNERAL MARCH” produced in Gainesville, FL, mixed and mastered at Pulp Recording Studios. Lucas holds a B.M. in composition from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee (2018). He has studied with Felipe Lara, Eun Young Lee, Curtis Hughes and Jonathan Bailey Holland.

Lucas Ranieri