"song of spring," for trumpet and sinfonietta, featuring Evan Honse (trumpet) and Contemporaneous.

Audio by Stuart Breczinski

song of spring

Convergent Boundaries: Giiwas, Kopački Rit, Etna (2022) features original field recordings from Crater Lake (Oregon, USA), Kopački Rit Nature Park (Osijek, Croatia), and Mt. Etna (Sicily, Italy). In this piece, natural sounds from these three locations converge, much like the forces that brought them into existence. The percussion music expresses the human dimension of my own experiences at each of these natural wonders through a patchwork of shifting landscapes. 

The title “Convergent Boundaries” refers to the travelogues of Adam Virzi, my brother. In the summer of 2021, Adam and I traveled across the Pacific Northwest through California, Oregon, and Washington. We visited the major peaks at 7 National Parks and Forests on the Cascade Volcanic Arc, a string of volcanoes along the Pacific Rim of Fire that extends into Canada, including Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. Adam’s travelogue details the natural history of these places alongside the more human moments we experienced. Adam’s first chapter, “Convergent Boundaries,” describes the geologic forces that gave rise to the Cascade Volcanic Arc.

Crater Lake is an ancient volcanic caldera that filled with rain and snowmelt to become the deepest lake in the USA, at nearly 2,000 feet deep and 6 miles in diameter. The Klamath people, who observed the creation of Crater Lake 7,700 years ago, tell that the collapse of Mt. Mazama and formation of the caldera was the outcome of a tremendous battle between spirit gods. After the battle, medicine men gave thanks for the victory in a sacred song. The lake was called Giiwas (a most sacred place), known as a place of power.” 

Kopački Rit is the largest nature preserve in Croatia and one of the largest wetlands in Europe – a place where the meandering rivers of Drava and Danube meet, forming a unique ecological habitat for hundreds of wildlife species. In June 2022, I explored the canals of Kopački Rit’s Special Zoological Reserve on a small boat, accompanied by a park ranger with expert knowledge of the landscape and wildlife.

L’Etna [Mt. Etna] is the volcano on the Italian island of Sicily, my ancestral homeland. Mt. Etna is located at the convergent boundary of the Eurasian and African tectonic plates and dominates the Sicilian landscape at over 11,000 feet tall with a base circumference of 87 miles. It is clear that the active volcano, which rises directly out of the Mediterranean Sea, is a singular force on the island – or that perhaps it is the island and everything surrounding it is merely a consequence of its frequent eruptions. 

Commissioned by the Novalis Music and Art Festival
Premiered by Line Upon Line Percussion - Osijek, Croatia (Oct. 2022)

"Convergent Boundaries" for Percussion Trio and Electronics (2022) | Line Upon Line

Riverdaughter (2023) is based on the character Goldberry, the “River-daughter,” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Part One: The Fellowship of the Ring. In Chapter 6, “The Old Forest,” Tolkien introduces Goldberry, an enigmatic being thought to be the spirit of the river Withywindle. When the Hobbits first encounter Goldberry, Tolkien describes her voice:

“Then another clear voice, as young and ancient as Spring, like the song of a glad water flowing down into the night from a bright morning in the hills, came falling like silver to meet them.”

Riverdaughter is an imagined realization of Goldberry’s voice, inspired in part by the sounds of water heard throughout my travels in the wilderness of California. The music is composed using naturally occurring acoustic phenomena, including sympathetic resonances on the cello. The electronics are performed live using field recordings of water sounds from the Yuba River in Northern California. The music video for this piece was also filmed on location at the Yuba River. The Yuba is itself an idyllic natural setting inhabited by people living in harmony with the natural world, perhaps a close real-world equivalent to Tolkien’s Withywindle.

Music Video: https://youtu.be/frD5ajDUQXQ?si=MtoTJnBlvYJTlhkz

"Riverdaughter" for Solo Cello and Electronics (2023) | Molly Aronson

All tracks performed and recorded by Laura Cocks at CIRM in Nice, France.

Atolls is for solo piccolo and twenty-nine spatialized piccolos. The  auxiliary performers surround the soloist and the audience. The pitch content is derived from the  twenty-nine most salient spectral components of a crash cymbal occurring (and analyzed) within  the shrill range of Janet Leigh's infamous scream from Hitchcock’s Psycho.

lauracocks.biz
davidbird.tv

Atolls - for Solo Piccolo and 29 Spatialized Piccolos

Subtitle: Motion and Arrhythmia 

Part of the 2016 highSCORE Contemporary Music Festival in Pavia, Italy.  So incredibly honored to work with these extraordinary musicians: Eli, Jami, Franz, and CosimoI've learned so much over these two weeks and met so many talented artists.  Congratulations to all! 

Photo credit: Nate May http://www.natemaymusic.com

String Quartet no. 2, op. 7 (2016) [LIVE]

Performed by Contemporaneous:
Thomas Giles - saxophone
Evan Honse - trumpet
Matt Evans - percussion
Mayumi Tsuchida - piano
Sarah Haines - viola
Luke Krafka - cello
David Bloom - conductor

Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center,
March 7th 2017

It stays how it is

Conducted by Isiah Shim and read by the Peabody Symphony Orchestra.

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” - Carl Jung

Entities - for Orchestra

Written for and performed by the JACK Quartet (January 2018).

Christopher Otto, Violin
Austin Wulliman, Violin
John Pickford Richards, Viola
Jay Campbell, Violoncello

During the Spring of 2017, I traveled to nature preserves throughout Northern California, hiking through valleys, mountains, forests, beaches, ridges, streams, ponds, and lakes in search of magical moments in the wild when the complex sounds of the earth fall into sync and become music. Among these locations are El Corte de Madera Creek, Thornewood, Big Basin, Windy Hill, Pescadero Marsh, Bedwell Bayfront, Skyline Ridge, Loch Lomond, and Yosemite National Park.

Songbird features original natural soundscape recordings from Windy Hill, alongside the birdsong of a variety of species, including the Redwinged Blackbird, California Quail, American Coot, American Crow, Steller’s Jay, Pileated Woodpecker, Nutall’s Woodpecker, Marsh Wren, Pacific Wren, a rafter of Wild Turkeys, and three subspecies of Song Sparrow.

On the Lost Trail at first light, you can hear the magnificent dawn chorus of countless birds as they swirl about in a shroud of thick, pale mist, howling wind, and drizzling rain. Not long after, at the great precipice of Hamms Gulch, an airplane soars across the Eastern horizon, passing through the rising sun as the forest awakens in golden light to a symphony of birdsong...

Dedicated to my dear friends Brian Cook, Christopher Rispoli, Jeremy Wexler, and Justin Nickell

"Songbird" for String Quartet (2018) | JACK Quartet

Recorded on November 14th, 2018 – Woodside, California

This week our guest is Davor Branimir Vincze, a Croatian composer living in Palo Alto, California. Davor has participated in a number of top festivals and residencies such as Impuls, MATA, Manifeste, and Royaumont. Similarly, his works have been premiered by several leading ensembles today including Ensemble Intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, Talea, and Ensemble Recherche.

Davor began his university education in composition at Graz and Stuttgart, and later studied at IRCAM in Paris. He has worked closely with Stefano Gervasoni, Georg Friedrich Haas, Klaus Lang, Mauro Lanza, and Marco Stroppa - all major figures in the field. Currently, Davor is completing his doctorate in composition at Stanford with Brian Ferneyhough.

Laibach Concerto: https://soundcloud.com/davor-branimir-vincze/laibach-concerto
Inflection Point: https://soundcloud.com/davor-branimir-vincze/inflectionpoint-em

http://www.db-vincze.com/
https://soundcloud.com/davor-branimir-vincze

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX4v1_HIlkU

Episode I: Davor Branimir Vincze

Dr. Nick Virzi (b. 1991) is a composer from New York City whose work includes acoustic, electronic, and electroacoustic music, as well as intermedia pieces and multichannel installations. His recent pieces explore the relationships between humans and the natural world, numerology and rhythmic structure, and ethnography and identity. His practice includes field recording in nature preserves, orchestration of rhythmic frameworks based on complex numerical systems, and ethnographic research focused on collecting and adapting archival media as an exploration of his identity as an Italian-American. In addition to composing, he is an electric guitarist, conductor, photographer, researcher, and educator. He also hosts the international composer interview series Composer OverTime.

Nick’s music has been performed throughout the USA and internationally by leading artists such as cellist Séverine Ballon (France), soprano Tony Arnold, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, the JACK Quartet, the Spektral Quartet, Splinter Reeds, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Ensemble Liminar (Mexico), Distractfold (United Kingdom), the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, the TAK Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Wild Up. His work has been featured at such venues as the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center, the Center for New Music in San Francisco, and the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark. His recent projects include “Convergent Boundaries” for Percussion Trio and Electronics, an electroacoustic piece featuring field recordings from Kopački Rit Nature Park in Croatia, Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, and Mt. Etna in Sicily, Italy. This piece was commissioned by the Novalis Music and Art Festival and premiered by Line Upon Line Percussion in October 2022.

Virzi has been a featured composer at international festivals such as Gaudeamus Muziekweek (The Netherlands), the Impuls Academy (Austria), and Festival Ecos Urbanos (Mexico). He has been awarded fellowships by the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival (NYC), the Cortona Sessions for New Music (Italy), the soundSCAPE Composition and Performance Exchange (Italy), and the New Music for Strings Festival (Denmark). He has won festival competitions including the Black Bayou Composition Award, 2nd Prize at the New Music on the Bayou Festival in Louisiana. He has held residencies at the Academy of Arts and Culture and Kopački Rit Nature Preserve in Osijek, Croatia, the Sagehen Experimental Forest and Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve in the UC Reserve System, and the Poto Festival in Grass Valley, California. He has presented his music and given lectures at universities such as UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Missouri (Mizzou). He has presented his research in music theory and analysis at conferences hosted by the American Beethoven Society, the California Interdisciplinary Consortium of Italian Studies (CICIS), and the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). He has presented his research in acoustic ecology at NYU’s Steinhardt School as part of the Precarious Sounds/Sounding Sanctuary Conference (NYC), The Catholic University of America at the Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts and Responses (Washington, D.C.), and the Centro Cultural Vila Flor at the Ninth International Conference on the Constructed Environment (Guimarães, Portugal).

Dr. Virzi completed his D.M.A. in Music Composition at Stanford University, where he studied with Mark Applebaum and Brian Ferneyhough. He also completed his B.M. at the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Du Yun, Huang Ruo, Laura Kaminsky, and Suzanne Farrin. He recently completed the H&S Dean’s Fellowship at Stanford University, where he was a Lecturer in the Department of Music and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). His music is published by the American Composers Alliance (ACA) in New York City.

"Songbird" for String Quartet (2018) | JACK Quartet

Nick Virzi

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