Hell Study: nature morte with hurdy-gury - octet version (2013)

performed by:
Bohdan Hilash, bass clarinet (quasi-solo)
--
Malgorzata Hlavsa, flute
William Lang, trombone
Joseph Kubera, piano
Tamas Schlanger, percussion
Adam Maros, percussion
Theresa Salomon, violin
Matthias Lorenz, cello
Conducted by Ondřej Vrabec

(I regret to inform you that there is no hurdy-gurdy in this piece. From Ostrava Days 2013)

Program notes:

my maserati does 185 / I lost my license, now I don’t drive
we are the vultures, the dirtiest kind
I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do / life’s been good to me so far
hold him underwater til the motherfucker drowns

***

Just to clarify, the translation of the title of this piece into French is Etude d’enfer: Naturaleza muerta avec vielle à roue. For an Anglophone, the discovery that the French word for “still life” (traduction directe : vie immobile) involves the word “dead” is something of a shock.

Hell Study is a reflection on the hell panel from Jerôme (Hieronymus. Hieronymus !) Bosch’s Northern Renaissance masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. You could see the basic unit of the piece, the “races”, the places where all of the performers play all at once, as explosions of the concept of the still life. You take all these disparate elements with different histories and stories and futures and mix them together in the same present, in a painting, then you retemporalize all that in music, in a messy free-for-all in which all of the subjects are talking (screaming?) at once.

What does that have to do with Bosch’s triptych, which is anything but a still life? Well, the disparate elements are still there, an instant captured, a movement, a gesture portrayed by tricks and conventions. You get into how weird a term “still life” is, in that, really, it applies to any painting. Nature morte hardly seems more apt - “dead” is overdoing it a little, and what’s natural about the traditional line-up of apples, or pheasants and skinned rabbits (true, those are all dead), or cups? The artist created each and every one of them to fit her aesthetic needs. What is nature without human interference? If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears...

I digress. The main point is the much-discussed temporality of music and the point-in-time nature of painting, and how this piece interacts with that. And also suffering, which only happens in time. Torture. The fire and brimstone of Bosch’s painting. And what that could mean today. And also a melody that Billie Joe Armstrong stole from Joe Walsh. All that, that’s what Hell Study’s about.

Hell Study (2013, octet version)

http://nissimmusic.org/music/somethingelse.shtml

The Frost performs its secret ministry
-Coleridge (Frost at Midnight)

This work was funded in part by the Composer Assistance Program of the American Music Center.

Music composed by Nissim Schaul
Performed by Esther Noh (violin) and Jacob Rhodebeck (piano)


Something Else (Music for Sleeping through Winter)

Sophocles's play is fascinating in that its Athenian audience knew the ending the first time the play was performed, and today we still do when we read or see it. Yet the play has always and continues to hold our attention. Oedipus's desire to know the truth is mirrored in the audience's own equivalent desire; in a sense, we become him. As a stand-alone piece, the overture gives an overall emotional impression of the action, while with the rest of the work, it serves as an introduction.

François Leyrit, Baroque double bass;  Samuel Rotsztejn, traverso/recorder, Gabriel Pidoux, oboe; Laurent Sauron, percussion; Marina Voznyuk, harpsichord; Baroque violon, viola, 'cello: Koji Ueda, Tania-lio Faucon-cohen, Nicolas Verhoeven; violone Adrien Alix. Conducted by Mauricio Ahumada.

Overture to Oedipus

http://nissimmusic.org/music/trio.shtml

I have been working for quite some time to pare down my notation to the bare minimum that the performers will require in order to perform a piece that sounds composed and not improvised at random. In Trio, I leave a lot of space to the performers to decide things like the length and placement of each note, the number of repetitions of a figure, and articulations and dynamics while providing signposts that allow them to stay together by listening to and watching each other. The result is a complex game of listening, responding, and cueing amongst the musicians, and also a sense of danger, of performing without a net, that should filter into the sound of the work. 

Music composed by Nissim Schaul

Performed by Matt Albert (violin), Agnieszka Kolodziej (cello), and Yu-Chun Kuo (percussion) at the Hindemith Foundation (Blonay, Switzerland)

Trio

4 Preludes for Harpsichord, for Baroque Trio
III. Not Yr Mom's Continuo Playing
IV. Rolling

from New Music for Old Instruments, for sale at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/flyingforms

Music by Nissim Schaul
Performed by Flying Forms

The original work, for harpsichord alone, was conceived as a set of relatively simple technical studies, covering a range of peculiarly harpsichordy techniques. The trio version adds a healthy touch of virtuosity to the mix. This is two movements out of the four.

    III. Not yr mom's continuo playing: (no comment)
    IV. Rolling: harpsichordists usually roll multi-note chords rather than playing them as a block

The piece was arranged for trio at the request of Flying Forms. 

New Music for Old Instruments preview: 4 Preludes for Harpsichord, for Baroque trio. III. & IV.

http://nissimmusic.org/music/rising.shtml, for 3 voices or 3-part chorus and whatever instrument(s) are available

Rising is a setting the "holy holy holy" prayer (sanctus in Latin, kedushah in Hebrew) in a quasi-Gregorian chant style, but with the related or identical texts in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic. The piece was written for and first performed in Croatia and Slovenia. The idea was to “surprise” the largely-Catholic audience with Catholic-sounding music in the sacred languages of the two other large religions in the region, plus my own tradition (Judaism), which also has deep roots in the Balkans

The piece is antiphonal, and the three choral parts are mostly independent of each other. The result is a haze of sound around the audience from which individual vocal lines sometimes pop out. As voices enter and drop out, moments of sonic mass and repose alternate. The droning instrumental part, placed in the middle of the performance space, is not optional, but can be played by any sustaining instrument.

Music composed by Nissim Schaul

Performed by Kate Smith and Anne Donlon (sopranos), Mollie Schwartz (alto), and Dylan Widjiono (baritone), with Kimmy Szeto playing violin. In a stairwell.

Rising

recording by Thomas Rabaud, tenor saxomophone

music composed by Nissim Schaul

...Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and fear, fear and surprise. Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency. Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Our *four*... no... Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise - I'll come in again!

...

...Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn...

(Cardinal Ximenez's obsessive elaboration, reiteration, and reinterpolation is what this piece is all about.)

What Nobody Expected

Miriam Kapner (oboe) and Frank Perko III (organ)

Cyclictych is an arrangement and recomposition of the 5th and 7th movements of the Wedge Miniatures. The Wedge Miniatures, which I wrote for oboe and piano, are very long when played together together, so I took this as an opportunity to "liberate" some of the music from the rest of that massive piece. The two movements I chose to rebuild also represent the beginning of the compositional path I've been following since 2007.

I started with two movements and ended with three: I decided to split the old 7th movement in two, putting one half at the beginning of the piece and the other half at the end. The result is sort of like a triptych (an association impossible to ignore when writing for the uber-religious organ), but cyclical instead of linear and narrative. The made-up word Cyclictych has a nice tripartite but cyclical look and sound, too

My special thanks to Miriam for requesting this work, and to Vincent Decleire for his help understanding the organ. 

Cyclictych 3

Cyclictych 1

Cyclictych 2

 In a few older RER stations in Paris, the train driver checks the platform to be sure no one is stuck in the doors by looking into a long mirror at the head of the train that reflects the platform back to him. If you ever have the good fortune to find a seat that gives you a view of one of these mirrors as the train pulls out of the station, and you look up into it at just the right time, you’ll see the frozen landscape left behind you. Where there were just hundreds of people, now no one. While all around you is motion, in the mirror, there is ice. This moment of peace is the subject of a piece entitled Glace – which in French can mean either “mirror” or “ice” – I am writing for a youth orchestra. Scratching the Ice is something of a dry run, an opportunity to try out some material in a fashion not fit for teenagers, either because of difficulty or content. As it is a collection of first drafts formed into a larger work, I decided to skew the work – the misshapen proportions and formal indecisiveness are intentional.

Scratching the Ice was written for the 2010 Acanthes Festival and Composition Workshop in Metz, France and was read there by the Orchestre National de Lorraine, Jacques Mercier conducting. 

01 Scratching the Ice

Harpsichord Swirl was written expressly for the Chapelle des Carmelites in the Musée d'art et d'histoire in St-Denis, France.  The Baroque-era Chapel's reverb is both lengthy and peculiarly warm.  The piece is performable in any resonant space, but will not have quite the same effect elsewhere.  It is meant for an 8-speaker array.  (This stereo recording somewhat, but nowhere-near-completely, flattens the octophonic effect.)

The sound source is recordings of a harpsichord being played in various ways, manipulated mostly by layering and reversing, with some pitch-shift.  Spacialization also plays an important role, as discreet sounds give way to piled, spinning ones -- but the sonic environment is key.  The long reverb, plus the amplification of the original sounds to a volume impossible with an acoustic harpsichord, combine to make sounds that take advantage of the harpsichord's natural resonance, but that die away slowly, the opposite of normal.

Thank you to Alissa Duryee for providing the harpsichord samples.

Harpsichord Swirl

Shadow in the Hot Sun performed by Alia Musica (Jamie Jordan, soprano; Henry Doktorski, accordion; Dawn Posey, violin; Katie Kroko, viola; Cody Green, cello; Federico Garcia, conductor), from the live performance of April 6, 2013.

I wrote most of Shadow in the Hot Sun in the spring and summer of 2009, before and while attending the Académie Musicale de Villecroze, which is quite possibly the most idyllic place on earth.  The title (initially its subtitle, back when it had three movements) was a direct result of the place, I found it while walking around the fields -- shadow is a bit threatening, but in the summer Provençal sun, some shade is all you want.  Time in Villecroze is short, so some revision and outright rewriting proved necessary.  I finally got to that in early 2013, in preparation for the performance heard here, by Pittsburgh's Alia Musica ensemble.

Shadow in the hot sun

A Paris-based American composer with a penchant for unusual sonorities and ancient instruments. His music for period and modern instruments takes the flexibility of much Baroque notation as a point of departure. The New York Times has called Nissim’s work "spare and whispered, with a dissonant but compelling edge that keeps you fascinated." When not composing, Nissim is learning to play a splendidly old and obscure instrument, the vielle à roue (French hurdy-gurdy), just for fun.

nissim schaul

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