Conductor: Elim Chan
Recorded at the University of Michigan
Recording engineer: Suby Raman
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Signal to Noise was written, in part, to express thoughts and feelings surrounding a number of major changes in my life in the two years before it was written. It is a snapshot of my busy mind in that moment, as I pushed toward mental calm and spiritual growth, a state Buddhists call “no mind.”
​
The piece consists of two primary background materials. An 18-note cyclic melody forms the backbone of the piece, repeating in various guises 11 times; integrated into the cyclic material is a 24-syllable mantra that, in its first appearance in the brass instruments, comprises all 18 notes of the cyclic melody at the same time. As the mantra repeats insistently throughout the piece, it sheds notes one at a time, until it consists of a single note, played by the cello at the end. The mantra is based on the first three lines of T.S. Eliot’s haunting and gorgeous poem, “Ash-Wednesday;”

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn

Thus, the music progresses from complexity to simplicity while never losing the importance of its cyclic nature.

Signal To Noise - for chamber orchestra

Explorations is a piece that explores the linear ramifications of a harmonic cell that could be described in set theory terms as a [0148] set.  It can also be thought of as an augmented triad with one chromatic tone a half step away from one of the pitches of the chromatic triad.  The piece itself is spontaneous, lyrical, and should sound quasi-improvisatory.  It was written for an amazing saxophone player named Drew Hosler, and lasts about six minutes.

Explorations for Solo Unaccompanied Tenor Saxophone

Fated Nines - Jason Eckardt (Amorsima Trio)

Ensemble39:
Alexandra von der Embse, oboe
Stanislav Chernyshev, clarinet
Abigail Fayette, violin
Yoshihiko Nakano, viola
Nathaniel West, bass

Premiere live at the Penn Composers Guild Concert, October 22, 2014, University of Pennsylvania

Night the Obscure is the sonic result of a couple fascinations of mine: sensual poetry and the use of cyclicity in artworks that otherwise unfold linearly in time. I was first inspired by this selection from Wallace Stevens’ magnificent 1916 poem “Six Significant Landscapes”: 

 The night is of the color
 Of a woman's arm:
 Night, the female,
 Obscure,
 Fragrant and supple,
 Conceals herself.
 A pool shines,
 Like a bracelet
 Shaken in a dance.

With this imagery in mind, I conceived a long, supple, sinuous melody for oboe that is repeated throughout the piece, at times echoed by the clarinet and violin, and always presented in a new harmonic context every time it repeats, as if ripples on a pool are constantly shaking our perception of the night’s light. 

This piece was written for Philadelphia-based Ensemble39, composed of former and current students of the Curtis Institute. Inspired by Sergei Prokofiev's Quintet, Op. 39, for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and bass, its unique mix of strings and winds embraces many musical styles, from the classical oboe to the jazz bass, the klezmer clarinet to the old time fiddle. In just two years, commissions for the ensemble have reached the double digits and continue to multiply. E39 has worked with some of the best young composers of their generation and have been regular performers at the Curtis Institute of Music's annual Composer Recital. E39 changes the conventional concert paradigm, exploring new venues, seeking diverse collaborators, loosening the presentation protocol, and pursuing mixtape-style programming. Equally at home in traditional concert spaces, art galleries, bars, pop-ups, and living rooms, appearances have included Philadelphia's AxD Gallery, Dresden's Glaeserne Manufaktur, World Cafe Live and Miller Theater. More can be found at http://www.ensemble39.org

Night The Obscure (with Ensemble39, for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and bass)

Continuing in my dark sonic adventures... An out of tune organ from another dimension seeps through the cosmic fabric of time...

Quintet II - What One Star Can Carve - Studio Recording Nov 16 2015

Premiere performance November 4, 2015
University of Pennsylvania
Michael Davidman, piano

This short, mosaic-styled work for solo piano began life as a bigger piece reflecting on the Seven Deadly Sins of early Christian ethics. It has since been whittled down into the leaner piece presented here. Like much of my work, the piece twists and refracts simple notions of human behavior (sin/virtue, pleasure/vice) in favor of more complex, intertwined readings. Thus when I think of Wrath, as in the opening bars of the piece, it’s not just wrath as violence, or wrath as hatred, but wrath as righteous anger, satire, self-loathing, and even the antitheses of all of those things. And when I think of Lust, as in the slower, more lyrical panels of the piece’s mosaic, it’s not just unbridled carnality I consider, but love, the holiness of sex, compassion, and the corporeality of intimacy among all of our relationships (not just with lovers).

Semi Sins for piano - Live Recording November 4, 2015

Curtis Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Joshua Gersen
Recorded at the Curtis Institute of Music, Drew Schlegel, recording engineer
April 10, 2017

These Violent Delights (2017), like its name implies, is full of violent contrasts, both in the way it sounds and circumstances under which it was produced. Written as partial fulfillment of my doctoral dissertation project at the University of Pennsylvania, this ten-minute piece for orchestra is a kaleidoscopic mixture of sensuality and spirituality, brashness and delicacy, rage and delight.

As perhaps a dissertation project should, These Violent Delights serves as both a summary of my previous work and a marker indicating new directions in my musical practice. Beginning with my chamber orchestra piece Signal to Noise (2012), and continuing to other works such as Night the Obscure (2014), Mirroring Sky (2014), and Entanglements (2015), I have explored cyclic composition forms, inspired equally by Western theme-and-variations forms as well as the expandable-frame cyclic forms of Indonesia gamelan music. TVD includes a quasi-tonal cyclic melody, heard most clearly at climactic points, that repeats many times throughout the piece in two different versions (a “Major” and a “Minor” version). Each repeat is stretched or compressed in time from its initial iteration and treated to numerous transformations of “key”, texture, timbre, orchestration, and harmony. The order in which these transformed cycles appear was based on Western sonata form. If you track it closely, you will hear what resemble “Primary” and “Second” themes of an Exposition, a Development section that explores new sounds, and a compressed Recapitulation followed by an intense Coda. 

Augmenting this quasi-cyclic, quasi-sonata form piece are two very slow, lyrical sections—one just after the Development, and one at the end. The material for these sections was drawn from on ongoing opera project, The Minor Passion, and includes some of its most poignant and wrenchingly-emotional music. I regard this as some of the most personally-revealing music I’ve ever written. 

It’s a tenuous proposition to link the aesthetics of a piece of art with the immediate personal and political circumstances of the artist during the time of its creation. Pointing to specific moments of a musical composition and saying, for instance, “That augmented chord in bar 78 there represents her disenchantment with Stalin!”  seems laughable from the composer’s perspective. That chord could very well come from her disenchantment with Stalin, but it also could be a chord she just likes, one that fits the counterpoint surrounding it, a happenstance of some precompositional process, or all of these at once. 

That said, I will admit that personal and political circumstances at the time I was doing the bulk of the work on These Violent Delights did have a direct impact on its overall sound. In November of 2016, when the piece was in full swing, the United States elected a dangerous megalomaniac into its position of greatest power. The anger, frustration, and fear this election both caused and was a metaphor for filtered into my writing. I had originally planned for the fast sections of TVD to form intricately contrapuntal webs; after the election, those webs became dense clouds of sound that flood the fast music with frustration, fury, and darkness. I can only hope that as the slower, spiritual sections of the piece provide a ray of hope, we too can find hope in dark times. 

These Violent Delights was first read and workshopped by the Curtis Institute of Music Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Joshua Gersen in April 2017.

These Violent Delights - for orchestra

Compositions

Bruce Quaglia - Venire dal Passaggio Scuro

Premiere NOVA 4.27.14: Jason Hardink, Piano; Brant Bayless, Viola; NOVA Chamber Ensemble (members of Utah Symphony Orchestra); Tim Weiss, cond.

Explorations for Solo Unaccompanied Tenor Saxophone

Robert Gross

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