by Miles Walter (2022)
Aspen Chamber Symphony (majority student orchestra; some faculty alongside), Nicholas McGegan, conductor
World premiere, rec. live July 8, 2022
Commissioned by Aspen Music Festival and School, Robert Spano, Music Director

This is the first movement of an incomplete, two-movement symphony.

I might never write anything that sounds like this again... but it was a joy to write, and I somehow feel that the way the architecture unites in the latter half of the movement justifies the borrowings and anachronisms of the whole...

[Walter] Symphony (2022), I. Broad, in flexible tempo

Oren Fader, guitar
Tara Helen O'Connor, flute
Cal Wiersma, violin
Chris Gross, cello

Martin Rokeach: "Sleepless Night", performed by Cygnus Ensemble

BTV 09 Show Me Spell(Long)

We are two female artists with two specialties and a single goal: to produce Living in Light, our debut album of vocal chamber music. 

To help us bring this album to production, donate here!  https://IGG.me/at/LivinginLight

This track is the first song from "Mixed Metaphors," a set of 3 cabaret songs for soprano and piano.

Margot Rood, soprano
Damien Francoeur-Krzyzek, piano
Heather Gilligan, composer
Christopher Swist, recording engineer



Mixed Metaphors - Blinded

Aleksei Gastev was one of the leading poets of the early Soviet Union; in 1922, Nikolay Aseev called him ‘the Ovid of miners and metalworkers’. He also became one of its key labour theorists, founding the Central Institute of Labour which trained over half a million workers in new methods of production, before being purged in 1939. In both aspects of his work, Gastev was obsessed with blurring the lines between human and machine, convinced that this was key to both creativity and productivity. The ten poems in Pack of Orders – the first five of which I have set – describe the creation and operation of what we now might call robots or cyborgs. The piece casts the four musicians as slightly malfunctioning androids, detailing Gastev’s vision with a mixture of cultish monomania and distracted confusion.

This recording is taken from a live Performance by The Hermes Experiment at King's Place, London, on 16 February 2017.

Pack of Orders
Aleksei Gastev (1921)

I
Forty thousand in a line.
Attention: an eye on the pressure gauge - solder.
Cast iron band-views.
Line Check - volley.
Shot along the line.
Shell’s trajectory - ten millimeters from foreheads.
Thirty foreheads stripped - the people scrapped.
Thousand A - east.
Column 10 - to the west.
Twenty thousand - freeze.

II (simultaneous with III)
Chronometer, on duty.
To rigs.
Rise.
Pause.
Charge of attention.
Supply.
Enable.
Self-propelled.
Stop.
Half a minute exposure.
Switch.
Operation B.
Receiving two, receiving four.
Seven.
Series twenty into operation.

III (simultaneous with II)
Doctors, in ranks.
Raise the temperature.
Increase by nine tenths of a degree.
The top ten.
Small pause.
Increase D to one hundred.
Large pause.
E to one thousand
To rigs, blades, microscopes.
Increase further.
Five-tenths.
S to one million.
Thirty cities.
Twenty states.
Agitprop-cannon.
Work-attack-extra.

IV
Prismatic homes.
A pack of twenty districts.
Into a press.
Flatten into a parallelogram.
Tighten to 30 degrees.
On screws and wheels.
City block tank,
diagonal movement.
Cut streets not trembling.
Excess thousands of calories to workers.

V
Funeral at the cemetery of the planets.
Roar in the catacombs of the worlds.
Millions, to future hatches.
Billions, stronger guns.
Servitude of mind.
Shackles of heart.
Engineered inhabitants.
Drive them to the geometry of the neck.
The logarithms of their gestures.
Opaque their romance.
Tons of anger.
Normalization of speech from pole to pole.
Phrases on the decimal system.
Boiler-room enterprise of speeches.
Destroy literature.
Throat around tunnels.
Force them to talk.
Sky - red for excitement.
Gears - overspeed.
Brainmachines - loaded.
Kinoeyes - installed.
Electronerves - work.
Arteriopumps - start.

Pack of Orders

Heather Gilligan, composer
Margot Rood, soprano
Patrick Owen, cello
This is the first of four songs for soprano and cello. Texts by Sara Teasdale. Released on the album "Living in Light," Albany Records.

Living In Light: Music by Heather Gilligan

Living in Light: I. Buried Love

Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, Et Les Unze Mille Vierges

Nauset is a chamber opera created in collaboration with poet David Troupes. The work is set on an Atlantic beach at night, where a man has drowned.

Performers: Louise Kemeny (soprano), Gwilym Bowen (tenor), Josephine Stephenson (soprano), and the Kallion Ensemble, conducted by Christopher Stark.

Martin Rokeach: "Sleepless Night", performed by Cygnus Ensemble

Ofader

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