If there is a dead thing still rotting (2021)

FOR FLUTE AND RECITED TEXT ALONE

If there is a dead thing still rotting takes its title from a line of poet Muriel Leung’s BONE CONFETTI, a collection of work intertwined with the relationships between death and mourning. Leung writes, “There are two types of survivors at the end of the world—lovers and ghosts who die, are revived, and die again. Each death and resurrection carves its way into the landscape of a wrecked city where skies are flocked by molten birds and trees grow in shades of ash.”

This reaction to Leung’s work incorporates a poem entitled “The Lost Years” from the subsection “In Abstensia-Land: A Funeral.” The performer recites the text of the work throughout the piece, stretching to bridge and emphasize the interdependency of text, sound, and meaning.

If there is a dead thing still rotting was written for flutist Denis Savelyev as part of a collaboration between the Peabody Institute’s Flute and Composition Departments, and was premiered on November 29, 2021.

For more information about Muriel Leung's BONE CONFETTI, visit www.murielleung.com/bone-confetti.

Denis Savelyev, flute and recited text
November 29, 2021
Baltimore, MD

If There Is A Dead Thing Still Rotting (2021)

filigree is a piece that explores the margins of sound, attempting to show musical gestures under varying degrees of magnification and compression. Sonic materials are at turns hyper-compacted and expanded to a grandiose volatility as the piece searches for a vantage point of relative stability. filigree was written for International Contemporary Ensemble.

International Contemporary Ensemble

Isabel Lepanto Gleicher - piccolo
Ryan Muncy - soprano saxophone
Clara Warnaar - percussion
Julia Den Boer - piano
Josh Modney - violin
Nicholas DeMaison - conductor

Premiered May 15, 2022
Martinos Auditorium - Brown University - Providence, RI

filigree (2021-22)

"three or four (of many)" by David Carlton Adams
Premiered June 8, 2022, at New Music On the Point by
JACK quartet

This piece explores the intersection of texture, just intonation, and renaissance polyphony. Ideas emerge, find expression, are subsumed, and disappear. Oh, and there’s math.

three or four (of many)- JACK quartet (live)

Black flight (2023)

From the album "Folk Songs" by Michelle O'Rourke + Ficino Ensemble
https://ergodos.bandcamp.com/album/folk-songs

I Would Be Where I Am Not

Recording by Yiyang Zhao on May 20, 2023.

Score purchase: https://www.babelscores.com/voir-et-rechercher-catalogue/instrumental/8124-pale-flower-vii8124

Pale Flower VII 蒼白之花 VII (2022) for prepared cello solo

Michael Hersch
MEDEA - (excerpt 1)
Libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann
Sarah Maria Sun, soprano
Schola Heidelberg
Bas Wiegers, conductor
Ensemble Musikfabrik
live performance - June 3, 2023
Commissioned by Ensemble Musikfabrik and Kunststiftung NRW
PROGRAM NOTE (in German, with English language libretto included)- https://www.musikfabrik.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/MUFA22822-WDR-Programm-85-230511.pdf
PROGRAM NOTE (English Translation) - https://michaelhersch.com/works/program/MEDEA.html

MEDEA - (excerpt 1)

Michael Hersch
MEDEA - (excerpt 2)
Libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann
Sarah Maria Sun, soprano
Schola Heidelberg
Bas Wiegers, conductor
Ensemble Musikfabrik
live performance - June 3, 2023
Commissioned by Ensemble Musikfabrik and Kunststiftung NRW
PROGRAM NOTE (in German, with English language libretto included)- https://www.musikfabrik.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/MUFA22822-WDR-Programm-85-230511.pdf
PROGRAM NOTE (English Translation) - https://michaelhersch.com/works/program/MEDEA.html

MEDEA - (excerpt 2)

Michael Hersch
MEDEA - (excerpt 3)
Libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann
Sarah Maria Sun, soprano
Schola Heidelberg
Bas Wiegers, conductor
Ensemble Musikfabrik
live performance - June 3, 2023
Commissioned by Ensemble Musikfabrik and Kunststiftung NRW
PROGRAM NOTE (in German, with English language libretto included)- www.musikfabrik.eu/wp-content/uplo…m-85-230511.pdf
PROGRAM NOTE (English Translation) - michaelhersch.com/works/program/MEDEA.html

MEDEA - (excerpt 3)

Composed and performed by Scott Allen Miller.
Recorded at the CUNY Graduate Center by Itzá Garcia and Tobias Fandel.

This solo bass piece is my first completed composition that uses 31 equal divisions of the octave. The title, which (as usual) I applied to the work after completing it, comes from Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry for the Future. It wonderfully describes the simultaneous force and fragility of so many things, from our political institutions to our tuning systems. I also love the layered imagery of a lacy gossamer net, somehow still and steady, overlaying a veiny block of impossibly animated granite. I hear a similar restlessness in the music's slippage across 31EDO's small steps (dieses) and the expressive variety of intervals this produces.

Granite of the careening world, held in gossamer nets of words (2023) in 31EDO for solo double bass

Fated Nines - Jason Eckardt (Amorsima Trio)

Richard Drehoff Jr. (b. 1991) is a doctoral student at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University studying composition and music theory. His compositional and research interests explore listeners' perceptions of gesture across time and examine sonic constructions of intimacy and vulnerability within the composer-performer-listener framework.

Richard is the Co-Director of earspace, an ensemble championing the presentation of immersive multimedia performances of diverse works by contemporary composers. His works have been commissioned by the Library of Congress and the New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble and have been performed by groups such as the Mivos Quartet, the ECCE Ensemble, and members of Talea Ensemble. Recent accolades include a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, a composition fellowship from the James Tenney Memorial Symposium, and conference presentations at the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic on works by Galina Ustvolskaya and Pierre Boulez.

If There Is A Dead Thing Still Rotting (2021)

Richard Drehoff Jr.

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