HitchHiking/Heinz from the cd "Where Were You Then?" composed w/Simon Ho

part of my autobiographical cd  O'Little Town of East New York composed with keyboard player David Weinstein

Grandma Gertie

Ken Ueno, extended vocals; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor

On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis (2008)
Commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

This piece was made possible by a grant from the JebehiahFoundation: New Music Commissions. 
It is dedicated to Rob Amory

The composing of On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis represents my first attempt to reconcile the multiplicity of my being a "classical" composer and "experimental" improviser. It is one of the most personal pieces I have composed to date.

In a manner akin to the way some contemporary visual artists make site-specific works, many of my works derive their structural aspects from considerations of the special instrumental skills of the performers with whom I have collaborated, in a manner I term "person-specific.' First, I imagine the sounds and then worked them out with collaborating performers to realize these sounds on their instruments. Then, I analyze the sounds using software in order to derive parametric data that will inform the structure of the music. (I am also inspired by the way contemporary architects use modern materials and computer-aided strategies to create structures that are more organic than what was previously possible).

On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis is person-specific to myself. As a vocalist, I specialize in such techniques as: overtone singing (straight bi-tonal style), throat singing (a style with laryngeal straining), multiphonics, circular breathing, sub-tones and extreme high register. During the composition of this piece, I subjected my singing to the aforementioned process of analysis, deriving harmonies (e.g. acoustic resynthesis of my vocal multiphonics) and orchestrational strategies from the analysis of my singing.

To further engage with my personal history in this piece, I employed two other strategies. First, the title of this piece comes from an article on computer science written by another Ken Ueno (I found it doing a "vanity" search in Google). In usurping the title of a work by my doppelganger, I thought of Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius in which an encyclopedic reference to a fictional universe begins to infiltrate reality. Second, the piece begins with a boombox playing a recording of my voice from when I was six. When I was six, my favorite object was a tape recorder. I used to walk around documenting my mom yelling at my brother, as well as sounds I made vocally (some evocative of sounds I still like to make today). By incorporating these recordings in the beginning of the piece makes it a kind of recapitulation of performances from my childhood over thirty years ago. My plan is to make another version of this piece thirty years from today by incorporating vocal sounds I can make today mixed with those from my childhood. My greatest hope would be able to make two more iterations of this process during my lifetime.

On A Sufficient Condition For The Existence Of Most Specific Hypothesis

improvised track  Hirsch vocals w/ Byzantine Punk Art Ensemble

Scotty the Dog and more

Zetsu (2015)- note by Robert Kirzinger
For Rob Amory and Steven Schick

Ken Ueno’s music sets up systems of multivalent resonance, combining sympathetic sources of expressive energy to catalyze new artistic possibilities, some predictable (by the composer), some serendipitous. These systems, or situations, or amalgams, begin with sound itself: Ueno pushes instruments beyond traditional performance methods to achieve sonic realities of visceral and evocative power. As a performer himself, a one-time rock guitarist and now a vocalist using extended throat-singing techniques, he anchors the musical gestures of his music in an awareness of the intense physical and emotional demands of performance. Ueno’s extraordinarily broad cultural interests, which include architecture, film, and other visual arts, literature, sociology and philosophy, and cuisine (the latter suggesting a concern for “applied” art), enrich the already lively musical details of his work. He continually seeks out, and is sought himself by, performers and collaborators who share his sense of challenge and exploration.

Music of this kind is not without risk; in fact it cultivates and channels the energy of risk. Virtuosity, the necessity of close communication among players in an unusual musical environment, learning and artistically performing perhaps never-before-encountered techniques (and even pitches) creates a sense of living on the edge that positively energizes the players to strive beyond complacency. This energy is in turn transmitted, again positively, to the listener, who reaches a new level of understanding of the work’s joy and challenge. Zetsu takes its title from a 2003 art ceramic by the Japanese sculptor Nishida Jun (1977-2005), now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. TenFourteen Project commissioner Rob Amory alerted Ueno to this piece, in which Nishida Jun createad a work of protean form, combining careful structure the chaotically amorphous results of experimental material and kiln techniques. The beautiful, enigmatic resulting pieces analogize processes of the formation of the earth itself. Nishida Jun’s willingness to push traditional ceramics beyond what could be considered failure was not only artistically but physically dangerous. At age twenty-eight, two years after the creation of Zetsu No. 8, he was killed in a kiln explosion while working with traditional potters on Bali.

In addition to a solo violin part that celebrates Diaz’s relationship to the violin—her extensive experience as a performer of new music as well as of standard repertoire—Zetsu generalizes the situation-specific idea with the creation of new instruments: percussion idiophones using microtonal tunings unique to the harmonic spectra of the piece, and the “hookah sax,” played via a tube inserted in its bell. Knowing his performers, Ueno taps into their senses of humor as well as of adventure. Formally, Zetsu pushes and pulls gestures and textures to extremes: the slowly evolving shimmer in the solo violin of the opening gives way to discrete, rhythmically clarified polyphony for the ensemble. The soloist returns with an intricate part ranging widely in articulation and tessitura, microtonal contours lending an organic, improvised, very human intensity.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6E-sN8RhgQ

Zetsu

For Twelve Female Voices and Chamber Orchestra
Performance by Lorelei Ensemble and Boston Modern Orchestra Project
From the album: 'The Debrecen Passion'
Year of Composition: 2015
Text: poems by Szilárd Borbély in Hungarian; 
Lamentations of Mary in modern Hungarian translation by Ferenc Molnár (fragments); 
Ana B’Choach (in Hebrew); 
Stabat Mater Specioso (fragments, in Latin); 
Thou Art a Vineyard (hymn text in Georgian))
Commissioned by The Jebediah Foundation
Score available at:
www.katiagocs.com

Grandma Gertie

shelleyhirsch

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