I often—lovingly—think of the harp world in the same sphere as that weird part of the Internet with odd diet blogs and Scientology forums; it comes complete with a sort a shibboleth and its own lingo. Objection comes next in a line of shorter harp pieces that I’ve written over the past few years, in the hopes of figuring out how the instrument and its attendant baggage works—I spent a few hours digging through Salzedo and other ‘harpy’ texts, and did a lot of listening. The result is a kind of hectic piece: the initial figure dominants its entirety, and— aside from a short, slightly slower interlude—the music maintains a constant pulse. At the outset, the music is in the middle-lower register of the harp, slowly working its way out. About a minute in, a nine-chord cycle begins, leading to more forceful music at the second repetition. From there the music becomes more frenzied, and trailing off by the last two chords of the cycle. A slower section takes over, using harmonies from before and the initial motive. The initial tempo is then picked back up at a hushed dynamic; Objection closes with arpeggiated harmonies reminiscent of the chord cycle.

Premiere: 4/22/2014
Mazzoleni Hall, Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto, ON
Hope Wilk, harp

Objection

Writing for saxophones is secretly my favorite task; either paired with other instruments, or together in a quartet as they are here, saxophones have a certain sultry and delicious range of expressive capabilities. For this quartet, I wanted to exploit that wide range in as many different ways as I could. The first movement is concerned with a small melody that the soprano and alto saxes introduce at the outset; the music is smooth and rocky in turns, alternatively harnessing the instruments’ natural inclination to blend with each other, and trying its best to thwart it. A short, frantic second movement follows, made entirely of canonic mountains and valleys that delight in using the highest range of the saxophone. The final movement is soft and somewhat mischievous: a tapestry constantly in motion is bookended by two quiet, rhythmically-staid sections. Minor Details was commissioned by Dynamic Music Festival, is dedicated to the Manhattan Saxophone Quartet, and lasts approximately eleven minutes.

Premiere: February 28, 2015
Manhattan Saxophone Quartet
Dynamic Music Festival
Frederick Loewe Theatre, New York, NY

Minor Details

Bang on a Can Summer Institute
July 25, 2016
Hunter Center @ MASS MoCA

Spending a month of the summer in the Berkshires holds special meaning for me; as a teenager, I spent a few summers at Tanglewood just a few miles south of North Adams, a kind of musical coming-of-age that has resonated with me ever since. In writing this piece for the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, I thought a lot about what I associate with the Berkshires—the specific, expansive natural environment; the respite from the city; the excited energy of music-making. In Sideline, I tried to spin six minutes of music out of the material contained at the beginning: a falling line first heard in the piano, and long tones that move quickly from soft to loud. The piano holds everything together as a kind of concertante instrument, emerging on its own only in the middle of the piece for a lonesome solo with the saxophone, a starry landscape refracted in memory. Sideline lasts about 6 minutes.

Sideline

When I think about percussion, the first characteristic that comes to mind is theater. Watching percussionists run around the stage juggling many different instruments is particularly thrilling, and, above all else, is what has always attracted me to percussion music. Seen and Heard is about exactly this; while writing the piece, beyond the notes and rhythms, I was thinking about what the music would look like on stage. Seen and Heard is dedicated to Adam Holmes, and lasts about ten minutes.

Seen and Heard

NYU Symphony Orchestra
Eduardo Leandro, conductor
May 8, 2017
NYU Frederick Loewe Theatre, NY, NY

I’ve recently been obsessed with music that creates a long line across an entire piece—the opening material carrying the music through to the final note. This technique is a very old one: think Brahms’s themes-and-variations, or 16th century motets. But the minimalist music of the 1960s and 70s follows a similar path, its shifting sands slowly leading you to point B relatively unawares. I wanted to make a piece that reuses the opening music over and over, spinning out new material as it goes, arriving at different, yet somehow related music at the end.

The lilting woodwinds combined with stratospheric string notes that open Strong Arm present the main threads of the piece. In counterpoint to these elements are big brass chords and short string motives that move quickly from soft to loud—first appearing as sporadic interruptions, then by about two-thirds through overwhelming all else. At its zenith, the texture explodes, each of these elements fractured and flung scattered across the slow dissolution of the piece. Strong Arm was commissioned by the NYU Symphony Orchestra and lasts about seven minutes.

Strong Arm

I do New Music. Composer, teacher, & editor.

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Kyle Tieman-Strauss (b. 1994) is a composer of music for stages and headphones, as well as a passionate advocate for contemporary music. His music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles such as ETHEL; Bearthoven; JACK Quartet; Conduit; Manhattan Saxophone Quartet; Cadillac Moon Ensemble; and the NYU Symphony Orchestra, where he held residencies in 2013-2014 and 2016-2017. His first chamber opera, These Walls, written in collaboration with librettist Matthias Hope Naroff and soprano Emilia Donato, investigates the interior life of the mid-century American serial killer Rhonda Belle Martin. It was premiered in May 2017 in New York.

Current projects include Forsaken Tunes, a new studio work for Sasha Zamler-Carhart, exploring texts of Muriel Rukeyser, Jack Spicer, and C.P. Cavafy; Creases, a harp and playback piece written for regular collaborator Hope Wilk; and Speed of Darkness, a setting of Rukeyser poems for mezzo-soprano and two guitars, for the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.

An avid cheerleader for the music of the twenty-first century, Kyle is the founder and artistic director of Echo Chamber, a sextet exclusively dedicated to commissioning and championing some of the most exciting composers active today. Through presenting concerts, multimedia works, and educational projects, Echo Chamber's mission is to provide composers with opportunities to create innovative, boundary-pushing work. While studying at NYU, he also founded a contemporary music festival, Pulsing & Shaking, which celebrates new music created in New York.

Kyle is a member of the composition faculty of the Mannes School of Music, where he teaches music graphics and notation, and is also a music editor at Boosey & Hawkes. He studied at New York University, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees working primarily with Michael Gordon and Robert Honstein. He is currently a fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, and was a 2016 composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute. He lives in Manhattan.

Outside of music, Kyle can be found preoccupied with the Bauhaus, desert modernism, and pencil cacti.

Kyle Tieman-Strauss

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