UW Modern Music Ensemble
Cristina L Valdés, Director

Seattle Modern Orchestra
Julia Tai, conductor

Rachel Reyes, flute
Angelique Poteat, clarinet/bass clarinet
Ryan Kaspandy, bassoon
Luke Fitzpatrick, violin
Rose Hashimoto, viola
Ha-Yang Kim, cello
Alex Fang, piano

I. Times sway
II. Echoes, decay...

The piece explores different types of oscillations, these may present themselves in the form of a simple, repeated melodic interval at a regular rate, or complex, acoustic beats that occur when an interval smaller than a semi-tone is sustained. This notion of stable &amp; regular ratios is also used to serve the majority of rhythmic & metric detail in the piece.

The first movement is based on cascading, scalic patterns that transform into slow melodic-steps and vice versa. While the texture is mostly polyphonic, many phrases and strata intersect with heterophony as well as homophony due to the voices’ proximity in range, or similarity in timbre and rhythm. This movement starts and develops with dense contrapuntal textures and concludes with sparsely voiced chords.

The second movement resonates with the concepts of the first and serves as an echo of the materials explored in it. Differently than the first movement, apart from the imitations at its beginning, in this movement - the degree of autonomy among voices is high, given that voices differ from each other in either rhythm, timbre, or range.

Both movements develop in an interrupted continuous way. There are barely any sudden changes, raptures, nor rests, so that when they occur, their dramatic impact seems substantial.

Performed in Meany Hall—Katharyn Alvord Gerlich Theater on May 3, 2024

Echoes, decay...

Performance by the Inverted Space Ensemble
Chapel Performance Space, Seattle, WA, 10/25/2013

Tosiya Suzuki, recorder
Tadashi Tajima, shakuhachi

March 25, 2017
Yodobashi Church, Tokyo, Japan
Recorded live and mastered by Yoshiaki Onishi

Gz is an abbreviation of Gestaltzerfall, or “shape decomposition,” a psychological phenomenon where one experiences a temporary loss of the ability to recognize certain letters, particularly often experienced in Japanese Kanjis, or Chinese characters. The elements of loss, uncertainty, and doubt are the underlying motivations for composing this work.

Named after Rumanian mathematician Dan Tudor Vuza who researched it extensively, a Vuza canon is a rhythmic, tiling canon with some peculiar musical properties. Even at the maximal density of the canon where all the voices are playing, the overall perception is a continuous flow of the basic pulse unit (in this piece, it is an eighth-note). Furthermore, at that moment, each “pulsation” is enunciated by only one voice. In other words, when one voice is enunciating, the other voices are absent. The end result is something similar to a hocket.

While this piece does start as a 12-part Vuza canon compressed into two voices, its canonic structure becomes distorted little by little, and toward the end of the work, all dissolves into layers of breath sounds.

Commissioned by Tosiya Suzuki, Gz is dedicated to Tosiya Suzuki, Tadashi Tajima who premièred this work, and to Fabien Lévy, who introduced me to the fascinating world of the Vuza canons.

Gz - A Vuza Canon for tenor recorder and shakuhachi (2017)

for Pierrot Ensemble.

Live recording from Atlantic Music Festival 2017

Over It

Inverted Space Ensemble - Marcin Pączkowski, cond.

April 15, 2017
Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center
Seattle, WA

Bowen - Backing, Raising

Ryoko Aoki, Noh-voice
Ryuji Masumoto, piccolo
15 October 2017, Shibaura House, Tokyo 

In March 2016, the computer program AlphaGo defeated Lee Se-dol, a South Korean Go player of 9 dan rank in the first game of Google DeepMind Challenge Match. AlphaGo’s victory meant a monumental achievement in the field of artificial intelligence—and immediately revived age-old questions about the nature of artificial and “natural” intelligence. The main inspiration of the piece comes from these unanswered questions. 

The piece is based on two layers of processing, a machine layer and a human layer. The machine layer consists of mapping the data taken from the game log of the Se-dol vs. AlphaGo game into musical parameters and eventually to musical notation, using a custom-written notation software. The Noh-voice is based on the black moves (Se-dol), while the piccolo part is based on the white moves (AlphaGo). The human layer consists of spontaneous repurposing, alteration, and amplification of the machine layer. Additionally, commentaries made about the game by various Go masters both provided the text, and are used to shape the dramatic contour of the music. The machine-human dichotomy, in terms of certainty and uncertainty, or calculation and intuition, also exists in the two modes of performance: each musician uses two types of notations that differ in their communication of how specific the musical result should be. One of these notational systems is based on the yowagin scale that is often employed in Noh theater. 

Shōbute is a Go term, signifying a risky play that is employed in an attempt to bring balance when one is at disadvantage. As a tactic that involves considerable risks, shōbute is an emotionally charged choice, symbolizing an inherently human aspect of the game.

勝負手 / Shōbute

Written for Bilkent Symphony Orchestra

Conductor: Vladimir Ponkin
Performed by Bilkent Symphony Orchestra- 03.02.2018

Unfortunately, some parts are not adequetely apparent because of both recording issues and limited rehearsal time which naturally affected the quality of performance. However, I want to thank a lot to Bilkent Symphony Orchestra and Maestro Ponkin for their efforts and encouraging attitudes.

...Introspection...   dedicated to Yiğit Aydın

Borusan Quartet

Seyir for String Quartet - 4th Movement: Seher

28/78 New Music Ensemble
	Andrew Lu, flute
	Scott Pastor, clarinet
	Thomas Hubel, trumpet
	Joshua Dunsford, trombone
	Tyler Golding, percussion
	Diego Bustamante, piano
	Sabrina Boggs and Micah Vogel, violins
	Anne Plescia, viola
	Malcolm King, violoncello
	Tristen Collinsworth, electronics

Yoshiaki Onishi, cond. 

February 2, 2019
Stockton, California, United States

28/78 New Music Festival
Conservatory of Music, University of the Pacific

Live Recording by Jeffrey D. Crawford (Owen Hall Recording & Video Studio)
Remastered by the composer

===
I: L'antienne acoustique 1
II: Mouvements
III: L'antienne acoustique 2
===
Antefenas is a spelling variant of an Old English word, antefn, meaning an “antiphon,” “anthem,” or a “hymn song sung in alternate parts.” No religious connotation is intended in this piece; however, throughout the piece I focus on the physicality of alternating sounds. In particular, I am interested in the kinetics of one sound responding to another, eventually forming the perception of a dialogue. Throughout the piece, dialogue is implied in various ways.

In the first part, L’antienne acoustique I (The acoustic dialogue I), an exchange between real and virtual acoustics takes place: the live musicians play short sounds through their instruments that would highlight the acoustics of the room or the hall where the piece is being played. The electronic part responds to these live instrumental sounds with sounds that are passed through impulse responses, artificially generated reverberations that simulate a “virtual” room. In the second part, Mouvements (movements), the electronic part is absent, and the focus is on the activities on the instrumental parts. “Movements” here refer not only to the fast passages that dominate this part, but also to the movements of the sounds that are exchanged from one instrumental group to another. The last part, L’antienne acoustique II, is essentially an inverse of the first part, where the live instrumental parts simulate the acoustics that the electronics produced in L’antienne acoustique I by producing the airy and hissing sounds that quickly decay in volume. The electronic part predominantly produces sounds with dry acoustics. New to the revised version, fast delays are added to the electronic sounds that bounce off left and right. Such sounds are put together with the live instrumental sounds to create a more immersive experience. The electronic part also plays a series of bell-like chords, which come from the residues of compositional materials that did not make their ways into the second part, Mouvements. I think of them as a signifier of the irreconcilable past. I find them particularly poignant, considering how turbulent the world has been for the past few years. Indeed, working on a now two-year-old piece makes the passing of time so visceral and palpable.

Antefenas-Studies was commissioned by and written for University of the Pacific’s 28/78 New Music Ensemble and Andrew Lu, in partnership with the Conservatory of Music. I dedicate this piece to Robert Coburn, in gratitude for introducing me to the world of Max/MSP while I was an undergraduate at the university, which has proven essential for creating the electronics component of this piece.

  --- Yoshiaki Onishi

Antefenas-Studies, for ensemble and electronics (2018)

Released 1.17.20
Album Artwork: Darra Bunkasem
Mixing and Mastering: Tanner Ninke
Written and Produced: Savannah Johnston & Zachary Troupe

勝負手 / Shōbute

Yiğit Kolat

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