NAKAHARA SELECTS OUTSTANDING COMPOSERS FOR EDGY PERFORMANCE

Mar 11, 2009

For Immediate Release

Contact: Annie Matlow 464-7071

Symphony on the Edge will feature works by six of the country’s leading contemporary composers on Friday, March 20 at 7:30 p.m. at the Knitting Factory (formerly the Big Easy Concert Hall.)

Resident Conductor Morihiko Nakahara has a record of thrilling the audience with exciting, innovative programs at Symphony on the Edge. The program features the following compositions: Huang Ruo, Confluence; Ingram Marshall, Fog Tropes; Derek Bermel, Three Rivers; Steve Reich, Triple Quartet;Aaron Jay Kernis, Musica Celestis; Michael Daugherty, Strut.

Morihiko Nakahara and the almost 50-piece orchestra will dress casually. Audience members are invited to grab refreshments and listen to exciting music chosen to stimulate and excite the ear. Concert lighting, and video close-ups of the conductor and the orchestra will complete the rock-music atmosphere at this popular Spokane nightclub.

This non-smoking performance will include seating for all ticket holders of all ages. Refreshments will be available for purchase at this general admission concert. Tickets are $19 for general admission seating. The Symphony does not sell more tickets than seats for this event. Tickets are available in advance at the Spokane Symphony Ticket Office, located at 1001 W. Sprague inside Martin Woldson Theater at The Fox, or by calling 509-624-1200. Tickets are also available at all TicketsWest outlets or by calling 1-800-325-SEAT or at spokanesymphony.org.

Full information on the composers:

Huang Ruo, Confluence (Chamber Ensemble No. 4)

Hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “strikingly assured,” Huang’s music has been performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch, the Juilliard Symphony under James Conlon, the American Composers Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies, the ASKO Ensemble under Ilan Volkov and many more. In 2003, he was featured on the composer’s portrait concert in the Miller Theater, where all his four chamber concertos were premiered as a cycle by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).  This concert was hailed by The New York Times critic Allan Kozinn as number two of the Top Ten Classical Moments of 2003.  In February 2007, the NAXOS Record released his Chamber Concerto Cycle on its acclaimed American Classics Series. 

A frequent winner of the ASCAP Concert Music Award, Huang Ruo’s work has been spotlighted on National Public Radio (NPR), Radio-Finland, Radio-Sweden, Radio-Amsterdam, Radio-Canada and Radio-China.  His works are published by the Huang Ruo Publishing and Recording Company which he founded in 2000. Also noted as an author, Huang’s book, “Selection of Classic Chinese Folk Songs,” was published by the Zhong Shan University Press.

Huang Ruo was born in HainanIsland, 1976, the year the Chinese culture revolution ended.  His father, who is a well-known composer in China, started teaching him composition and piano when he was six years old.  Growing up in the 80’s and the 90’s, when China was steadily opening up its gate to the Western world, he received both traditional and western education in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he was admitted into the composition program studying with Deng Erbo when he turned 12.  Witnessing the dramatic cultural and economic changes in China, his education expending from Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, Lutoslawski, to Beatles, rock n’ roll, heavy metal, and jazz, all of which were allowed to enter the cultural life in China approximately the same time after the culture revolution.  All these ‘new’ western influences enable him to absorb them without any hierarchy and limitation of styles.

After winning the Henry Mancini Award at the 1995 International Film and Music Festival in Switzerland, he moved to the United States for further education.  Since then, he has gotten a BM degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a MM degree from the JuilliardSchool, and is working with Samuel Adler at the JuilliardSchool approaching a Doctor of Musical Art degree in Composition program.  Huang is currently a composition faculty member of the SUNY Purchase.  Huang is a permanent resident of the United States, and a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).

For more information about Huang Ruo, please visit his website at: http://www.huangruo.com/.

Ingram Marshall, Fog Tropes

Ingram Marshall lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1973 to 1985 and in WashingtonState where he taught at Evergreen State College until 1989; his current base is Connecticut. He studied at ColumbiaUniversity and California Institute of the Arts, and has been a student of Indonesian gamelan music, the influence of which may be heard in the slowed-down sense of time and use of melodic repetition found in many of his pieces. His music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras such as the Kronos Quartet, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and St. Louis Symphony.

He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Fromm Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation and the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters. He has performed his live electronic music pieces such as Gradual Requiem and Alcatrazwidely in Europe and the USA.  Recent collaborations have been with Stuart Pimsler Dance Theater, and with Paul Hillier and The Theater of Voices, for whom he has written a new work, Hymnodic Delays. His award winning composition, Fog Tropes, for tape and brass sextet has been recorded on both the Nonesuch and New Albion labels.

Marshall’s Notes:

Fog Tropes was composed in San Francisco in 1981 at the behest of John Adams who was then organizing a concert series for the San Francisco Symphony called ‘New and Unusual Music.’ A few years earlier I had put together a tape piece called simply “Fog” which used ambient sounds from around the San FranciscoBay—mostly fog horns. That 10-minute piece became the underlying “bed” for the live instrumental parts (six brass instruments, amplified and slightly reverberated).

Its first performance was in the Japan Center Theater on one of those ground breaking programs which Adams organized as the first composer in residence with the San Francisco Symphony, although the players were actually students from the San Francisco Conservatory. A few years later, the Symphony proper performed it on their regular subscription concerts, Edo deWaart conducting. It has been performed many times all over the world in spaces ranging from concert halls to churches, state capitol domes and even a slow moving river barge. Two recordings have been made, both with Adams conducting; the first is on New Albion records, the second on Nonesuch.

The tape part not only uses maritime sounds for its constructive materials but vocal keenings and the unique sound of the Balinese gambuh, a long bamboo flute. Although the brass parts and tape sounds are distinct from one another there is an attempt to blend them so as to create a harmonious whole.

In the opening minute only the tape sounds are heard and then the horns begin their intertwining eighth notes of ascending twirls, which become more intense as the piece progresses. Trombones arrive underneath and the first cry-like utterances of the trumpets appear on top. The basic sound world of the piece is established. Mid way through the piece a series of chordal ladders create a climatic feeling as the lowest fog horns become more assertive. This harmonic progression reappears at the end but in a more wistful, restrained manner. Many people are reminded of the San FranciscoBay when they hear this music but for me it is a piece about memory and the feeling of being lost.

Derek Bermel, Three Rivers

”Three Rivers by Derek Bermel, a new-music composer who has dipped into rock and African music, finessed the distinction between big band and chamber ensemble. As the themes overlapped, grappled, fused and pulled apart, the earthy beat and angular melodies made the music swagger like a more abstract “West Side Story.’”
- NEW YORK TIMES

Notes:
The three rhythmic currents in “Three Rivers” at times flow separately, and at other times concurrently; often they mix and collide. The opening lugubrioso material is linear, and its musical shapes should yield approximate contours rather than distinct melodies. The rhythm of this opening section in the low instruments is swung, felt behind the beat. The eighth note stays constant into the second section of smoother, cascading rhythms. The third, most frenetic rhythmic level, is felt in straight sixteenth notes. The triplet sixteenth notes in the fast bop section are also felt as swung. This is a piece which combines fully notated and improvised music.

Described by the Toronto Star as an “eclectic with wide open ears” and by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as “one of America’s finest young composers”, composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. Bermel’s works draw from a rich variety of musical genres, including classical, jazz, pop, rock, blues, folk, and gospel. Hands-on experience with music of cultures around the world has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language.

As a Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Bermel has received commissions from the Pittsburgh, National, Saint Louis, New Jersey, and Pacific Symphonies, Los Angeles and Westchester Philharmonics, the New York Youth Symphony, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, WNYC Radio, eighth blackbird, the Guarneri String Quartet, Music from China, De Ereprijs (Netherlands), Jazz Xchange (U.K.), Figura (Denmark), violinist Midori, electric guitarist Wiek Hijmans, cellist Fred Sherry, and pianists Christopher Taylor and Andy Russo, among others.

His many awards include the Alpert Award in the Arts, the Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center, the Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paul Boylan Award from the University of Michigan, the Quinto Maganini Award, the Harvey Gaul Prize, the Lily Boulanger Award, the Brian Israel Prize, commissions from the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations, Meet the Composer, and the Cary Trust, and residencies at Yaddo, Tanglewood, Aspen, Banff, Bellagio, Copland House, Sacatar, and Civitella Ranieri.

Steve Reich, Triple Quartet

Steve Reich’s compositional genius and influence over contemporary music—especially over recent developments in electronic music—have established him as a living legend. Perfecting the sound of minimalism since the 1960s, the composer’s work has played such a substantial role in music that attempts at equating and mimicking his trademark melodies can now be heard everywhere, from television to radio advertisements to clubs. No one, though, has mastered the art as definitively as Reich.

Triple Quartet is the composer’s first release to include new music since his 1996 album, City Life (Nonesuch), but it also contains new recordings of the classic Reich compositions, “Music for Large Ensemble” and “Electric Guitar Phase”, the latter being a reworking of the 1967 piece, “Violin Phase”. Also included on the record is a version of “Vermont Counterpoint”, called “Tokyo/Vermont Counterpoint”.

The title track, Triple Quartet (1999), was commissioned by and dedicated to the Kronos Quartet. Divided into three movements, “Quartet” immediately brings to mind the string quartets of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. And there is a reason for this. Reich found inspiration to compose his “Quartet” in the last movement of Bartók’s “String Quartet No. 4”, as well as in the music of Alfred Schnittke.

With an oppressed and often overwhelmingly dissonant sound, Reich’s quartet, which is to be performed either by an orchestral string section of 36 players, three string quartets (12 players), or one string quartet and pre-recorded tape—Kronos performs it employing the latter method—is one of his more haunting compositions. Following the three movements’ unyielding progression, Kronos attacks the intricate piece with an energy that does not cease until sometime after the final notes are played.

Aaron Jay Kernis, Musica Celestis

Pulitzer Prize winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis studied composition in San Francisco, Manhattan and at Yale with Adams, Druckman, Subotnik and Wuorinen. He employed rigorous compositional processes until the early 1980s when a growing sense of intuitive freedom became increasingly evident in his work. From 1990 his style took on a new transparency and emotional eloquence, as in the exquisite musica celestis. His is a truly eclectic musical language and he is as happy incorporating Latin rhythms and rap into his music as he is paying harmonic tribute to the Romantic masters and Hildegard von Bingen.

With his “fearless originality [and] powerful voice” (The New York Times), Kernis is among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation and each new Kernis work is eagerly awaited by audiences and musicians alike. His music, full of variety and dynamic energy, is rich in lyric beauty, poetic imagery, and brilliant instrumental color.

Passion laced with chutzpah marked Kernis’s earliest recognition by the music world: when Jacob Druckman, his teacher at Yale and then Composer-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic, scheduled an open reading of Kernis’ Dream of the Morning Sky at the Philharmonic’s Horizons Festival of new music in June 1983, Kernis vigorously defended his handling of the orchestra after the conductor, Zubin Mehta, criticized it from the podium. Audience and critics were won over, and Kernis was news.

One of America’s most honored young composers: The youngest composer ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the coveted 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, two Grammy Award nominations, the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and others

Commissioned by America’s foremost musical institutions, including the New York Philharmonic (for its 150th anniversary), the Philadelphia Orchestra (for the inauguration of its new home at the KimmelCenter), and the San Francisco Symphony

Other commissions include work for violinist Joshua Bell, pianist Christopher O’Riley, a song cycle for Renee Fleming (commissioned by the Lincoln Center Great Performers Series and the Minnesota Orchestra, Pamela Frank, Paul Neubauer), and Carter Brey (for American Public Radio), Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Sharon Isbin.

Among the five most frequently performed composers of today: recent commissioners include the Singapore Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the RoseCenter for Earth and Space at the AmericanMuseum of Natural History

Dozens of recordings extent on labels including Koch, Nonesuch, New Albion, Virgin, Argo, Arabesque, and CRI.  His most recent orchestral disc has appeared on 2008 Best Recordings lists across the country

Michael Daugherty, Strut

Michael Daugherty is one of the most commissioned, performed and recorded composers on the American concert music scene today. His music is rich with cultural and political allusions and bears the stamp of classic modernism, with colliding tonalities and blocks of sound; at the same time, his melodies can be eloquent and stirring. Daugherty has been hailed by The Times (London) as “a master icon maker” with a “maverick imagination, fearless structural sense and meticulous ear”.  Daugherty first came to international attention when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Zinman, performed his Metropolis Symphony at Carnegie Hall in 1994 and the Houston Grand Opera premiered his opera Jackie O in 1996.  Since that time, his music has entered the orchestral, band, opera and chamber music repertory and made him, according to the League of American Orchestras, one of the ten most performed living American composers.

Born in 1954 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Daugherty is the son of a dance-band drummer and the oldest of five brothers, all professional musicians. He studied music composition at the University of North Texas (1972-76), the Manhattan School of Music (1976-78) , Boulez's IRCAM in Paris (1979) and Yale University (1980-82).  During his studies at Yale, Daugherty also collaborated with jazz arranger Gil Evans in New York, and pursued further studies with composer Gyorgy Ligeti in Hamburg, Germany (1982-84). After teaching music composition from 1986-1990 at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Daugherty joined the School of Music at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1991, where he is Professor of Composition.

Daugherty has been the Composer-in-Residence with the Louisville Symphony Orchestra (2000), Detroit Symphony Orchestra (1999-2003), Colorado Symphony Orchestra (2001-2002), Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (2001-04, 2006-08), Westshore Symphony Orchestra (2005-06), Eugene Symphony (2006), the Henry Mancini Summer Institute (2006), the Music from Angel Fire Chamber Music Festival (2006) and the Pacific Symphony (2010).

Daugherty has received numerous awards, distinctions, and fellowships for his music, these include: a Fulbright Fellowship (1977), the Kennedy Center Freidheim Award (1989) for his compositions Snap! and Blue Like an Orange, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1991), fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1992) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1996), and the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (2000). In 2005, Daugherty received the Lancaster Symphony Orchestra Composer's Award, and in 2007, the Delaware Symphony Orchestra selected Daugherty as the winner of the A. I. duPont Award. Also in 2007, Daugherty was named "Outstanding Classical Composer" at the Detroit Music Awards and received the American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Award for his composition Raise the Roof for Timpani and Symphonic Band.