COMPOSER NOTES

Caroline Shaw - Limestone & Felt for marimba & viola

Limestone & Felt presents two kinds of surfaces – essentially hard and soft. These are materials that can suggest place (a cathedral apse, or the inside of a wool hat), stature, function, and – for me – sound (reverberant or muted). In limestone & felt, the hocketing pizzicato and pealing motivic canons are part of a whimsical, mystical, generous world of sounds echoing and colliding in the imagined eaves of a gothic chapel. These are contrasted with the delicate, meticulous, and almost reverent placing of chords that, to our ears today, sound ancient and precious, like an antique jewel box. Ultimately, felt and limestone may represent two opposing ways we experience history and design our own present.

Blake Tyson - A Cricket Sang and Set the Sun for solo marimba

A Cricket Sang and Set the Sun is a beautiful, lyrical piece for solo marimba. The opening passages of the piece ebb and flow and create a very reflective mood. "This work takes its title from an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, "The cricket sang, And set the sun." When I read these words, I was moved by the powerful ideas they evoked. It was not just the image of a beautiful and slowly shifting sunset that struck me, but the idea that something so small could affect something so large, that a cricket's song could transform day into night. Although the piece is not directly based on the poem, I have tried to capture the sense of fascination, inspiration and beauty that these opening lines create."

Joan Tower - Rising for flute and string quartet

I have always been interested in how music can "go up." It is a simple action, but one that can have so many variables: slow or fast tempos, accelerating, slowing down, getting louder or softer — with thick or thin surrounding textures going in the same or opposite directions. For me, it is the context and the feel of the action that matters. A long climb, for example, might signal something important to come (and often hard to deliver on!). A short climb, on the other hand, might be just a hop to another phrase. One can’t, however, just go up. There should be a counteracting action which is either going down or staying the same to provide a tension within the piece. (I think some of our great composers, especially Beethoven, were aware of the power of the interaction of these "actions.")

The main theme in Rising is an ascent motion using different kinds of scales — mostly octatonic or chromatic — and occasionally arpeggios. These upward motions are then put through different filters, packages of time and varying degrees of heat environments which interact with competing static and downward motions.

Nancy Ives - Black Snow, Dark Ocean for cello

The Arctic region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Polar ice reflects a great deal of solar radiation through its high albedo, and has an outsized role in regulating the Earth’s climate. As ice sheets, glaciers and snow fields melt, they become darker and create more open water, all of which decreases the albedo of the Arctic and absorbs more solar energy. Additionally, ice is getting darker as industrial soot is finding its way into the Arctic. Arctic peoples are affected daily by the loss of permanent ice, and face both increasing danger from the unpredictable conditions and potentially, the loss of their way of life. Aniuvat is an Inuktitut (a language of the Inuit) word meaning “snow patches that never melt.”These are an important part of the Arctic landscape, along with sea ice, glaciers and permafrost. Uggianaqtuq (which I have seen described as OOG-gi-a-nak-tuk) means “like a familiar friend behaving strangely,” and the Inuit are using it to describe the weather and the changing conditions of their home in this time of changing climate. Ancient cycles and patterns are breaking down. Scientific evidence is suggesting that there is increasing " ice-albedo feedback," which increases the rate of warming, and that a tipping point may be approaching that will have global climate impacts. In ...black snow, dark ocean..., I’ve used the form of a passacaglia to evoke the sense of ancient cycles being altered and ultimately, ruptured.

Matthew Burtner - Wooden Dance in 14 Time for viola & electronics 

14 is described by mathematicians as “deficient”, “equidigital”, and “odious”. These words have mathematical significance, but they aren’t particularly flattering to this interesting number. In music, these properties give 14 a surprising and propulsive  character because of its factors 2 and 7. It has the property of asymmetrically jumping the beat repeatedly because it suggests even pairs of 7/8 measures. 

I scored the quality of the number into wood and viola, the number and the material together creating a surprising, playful and groovy dynamic. Note the temporal expansion of the opening and the temporal contraction of the end.

Karen Tanaka - Frozen Horizon for flute, string quartet, bass, percussion

The idea of Frozen Horizon is based on the landscape of Harstad, the city on one of the fjord islands in northern Norway which I visited for the Ilios Festival in January 1997. Extreme climate conditions prevail during the winter, when darkness lasts all day without any sunlight. One can see northern lights like hallucinations. Beyond the icy earth's surface, the frozen sea spreads towards a curved boundary line between the sea and the dark sky. Time passes slowly there.

Frozen Horizon was composed based on my memories of this extreme landscape.

This work was commissioned by the Mirkk Art Forum. It was first performed by the BIT20 Ensemble conducted by Ingar Bergby, at the Bergen International Festival in Norway, on 22nd May 1998.