Thursday, May 18 at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall
7:30pm: Density parts i & ii (2013-14)
PROGRAM
Edgard Varèse: Density 21.5 for flute alone (1936)
Felipe Lara: Meditation and Calligraphy for solo bass flute (2014)
Felipe Lara: Parabolas na Caverna for solo flute (2014)
Marcos Balter: Pessoa for six bass flutes (2013)
Mario Diaz de Leon: Luciform for flute and electronics (2013)
Du Yun: An Empty Garlic for bass flute and electronics (2014)
George Lewis: Emergent for flute and electronics (2014)
Claire Chase, flutes
Levy Lorenzo, live sound
Nicholas Houfek, lights
Density 2036: part i is dedicated to Fred Anderson; Density 2036: part ii is dedicated to Elise Marie Mann.
NOTES
January 1936. New York City is in the grip of the Great Depression. Construction sites have fallen silent, leaving the city gap-toothed, littered with half-finished buildings. Many of the skyscrapers that sprouted like weeds during the boom times of the 1920s are now struggling to secure tenants: Locals deride the brand-new Empire State Building as the “Empty State Building.” Still, as always, the city seethes with life. Sirens howl, newsboys shout. The elevated trains rattle and shriek. Radios crackle with variety shows, zippy jazz numbers, and (every once in a while) the reassuring voice of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressing the nation in one of his fireside chats.
In the thick of it all—in a house on Sullivan Street crammed with gongs, paintings, and stray leaves of manuscript paper—French composer Edgard Varèse burns with ambition. Varèse wants his music to capture and distill the brute-force, electrified consciousness of the Machine Age. But if he is to succeed, he needs a more extensive set of musical resources than that bequeathed to him by the 19th century. The doors of music must be flung open to admit the entire world of sounds, thinks Varèse, and new instruments must be developed—in particular, electronic instruments capable of producing any sound whatsoever.
The Varèse of 1936 was a youthful spirit with a heterodox vision—but he was no enfant terrible. He was 52 years of age; he had been in New York for more than 20 years and was an established figure in the downtown music scene. New Yorkers already had multiple encounters with Varèse’s musical world, in which traditional instruments sat alongside sirens, lion’s roars, and whatever electronic instruments Varèse could get his hands on. (Very few existed at the time.) But even though some critics praised his work, most New Yorkers just didn’t get it. The New York premiere of Varèse’s monumental symphonic work Amériques at Carnegie Hall in 1926 had descended into abject chaos: Murmurs among the crowd grew steadily into a din, with one man seen rising to his feet with his two thumbs pointed downward in a pantomime of a Roman emperor sentencing a gladiator to death. If such hostility were not discouraging enough, Varèse had also been met with indifference from industry leaders he had petitioned for funds to support the development of the new electronic instruments he so badly needed. As 1936 dawned, Varèse found himself frustrated and increasingly depressed.
It was in January 1936 that Varèse completed Density 21.5, written at the request of flutist Georges Barrère as a showcase for his new platinum flute. The piece premiered at Carnegie Hall the following month. Density 21.5 represents a return to first principles for Varèse. All of the resources he was so adept at handling—orchestral, choral, electronic—are stripped away, leaving nothing but a single voice. Still, the full, stark panorama of Varèse’s sound world is present here in miniature. By combining the different registers of the flute with carefully chosen dynamics that range from fortissimo to sudden near-silences, as well as by occasionally treating the flute as a percussion instrument, Varèse shows us just how much timbral variation
the flute is capable of. In Density 21.5, Varèse makes the flute strange again: He makes it new.
Density 21.5 was followed by a creative desert for Varèse: He would not complete another new work for 10 years. But Density 2036, Claire Chase’s 24-year commissioning project for solo flute, inserts a stitch into the fabric of time, bringing Density 21.5 into immediate contact with the electronic, musical, and otherwise creative resources of the 21st century—resources that Varèse himself would have greeted as a parched man does water. Each year, Chase commissions a set of new works for solo flute; every 10 years, she performs all the works commissioned to that point. The final year of the project, 2036, will be the 100th anniversary of Density 21.5. Tonight’s concert—the first installment in the 10-year Density marathon—features
works commissioned in 2013 and 2014, the first two years of the project.
Having begun with Density 21.5 itself, we move to Felipe Lara’s Meditation and Calligraphy for solo bass flute. Upon being asked by Lara how he created his beautiful calligraphies, the Mongolian poet and calligrapher Mend-Ooyo Gombojav responded, “Meditation, meditation, meditation for a very long time ... then calligraphy with one quick gesture.” Lara resolved to meditate on a solo bass flute work for an entire evening, and then, upon waking the next day, write the piece in less than 30 minutes. The result is a single, fluid, lyrical musical gesture in which the flute becomes, by turns, a percussion instrument and an amplifier for the flutist’s voice.
Lara’s Parábolas na Caverna for solo flute is a musical illustration of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” presented in The Republic in a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon. The majority of people are, Socrates tells Glaucon, analogous to prisoners who have been chained to the wall of a cave for their whole lives, and who think that the world is exhausted by what little they can see of it—namely, the shadows that flit across the cave wall opposite them. The philosopher, however, is like the prisoner who manages to escape the cave and to see the world as it truly is with all the pain that this entails. The philosopher is initially blinded, bewildered, and frightened by what he sees; and later, when he returns to the cave to liberate his companions, he is met with incredulity and contempt. Lara’s piece gives us the dancing shadows in the cave, the philosopher’s struggle against his chafing bonds, and the mingled excitement, dread, and loneliness that comes with seeing the world clearly.
Marcos Balter’s Pessoa for six bass flutes is a musical adaptation of a poem by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, “Solene passa sobre a fértil terra” (“Solemnly passes above the fertile land”), a meditation on the fleeting, senseless darkenings of mood by which we are all daily afflicted. Pessoa opens with a low, plaintive melody for solo bass flute. When the melody repeats, pre-recorded bass flutes enter, unobtrusive at first but growing more and more insistent as the piece progresses. Breathing and shifting, these ghost flutes weave themselves around the melody like smoke, at times obscuring it almost entirely. To witness Pessoa in performance is to have the impression that Chase is being assailed onstage by past versions of herself (she recorded all the parts), which have risen unexpectedly from the depths to crowd around her, only to disperse as unexpectedly as they came.
With the first measure of Luciform, a concerto for flute and electronics by Mario Diaz de Leon, we find ourselves in very different territory. An anxious, jagged flute motif erupts into sudden flight, pursued by a slow, swooping figure in the pre-recorded synthesizer part—an echo of the sirens that caused such consternation when Varèse included them in his orchestral works. From here, the flute and synthesizer move through a series of scenes, marked by distinct timbral palettes, with Diaz de Leon’s metal and industrial rock influences clearly audible throughout.
Du Yun’s An Empty Garlic for bass flute and electronics is named for Rumi’s eponymous poem, which warns the reader not to waste time on pursuits that death will reveal as having always been “empty / as dry-rotting garlic.” The piece begins with pitched inhalations swirling around a solemn, languorous bass flute motif. Great blooms of electronic sound blossom, grow, and die away as the flute snaps alert, plunging into icier musical waters. The score requires the flutist to sing as well as to play, giving the piece the character of an uncanny duet between Chase and her instrument. In one particularly striking passage near the end, which quotes the sarabande from J. S. Bach’s A-Minor Partita for solo flute, breaths are eliminated entirely, with the flutist inhaling specific vocal pitches before exhaling the flute pitches. The piece culminates in a Varèsian flourish: a sudden, insistent quote of Density 21.5’s opening motif.
George Lewis’s Emergent for flute and electronics takes Varèse’s stated intention for his 1958 Poème électronique—namely, to introduce “a fourth [dimension], that of sound projection” to music—and gives it a 21st-century realization. Through a combination of digital delays, four-channel sound, and real-time timbre transformation, the fully scored flute material is refracted into a host of digital doppelgängers that alternately mimic, mock, and flee from Chase into the furthest corners of the auditorium. As the piece proceeds, Chase bowls through an evermore alien soundscape, until both she and her electronic companions find that they have left Earth entirely and are floating gently and noiselessly through space.
In a lecture given at the University of Southern California in 1939, Varèse quoted his contemporary, French novelist Romain Rolland, in order to express his own views regarding what the artist must do if she is to produce work of real value. The artist, said Varèse, must at all costs stay away from “that bed, all prepared for the laziness of those who, fleeing the fatigue of thinking for themselves, lie down in other men’s thoughts.” Were he present at Carnegie Hall for this concert, and for the others that remain in the Density 2036 10-year marathon, Varèse would be heartened to discover that today’s composers are no more lying down in his thoughts than he was in the thoughts of his predecessors.
—Jenny Judge
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of composer Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.
Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.
His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records. He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.
Mario Diaz de Leon is a composer, performer, and recording artist, whose creative work explores intersections of sound, spirituality, and technology. His music has been acclaimed by the New York Times, Pitchfork, and the New Yorker, and he has received commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and TAK Ensemble. Diaz de Leon is concurrently active in modern classical music, experimental electronic music, improvisation, and metal, having produced over a dozen albums of his work in collaboration with chamber ensembles, as a solo electronic artist, in the duo Luminous Vault, and with the improvisation trio Bloodmist. In his teenage years he explored electronic, metal, and hardcore music, which was followed by study at Oberlin Conservatory and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in music composition. Under the stage name Oneirogen, he released several albums of heavy ambient electronics performed internationally, including CTM Festival in Berlin; Donaufestival in Krems, Austria; and The Kitchen in NYC. The first electronic release under his own name, Heart Thread, was released in 2022, and pursues an immersive, ecstatic sound across two side-long pieces scored for an ensemble of synthesizers, woodwind timbres, and electronic percussion. Heart Thread, Diaz de Leon explains, “is a way for me to explore sacred expressions of abundance—a technology for channeling mystical experience.” Having previously taught at Columbia as Core Lecturer, he is currently Assistant Professor of Music and Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China and currently based in New York City, is a composer, performer, and advocate working at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theater, cabaret, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics and noise. In 2017 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her opera ANGEL’S BONE (libretto by Royce Vavrek); her collaborative opera with Raven Chacon, SWEET LAND, won the 2020 Best New Opera by the Music Critics Association of North America. Other notable recognitions include Guggenheim, American Academy Berlin Prize, Creative Capital, Foundation Contemporary Arts and a GRAMMY nomination in Best Classical Music Composition (for her work Air Glow). Her studio albums have been a New Yorker Notable Recording of Year in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021, respectively. Her latest monodrama opera, In Our Daughter’s Eyes, was a notable performance of the year in 2022 by the New Yorker.
Du Yun is Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University. As a curator and advocate for new music and art, she was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, artistic director of MATA festival (2014-2018), and founded the FutureTradition initiative championing collaborations in oral tradition practices. She was Artist of the Year at the Beijing Music Festival in 2019, and the Asia Society in Hong Kong has honored her for her continued contributions to the performing arts. The Carnegie Foundation and the Vilcek Prize in Music have honored her as an immigrant who has made lasting contributions to American society.
Praised by The New York Times as "a gifted Brazilian-American modernist" whose works are “brilliantly realized,” “technically formidable, wildly varied,” and possess “voluptuous, elemental lyricism,” Felipe Lara—whose work includes orchestral, chamber, vocal, film, electroacoustic, and popular music—engages in producing new musical contexts by means of (re)interpreting and translating acoustical and extra-musical properties of familiar source sonorities into project-specific forces. He often aspires to create self-similar relationships between the macro and micro-articulation of the musical experience and highlights the interdependence of acoustic music composition and technology.
His music has been recently commissioned by leading soloists, ensembles, and institutions such as the Arditti Quartet, Brentano Quartet, Claire Chase, Conrad Tao, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble Modern, Helsinki Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Loadbang, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Parker Quartet, and São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, as well as recently performed by the Ensemble Recherche, esperanza spalding, Ilan Volkov, JACK Quartet, KNM Berlin, Mivos Quartet, Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic Hilversum, New York Philharmonic, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Peter Eötvös, Steven Schick, Susanna Mälkki, Talea Ensemble, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, and Thomas Adès.
The recipient of a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship from Harvard University, he holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from New York University (Graduate School of Arts and Science) where he was a Henry M. MacCracken Fellow, a Master’s from Tufts University, and a Bachelor's degree from Berklee College of Music. Lara is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Composition Department at The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Having previously taught at Boston Conservatory at Berklee and Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Music and Visiting Lecturer at Harvard’s Department of Music, where he was awarded two Harvard Excellence in Teaching Awards.
George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, where he serves as Area Chair in Composition and Faculty in Historical Musicology. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvisational forms is documented on more than 150 recordings. His work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Mivos Quartet, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, London Sinfonietta, Spektral Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, Ensemble Erik Satie, Eco Ensemble, and others, with commissions from American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Harvestworks, Ensemble Either/Or, Orkestra Futura, Turning Point Ensemble, Studio Dan, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, IRCAM, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and others. Lewis’s music is published by Edition Peters.
Lewis received the 2012 SEAMUS Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Friday, May 19 at The Kitchen at Westbeth
6:30pm: Density part iii (2015)
PROGRAM
Dai Fujikura: Lila for solo flute (2015)
Francesca Verunelli: The Famous Box Trick for bass flute and electronics (2015)
Nathan Davis: Limn for bass flute, contrabass flute and electronics (2015)
Jason Eckardt: The Silenced, a monodrama for solo flute (2015)
Pauline Oliveros: Intensity 20.15, Grace Chase for speaking flutist and Expanded Instrument System (2015)
Claire Chase, flutes
Levy Lorenzo, live sound and Expanded Instrument System
Nicholas Houfek, lighting and production design
Winsome Brown, stage direction (Intensity 20.15: Grace Chase)
Density 2036: part iii is dedicated to Steven Schick.
NOTES
Lila for solo flute (2015)
This piece is based on the solo part of the flute concerto that I have also written for Claire Chase. Lila, as well as the flute concerto, tells a story from the flute player's point of view, starting with a flurry of sounds that are produced by speech-like articulations, interspersed with dance-like cascades. Lila means "creative play, divine play–the play of the child’s spirit" in Sanskrit.
—Dai Fujikura
The Famous Box-Trick for bass flute and electronics (2015)
The Famous Box Trick (1898), translated from the French Illusions Fantasmagoriques, is a 70-second “trick film” by director Georges Méliès. In the words of writer Michael Brooke, the film "hearkens back to stage magic.” I am fascinated by the hybrid texture of the “trick,” which allows the spectator to position themself in between the physical magic of the stage and the virtual “magic” of cinema—the corporeal versus the incorporeal—biological time versus machine time. The spectator is suspended in between belief in the trick and a conscious awareness of it. This is not the case in modern cinema, where the spectator is cut out from the “illusion” and can only believe in it from the “outside.”
In this piece, the flute inhabits corporeal sounds, including the family of vocal sounds obtained by the complex interactions of the voice with the instrument. These are, paradoxically, made to sound “fake” by a sound-world of completely synthetic sounds realized by electronic means. The result, like Meliès’ absurdist irony, is the reciprocal estrangement of the ontological nature of each sound-world.
—Francesca Verunelli
Limn for bass flute, contrabass flute, and electronics (2015)
Written for Claire Chase for bass and contrabass flute, Limn intimates the instrument by illuminating its edges. Its primary materials are whistle tones—fragile and unstable sounds that dance around the overtone series of a phantom fundamental—and key mechanics, both fluttering and brutal. These are sewn together with Claire's voice, aspirated and exhaled, and extended with electronic processing.
—Nathan Davis
The Silenced, a monodrama for solo flute (2015)
The Silenced is a meditation on those who are muted, by force or by political, economic, or social circumstances, yet still struggle to be heard. While composing the work, I was concerned with the ideas of trauma and self expression during and after a traumatic experience. This is manifested musically by gagged, stifled sounds that are perpetually in transition towards a clearer articulation that is never fully reached. Significantly, it is the flute, not the voice, that comes closest to realizing a kind of expressive "purity," free of the noise and interference that typify so much of multilayered sound strata in the piece.
The Silenced is dedicated with great love and admiration to Claire Chase for her Density 2036 project.
—Jason Eckardt
Intensity 20.15, Grace Chase for speaking flutist and Expanded Instrument System (2015)
Intensity 20.15 is inspired by text written by Grace Chase, grandmother of Claire Chase and by the virtuosity and flexibility of Claire Chase the performer.
In addition to the text and many small percussion instruments, the piece incorporates the use of Expanded Instrument System (EIS), a computer-controlled sound interface that I have designed and continued to evolve since 1963. Sounds are picked up by a microphone and fed to different processing modules in the computer, then output to a multichannel sound array that distributes sound around the performance space.
All sounds heard during the performance originate from the sounds performed by Claire Chase. EIS transforms sounds and plays them back. EIS is performative and is played by Levy Lorenzo.
— Pauline Oliveros
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Stacey-Jo Marine, Production Manager, Density @ 10
Tricia Toliver, Stage Manager, Density @ 10
Jessica Shand, Production and Curatorial Assistant, Density @ 10
Matthew Lyons, Curator, The Kitchen
Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen
Zack Tinkelman, Former Production Manager, The Kitchen
Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen
Randi Rivera, Interim Production Manger, The Kitchen
Al Foote, Videographer
Howard Silver, Videographer
Jennifer Karner, Videographer
Walter Wlodarcyzk, Photographer
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Nathan Davis "writes music that deals deftly and poetically with timbre and sonority" (New York Times). His opera/ballet Hagoromo was produced by American Opera Projects and premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival with the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, choreographer David Neumann, and dancers Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto. And Lincoln Center presented the premiere of “Bells”, a site-specific work for ensemble, multi-channel audio, and live broadcast to audience members’ mobile phones.
Nathan received other commissions from GMEM and Ensemble CBarré (Marseille), FringeArts and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (Philadelphia), Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), Yarn/Wire, Claire Chase, Ekmeles, Miller Theatre, Ojai Music Festival, the Calder Quartet, and Third Coast Percussion, with premieres at Tanglewood, Park Avenue Armory, Guggenheim Museum, and Carnegie Hall. His music has been released on Starkland, Tundra, New Focus, and Bridge.
The 2018 Aaron Copland Fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, Davis has received awards and fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, New Music USA, NYSCA, Meet The Composer, Fromm Foundation, Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, MATA, and ASCAP. He and Phyllis Chen won a NY Innovative Theater Award for their score to Sylvia Milo's play, “The Other Mozart.”
Also an active percussionist and member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, he has appeared as a concerto soloist with the Seattle Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, and Nagoya Philharmonic. A graduate of Rice, Yale, and the Rotterdam Conservatory, Nathan currently teaches at The New School.
Jason Eckardt (b. 1971) played guitar in jazz and metal bands until, upon first hearing the music of Webern, he immediately devoted himself to composition. Since then, his music has been influenced by his interests in perceptual complexity, the physical and psychological dimensions of performance, political activism, and self-organizing processes in the natural world. He has been recognized through commissions from Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, the Koussevitzky Foundation (2000, 2011), the Guggenheim Museum, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (1996, 2008), New Music USA, Chamber Music America, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago, the New York State Music Fund, Meet the Composer, the Oberlin Conservatory, and percussionist Evelyn Glennie; awards from the League of Composers/ISCM (National Prize), Deutschen Musikrat-Stadt Wesel (Symposium NRW Prize), the Aaron Copland Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, ASCAP, the University of Illinois (Martirano Prize), the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and Columbia University (Rapoport Prize); and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fondation Royaumont, the MacDowell and Millay Colonies, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, the Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, the Composers Conference at Wellesley, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music.
Eckardt received a doctorate in composition from Columbia University as a Presidential Fellow. In 1992, Eckardt graduated cum laude from Berklee College of Music where he was awarded the Richard Levy Scholarship. He has attended masterclasses with Milton Babbitt, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has taught at Columbia, Illinois, New York, Northwestern, and Rutgers Universities, the Oberlin and Peabody Conservatories, and is currently on the faculties of the Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Born in 1977 in Osaka, Japan, Dai Fujikura was fifteen when he moved to the UK. The recipient of many composition prizes, he has received numerous international co-commissions from the Salzburg Festival, Lucerne Festival, BBC Proms, Bamberg Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and more. He has been Composer-in-Residence of Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra since 2014 and held the same post at the Orchestre national d'Île-de-France in 2017/18. Dai’s first opera, Solaris, co-commissioned by the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Opéra de Lausanne and Opéra de Lille, had its world premiere in Paris in 2015 and has since gained a worldwide reputation. A new production of Solaris was created and performed at the Theatre Augsburg in 2018, and the opera received a subsequent staging in 2020.
In 2017, Dai received the Silver Lion Award from the Venice Biennale. In the same year, he was named the Artistic Director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Theater’s Born Creative Festival. In 2019, his Shamisen Concerto was premiered at Mostly Mozart festival in New York Lincoln Center and there have so far been 9 performances of this work by various orchestras. 2020 saw the premiere of his fourth piano concerto, Akiko’s Piano, dedicated to Hiroshima Symphony's Peace and Music Ambassador, Martha Argerich and performed as part of their "Music for Peace" project. His third opera, A Dream of Armageddon, premiered in New National Theatre Tokyo in the same year. His works are recorded by and released mainly on his own label Minabel Records in collaboration with SONY Music and his compositions are published by Ricordi Berlin.
Dai is currently focusing his attention on upcoming works including an opera on the life of Hokusai, a concerto for two orchestras, and a double concerto for flute and violin.
Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the '60s she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.
She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, New York, NY, The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and The John Cage award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.
Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded "Deep Listening®," which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds.
"Deep Listening is my life practice," Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, Troy, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through The Pauline Oliveros Trust and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc.
Francesca Verunelli studied composition with Rosario Mirigliano and piano with Stefano Fiuzzi at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence where she earned both diplomas summa cum laude. She concluded her studies in composition at the Accademia Santa Cecilia with Azio Corghi. After moving to Paris, she attended IRCAM’s training in Composition and Computer Music. She holds a Ph.D. from PSL University (Paris Sciences & Lettres).
She was awarded the 41st “Premio Abbiati della critica” in May 2022, received the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Composer’s Prize in 2020, and in 2010 at La Biennale di Venezia, she was awarded the “Leone d’argento” prize.
She has been composer-in-research at Ircam and GMEM and resident artist of the Casa de Velasquez (Madrid, 2015/2016) and the Villa Médicis (Académie de France à Rome, 2016/17). During the summer of 2021, she was composer-in-residence at Festival des Quators du Luberon, where the Béla Quartet premiered Unfolding II.
She has received commissions from important musical institutions and festivals such as IRCAM, NeueVocalsolisten Stuttgart, La Biennale di Venezia, Orchestre Philarmonique de Radio France, Milano Musica, Accentus Chamber Choir, Lucerne Symphonic Orchestra, Court-Circuit ensemble, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, GMEM de Marseille, CIRM de Nice, the French State, the FACE Foundation, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, International Contemporary Ensemble, Donaueschinger MusikTage, ECLAT, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Klangforum Wien, Musica Viva – Munich, Acht Brücken Köln.
Upcoming premieres also include Accord, chord and tune for accordion and orchestra, written for Krassimir Sterev and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (2022/23), Tune and retune II for SWR Orchestra (Donaueschinger Musiktage 2023), and Songs and Voices, an hour-long piece for voices and ensemble co-commissioned by Neue Vocalsolisten, GMEM, Ircam and Venice Biennale to be premiered in October 2023.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Friday, May 19 at The Kitchen at Westbeth
9pm: Density part iv (2016)
PROGRAM
Pauchi Sasaki: Gama XV: Piece for Two Speaker Dresses for bass flute, violin, electronic live processing, vocals and two speaker dresses (2016)
Richard Beaudoin: Another Woman of Another Kind for flute and eight voices (2016)
Suzanne Farrin: The Stimulus of Loss for glissando flute and ondes Martenot (2016)
Vijay Iyer: Five Empty Chambers (2016) (version for flute ensemble, arr. Claire Chase and Jessica Shand)
Tyshawn Sorey: Bertha’s Lair for flutes and percussion (2016, rev. 2018)
Claire Chase, flutes and speaker dress
Levy Lorenzo, live sound
Donald Nally, conductor
Steven Bradshaw, Matthew Cramer, Lauren Kelly, Maren Montalbano, Becky Siler, Dan Spratlan, Kevin Vondrak, and Shari Wilson, singers
Carlos Aguilar, Ilariah Hawley, Naamia Rivera, Diego Ruiz, Jessica Shand, and Elijah Thomas, flutes
Pauchi Sasaki, speaker dress, violin, and electronics
Tyshawn Sorey, percussion
Nicholas Houfek, lighting and production design
Nick Hallett, host
Density 2036: part iv is dedicated to Pauline Oliveros.
NOTES
Gama XV: Piece for Two Speaker Dresses for bass flute, violin, electronic live processing, vocals and two speaker dresses (2016)
Gama XV: Piece for Two Speaker Dresses explores the relationship between air as a sound source, body as a medium for the amplification of sound, and space as the container of these elements’ interactions. This composition features a new creation: Speaker Dress No. 2 (SD2), which is inspired by Claire Chase’s personal interpretation of the flute.
As performers, we unconsciously develop a body language around our instruments. Our bodies “dance” while playing, searching for pathways to fuse the emission of sound with our gesture and physicality. In this sense, my intention is to provide Claire with a new experience of sound embodiment. In the first half of the piece, the body becomes an instrument itself by wearing the speaker dress, at the same time evidencing the movement lexicon of the performer.
The second half of the composition integrates the performers’ traditional instrumentations. While in SD1, a usually soundless skin becomes the sound source for the dress, in SD2, respiration and unintelligible vocal sounds shape the sonic palette. I wanted to visually integrate air into the design of SD2, since Claire’s breathing is the inspiration for the sculpture. This visual manifestation was achieved by the design of an accessory: a mask with several tubing connected to a purse that emanates negative ions, becoming an emulation of an artificial “lung system.” Another functional aspect of the mask is to isolate the headset’s reception of the sound amplified by the dress, avoiding any chance of feedback during live processing.
—Pauchi Sasaki
Another Woman of Another Kind for flute and eight voices (2016)
Another woman of another kind—a commedia of identity—circles around the line: “It seems I should remember what to say.” This 23-minute, kaleidoscopic song-cycle for Claire Chase and Roomful of Teeth sets seven unpublished poems by Paul Griffiths.
The work is based on a millisecond-level microtiming analysis of Claire’s own performance of Varèse’s Density 21.5 made in February 2016 at Meyer Sound in Berkeley, California. The duration of each sound event—Claire’s every pitch, click, surge, and breath—was measured, transcribed into notation, and used as material.
The title, a line from Griffiths’ closing sonnet, hints that there are (at least) two Claires involved in the piece: The MeyerSoundClaire that is transcribed into the notation, and the LiveOnstageClaire who (with Teeth) weaves new music atop, inside, behind and under the microtimed transcription. Finally, the durations of the movements follow a curve: each is longer than the one before.
—Richard Beaudoin
The Stimulus of Loss for glissando flute and ondes Martenot (2016)
A friend introduced me to the idea of Emily Dickinson’s letters. He quoted a phrase in a talk that I found astounding (“to multiply the harbors does not diminish the sea”). As I went searching for that phrase, I began to read others along the way, each with its own sparkling revelation of her genius.
—Suzanne Farrin
Five Empty Chambers (2016) (version for flute ensemble, arr. Claire Chase and Jessica Shand)
Every sound you hear in this piece was generated by Claire Chase. My initial idea was to build a piece for live flute and pre-recorded audio. I asked Claire to record herself playing non-pitched material so that I could build some accompanying rhythms and textures.
I specified almost nothing about what I needed, and so what she sent me were not isolated individual sounds, but a series of virtuosic pitch-free impromptus on five different flutes (contrabass flute, alto flute, flute, piccolo, and ocarina). She displayed a different personality on each instrument; it was like listening to a cypher of whisper-quiet battle emcees, or perhaps a series of encounters with various insect-robots, whirring and buzzing in the air in front of you.
I decided I would treat each of her improvisations as an episode. I built a specific environment around each one, and ran them through effects so that her extemporaneous rhythms were triggering other sounds. The more I sat with the results, the more I realized that additional flute might not be necessary. So I decided to give Claire a break for this round. Thank you for listening.
—Vijay Iyer
Bertha’s Lair for flutes and percussion (2016, rev. 2018)
A colorful instrument of myriad possibilities and beauty, the flute is an instrument that has been central to much of the work that I produced during recent years. It has been a tremendous honor for me to have collaborated with some of the most brilliantly virtuosic practitioners on that instrument, from Margaret Lancaster, Alice Teyssier, and Malik Mezzadri to Laura Cocks, Nicole Mitchell, and Claire Chase—all individuals who continue to stretch beyond the limits of that instrument in their own, personal way. I am indebted to all of these masters for their inspiration and courage to further my writing for the flute.
Which brings us to Bertha’s Lair, an explosive tour-de-force written exclusively for Chase and myself (on drum set or unpitched percussion) that further exemplifies my penchant in exploring the improvisation-composition continuum, as evidenced in my Trio for Harold Budd (2012) and Ornations (2014). One of the rarer members of the woodwind family, the instrument lovingly known as Bertha (after whom this work is named) is anything but simply a contrabass flute; ostensibly there exists a seemingly vast amount of readily available sonic possibilities to explore. However, I also found it necessary to create a work for this instrument that is full of high, raucous energy—to write music that is counterintuitive to using certain “effects” that are more customary for the instrument (that is, to avoid as much as possible the use of long, quiet, mysterious sounds, whistle tones, etc.)—and focus more on shape, line, color, texture, ritual and most of all, the physicality of live performance on this particular instrument. This avoidance principle is strictly adhered to until the very last system of the composition.
This work is dedicated to the late Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), who was the first to compose a piece for Bertha to be performed by Chase, and who named the instrument at first hearing.
—Tyshawn Sorey
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Stacey-Jo Marine, Production Manager, Density @ 10
Tricia Toliver, Stage Manager, Density @ 10
Jessica Shand, Production and Curatorial Assistant, Density @ 10
Matthew Lyons, Curator, The Kitchen
Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen
Zack Tinkelman, Former Production Manager, The Kitchen
Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen
Randi Rivera, Interim Production Manger, The Kitchen
Al Foote, Videographer
Howard Silver, Videographer
Jennifer Karner, Videographer
Walter Wlodarcyzk, Photographer
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Richard Beaudoin is an architect of the microtiming technique. Iconic recordings are transcribed in minute detail, then treated as palimpsest, forming a parchment over which the composer manipulates, reorganizes and interweaves original material to create innovative compositions of startling beauty and originality.
Performers of Beaudoin’s works include Claire Chase, Roomful of Teeth, Boston Lyric Opera, the Kreutzer and Chiara String Quartets, Sound Icon, members of the Philharmonia Orchestra, Transient Canvas, Mark Knoop, Colin Davin, Marilyn Nonken, Constantine Finehouse, Wolfram Rieger, Ulrich Naudé, and Philip Howard, Serge Vuille, Christopher Graham, Clive Driskill-Smith, Christian Wilson, Carl Rosman, Clio Gould, Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Neil Heyde, and Rohan de Saram. His vocal music has been sung widely by artists including Annette Dasch, Dashon Burton, Estelí Gomez, Joseph Kaiser, Annika Sophie Ritlewski, Frank Kelley, Kevin Burdette and Roomful of Teeth. Settings of Paul Griffiths, Christian Bök, Celan, Éluard, Empson, William Henry Fox Talbot, Heaney, Heine, Hölderlin, MacDiarmid, Melville, Morgenstern, Muresan, Pushkin, Rilke, Rückert, John Updike, William Carlos Williams, and Christa Wolf.
Recordings include Digital Memory and the Archive (New Focus 2023) and Microtimings (New Focus 2012), as well as contributions to Claire Chase’s Density 2036, part iv (2020) and recordings by Constantine Finehouse and Daniel Kurganov. Compositions performed at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Wiener Konzerthaus, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Brucknerhaus in Linz, the Schwetzinger SWR Festspiele, The Kitchen, Weill Recital Hall, Boston's The Institute for Contemporary Art, Calderwood Pavilion, Sanders Theatre and Jordan Hall, and in London at the Royal Festival Hall, Duke’s Hall, The Forge, The Arcola Theatre, Wilton’s Music Hall, Pushkin House, and King’s Place, with commissions from Konzerthaus Dortmund, Staatstheater Kassel, the President of Harvard University, Sound Icon, and Boston Lyric Opera.
Since Fall 2019, Beaudoin has held a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Music at Dartmouth College.
Suzanne Farrin is a composer whose works have been performed around the world. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times called her first opera, dolce la morte, a work of “shattering honesty.” Her debut recording, Corpo di Terra, was described in Timeout Chicago “like field recordings from inside the cerebral cortex.” Recent commissions include works for The Parker Quartet, Talea, The Library of Congress, Sō Percussion, JACK Quartet, and The International Contemporary Ensemble. She was a 2018 Rome Prize Winner and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in Composition.
Her music has been featured at venues and festivals including The BBC Proms, Mostly Mozart, The Gothenburg Art Biennial, Matrix, Alpenklassik, Music in Würzburg, BAM NextWave, Theaterforum (Germany), Town Hall Seattle, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Symphony Space, Wigmore Hall, The National Theater of Tiachung, Taiwan, and Ojai Festival, among many others.
In addition to composing, Suzanne is a performer of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in the 1920s as a response to the simultaneous destruction and technological advances of WWI. Her life as an interpreter on the instrument has taken her to venues such as the Abrons Arts Center in NYC, Centro de Artes in Buenos Aires, as well as film and television. She has performed in film scores such as Chicuarotes (Gael Garcia Bernal, director), Sade Ma’bar/Blockage (Mohsen Gharaie), and USERS (Natalia Almada), which was featured at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. She appears as herself in an episode of Mozart in the Jungle (Roman Coppola).
Suzanne is the Frayda B. Lindemann Chair of Music at Hunter College and The C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center, where she teaches composition. She has been the lead mentor composer for Evolution: Quartet at the Banff Centre since 2021. She holds a doctorate from Yale University.
Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” composer and pianist Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music over the last twenty-five years, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation.
He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German “Echo” awards, and was voted Downbeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the last decade. He has been praised by Pitchfork as “one of the best in the world at what he does,” by the Los Angeles Weekly as “a boundless and deeply important young star,” and by Minnesota Public Radio as “an American treasure.”
Iyer’s musical language is grounded in the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, the African American creative music movement of the '60s and '70s, and the lineage of composer-pianists from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016), a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.
A longtime New Yorker, Iyer lives in central Harlem with his wife and daughter. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a Steinway artist.
Described by The Wire as an artist "unafraid of working within different disciplines and stylistic constraints" (2015), Pauchi Sasaki's interdisciplinary approach integrates musical composition with the design of multimedia performances and the application of new technologies. Her work focuses on the development of real-time interactive music and self-designed instruments such as the Speaker Dress, a wearable sound sculpture created from 100 speakers. This branch of her work seeks the embodiment of electronic music performance, integrating electronic sounds with corporeal expressivity.
Pauchi’s work has been presented at international venues and festivals including the Tokyo Experimental Festival, Venice Biennale, Carnegie Hall, Cannes Film Festival, Walt Disney Hall, MET, The Kitchen, Art Basel Miami week, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and has received commissions by Rolex, ACO/Carnegie Hall, Silkroad Ensemble, Pan American Games, Stiftung Kunst & Musik für Dresden, HELLERAU European Center for Arts, Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione from Italy, Vanderbilt University, and Americas Society.
She has received the Ibermúsicas/CMMAS grant for sound composition with new technologies (México), the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative award selected by composer Philip Glass, Goethe-Institut artist residency, Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, Columbia University’s fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and the Hermitage Fellowship. "Pauchi Sasaki's effective scores" (Variety 2015) are featured in more than 30 feature and short films, having received four "Best Original Score" awards from international festivals including Cine Ceara in Brazil and Cinema Latino Americano di Trieste in Italy.
She is now working on her first opera, ARTEMIS, a multi-platform opera inspired by NASA’s Artemis program, a space mission that will bring the first woman to the Moon’s surface in 2024, 55 years after the first Moon landing. The project involves the construction of the Speaker Dress No. 3.
Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey (b. 1980) is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as artists such as John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, George Lewis, Claire Chase, Steve Lehman, Jason Moran, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, and Myra Melford, among many others.
The New York Times has praised Sorey for his instrumental facility and aplomb: “he plays not only with gale-force physicality, but also a sense of scale and equipoise,” The Wall Street Journal notes Sorey is “a composer of radical and seemingly boundless ideas,” and The New Yorker recently noted that Sorey is “among the most formidable denizens of the in-between zone…An extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape.”
Sorey has composed works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the International Contemporary Ensemble, soprano Julia Bullock, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, the McGill-McHale Trio, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, the Louisville Orchestra, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee with Opera Philadelphia in partnership with Carnegie Hall, as well as for countless collaborative performers. Sorey has received support for his creative projects from The Jerome Foundation, The Shifting Foundation, and Van Lier Fellowship, and was named a 2017 MacArthur fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow.
Sorey has taught and lectured on composition and improvisation at Columbia University, The New England Conservatory, the Banff Centre, University of Michigan, International Realtime Music Symposium, Harvard University, Hochschule für Musik Köln, Berklee College of Music, University of Chicago, and the Danish Rhythmic Conservatory. Sorey joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Donald Nally collaborates with creative artists, leading orchestras, and art museums to make new works for choir that address social and environmental issues. He has commissioned over 180 works and, with his ensemble The Crossing, has produced thirty recordings, winning three Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance. He has held distinguished tenures as chorus master for Lyric Opera of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and for many seasons at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Donald has served as visiting resident artist at the Park Avenue Armory, music director of David Lang's 1000-voice Crowd Out at Millennium Park in Chicago, Lang’s 1000-voice The Mile Long Opera on the High Line in Manhattan, and chorus master for the New York Philharmonic for world premieres of Lang and Julia Wolfe. His sixty-chapter series Rising w/ The Crossing, a response to the 2020 pandemic, has been archived by The Library of Congress as a cultural artifact. Recent conducting and directing includes the Swedish Radio Choir, Klockriketeatern at the Finnish National Opera, the Big Ears Festival, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, The Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Lisson Gallery London, The National Gallery Osaka, TBA21 Córdoba, and Museu Serralves Porto. Donald is a frequent guest artist/teacher at universities, including Yale, Duke, Chicago, Indiana, Notre Dame, and Boston Conservatory. He is currently in his final year as the John W. Beattie Chair in Music at Northwestern University.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Saturday, May 20 at The Kitchen at Westbeth
6:30pm: Density part v (2017-18)
PROGRAM
Marcos Balter: Pan* (2017–18, rev. 2023) (version for solo flute and electronics)
Claire Chase, flutes
Levy Lorenzo, live sound
Monica Duncan, projection design (projections by Adam Larsen)
Nicholas Houfek, lighting and production design
Pan was originally conceived as a fully staged work for flute, electronics and a large ensemble made up of community members, directed by Douglas Fitch.
*Commissioned and developed by Project& and Jane M Saks.
Density 2036: part v is dedicated to Andreas Waldburg-Wolfegg.
NOTES
For the ancients, the gods could do no wrong. But that didn’t mean the gods were seen as virtuous. The concepts of sin and wrongdoing simply didn’t apply to divinities: the gods were seen as beyond good and evil entirely, as Nietzsche puts it. And they were beyond mortality too, of course, because the gods could not die — by definition.
But things were less clear when it came to the demigods. Take a satyr: an in-between creature, neither god, nor man, nor beast. Could satyrs do wrong? Were they mortal, or not? And if satyrs could sin, and die, would it ever be justifiable to put them to death?
Pan, whose story unfolds over the nine tableaux of Marcos Balter’s Pan, is the satyr-lord of the woodlands, and the enchanter of all that hear his music. His musical talents are certainly godlike, as are the powers that those talents bring in their train. But Pan is not really a god — or at least, he is not acknowledged as such. When Pan invites Apollo to compete with him in a musical duel, Apollo sees this not as a challenge from an equal, but as an outrage. Condemned as an upstart, Pan is seized, tortured, and put to death. In dying, Pan gives his persecutors the satisfaction of knowing they were right: if he has died, he can’t have been a true god.
In many ways, Pan is more animal than anything. He has the hindquarters, legs and horns of a goat, and he can be as heedless and vicious as any wild creature. But Pan does not really belong among the animals, either — because Pan is on the cusp of becoming human.
Pan offers a musical portrait of this turbulent transformation. As we listen to the music that Pan plays, noticing how it alters, we are given an insight into what it would be like to be a creature taking the first hesitant steps toward fellowship, accountability, and love.
The transition from beast to man is not a linear one. Over the course of the work, we hear Pan’s subjectivity veering continually and unpredictably between the animal and the human. At times, we are given his white-hot, right-here-right-now animal consciousness: the searing rage, the overwhelming desire, the single-minded and unalloyed self-interest. But at other times, we sense the dawning of compassion, and a burgeoning need for companionship.
Pan begins with Pan’s violent death at the hands of Apollo, the horror of which is made viscerally apparent in the musical texture (‘Death of Pan’). As the agony becomes unbearable in his final moments, Pan begins to lose consciousness of the world around him. He turns inward. Pan dwells on his grief for what he has lost (‘Lament for Pan’s Death’), imagining his followers mourning him, and he begins to relive the course of events that has terminated in this most hideous of fates.
We are taken back to the very beginning of Pan’s transformation. This is the moment of his twofold discovery: of music on the one hand, and of power on the other (‘Pan’s Flute’). As Pan begins to play, we see his followers flock to him, enchanted by his music (‘Music of the Spheres’).
Pan initially sees the community as a tool to use for his own purposes, but this begins to change. Slowly, Pan realizes that his followers are fellow consciousnesses with minds and wills of their own: they are not creatures to dominate, but people from whom he needs recognition. As his conception of himself and his companions begins to alter, Pan begins to feel love. ‘Echo’, ‘Serenade to Selene’ and ‘Dance of the Nymphs’ are Pan’s hymns to his three lovers: Echo, Selene and Syrinx.
But love, for a creature like Pan, is not love as we know it. Pan has committed unspeakable acts of violence against all three of his lovers. In ‘Serenade to Selene’, we are given a window into what love feels like for Pan: for him, passion is shot through with aggression, hostility and bloodthirsty glee.
Pan’s misdeeds come home to roost in ‘Fray – The Unravelling’. Here, we see that Pan is not the only one whose understanding has been evolving. Pan’s followers have been growing, too, and they are realizing that they can no longer countenance his offenses. The musical charm breaks, and Pan’s community turns against him.
Pan sees condemnation, betrayal and disappointment in the faces of his friends. And this is the moment when Pan becomes human. In knowing others, he has come to know himself. Pan offers one last, thoroughly human plea for forgiveness (‘Soliloquy’), but it is too late.
Pan has spent his entire existence as an outcast, shunned by the worlds of god, man and beast alike. At the very end, he proves that he belongs in the human world. But the very moment at which he does so is the moment of his final, and irrevocable, banishment.
Many works of art explore what it is to be human. But Pan explores what it would be like to become human. Pan makes it clear that transformation of consciousness from animal to human carries with it not just the possibility of redemption, but the seeds of tragedy, too.
—Jenny Judge
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Stacey-Jo Marine, Production Manager, Density @ 10
Tricia Toliver, Stage Manager, Density @ 10
Jessica Shand, Production and Curatorial Assistant, Density @ 10
Matthew Lyons, Curator, The Kitchen
Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen
Zack Tinkelman, Former Production Manager, The Kitchen
Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen
Randi Rivera, Interim Production Manger, The Kitchen
Al Foote, Videographer
Howard Silver, Videographer
Jennifer Karner, Videographer
Walter Wlodarcyzk, Photographer
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of composer Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.
Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.
His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records. He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Monica Duncan is a video and performance artist. Her time-based work investigates the nature of visual perception, audience-performer relations and queer potentiality through camouflage, stillness and collective image-making.
Duncan’s video and performance work has been exhibited at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Hebbel am Ufer HAU1, zeitraumexit, Komuna//Warszawa, The Kitchen, Roulette, Parkhaus Projects, Atlanta Contemporary, Hallwalls, La Casa Encendida, ZKM, LACMA, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, amongst others. She has been a visiting artist at the Atlanta College of Art, Georgia State University, Hunter College, Signal Culture, Experimental Television Center, Scena Robocza (Poznań), PACT Zollverein and the Institute of Electronic Arts.
Duncan received her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego and while on a D.A.A.D fellowship her MA in Choreography and Performance at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Duncan joined the faculty of the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre & Dance at Lehman College-CUNY in Fall 2019.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Saturday, May 20 at The Kitchen at Westbeth
9pm: Density part vi (2019)
PROGRAM
Olga Neuwirth: Magic Flu-idity (2019) for solo flute and typewriter
Pamela Z: Louder Warmer Denser (2019) for flute, bass flute, contrabass flute, and fixed media
Sarah Hennies: Reservoir 2 (2019) for bass flute and voices
Phyllis Chen: Roots of Interior (2019) for flute and heartbeat
Claire Chase, flutes
Levy Lorenzo, live sound
Nathan Davis, percussion
Constellation Chor, voices/Marisa Michelson, director
Marisa Michelson, digital stethoscope
Nicholas Houfek, lighting and production design
Density part vi is dedicated to Doriot Anthony Dwyer.
NOTES
Magic Flu-idity (2019) for solo flute and typewriter
Olga Neuwirth’s Magic Flu-idity is a reduction of her recent flute concerto Aello - ballet mécanomorphe, which she wrote for Claire Chase and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in 2018 as a companion piece to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4. In the flute concerto version, scored for solo-flute, two muted trumpets, string ensemble, keyboard and typewriter, “Aello” alludes to one the harpies of classical mythology, “someone sent by the gods to restore peace, if necessary with force, and to exact punishment for crimes.” Mark Berry of Seen And Heard International described it this way: “In three movements, like its companion, it immediately spoke with the tones—in every sense—of a serious composer at work. Figures remembered from Bach, whether melodic, rhythmic, or both, sounded as if trapped in a machine. Or were they actually perfectly happy to be there? Claire Chase on flute, shadowed by two muted trumpets, offered breathtaking virtuosity, set against an ever-changing ensemble that included synthesized harpsichord and glass harmonica as well as portable typewriter. Machines can be fun as well as serious—indeed sometimes especially when they are serious. So too can Bach.”
In this duo version, both the solo flute and the typewriter absorb lines of the original concerto, conjuring the spirit of Aello—at times capricious, at others demonic—with orchestral force.
Louder Warmer Denser (2019) for flute, bass flute, contrabass flute, and fixed media
I had a studio visit from Claire while she was in San Francisco last summer. She brought her flutes with her so I could hear and record some of her intriguing techniques to aid and inspire my work on composing this piece for her Density 2036 project. I also asked her if I could put her in my recording booth and interview her—telling her it would help spark ideas for the piece. I then used the recorded interview to create a text collage that became the basis of the work’s melodic and rhythmic material and its structure. What I ended up with feels, to me, like a little portrait of Claire. Her de-constructed stories, fragments of her laughter, her sighs and non-verbal sounds all conjure her for me, each time I hear them. A stretched Varèse quote also found its way into the piece, but I think of the bulk of its substance as distilled Claire Chase.
—Pamela Z
Reservoir 2 (2019) for bass flute and voices
“Intrusion” is the second in a series of pieces called “Reservoirs” based on the relationship between human conscious and unconscious thought.
The title is based on Freud and Jung’s belief that the human unconscious mind is a large reservoir of thought and feelings mostly inaccessible to us in our conscious lives. Many psychologists also believe that the unconscious mind is a “storage facility” for unpleasant and traumatic memories, a kind of internal mental protection so we don’t have to continually relive our past traumas every day.
—Sarah Hennies
Roots of Interior (2019) for flute and heartbeat
There was a time when I could hear two heartbeats inside my body, beating in counterpoint, in conversation. Since the sound of my heartbeat was the first music my daughter heard, I always trusted she would intuit the rhythm of my song. With all the metaphoric uses of the heart, it is surprising that I forget to simply listen to my own beatings, its speed, its irregularities and other qualities. In this piece, I think of Claire not only as a performer but as a landscape, an environment that changes as she plays. Toward the end of the work, we catch a glimpse into her experience by way of a digital stethoscope strapped to her chest. What will her heart sound like today? And what will it be like in 2036?
— Phyllis Chen
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Stacey-Jo Marine, Production Manager, Density @ 10
Tricia Toliver, Stage Manager, Density @ 10
Jessica Shand, Production and Curatorial Assistant, Density @ 10
Matthew Lyons, Curator, The Kitchen
Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen
Zack Tinkelman, Former Production Manager, The Kitchen
Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen
Randi Rivera, Interim Production Manger, The Kitchen
Al Foote, Videographer
Howard Silver, Videographer
Jennifer Karner, Videographer
Walter Wlodarcyzk, Photographer
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Described by The New York Times as “spellbinding” and “delightfully quirky matched with interpretive sensitivity,” Phyllis Chen (2022 Guggenheim Fellow, 2019 Cage-Cunningham Fellow) is a composer, pianist and sound artist whose music draws from her tactile exploration of object and sound.
Phyllis started playing the piano at the age of five and came across the toy piano as an adult. As a pianist, she immediately fell in love with the instrument’s possibilities. Being bound to no history, the toy piano became her grounds to develop her personal voice, one that reflects her third culture kid experience. The unrefined and raw tone of the instrument inspired Phyllis to create very personal miniature theater works (The Memoirist, The Slumber Thief and Down The Rabbit-Hole) in collaboration with her partner and video artist, Rob Dietz. One of her interdisciplinary solo works, Lighting The Dark, was described by NYT as “by turns poignant, humorous and virtuosic, Chen’s performance offered a slyly subversive take on issues relating to femininity, technology and power…the looping, spellbinding music…became a fitting tribute to the modest, repetitive, yet quietly heroic work of women.”
Phyllis has received commissions by ensembles and organizations such as the International Contemporary Ensemble, A Far Cry, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Claire Chase’s Density 2036, Opera Cabal’s Opera Shop, Singapore International Festival of the Arts, the Roulette-Jerome, Look & Listen Festival, Jacob Greenberg, and others. She has received grants from New Music USA, Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, NYSCA (via Concert Artists Guild and Look & Listen Festival), Fromm Foundation and the Pew Heritage Trust via Christ Church of Philadelphia.
Phyllis has released five albums, three solo albums (Concert Artists Guild, cerumenspoon, New Focus Recordings) and a fourth collaborative album with Indie-band Cuddle Magic on FYO records.
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues, including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has worked with a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, ensemble 0, Judith Hamann, R. Andrew Lee, The Living Earth Show, Talea Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.
Her groundbreaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.
Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
Olga Neuwirth was born in Graz, Austria and studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and San Francisco Conservatory of Music, also studying painting and film at San Francisco Art College. She sprang to international prominence in 1991 at the age of 22, when two of her mini operas with texts by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek were performed at the Vienna Festwochen.
Neuwirth’s works have explored a wide range of forms and genres: operas, radio-plays, sound installations, artworks, photography and film music. In many works she fuses live musicians, electronics and video and calls her main aesthetic an “art-in-between.” Highlights include two portrait concerts at the Salzburg Festival (1998); her multi-media opera Baa-Lambs Feast (1993/1998) after Leonora Carrington; Clinamen/Nodus for Pierre Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra (2000); a composer-in-residence position at the Lucerne Festival (2002/2016); the world premiere of her music-theatre work Lost Highway (2003) after David Lynch, which won a South Bank Show Award (ENO at the Young Vic, 2008); and two new operas while living in New York (2010/11)—The Outcast: Homage to Herman Melville and American Lulu, based on Alban Berg’s Lulu.
Neuwirth’s opera Orlando after Virginia Woolf premiered at the Vienna State Opera in December 2019, making her the first woman commissioned in the 150-year history of the house; it was named World Premiere of the Year by Opernwelt and awarded the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition by the University of Louisville Kentucky. Orlando was released on DVD in September on Unitel.
Among a host of other honors, Neuwirth received two prestigious awards in the last years: in 2021 the Wolf Prize, shared with Stevie Wonder, and in 2022 the Ernst von Siemens Prize. Her composition teachers included Adriana Hölszky, Tristan Murail and Luigi Nono.
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working primarily with voice, live electronics, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live looping, she processes her voice to create complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theater, film, and chamber ensembles including the Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Julia Bullock with the San Francisco Symphony, and the LA Philharmonic New Music Group. Her interdisciplinary performances have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can (NY), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Dak’Art (Sénégal) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal). She is a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Dorothea Tanning Award, United States Artists, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Guggenheim Fellowship, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Constellation Chor is a vocal performance collective founded and directed by Marisa Michelson. Its intention at inception, and still to this day, was to create a space for humans to sing virtuosically together while also prioritizing deep embodied experience and movement. From 2015 - 2020, Constellation Chor was in residence at Judson Memorial Church in NYC, meeting weekly. In 2019, the Chor had a performance residency at Spectrum in Brooklyn.
We are singers, composers, and dancers. We are committed to embodied music-making, to practicing together over a long period of time, and to the liberation of the singing Being (that is: all of us, and all of you). We have two branches: our improvisational branch (based on a set of principles called Core Sounding), and our written-composition-based branch, in which we learn and perform works by various composers (including originals from within the Chor). We’ve improvised and performed compositions in a variety of spaces including Lincoln Center, the Kitchen, Harvard ArtLab, Spectrum, Pioneer Works, and National Sawdust; we’ve also performed as far afield as Iceland and Greece. Our practice fuels everything we do. We invite our rawest impulses to channel through us, and aesthetically translate those impulses into voice or movement. We practice non-attachment to narrative. We also cultivate vulnerable emotional transparency. We want to show up, to be seen, and to see.
The Chor’s collaborators include William Britelle, Metropolis Ensemble, Claire Chase, Sarah Hennies, Ashley Fure, the New York Philharmonic, the Kitchen, Heartbeat Opera, Pioneer Works Maria Popova, Paola Prestini among others. Awards/grants/residencies include: 2021 Toulmin Fellowship with National Sawdust and Center for Ballet Arts, Modern Accord Depot Inaugural Residency, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Eric Salzman Aard for Music-Theatre, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Tuesday, May 23 at The Kitchen at Westbeth
6:30pm & 9:30pm: Density part vii (2020)
PROGRAM
Liza Lim: Sex Magic for contrabass flute (alto ocarina, Aztec ‘death whistle,’ bell, pedal bass drum), electronics, and an installation of kinetic percussion instruments (2020)
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Pythoness
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Oracles: Salutations to the cowrie shells
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Oracles: Womb-bell
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Oracles: Vermillion – on Rage (for contrabass flute, pedal bass drum, Aztec ‘death whistle’)
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Oracles: Throat Song (for alto ocarina)
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Oracles: Moss – on the Sacred Erotic
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Oracles: Telepathy (silent meditation)
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Skin-Changing
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The Slow Moon Climbs
Claire Chase, contrabass flute, alto ocarina, Aztec ‘death whistle,’ pedal bass drum
Senem Pirler, live electronics
Levy Lorenzo, kinetic percussion, electronics and sound design
Nicholas Houfek, altar and production design
Density 2036: part vii is dedicated to IONE.
NOTES
Sex Magic (2020) is a work about the sacred erotic in women’s history. It is about an alternative cultural logic of women’s power as connected to cycles of the womb—the life-making powers of childbirth, the ‘skin-changing’, world-synchronizing temporalities of the body, and the womb center as a site of divinatory wisdom and utterance.
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Stacey-Jo Marine, Production Manager, Density @ 10
Tricia Toliver, Stage Manager, Density @ 10
Jessica Shand, Production and Curatorial Assistant, Density @ 10
Matthew Lyons, Curator, The Kitchen
Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen
Zack Tinkelman, Former Production Manager, The Kitchen
Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen
Randi Rivera, Interim Production Manger, The Kitchen
Al Foote, Videographer
Howard Silver, Videographer
Jennifer Karner, Videographer
Walter Wlodarcyzk, Photographer
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Liza Lim (b. 1966, Perth, Australia) is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focuses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works such as Sex Magic (2020) for Claire Chase; the orchestral cycle, Annunciation Triptych: Sappho, Mary, Fatimah (2019-22), and the piano concerto World as Lover, World as Self (2021). Her large-scale cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally and highlights ecological listening to beyond-the-human realms.
Lim has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC, SWR and WDR Symphony Orchestras, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ELISION, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet and JACK Quartet. She was Resident Composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and 2006. Her music has been featured at the Berliner Festspiele, Spoleto Festival, Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Venice Biennale, Lucerne Festival, and at all the major Australian festivals. Awards recognizing her wide-ranging career and depth of compositional practice include the Australia Council’s Don Banks Award (2018), the ‘Happy New Ears Prize’ of the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation (2021), and the 2022 APRA AMCOS National Luminary Award. She was DAAD Artist-in-Berlin (2007-08) and Composer-in-Residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2021-22). She was a founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2012-16) and was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin in 2022.
Lim is currently Professor of Composition and inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Senem Pirler (she/her) is an intermedia-sound artist whose interdisciplinary work crosses over into sound engineering, sound art, video art, dance, performance, and installation. Born in Turkey, she studied classical piano at Hacettepe State Conservatory and sound engineering & design at Istanbul Technical University (MIAM). She developed her artistry working as a composer and recording engineer before moving to the U.S. in 2010 to study Music Technology on a Fulbright Fellowship. Pirler earned her M.M. in Music Technology on the Stephen F. Temmer Tonmeister Honors Track from NYU Steinhardt and her Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her dissertation’s title was “Disruption, Dis/orientation, and Intra-action: Recipes for Creating a Queer Utopia in Audiovisual Space.” Pirler’s recent work has been exhibited at EMPAC, Roulette, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Montalvo Arts Center, Mount Tremper Arts, and Collar Works, NY. Her work has been recognized by grants, residencies, and awards including most recently PACT Zollverein residency, Signal Culture residency and The Malcolm S. Morse Graduate Research Enhancement Award to honor the work of Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening in 2018. Pirler joined the Bennington College faculty in Fall 2018.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Wednesday, May 24 at The Kitchen at Westbeth
6:30pm: Density part viii (2021)
PROGRAM
Matana Roberts: Auricular Hearsay for flute, video, and open ensemble (2021)
Ann Cleare: anfa for contrabass flute, bass flute, electronics and video (2021)
Wang Lu: Aftertouch for flute, alto flute, bass flute, electronics and video (2021)
Claire Chase, flutes
Levy Lorenzo, live sound and electronics
Senem Pirler, live electronics
Katinka Kleijn, cello
Monica Duncan, projection design
Nicholas Houfek, lighting and production design
Artwork in Wang Lu’s Aftertouch by Polly Apfelbaum
Video in Ann Cleare’s anfa by Ailbhe Ní Bhriain
Video in Matana Roberts’ Auricular Hearsay by Matana Roberts
Density 2036: part xiii is dedicated to Alvin Lucier.
NOTES
Auricular Hearsay for flute, video, and open ensemble (2021)
Auricular Hearsay is a conceptual sound work that uses a mixed media framework Roberts is currently developing called “Endless Score.” The work is a visual and sonic exploration of the brains of the neurodiverse. Neurodiverse brains operate in starts, stops, spurts. They never rely on a linear track, often flowing in the moment, taking risks, using improvisation as a root for inquiry and organization of various realms of logic. Endless Score is at its foundation a sonic experiment in real time, a tool for infinite performative iteration of a set of guided sounds/instruction, not unlike the models of music restatement, theme and variation that exist within many types of music traditions worldwide, the difference here being the use of a key foundational physiological phenomena to anchor all that will be explored by composer, performer and listener in real time.
anfa for contrabass flute, bass flute, electronics and video (2021)
anfa is the Irish word for a disturbance in the elements and in this piece, it signifies a psychogeographical exploration with the materiality of place and the history and secrets a place might hold beyond its surface.
As visualized through the works of Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, the particular place in focus here is the desolate, depleted Boglands at the center of Ireland, a landscape that is haunted by its industrial and geological history.
Through the infiltration of contrabass flute, this ‘fixed’ place becomes liquified, animated, traversable, venturing inward towards vanished and re-emerging forms of light and motion, returning the landscape to a position of material vitality and possibility.
Aftertouch for flute, alto flute, bass flute, electronics and video (2021)
Aftertouch is a MIDI keyboard parameter that senses the pressure applied to a key after it has been initially played. In this way, the volume, vibrato, or a filter can be manipulated and controlled for expressive ends.
Inspired by Claire Chase’s individualistic, virtuosic and kaleidoscopic playing, this work experiments with the boundless timbres she generates through gesture-based sound sculpting, improvisation, and the full spectrum of flute techniques, in dialogue with overlapping electronic beats. It grooves along simultaneously with artist Polly Apfelbaum’s floor projection of spinning singing bowls. Special thanks to electronics assistant Russell Greenberg.
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Stacey-Jo Marine, Production Manager, Density @ 10
Tricia Toliver, Stage Manager, Density @ 10
Jessica Shand, Production and Curatorial Assistant, Density @ 10
Matthew Lyons, Curator, The Kitchen
Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen
Zack Tinkelman, Former Production Manager, The Kitchen
Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen
Randi Rivera, Interim Production Manger, The Kitchen
Al Foote, Videographer
Howard Silver, Videographer
Jennifer Karner, Videographer
Walter Wlodarcyzk, Photographer
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Ann Cleare is an Irish artist working in the areas of concert music, opera, extended sonic environments, and hybrid instrumental design. Described as “an altogether different artform that draws from musical traditions, but pushes against and beyond them, articulating something that is at once about sound, but that is equally concerned with energy, motion, space, and the world itself,” her work explores the static and sculptural nature of sound, probing the extremities of timbre, texture, color, and form. Exploring poetries of communication, transformation, and perception, she creates highly psychological and corporeal sonic spaces that encourage a listener to contemplate the complexity of the lives we exist within and “to hear the world differently.”
A recipient of a 2019 Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize, her work has been commissioned and presented by major broadcasters and festivals. Recent projects have focused on creating experiential environments where sound is given a visual as well as sonic dimension. Such works include eyam i-v, a series of five attacca pieces, centered around clarinet and flute writing in various solo, ensemble, electronic, and orchestral settings and spanning just over two hours of music that is continuously transformed in shape, time, and motion around the listener; rinn, a time travel chamber opera involving a multichannel sonic sculpture that the singers and actors wear, interact with, and are amplified by; spatially choreographed chamber pieces such as I should live in wires for leaving you behind, anchor me to the land, and on magnetic fields; a newly-designed instrument that a musician simultaneously wears and plays in eöl; and surface stations, multi-layered theater pieces involving the staging of extended brass instruments, vocal ensemble, and visuals.
Ann is Assistant Professor of Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin. She is an artist-in-residence with Crash Ensemble.
Matana Roberts [they/them] have been called "a major talent" (The Wire) and "the spokesperson for a new, politically conscious and refractory Jazz scene" (Jazzthetik). Their Coin Coin work has been widely and highly praised for its stylistic innovations and narrative power. Noted music critic Peter Margasak has written of Coin Coin: "Memory is a powerful thing, but it's so private, fluid, and unreliable that it can seem almost impossible to capture in a work of art—and history is often no more stable, once you look closely enough. Roberts has succeeded at evoking both, though, and gives [their] audience a long look at something ghostly, tragic, and beautiful. [They are] carving out [their] own aesthetic space, startling in its originality and gripping in its historic and social power."
A self-taught mixed media composer, the Chicago-born Roberts earned two degrees in performance from a smattering of American institutions but received their primary training from free arts programs in the American Public School System.
They are a past member of the Black Rock Coalition (BRC) and The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). They have been a Van Lier Fellow, a Brecht Forum Fellow, a Copeland Fellow, a Jerome fellow, an ICASP fellow, an FCA awardee, and won the Alpert Award In The Arts.
Of their work, Matana says the following: "At my artistic core, I am firmly dedicated to creating a unique and very personal body of sound work that speaks to, and reminds people of all walks of life to reach, stand up, give voice, regardless of difference, created from mere labels of intellectual classification. In my ideal world the idea of 'difference' is an illusion designed only for modern economic division and elitist intellectual hierarchy. Through my life's work, I stand creatively in defiance."
Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects natural influences from urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music, and freely improvised traditions through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities.
She is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, after receiving her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Wang Lu’s works have been performed internationally by ensembles including Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW, Minnesota Orchestra, Boston Lyric Opera, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre National de Lille, Holland Symfonia, Ensemble Recherche, Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Musiques Nouvelles, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Third Sound, Yarn/Wire, The Crossing Choir, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Argento, Aizuri Quartet, New York Virtuoso Singers, Momenta Quartet, violinists Miranda Cuckson, Jennifer Koh, and pianist Shai Wosner, among others.
A 2020 recipient of the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, Wang Lu has also received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (spring 2019 residency) and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and she has received commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard. Wang Lu was the Vanguard Opera Composer in Residence with the Chicago Opera Theater and her chamber opera, The Beekeeper, premiered in 2022. Of her portrait album Urban Inventory, released in March 2018, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker: “I’ve listened at least a dozen times to the composer Wang Lu’s new album, Urban Inventory (New Focus Recordings), and remain happily lost in its riotous maze of ideas and images.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Senem Pirler (she/her) is an intermedia-sound artist whose interdisciplinary work crosses over into sound engineering, sound art, video art, dance, performance, and installation. Born in Turkey, she studied classical piano at Hacettepe State Conservatory and sound engineering & design at Istanbul Technical University (MIAM). She developed her artistry working as a composer and recording engineer before moving to the U.S. in 2010 to study Music Technology on a Fulbright Fellowship. Pirler earned her M.M. in Music Technology on the Stephen F. Temmer Tonmeister Honors Track from NYU Steinhardt and her Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her dissertation’s title was “Disruption, Dis/orientation, and Intra-action: Recipes for Creating a Queer Utopia in Audiovisual Space.” Pirler’s recent work has been exhibited at EMPAC, Roulette, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Montalvo Arts Center, Mount Tremper Arts, and Collar Works, NY. Her work has been recognized by grants, residencies, and awards including most recently PACT Zollverein residency, Signal Culture residency and The Malcolm S. Morse Graduate Research Enhancement Award to honor the work of Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening in 2018. Pirler joined the Bennington College faculty in Fall 2018.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has since cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and performance art.
Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised piece Water On the Bridge. Similarly, Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) uses a shared-circuit synthesizer to articulate parallels between the human and cello body. RESIDUUM (2022), a film made in collaboration with Aliya Ultan, pairs Kleijn’s cello with trash of epic proportions, like 600 feet of Mylar or a dress made of soda cans.
An active musician in classical and contemporary classical spheres, Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble. She has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hague Philharmonic, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented her solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Kleijn’s 2016 world premiere performance of Dai Fujikura’s cello concerto at Lincoln Center was released by SONY Japan. As an improviser, she has collaborated with musicians like Bill MacKay, Ken Vandermark, Macie Stewart, Joe McPhee, Claire Rousay, Caroline Davis, and Damon Locks.
Kleijn is a Drag City recording artist, releasing STIR with Bill MacKay (2019), Momentum 5: Stammer with Ken Vandermark (2021), An Ayler Xmas with Mars Williams (2017), and SINE NOMINE with Mark Feldman (2022).
Monica Duncan is a video and performance artist. Her time-based work investigates the nature of visual perception, audience-performer relations and queer potentiality through camouflage, stillness and collective image-making.
Duncan’s video and performance work has been exhibited at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Hebbel am Ufer HAU1, zeitraumexit, Komuna//Warszawa, The Kitchen, Roulette, Parkhaus Projects, Atlanta Contemporary, Hallwalls, La Casa Encendida, ZKM, LACMA, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, amongst others. She has been a visiting artist at the Atlanta College of Art, Georgia State University, Hunter College, Signal Culture, Experimental Television Center, Scena Robocza (Poznań), PACT Zollverein and the Institute of Electronic Arts.
Duncan received her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego and while on a D.A.A.D fellowship her MA in Choreography and Performance at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Duncan joined the faculty of the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre & Dance at Lehman College-CUNY in Fall 2019.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Wednesday, May 24 at The Kitchen at Westbeth
9 pm: Density part ix (2021-22)
PROGRAM
Craig Taborn: Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms for flutes, clarinet, cello, piano, and electronics* (2022-23) (World Premiere)
Claire Chase, flutes
Joshua Rubin, clarinets
Susie Ibarra, percussion
Craig Taborn, piano, keyboard, and electronics
Levy Lorenzo, sound design
Nicholas Houfek, lighting and production design
*Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University.
Density 2036: part ix is dedicated to George Crumb.
NOTES
The title and initial idea for this piece came from a dream of wandering through some kind of forest or garden and encountering foliage/plants that responded to the proximity of my body- awakening, blossoming, and scenting as I drew near and then continuing to grow and change as I moved on. It was a simple and pleasant dream, but as I woke, I could not escape some sense that in our waking human interactions, we work somewhat in this way- awakening and inspiring others in our environment with our proximity and presence. This piece was initiated from the idea of a composition where the performers' interactions condition in a substantive way how the work unfolds.
Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms is a concert-length work for solo flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, and quadraphonic electronics. The performers are positioned in different areas of the performance space. The flute soloist will move physically amongst the other musicians while performing composed and improvised material, initiating various pre-composed duets and ensemble movements, and defining the performance sequence. The ensemble performers will structure the composition and provide the impetus for how the piece unfolds. Improvisation with elements of the composed materials and electronic environments is designed to be interwoven at the soloist's liberty, allowing for many possible sequences/shapes for the piece. The musicians can thus realize each performance within a variety of durations and contexts and also with a variety of ensemble sizes. Ideally, every version will differ while retaining the piece's unique compositional identity.
This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation.
—Craig Taborn
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Stacey-Jo Marine, Production Manager, Density @ 10
Tricia Toliver, Stage Manager, Density @ 10
Jessica Shand, Production and Curatorial Assistant, Density @ 10
Matthew Lyons, Curator, The Kitchen
Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant, The Kitchen
Zack Tinkelman, Former Production Manager, The Kitchen
Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen
Randi Rivera, Interim Production Manger, The Kitchen
Al Foote, Videographer
Howard Silver, Videographer
Jennifer Karner, Videographer
Walter Wlodarcyzk, Photographer
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Born in Minneapolis, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty-five years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations, including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise, and avant-garde contexts.
He has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music, and electronic music, including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Steve Coleman, David Torn, Chris Potter, William Parker, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, Ikue Mori, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Dan Weiss, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver, and Rudresh Mahanthappa.
He is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel and the newly released Shadow Plays), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts), and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith; he has also done piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus), and Cory Smythe. In addition, he makes music as a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley Is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Joshua Nathan Rubin served as the Program Director and then Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble from 2011-2018, where he oversaw the creative direction of more than one hundred concerts per season in the United States and abroad. As a clarinetist, the New York Times has praised him as, "incapable of playing an inexpressive note." His interest in electronic music has led him to work to make technologies easier to use for both composers and performers, and to build platforms for the collective management of ensembles.
He has collaborated with the foremost composers and performers of our time, and this season is featured in performances on modern and on historical clarinets in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Houston, Geneva, Bergen, and Berlin, at Carnegie Hall, and at the Ojai Music Festival.
Rubin serves on the faculty of the College of Performing Arts at The New School, Ensemble Evolution, and soundSCAPE Festival in Switzerland, teaching clarinet and electronic music.
Joshua holds degrees in Biology and Clarinet from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a Master's degree from the Mannes School of Music. He maintains an artistic presence in New York and Los Angeles.
His passion for technology in arts led Joshua to develop LUIGI, management software that is available to ensembles and other arts organizations who value transparency and collective management, as well as his ongoing work to make electronic music technologies easier to use for performers and composers. He maintains an artistic presence in New York and Los Angeles.
Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multi-channel audio installations, recording, and documentary. Many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation, including work to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures such as musika katatubo, advocacy for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters, and collaboration with the Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.
She is a recipient of the Foundation For Contemporary Arts Award in Music/Sound (2022); National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship (2020); United States Artists Fellowship in Music (2019); Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2018); and TED Senior Fellowship (2014).
The title piece of her album Talking Gong (New Focus Recordings 2021) featuring Claire Chase (bass, alto, flute and piccolo) and Alex Peh (piano) was commissioned by SUNY New Paltz when Ibarra was Davenport Composer in Residence 2018. The album is inspired by traditional Filipino southern gong music, Maguindanaon kulintang music and birdsongs of the region.
Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change (2020), a collaboration with glaciologist, geographer, and climate scientist Dr. Michele Koppes, is an acoustic story of human entanglements with a changing climate and landscape derived from field recordings of five global watersheds. The premiere of Water Rhythms was presented by Fine Acts Foundation and TED at Jack Poole Plaza in Vancouver and Innisfree Gardens in Millbrook, NY (2020). It has also been shown at The Countdown Summit in Edinburgh (2021); as part of Nothing Makes Itself at the ARKO Art Center in Seoul (2021); and as a multi-channel sound installation at the Fridman Gallery (2021) and San Francisco Exploratorium (2022).
Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Zildjian Drum Artist.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Thursday, May 25 at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall
7:30pm: Density part x (2022-23)
PROGRAM
Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Ubique for flute, bass flute, contrabass flute, two cellos, piano, and electronics* (2023) (World Premiere)
Claire Chase, flutes
Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods, cellos
Cory Smythe, piano
Levy Lorenzo, live sound
Nicholas Houfek, lighting and production design
Density 2036: part x is dedicated to Ryan Muncy.
NOTES
Ubique lives on the border between enigmatic lyricism and atmospheric distortion. Through a combination of sounds, pitches, and textural nuances, low deep drones envelop lyrical materials and harmonies that breathe in and out of focus throughout the progress of the piece. The flow of the music is primarily guided by continuous expansion and contraction — of various kinds and durations — as it streams with subtle interruptions and frictions but ever moving forward in the overall structure.
The work is inspired by the notion of being everywhere at the same time, an enveloping omnipresence, while simultaneously focusing on details within the density of each particle, echoed in various forms of fragmentation and interruption and in the sustain of certain elements of a sound beyond their natural resonance - throughout the piece, sounds are both reduced to their smallest particles and their atmospheric presence expanded towards the infinite.
As with my music generally, the inspiration is not something I am trying to describe through the music as such – it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere and material of the piece.
Ubique is 50 minutes in duration and is written in 11 parts, for flutes, grand piano, 2 cellos and pre-constructed electronics. The piece was commissioned by the Pnea Foundation, with lead funds from the Cheswatyr Foundation, and Carnegie Hall for Claire Chase’s Density project.
With love, for Claire, Cory, Katinka, Seth and Levy.
© 2023 Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Ubique was co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, The Cheswatyr Foundation, The Pnea Foundation, and Kurt Chauviere.
Claire Chase would like to thank all the Density composers and collaborators, Matthew Lyons at The Kitchen, Liz Mahler at Carnegie Hall, the Music Department at Harvard University, the Pnea Foundation Board of Directors, the Cheswatyr Foundation, Kurt Chauviere, Barbara and Andrew Gundlach, James Egelhofer, Jane M. Saks and Project&, Jennifer Judge, Jenny Lai, Ara Guzelimian, Jessica Shand, Carlos Aguilar, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.
DENSITY 2036 COMPOSERS
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s (b. 1977) “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (NY Times) and striking sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR). Her music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material—it is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired by nature’s structural qualities, like proportion and flow.
Anna’s “detailed and powerful” (Guardian) orchestral writing has garnered her awards from the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, Nordic Council, and Ivors Academy, as well as commissions by many of the world’s top orchestras. CATAMORPHOSIS was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko in January 2021, following the orchestra’s European premiere of METACOSMOS with Alan Gilbert in 2019. It had its US premiere with the New York Philharmonic and Santtu-Matias Rouvali in January 2023.
ARCHORA—the latest addition to Anna’s “ever-growing and ever more essential catalogue of orchestral pieces” (BBC Radio 3)—was premiered at the BBC Proms in August 2022, by the BBC Philharmonic and Eva Ollikainen, and receives its US premiere with the LA Philharmonic in May 2023. And “while [she] has made the symphony orchestra her own,” according to Gramophone Magazine, “her chamber music is cut from the same cloth and somehow sounds with much the same combination of immensity and intimacy.” Anna’s newest portrait album, the world premiere recordings of ARCHORA and AIŌN, is out on Sono Luminus on May 26. The world premiere recording of CATAMORPHOSIS will also be released by Sono Luminus this spring.
Anna is currently based in London. In 2023, she will be in residence at the Aldeburgh Festival and Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California in San Diego.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org.
Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.
From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has since cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and performance art.
Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised piece Water On the Bridge. Similarly, Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) uses a shared-circuit synthesizer to articulate parallels between the human and cello body. RESIDUUM (2022), a film made in collaboration with Aliya Ultan, pairs Kleijn’s cello with trash of epic proportions, like 600 feet of Mylar or a dress made of soda cans.
An active musician in classical and contemporary classical spheres, Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble. She has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hague Philharmonic, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented her solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Kleijn’s 2016 world premiere performance of Dai Fujikura’s cello concerto at Lincoln Center was released by SONY Japan. As an improviser, she has collaborated with musicians like Bill MacKay, Ken Vandermark, Macie Stewart, Joe McPhee, Claire Rousay, Caroline Davis, and Damon Locks.
Kleijn is a Drag City recording artist, releasing STIR with Bill MacKay (2019), Momentum 5: Stammer with Ken Vandermark (2021), An Ayler Xmas with Mars Williams (2017), and SINE NOMINE with Mark Feldman (2022).
Hailed by The Guardian as “a cellist of power and grace” who possesses “mature artistry and willingness to go to the brink,” Grammy-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres. His projects delve deep into our cultural fabric, reimagining traditional works and commissioning new ones to propel classical music into the future, inspiring The New York Times to write, “Woods is an artist rooted in classical music, but whose cello is a vehicle that takes him, and his concertgoers, on wide-ranging journeys.” He is a recipient of the 2022 Chamber Music America Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.
Woods recently joined the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California as Assistant Professor of Practice - Cello and Chamber Music. He previously served on the faculties of the University at Buffalo, University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, and the Chicago Academy of the Arts and as Artist in Residence at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and Northwestern University - Center for New Music. Woods holds degrees from Brooklyn College, Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, and a Ph.D. from the University of Huddersfield. In the 2020-21 season, he was an Artist in Residence with the Kaufman Music Center, and from 2018-2020 he served as Artist in Residence with Seattle Symphony and Creative Consultant for the interactive concert hall, Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center.
Seth Parker Woods is a Pirastro Artist and endorses Pirastro Perpetual Strings worldwide.
Pianist Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including saxophonist-composer Ingrid Laubrock, violinist Hilary Hahn, and multidisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader), and his first record was praised by Jason Moran as “hands down one of the best solo recordings I’ve ever heard.” Smythe has been featured at the Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, Trondheim Chamber Music, Nordic Music Days, Approximation, Concorso Busoni, and Darmstadt festivals, as well as at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, where he was recently invited to premiere new work created in collaboration with Peter Evans and Craig Taborn. He has received commissions from Milwaukee’s Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member, and the Shifting Foundation. Smythe received a Grammy award for his work with Ms. Hahn and plays regularly in the critically acclaimed Tyshawn Sorey Trio.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. Called an “electronics wizard” by The New York Times, his international body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble, he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the New York Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Levy earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Nicholas Houfek (he/him) is an NYC-based lighting designer. Frequent and recent collaborations include: International Contemporary Ensemble, Marcos Balter’s Oyá with the New York Philharmonic, Natalie Merchant, Claire Chase, Ojai Music Festival, Silk Road Ensemble, John Kelly's Underneath the Skin, Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler, Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things, Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte, George Lewis’ Soundlines, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air, and Ash Fure’s The Force of Things. Recent creations include the ColorSynth and other applications of live lighting for performance. Excerpts of Instructions for Lighting can be read at commonwelljournal.com and will be in the first print edition released September 2023. Mr. Houfek is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.