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Program 1 Notes I/O Fest 2012 Thursday, January 5, 8 pm You Are Here some notes on the program Casey McLellan Casey McLellan, a student of music and chemistry at Williams College, wanted more than anything to be a critically acclaimed executive chef. However, her ambitions changed drastically during a viewing of John Cage’s 27 Sounds Manufactured in a Kitchen, when she realized that being an experimental composer would be much more fun. Fusing her love of percussion performance and experimental music, she attended the So Percussion Summer Institute last summer and hopes to receive the Atlantic Music Festival Contemporary Ensemble Fellowship for this coming summer. Born and raised in the sunny paradise of South Florida, Casey enjoys watching the Food Network and living vicariously. The vast majority of music that is performed in today’s concert halls starts off as a notated score using either traditional or graphic notation before it is realized by the musicians in the concert. A Seemingly Meaningless Sequence relays the musical information to the performers using audible material in the form of recorded speech and sound rather than a visual score. The similarity between these two approaches is that the audience is usually not aware of the musical notation and its connection to the final performance. In both cases the musician synthesizes the given information to produce music. The transfer of meaning from spoken words to metallic pitches in this piece transforms the unheard monologue to a sound environment that retains little, if any, of the original meaning. A new significance can be found in the sounds themselves, as if one was listening to a foreign language rather than meaningless noises. - Casey McLellan Mauricio Kagel German-Argentinean composer Mauricio Kagel is best known for his theatrical compositions, which emphasize his belief that music can only be properly experienced in a live format. His Fanfanfaren is a collection of twelve small movements for four trumpets. They are not meant to be performed in any specific order, nor are they designed as a complete set, necessarily. Many of the musical specifications are given as suggestions, to be freely changed/interpreted by the artist (such as mute usage, stage setup, and even the key of each movement). Lukas Ligeti Born in Vienna, Austria, Lukas Ligeti studied composition and percussion at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, spent two years at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, and has lived in New York City since 1998. His commissions include those from Bang on a Can, the Vienna Festwochen, Ensemble Modern, Kronos Quartet, the American Composers Orchestra, ORF Austrian Broadcasting Company, Radio France, Armitage Gone! Dance, and others. As a drummer, he co-leads several bands and has performed and/or recorded with John Zorn, Henry Kaiser, Raoul Björkenheim, Gary Lucas, Michael Manring, Marilyn Crispell, Jim O’Rourke, John Tchicai, and many others. He performs frequently on electronic percussion using the marimba lumina, an instrument invented by California engineer Don Buchla. His compositions are featured on 2 CDs on the Tzadik label. Since 1994, he has worked on intercultural collaborative projects, mainly in Africa. He co-founded the experimental ensemble Beta Foly in Côte d’Ivoire, leading to the release of his first CD, Lukas Ligeti & Beta Foly, in 1997, and has also collaborated with traditional musicians, dancers, and other artists in Florida, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Uganda. He has been composer-in-residence at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has taught composition at the University of Ghana. Lukas’ band Burkina Electric, based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, combines African traditions with electronic dance music and tours internationally. Their debut CD, “Paspanga”, was released in 2010 on Cantaloupe Records. Lukas Ligeti has received numerous awards and recognitions, most notable among them the 2010 California Institute of the Arts Alpert Award in Music. For more information, please see www.lukasligeti.com. Pattern Transformation is one of the first pieces I ever composed, and is certainly the first in which I began to find a voice of my own. Inspired by the metric structure of Baganda court music, from a region today situated in Uganda, I set out developing new forms of interplay between musicians in an ensemble. Based on a fast fundamental pulse, different musicians feel the “beat” at different moments, and this relative notion of meter opens the door to endless polyrhythmic possibilities, giving the music a 3- dimensional quality, akin to looking at a sculpture from different sides. When I initially wrote Pattern Transformation, I believed it to be impossible to play; it is no coincidence that the piece was championed by the Amadinda Percussion Group, an ensemble from Hungary that named itself after the amadinda xylophone, one of the principle instruments of Baganda music, and has mastered the rhythmic techniques of the tradition. For me, this piece was the beginning of a path of exploration of polymetrics which continues to this day and has become one of my main areas on interest as a composer. I wrote Tangle (commissioned by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust) for percussionist Colin Currie and trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger, two virtuosos of the highest order, and the technical and musical complexities of the piece reflect this: I attempted to write music of sonic, timbral beauty while stretching the limits of what is possible on these instruments. The trumpet part spans a wide variety of sounds, from a classical timbre to ways of imitating electronics. During the second half of the piece, the percussion part at times employs a polymetric playing technique that gives the impression of several tempos at the same time; in reality, the percussionist plays patterns derived from organic ways of moving the arms and hands around an assemblage of various instruments. Mostly, however, trumpet and percussion play together in tight interaction; their timbres modulate gradually and in tandem and their phrases complement each other, each one starting where the other can no longer go on. The players phrase and breathe together, the flow of air and of the limbs determining the shape of melodies and the interaction between the instruments, creating harmony between their vastly different ways of producing sound. - Lukas Ligeti Ileana Perez Velázquez Ileana Perez Velázquez‘s music has been featured in numerous national and international festivals in the USA, South and Central America, Europe and the Middle East and has been performed by numerous performers and ensembles. Recording of her compositions have been released by Albany Records and Innova. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Music Department at Williams College. Naturaleza Viva was written for Orlando Cela. I enjoy writing for solo wind instruments creating an implied polyphony by the alternation of different registers and rhythmic patterns. This concept of implied polyphony is further “amplified” with the use of multiphonics and extended techniques that Orlando masters so wonderfully. Since I was writing this piece to be premiered at the I/O Festival, I was also remembering our friend and colleague Steve Bodner, hence the title of Naturaleza Viva and the character of the piece – it is a celebration of nature, its cycles of life, and of all that it is within us, and our actions that will remain alive even when we are not physically present. - Ileana Perez Velázquez Hong-Da Chin Hong-Da Chin graduated from Yu Hua Secondary School in 2002. Chin studied both Chinese bamboo flute and western flute with Mr. Kah-Hoe Yii from 1997 – 2002. As a composer, some recent commissions include a flute duet commissioned by Ms. Jennifer Keeney to be premiered in 2012. Also, Lost Sound for violin and marimba was commissioned by AURA Contemporary Ensemble, a student ensemble directed by Dr. Rob Smith, after winning the Sarofim Composition Contest. Most recently, Chin’s Conversations between Wind and Water for flute solo was selected as one of the winning pieces for flutist Orlando Cela’s recording project “Extended.” Chin is currently a Moritz von Bomhard fellow studying composition with Dr. Steve Rouse and flute with Ms. Kathy Karr at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. I have long been passionate and enthusiastic about nature. As a flutist, the sounds of wind and water have been my targets of imitation. Through Conversations Between Wind and Water, I used the sound of flute to imitate the sounds of wind and water with as many extended techniques as I could possibly use. - Hong-Da Chin Laone Thekiso Laone Thekiso began officially composing in the fall of his second year at Williams College. Prior to that, he had written a few pieces for marimba band, as well as transcribing and arranging music for a production of “Sarafina” while at home in Botswana. Currently in his final year at Williams, he hopes to go onto graduate school for composition next year, and piano performance the year after. He also has an interest in ethnomusicology, as a result of his work with the Zimbabwean Marimba while at Williams. I first conceived of Music for Marimba while sitting awake on the long eighteen-hour flight home at the end of my junior year at college. I was interested in composing a piece that fully and comprehensively utilized the chromatic capabilities of the Zimbabwean marimbas at Williams College, as well as challenging the players in a way that the traditional repertoire may not often do. When composing the prelude I decided early on that I would employ a non-strict fugue form, using a tonal (yet not completely tonal) harmonic language. By the end of the summer the piece was half-finished and remained that way for most of the fall semester.
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