Keeril Makan Either/Or

Miller Theatre at Columbia University 2014-15 | 26th Season Composer Portraits Keeril Makan Either/Or Friday, December 5, 8:00 p.m. From the Executive Director It’s hard to believe that it’s December, and time for the final performances of 2014! These past few months have been an amazing time at Miller Theatre. We started the season strong with a sold-out Opening Night featuring eighth blackbird, where we were joined by more than 275 student audience members—many experiencing their first new-music performance. Next, we welcomed over 375 community members to Miller for a week of lantern- making workshops during the third annual Morningside Lights, and over 1,000 people joined us for the illuminated procession through Morningside Park. Morningside Lights has fast become a beloved neighborhood tradition, and it’s just one of the ways that Miller is committed to sharing the arts with our community. Last year, almost 700 people joined us for free Pop-Up Concerts, enjoying new music and complimentary drinks. This spring, Pop-Up Concerts are back, with four new performances just announced today! Tonight, you’ll hear the world premiere performance of Keeril Makan’s newest work, one of more than 40 world premieres that Miller Theatre has presented in the last five seasons. We make it a priority to expand the contemporary repertoire by commissioning new works as often as we can. During my tenure, it’s been an honor to commission 11 composers and two visual artists: nine for Composer Portraits, two for the Early Music series, and two site-specific murals for the Miller Theatre lobby. If you value the work that we do, please make a donation to support Miller today. Big or small, your gift matters a lot. Miller has no programming endowment, so we rely on support from friends like you to keep the music going for everyone. You may have received a letter from me recently, asking for your support. If you’ve already given to Miller Theatre, thank you. On behalf of all of us, we appreciate your generosity. Melissa Smey Executive Director Miller Theatre at Columbia University 2014-15 | 26th Season Composer Portraits Friday, December 5, 8:00 p.m. Keeril Makan Either/Or Keeril Makan (b. 1972) If We Knew The Sky (2014) world premiere Richard Carrick, conductor Onstage discussion with Keeril Makan and Richard Carrick INTERMISSION Letting Time Circle Through Us (2013) New York premiere Jennifer Choi, violin Dan Lippel, guitar Russell Greenberg, percussion John Popham, cello Taka Kigawa, piano David Shively, cimbalom This program runs approximately ninety minutes, including intermission. Major support for Composer Portraits is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. Please note that photography and the use of recording devices are not permitted. Remember to turn off all cellular phones and pagers before tonight’s performance begins. Miller Theatre is ADA accessible. Large print programs are available upon request. For more information or to arrange accommodations, please call 212-854-7799. About the Program Introduction Probably if there is one central thing, even more than the love of sound, it is the love of performance. —Keeril Makan Keeril Makan was born in New Jersey in 1972, to parents of South-African Indian and Russian Jewish origin. He played the violin as a boy, and grew up surrounded by diverse musical cultures—Western classical, Indian classical, blues, rock—from which he was later to form his own, not by patching together so much as by stripping down, finding common basics, and building up again. Those common basics naturally include the act of performance, and communication by way of performance, but they also embrace principles within the sonic material: most notably, regularity and resonance. Five seconds of almost any Makan composition will show these features, as pulse and as a bloom of partials on the sound, whether this bloom comes directly from an instrument or from reverberation within the performance space. A classic example is his solo percussion piece Resonance Alloy of 2007, where rapidly repeating strokes, moving over a small array of metal instruments, generate a shifting cloud of hovering sound that moves on slowly through half an hour. This extraordinary piece is, though, a special case. Makan’s music is generally more impatient, more dynamic, ricocheting in several dimensions between sameness and difference. Take2 , for violin and percussion, which was his breakthrough achievement, dating back to 1998. It starts with the two components locked together reiterating one sound, with a glow of metal resonance on it. (Afterglow is the very appropriate title of a solo piano piece that, coming from the same year as Resonance Alloy, also has to do with resonant effects caused by repetition.) Regularity in Makan’s music, though, is always going to hit up against irregularity. In the case of 2, the instruments stop, and then they go on again, but not for so long. Other things change, and what you thought was the music comes to seem like the obstacle to the music, which is emerging now as something less regular—though only to become in turn regular, and the obstacle to some other music. Eventually there arrives a lament, which, in terms of sources, could be Scottish or Chinese, but which also, in its registration for violin and echoing percussion, sounds like nothing else. Here one might recognize how “resonance” has another meaning, how the music resonates not only in itself but with traditions beyond. References are not sought; rather, they spring to life as sympathetic vibrations, and might well be different for different listeners. When he wrote this piece, Makan was still a student, on the doctoral program at U. C. Berkeley, where his teachers included Edmund Campion, Jorge Liderman, and David Wessel. He completed his doctorate in 2004, after spending a year in Finland and two in France, and began his teaching career at the University of Illinois. Two years later, he moved to M. I. T. Makan has composed an opera, Persona, to a libretto by Jay Scheib after the Ingmar Bergman film, but most of his output so far has been for instrumental resources. Ensembles for which he has written—besides tonight’s group— include the American Composers Orchestra (Dream Lightly, with solo electric guitar, played at Carnegie Hall just over six years ago), the Scharoun Ensemble of Berlin, California EAR Unit, and the Del Sol, Kronos, and Pacifica string quartets. There are albums devoted to his work on Tzadik (Kronos Quartet and Paul Dresher Ensemble), Starkland (Either/Or), and mode (ICE). If We Knew The Sky (2014) Makan’s new piece is music of grand gyrations, like the composition that will follow after intermission, but this time for a larger ensemble—of woodwind, brass, and string soloists with two xylophones and a harp—completing its course in about half the time: under half an hour. This is also another of Makan’s great titles. If we knew the sky, then what? Yes, we might want to agree, there is nothing more unknown and unknowable than the sky, which is always there and always different, and which our gaze tends to ignore in favor of what is, like us, earthbound. But then what? The proposition is left off halfway, open. Setting the work in motion, the two vibraphones shake a low-middle G sharp, one of them in even eighth-notes but with irregular accents, which the other reinforces, the dynamic level increasing in steps. The music is initiatory, waiting for something to happen, and eventually something does. A fundamental A is established by the two About the Program low string instruments, and the work begins to unfold its most characteristic texture: progressions of parallel, exquisitely dissonant chords, sometimes rotating on more than one temporal level, here more or less ignoring louder octaves. F sharps, on the vibraphones and harp, set a new fundamental, over which a new process of growth starts. Some way into this a rising scale figure is introduced, a memento fromLetting Time Circle Through Us. This brings us to about a quarter of the way through the piece, and most of the constituents are in place—but not all. For, while sharing something of the cyclical nature of its predecessor, If We Knew The Sky also keeps turning in new directions, perhaps not so much a circle as a helix. Different aspects and different energies are encountered in this steady, exploratory motion, and though tremulant eighth-note repercussions recur, they are never as they were at the beginning, being altered in position, instrumentation, and speed. Much of the piece has all the instruments in play in music of buoyancy and drive, after which, when the eighth-note impulses come back, they are transformed, and they signal something quite different. Letting Time Circle Through Us (2013) Playing for almost fifty minutes, this piece was composed in 2013 as a commission from Either/Or, which gave the first performance eight months ago at M. I. T. It is by some way Makan’s longest work to date, excepting only his opera Persona, which he completed the year before. It is also a beautiful, serene, and yet at the same time electric adventure into a time world of sweeping rotations within an essential changelessness— of movement where there is no movement. This stillness of imminence he had found before in parts of works (the opening of his 2007 string quartet Washed by Fire, for instance), but never for so long. Listening to it here, we may well feel ourselves in the presence of time circling through us.

Load more