Nathan Lincoln-Decusatis
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OBLIVION — Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis WIDE OPEN SPACES — Armando Bayolo Oblivion is a chamber symphony in three movements that continues the trend in my music that transitions While I certainly respect our natural world, I have never, save for a brief period in my childhood when I from inner psychological narratives towards a more outward-gazing contemplation of the external world. belonged to the Boy Scouts of America, been a recreational nature lover. So, when Bill Ryan approached As I was composing this piece in late 2013 I was finally coming to terms with the role of the creative me to write a short piece based on our National Parks for a tour by his Grand Valley State University New musician in what we may one day call The Mid-to-Late Internet Age. The already uneasy relationship Music Ensemble, I took on the task with a bit of trepidation. Not long after receiving the commission from between commerce and musical expression seems to have finally ruptured into a chaotic state where the Bill, however, I heard National Parks Service director Jonathan Jarvis speaking on public radio about the kinds of concrete experiences of music in concert halls, record stores and meticulously organized CD impact of climate change on our National Parks. I decided, then, to compose a work that addressed these collections, etc., has become sublimated into a digital cloud, always present at your command but never concerns. really there – like trying to tie down your own shadow. I had the horrifying realization recently that if my Wide Open Spaces is cast in three sections. The first aims to evoke the feelings of a walk in the woods with computer suddenly ceased to function, most of my music, by extension, would be gone with it now that an expansive passacaglia in the piano and vibraphone, over which the flute and bass clarinet sing a plaintive all the CDs and records I’ve gathered over the years are stored in boxes in the closet, outmoded by the melody. After some time, this gives way to a melody in the cello which, rather than lead to a contrasting “B” seductive convenience of digital files. Now I’m starting to miss this “old media” and the way it affects section is, instead, interrupted all too soon by the pervasive and increasingly unavoidable sound of an F# my listening habits – saving up money, carefully choosing the next record for my collection, giving it my which has been sounding, quietly, from the very beginning of the piece and gradually taking over the texture: complete attention, and then the feeling over time like the music becomes part of the fabric of my own the proverbial elephant in the room. Nothing but the F# is heard in the next section, “Waste Land,” which unique musical personality with a worn-out, cracked jewel case as a kind of artifact of that process. As I’m suggests barren emptiness as the result of inaction at the changes visible in the world around us. The piece dusting off the old-fashioned record collection I’m asking myself: How much of the music I listen to on a ends with a “Marche au supplice” (a march to the scaffold) over the F# drone, representing our mindless daily basis actually belongs to me the way these old records belong to me, and how much is just an illusion motion towards environmental catastrophe. of ownership sustained by the constant presence of the mp3 cloud floating overhead? In this disorganized, Wide Open Spaces was written in Alexandria, Virginia and Chicago, Illinois in June, 2013. It was hyperactive, Deleuzian listening environment, how can the individual voice of the composer break through commissioned by Bill Ryan and Grand Valley State University and is dedicated to Bill Ryan and the GVSU the static to communicate with a sympathetic listener? These are the questions that Oblivion explores New Music Ensemble. through a sonic narrative that travels between the concrete and the abstract, the physical and the cerebral, the human and the machine, the real and the illusory. BLACK BEND — Dan Visconti The three movements of the symphony are each modeled on a specific sonic shape. The first movement, Ex Black Bend begins with a spacious collage of distant, mournful sounds with the flavor of limpid summer Machina, is a straight arrow, propelled by mechanistic repeated notes that thread throughout the movement. landscapes and the slow drawl of rural vernacular; from this texture a slow blues emerges and accelerates Beginning with the entire orchestra on or around A 440 (the traditional tuning note), the piece slowly unfolds in a wailing frenzy, only to dissolve into nothing as quickly as it materialized. through several tableaux including sections of light chatter, muscular polyrhythms, brittle nattering, and a few tidal waves of sound that eventually recede back to the opening repeated-note gesture. The ending This imagery was inspired, in part, by certain local legends surrounding the collapse of a railroad bridge is the most connected to my music-as-illusory-cloud allegory: the repeated-note mechanism slowly over a meandering stretch of the Cuyahoga River. While I don’t particularly believe in ghost stories, the deteriorates into non-pitched sounds of stopped strings, key-clicks, and muted piano creating a sensation thought of the deceased victims’ eerie moans rising up from the river suggested to me the painful, almost of erosion into the distance. supernatural power of expression which often inhabits the voice of the blues singer, and I reacted to the emotional complexity of the story with a musical language flagrantly lifted from the American blues If Ex Machina is a straight line, then Into Thin Air is a circular, timeless movement. Long held notes tradition but persistently shrouded in an ominous aura that foreshadows the inevitable conclusion: a train throughout the orchestra create a hazy tapestry against a lament in the English horn that for me represents accelerating out of control and careening into an abyss. the singular human element of the composer’s voice against calling out against background static in the orchestra. The overall sensation is one of constant evaporation – harmonic glissandi, sul ponticello Black Bend was originally commissioned by the Cleveland Museum of Art and first presented in a version whorls, the omnipresent upper-register diatonic shards in the piano and harp that continually rise into for string quartet; the present orchestra version was made possible with a Composer Assistance Grant from nothing. Towards the end, the orchestra tries to surge out of this Nietzschean time-circle only to crash back the American Music Center and premiered at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. down to the same static sound cloud shaded into a minor-esque ambience. In this movement I wanted to metaphorically evoke the actual phenomena of sound itself as moving air particles in the spectral voicings of the harmonies, the use of natural harmonics in the strings and harp, and engaging the overtone series as WORDLESS CREATURES — Julia Adolphe a kind of phantom chord-scale that lurks behind the counterpoint. Wordless Creatures, for mixed ensemble, imagines a community of small, scurrying characters. They move The final movement, The Reckoning, merges the straight line and the circle into a their logical combination: through a series of scenes, portrayed through shifting soundscapes of color and texture. While there is no a spiral. The swirling arpeggio gestures in this movement seem to always slip past the ear before they set story, different combinations of instruments capture certain dispositions. The clarinet and piano juggle can be pinned down – and here we’ve reached this piece’s final evolution from mechanized physicality (Ex the main motif, an active, jittery gesture that permeates the environment. They dance against a glittering Machina), evaporation (Into Thin Air), and now the downward spiral: sound sliding through space like a background, an atmospheric sound world colored by the harp, vibraphone, and strings. A third character, mirage, or a shadow of itself, perched on the edge of oblivion. The ending gesture was probably rewritten that of the trumpet, functions as a mediator, a voice of reason that inserts itself into the texture and tries to about fifty times as I swung between differing opinions on how I felt about the outcome of this narrative. stabilize the music’s harmonic language. Bamboo wind chimes strike during periods of agitation while glass But the very fact that you are reading these words means that you are listening to a album you bought, or wind chimes smooth the surface and restore calm. you are sitting at a live concert, both of which constitute a small victory over the disillusion of music into Musically, Wordless Creatures is an exploration of short, dislocated motifs – a furtive, slightly aggressive disembodied cloud commodity. So the last six pounding E-flats (the opposite end of pitch-space from the gesture with a kick juxtaposed with a soft, lyrical, expanding line. These two ideas “argue” and attempt opening A) marked “snarling; defiant,” represent a kind of refusal to sink away into oblivion, but to rush out of it into the daylight and say “We are still here, now listen:…..” to control, embrace, or synthesize one another. The colors and temperatures shift like a kaleidoscope, highlighting certain instruments for brief moments in time before moving onto the next. Like musicians in their element, the creatures portrayed in this piece do not communicate with words. They express their dreams, fears, and triumphs through an unknown language that we can only intuit. Wordless Creatures grapples PERFORMERS with the fleeting nature of sound, the ephemeral quality of music, and strives to capture the beauty of disappearance.