Program Notes

By Lisa Bielawa

One of the greatest perks of being the Composer in Residence with BMOP in particular is that the players themselves are already deeply connected to new music, and are already forging vital relationships with composers. The Club Concerts are going to be the "lab" for my collaboration with the players over the next few years, in two ways: the Synopses Project will enable me to write solo works expressly for BMOP players, one at a time, intensively; and Co-Curating the Club Concerts with the players will enrich the new music community that we all inhabit, because each of us brings different networks, experiences and colleagues to the table in the process. This first concert has been a dynamic kick-off to both of these collaborative tracks.

My initial program ideas arose out of an irony: I am hosting these club concerts, but it is the players who are native Bostonians, and I feel like their guest! How can I contribute to this community if I am new here myself? But then I realized - I know many composers, from all different places. I come to curating primarily through my background as one of the Founders and Artistic Directors of the MATA Festival in New York. Each year we produce a week-long festival of works by young composers, culled from an annual search of over 200 submissions from all over the world. Many of the composers that have appeared on the MATA Festival have since become close friends and colleagues. It is a pleasure to follow their careers, especially now that our young composers' festival has alums that are reaching mid-career, and thriving. Which of these, I asked myself, have a significant connection to the Boston area?

Several wonderful answers jumped to mind. I met Keeril Makan when his 2 was chosen for the MATA Festival in 2002. He has just joined the faculty at MIT this year. Keeril's work is conceptually elegant, always taking into the account the listener's experience of dramatic shape over time. The temporal architecture of his pieces reminds me of the time in history when architects first discovered how to make large indoor spaces through the use of buttressing and beams. Expansive and elegant, wrought with superb technique and sensitivity, Keeril's pieces allow us to experience bigger spaces than we knew possible, while luxuriating in timbral details at every moment along the way. And in fact, at 17 minutes, 2 is the cathedral of our Club Concert tonight.

Daniel Felsenfeld was on the 2003 MATA Festival, shortly after he came to New York after being in Boston at NEC for a number of years. I had heard from Danny that he had a short virtuoso violin piece that had been played only once (on Radio Cologne by the violinist Carolyn Widmann as part of her Yehudi Menhuin competition prize recital), and that he had missed his flight from Boston and, consequently, the premiere. In his own words, "as I've never been able to get hold of the tape of that performance, tonight's version is, as far as I am concerned, the World Premiere. I've always admired Gabriella Diaz as a musician and friend, and I can think of no better person to properly introduce Air That Kills to the world." References abound: a tip-of-the-hat to Elvis Costello in the musical material; the title is taken from an A.E. Houseman poem; and a nostalgic reference in the concept of the piece itself to Los Angeles, where Danny grew up in the smog.

Having brought in a composer who has just entered Boston musical life, and one who was a vital part of it through his fertile student years, I thought it would be great to include a composer who was born and bred here, Gordon Beeferman. An accomplished pianist and improviser as well as a composer, Gordon was the first young musician to do a free improvisation as his MATA Festival debut in 2003. In 2005 he wrote West of Winter for me to sing and for his collaborator Anita Cheng to choreograph. You will hear four of me (three on CD!), and there were four dancers as well. As I learned the piece, I felt that it was written not just for my voice but also expressly for my own intellectual fascinations. Gordon's whimsical music has, for me, a performer-ly, physical logic that shows me first-hand how deeply organic his ideas are.

Like Gordon, Aaron Trant is a performer-improviser-composer hybrid, and when it was clear that we had four performers assembled for this concert, Sarah suggested that we perform his three studies in improvisation collectively entitled Dictit. Aaron explains to us, "Movement I, Twelve Tone, is to be played through three times. The first time player one plays the written music while player two improvises on the given tone row. The second time player two plays the written portion while player one improvises on the tone row. The last time has both players playing the written parts. Movement II, Rhythm, is to be played through one time. Rhythms are strict but pitches and sounds are improvised." The last movement, Graphic, is just as it sounds: an improvised response to a visual stimulus.

Sarah and Aaron brought two other works to this program from their own repertoire as Primary Duo: Roshanne Etezady's Unsafe (at Any Speed) and Jocelyn Morlock's Quoi???. I was delighted to hear that Roshanne's music was known to them, since she was one of the 2003 MATA Festival Commissionees. Roshanne's music has a driving energy that is both edgy and welcoming: "Rumbling, relentless…angular…jagged…shiny…pulsing…irrepressible" are the words she uses to talk about the colorful musical world of this piece.

Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock muses on her bilingual fascination with the word "Quoi," with all of its particular sonic and conceptual openness in the French language: "It is a much more open-ended word than 'what,' a word which sounds like even though you're asking, you've already made up your mind." I am grateful to Sarah and Aaron for introducing me to a composer and a piece that are entirely new to me.

I am also grateful to them for being my first two Synopsis Subjects. These two Synopses are the first of a proposed set of around 20 pieces that I will write over the course of my residency with BMOP, as a way to get to know the individual players. By the time I complete the Concerto for Orchestra that BMOP will premiere in May 2009, I will have written solo pieces for half the orchestra. These little pieces may also serve as studies or sketches - some of these ideas may show up in the big piece. For now, I am enjoying the exercise of writing each Synopsis in just one week, while I am in residence in Boston. I'm also enjoying giving each of them a six-word title, out of affection for Ernest Hemingway, who purportedly enjoyed writing six-word stories as much as I enjoy writing 2-3-minute pieces. Synopsis #1: It's Over (But It Was Fun) for Sarah Bob was written October 24-31, and Synopsis #2: In the Eye of the Beholder for Aaron Trant was written November 1-5.

ARTISTS

Sarah Bob, piano, hailed as "sumptuous and eloquent" by The Boston Globe, is an active soloist and chamber musician noted for her colorful playing and diverse programming. A strong advocate for new music and considered a "trailblazer when it comes to championing the works of modern composers and combining art media in the process..." (Northeast Performer), she is also the founding director of the New Gallery Concert Series, a series devoted to commissioning and uniting new music and contemporary visual art with their creators. She is an original member of many ensembles including her piano/percussion group, Primary Duo, the 20th and 21st century focused Firebird Ensemble, and Radius Ensemble, a fresh and creative chamber music collective that presents both the traditional and cutting edge. Ms. Bob often plays with Ann Arbor's Phoenix Ensemble and recently made her Carnegie Hall debut with soprano, Caprice Corona in April 2005. Recognized as a risk taker and cited for an "ideal combination of all-stops-out abandon and sure-footed technical control" by 21st Century Music, she is a grant recipient of the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music and top prizewinner of the International Gaudeamus Competition 2001. She is also the recent recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation's 2005 Grant-in-Aid Award, an honor that recognizes the quality of her work and artistic merit. Ms. Bob presently resides in Boston and can be heard playing the music of Lee Hyla on the Tzadik label and Curtis K. Hughes on Cauchemar Records.

Gabriela Diaz, violin, began her musical training at the age of five, studying piano with her mother, and the next year, violin with her father. Shortly before her sixteenth birthday, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease, a type of lymphatic cancer. As a cancer survivor, Ms. Diaz is committed to cancer research and treatment. She has lent her talents to a wide range of related programs and organizations, including the American Cancer Society, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Hasbro Children's Hospital, Beth Israel Hospital, Mount Auburn Hospital, The Race for the Cure, OnCare, Inc., the Columbus Medical Center, and the Egleston Children's Hospital at Emory University in Atlanta. In 2004 Ms. Diaz was a recipient of a grant from the Albert Schweitzer Foundation. This grant enabled Ms. Diaz to begin organizing a series of chamber music concerts in cancer units at various hospitals in Boston called the Boston Hope Ensemble. In addition to these hospital concerts, Ms. Diaz organized two benefit concerts for cancer research organizations.
 
Ms. Diaz has attended the Aspen Music Festival, the Sarasota Music Festival, and has performed at the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, and Vail Valley Bravo Music Festival, among others. In 2003 she won the BMOP/NEC concerto competition, and performed John Zorn's Contes des Fees with the orchestra. She also became the youngest person to ever record the Ligeti violin concerto, recorded for Mode Records with New England Conservatory's Contemporary Ensemble. Ms. Diaz received her Bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, studying with James Buswell. At graduation, she was awarded the John Cage Award for her contribution to new music, and the Chadwick Medal, the highest award bestowed on undergraduates at NEC. She recently completed her second year of Master's study at NEC.

Aaron Trant, percussion, deemed by 21st Century Music as a "fire-breathing" percussionist, is both an active performer and composer. Cited for his "melodic, if unpitched, voice" (Spendidzine), he has also received great acclaim for his original score and solo percussion performance of the Christ Marker film, La Jetée. His eclectic knowledge of classical, jazz, rock, contemporary and improvised music has made him an asset to many ensembles throughout the United States. Mr. Trant is the cofounder, performer and composer for the After Quartet, one of the few groups dedicated to the art of live musical accompaniment of silent film. He is also the assistant director and percussionist for the Boston based group Firebird Ensemble, a new music chamber group. Mr. Trant is an original member of Primary Duo, for piano and percussion (Boston); Endy Emby for trumpet and percussion, the Adam James Wilson Quintet (NYC); High Street Percussion (Miami, Florida); and the frequently touring group Cordis. He also performs regularly with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Fromm Players at Harvard, and with the new music group Alarm Will Sound. Mr. Trant has been seen in a variety of concert venues including Carnegie Hall, Jordan Hall, and Mexico's Palacio de Bellas Artes. Now residing in Boston, Mr. Trant can be heard on the Boiled Jar, Cauchemar, Nepenthe and Stone Quarry labels.

Lisa Bielawa, composer-vocalist, is Composer in Residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Her three-year residency, which will yield several new works and culminate in a recording of her orchestral music, is part of Music Alive, a joint program of Meet The Composer and the American Symphony Orchestra League. Ms. Bielawa has appeared as vocalist in her own work at the Seattle Symphony's Made in America festival (May 2006); Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan (July 2000); in a music-theatre work with playwright Erik Ehn at the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (June 2000); in several works as composer-in-residence at American Music Week in Sofia, Bulgaria (November 2000); at the 1999 Bang On A Can Festival; and at the 1998 Lincoln Center Festival and the World Financial Center Winter Garden in the Electric Ordo Virtutum. Also a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1992, she has premiered and recorded countless works by her composer colleagues, including operas by Anthony Braxton and Michael Gordon, for which she sung major roles.

As a composer, Ms. Bielawa has received grants, fellowships and awards from the Alpert-Ucross Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation, ASCAP, and the Fondation Royaumont in France. An enthusiastic advocate for the field, Ms. Bielawa is Artistic Director of the MATA Festival, serves on the Board of the American Music Center, and is Assistant Director and teaches composition through the New York Youth Symphony Making Score program.