Pendulum New Music

Interview with Hsing-ay Hsu (by Nathan Hall)

2012-02-17T11:11:00.003-07:00

CU composers are busy preparing for the February 22nd concert in the ATLAS Black Box Theatre. This concert is one of the few Pendulum events of the year outside of our usual “home” in Grusin Recital Hall. I started thinking about all that goes on for Pendulum: an entire year of concerts is scheduled to showcase composers' new works, which comes with varied levels of decision-making, programming, promoting, rehearsing, and crisis management, until finally one can deliver a concert to listeners. How does one juggle all of this? Indeed, the work can be a full-time job. I sat down recently with Hsing-Ay Hsu, Artistic Director of Pendulum, who helped me sort through all that she does to make our concerts flow smoothly and effortlessly.

Hsing-Ay has been working for Pendulum for over six years. She tells that that one of the main reasons Pendulum was created (and still thrives) is to cultivate relationships between composers and performers. Hsu describes Pendulum’s primary goal as: “How do we get composers and performers to collaborate with each other right from the beginning, rather than throwing something last minute on stage and hoping to have a resemblance of the artistic intention?” It was Dr. Daniel Kellogg, who is on the composition faculty and Hsu's husband, who first introduced her to new music. "When Dan and I first met as music students, I knew nothing about the excitement of premiering a piece that has never been heard before. And as Dan and I worked together on different projects, we also spent a lot of time talking about how we would make education better when we had the chance. It's been a great opportunity and a worthwhile challenge to bring our ideals into a real world setting here at CU." Hsing-Ay not only encourages composers to plan in advance for all their performance details, but also coaches groups before the concerts, and talks to the performers about delivering a meaningful and artful performance to the audience. Her "double life" as a concert pianist gives her a performer's insight as well as administrative drive.

Much goes into the planning of a Pendulum concert, long before the few weeks before the show. Two years ago, our February 22nd concert date was set, along with other concerts for the year. Once the dates were cleared with all the other music departments, festivals (like this fall’s upcoming John Cage Festival) were planned and guest artist residencies booked. Then, about three months ago, Hsing-ay motivated the composers to pin down the dates of their intended performances, and information about their specific projects. A month ago, materials for programs were sent to the concert office, and Hsu will personally proofread. Posters are created, publicity is sent out. Then around two weeks before the concert, Hsu makes sure that personnel and rehearsal scheduling are in place (Michael Theodore is our electro-acoustic specialist coach) and clears up any issues surrounding the performance/performers. One week prior to the concert is “surprise time”. Who knows what might happen: crises are dealt with and last-minute changes are made. Even after the night of the concert, there is work to be done. Hsing-ay thanks the guest musicians, videos are uploaded to our website, and any unresolved issues are cleared up. Work begins immediately on the concert for the following month. She applauds the team work of her production manager Anthony Green and media manager/graphic designer Hunter Ewen, as well as the comp faculty and student representatives on the Pendulum Committee.

I wondered if Hsing-ay noticed any changes to the overall nature of Pendulum concerts over the years. More electronic works? More popular music? She sees an increasing diversity of the student body of composers and increased confidence in communicating their unique compositional voices. She notices continually improving recruitment of students. “Word is getting out that this is a program where we really care about students, that we have a young energetic faculty who cares about new music, and that we’re constantly trying to create new opportunities for students. This really affects the kind of composers we get.” Sounds like a winning situation for continued success of Pendulum New Music concerts, and exciting new works yet unheard.

Above: Hsing-ay Hsu.

Pomegranate Songs (Ofer Ben Amots)

2012-02-15T12:31:00.005-07:00

Gliese 777 (Andrew Buckner)

2012-02-15T12:31:00.002-07:00

BOSS (Raechel Sherwood)

2012-02-15T12:30:00.002-07:00

Llanto (John Drumheller)

2012-02-15T12:29:00.001-07:00

February 22nd Pendulum - Atlas Black Box

2012-02-06T23:09:00.000-07:00

Here at Colorado University we're on a never ending quest to churn out newer and better music, in an attempt to delight, entertain, and enrich the ears of our audiences! Come out this February 22nd at 7:30pm to the Atlas Black Box Theater to see what we have in store for you this month! There are no tickets or reservations required.

Questions for Raechel Sherwood: After the Premiere (Nathan Hall)

2012-01-31T19:15:00.000-07:00

What does it feel like to be a composer during a performance, listening to your own work on stage (or screen, or in speakers, or what have you) and hoping it goes well? You are somewhere between a participant and an audience member. You can't run up on stage if a player drops a page (well, unless perhaps it's a total disaster, and we don't want that). I reconnected with Raechel Sherwood to see if any of her ideas about her piece Boss had changed since we last spoke. The Tesla Quartet at this past week’s Pendulum concert played Sherwood’s work stunningly. Sherwood gave a brief introduction to her piece that included a couple lines of dialogue from the play from which Boss originated. The mood was perfectly set for Tesla’s entrance, carrying coffee cups, briefcases, and wearing business suits- the everyday grays so many employees wear to work. They took their instrument parts out of their briefcases. Even before they started playing Sherwood’s work, I was captivated.

I asked Raechel what passed through her mind while her piece was being performed. Could she even enjoy the performance, or is it too nervewracking? And once the piece was over, did her opinions of her work change? Did it sound different when on stage versus on paper or in rehearsal? So often I think composers are so absorbed by the details of the work that it is difficult to step back and enjoy one’s labors. Sherwood said she tried to enjoy the premiere as much as possible, and the Teslas made the experience free of nail-biting moments. The Tesla Quartet
“has an energy and focus that is riveting during a performance and I think it takes an audience to reciprocate that kind of intensity. I think my perspectives on the piece shifted in opposite directions after hearing it aloud. On one hand, during certain parts of the piece I realized the life that it has and the potential it give performers to really perform it. But on the other, at times I heard all the possibilities it could still have. Overall though, I'm very happy with it and it taught me a lot about my own music.”

What would happen if Sherwood acted on the possibilities for change that she felt the piece contained? I spoke once to a composer (Christopher Theofanidis, to be precise) about ‘life after performance’. Theofanidis told me that he never goes back to look at previous works. The versions they are printed in first represent moments in time that can’t really be changed all that much. A composer grows and changes so much with each new work that for him it felt like someone else's work entirely. Sherwood’s response differs.
“I don't think I have any problem going back and changing pieces after they've been performed. I think since I am constantly growing as a composer, my pieces should as well… I have not yet had a piece that I did not write in anticipation of coming back to it several times throughout my life. I think that might be partly because of the type of music I write and the fact that I want to combine it with other mediums, which often occur far beyond a one-time performance.”

Thanks to Raechel for her thoughts (twice!) on her work. Here’s to another successful Pendulum concert, and we hope to see you at the next, on February 22nd in the ATLAS Black Box Theatre.

Questions for Raechel Sherwood: Before the Show (Nathan Hall)

2012-01-25T07:34:00.002-07:00

Some Questions for Raechel Sherwood: Before the Show (Nathan Hall)

CU undergraduate composer Raechel Sherwood premieres her work BOSS tomorrow night, written for string quartet and performed by the College of Music’s Tesla Quartet. I asked Raechel to share some insight into her piece, and what she was thinking in the moments leading up to its performance. I also told her I would be back again after the concert to check in, seeing if any of her thoughts or feelings about the piece changed.

Sherwood is very active in the theatre scene, and primarily works in theatrical and musical genres. For the last Pendulum concert, Raechel wrote and performed a short solo monologue with the working title ‘Boxes’, focusing on the minutiae of every day life and our struggles to comprehend and conveniently organize our existence. Similarly theatrical in origin, BOSS began its life as an on-stage accompaniment to a one-act play, a sectional piece used for incidental music. The work, she tells me, “was inspired by the message of the play which brought attention to the mundane-ness of life and the endless cycle that our lives seem to fall into, regardless of how often we make plans to break from it.” This year Sherwood reworked the piece into a through-composed quartet that “still attempts to takes the audience on the journey to find meaning behind what they do every day.”

Some of Pendulum’s most exciting concerts feature performances by the Tesla Quartet. Formed of graduate string players, the group is one of the premiere ensembles in the College of Music and has been making national and international waves. Sherwood tells me that working and rehearsing her piece with ‘the Teslas’ has been a pleasure, as the quartet has “brought a musicality to this piece and lifted the notes off the page even in our first rehearsal together.”

While Sherwood was up to the tasks of re-composing a work for an intimidatingly talented ensemble, a new audience, and a new context, she still found it a challenge to think of the piece as fresh. Will the work have the same effect for its listeners without the integration of the spoken word of the play from which it came? (Raechel welcomes any feedback from the audience and her fellow colleagues if you decide to let her know.) The piece will be an experiment that Sherwood hopes will enlighten future collaborations in theatre, refining her own personal style along the way.

January 25th Performance

2011-12-13T13:28:00.002-07:00

November 30th Concert

2011-11-28T12:19:00.001-07:00

Anthony Green and 'Weightless'

2011-11-25T12:31:00.002-07:00

Another Pendulum Concert approaches on November 30th, and I sat down with Anthony Green to chat about his upcoming premiere Weightless, written for alto saxophone and piano. Written in the summer of 2010, it will be played on sax by Benjamin Sorrell from Los Angeles, CA.

Weightless is part of an ongoing series of Green’s works that contain multiple compositional or philosophical ideas of some of Green’s favorite composers, such as Stockhausen, Scelsi, and Cage. This piece in particular showcases ideas and influences from Lee Hyla, who is the featured composer of this Pendulum concert and a former composition professor of Green’s at New England Conservatory. Green says that Hyla’s influence can be found in many places in Weightless, including a careful attention to pitch (for example, Green avoids or skirts around the pitch F-sharp throughout the piece and then ends the piece on that particular note); rhythmic fluidity, and use of minor thirds. All of these ideas appear in much of Hyla’s music.

With a piece called Weightless, I wondered if the audience would be able to hear a certain ‘floating’ quality in the music, or if this would be built more into the composition structure. Green says that he’s working with both sonic and structural “weightlessness”. The piece is built around quasi-serialist processes, not so much in deciding which pitches will appear in certain orders, but in avoiding certain tones and using “incorrect” resolutions of harmonies. There are also musical gestures that always move upwards and never come back down, giving piece a sense that it never quite arrives back where it started. The audience should be able to hear that the piece is highly organized and structured, even if the compositional technique is not audible. In a sense, the listener is aware that the composer is “up to something”.

When Anthony is not composing, his other interests tend toward the detail-oriented. Green loves learning the structure and syntax of languages, and is currently learning Dutch in preparation for moving abroad after his time at CU. Green is also studying the Japanese instrument the koto; he says the sound and meditative resonance of that non-Western instrument may also be creeping into his compositions. I'll wait and see if these sounds and syntaxes continue to make their way into Green’s future work, which include an upcoming opera. Until then, please come to hear Green’s work and all the pieces on next week’s Pendulum concert, November 30th at 7:30pm!

A Short Chat with Steve Sachse (Nathan Hall)

2011-10-24T19:05:00.004-06:00

Steve Sachse is about to premiere his piano quintet ‘Joy, Gifts, Sleeplessness’ at this week’s Pendulum concert, performed in part by one of CU’s most ambitious ensembles, the Tesla string quartet. I sat down with him to ask how his preparation for the concert has been going. Without even needing a prompt, he finishes with a great plug for Pendulum, an excellent reason to come show your support at this month’s concert!

Nathan: Where were you when you wrote this piece, physically and mentally?
S: After completing my undergraduate degree I stayed in my local area where I was very fortunate to be able to make a living through gigging and teaching guitar. But eventually the desire to return to composition studies really became something bigger that I had to address. The decision to leave the privileged situation I felt that I had found myself in and move to another state was a very difficult one to make. I had discovered a number of pieces during that time that really floored me, and the inspiration they stirred up was an overwhelming factor in the decision I wrestled with for some time. Each of the words in the title of my piece refers to things I was reflecting on concerning where my path in music had led me to that point, and the difficulty I had in making the decision to leave my home state and surroundings behind.

N: Did you have any musical role models in mind while writing? What was on your playlist?
S: I was certainly inspired by a number of quintet pieces during that period. In particular, I had also discovered a number of foreign composers who I really felt were able to display their cultural identities through their art in very organic and interesting ways. Composers such as John Psathas, Gareth Farr, and Jack Body were frequently part of my daily studies and musical experience, along with Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Karen Tanaka, and a few others.

N: How do you go about rehearsing your piece?
S: So far I’ve had two rehearsals for the piece, and the group’s progress has been steady. I would say that the piano part is by far the most technically demanding. Usually during the first rehearsals for any piece, I try to avoid nitpicking things and focus on whether the broader gestures are taking shape, as well as addressing any questions or potential issues the performers may have concerning the notation. After a couple of rehearsals, and as the players become more familiar with the music, I can talk more directly about expression and intention. It has been a fantastic opportunity to work with a group such as the Tesla quartet, and to be involved in the incredibly dynamic and supportive composition program here at CU.

October 26th Performance

2011-10-20T23:17:00.001-06:00

Please join us on October 26th, for a great new Pendulum concert -- with music by Buckner, Ingraham, Muhly, Mazzoli, and Sachse.

Remembering Wes Blomster

2011-10-16T23:03:00.000-06:00

To an honored colleague, friend, and fellow supporter of the arts: you will be missed.

Dr. Wesley Verne Blomster died October 1, 2011 of prostate cancer. Wes had a distinguished career as a German professor at the University of Colorado and as a local and international music critic. As a child of the Great Depression, Wes lived the American Dream and left a legacy of students and a love and passion for music, literature, and the arts that has no equal. Wes is survived by his brother Dwayn Blomster, his son Thomas and daughter in law Nikki Tsuchiya, and Wesley's divorced wife Adelheid Blomster. Wes requested that memorial contributions be made to his son Thomas' orchestra:

Colorado Chamber Orchestra

1820 Race Street

Denver, CO 80206-1116

The Form is the Flow (Nathan Hall)

2011-10-13T22:33:00.003-06:00

September’s Pendulum concert was a spectacular introduction to new music here at CU Boulder. The program was short and sweet, and included about half acoustic music, and half pieces of live solo performances with electronic music. While the Schwantner was beautifully orchestrated and gave me much to think about, and Dan Brandt’s short piece ‘Sleep’ for solo piano had beautiful and narrative moments worth remembering, it was actually the three electronic pieces that got me thinking the most. In particular, it got me thinking, how do I talk about forms in electronic music, how it evolves over time, if there is no ‘traditional’ form in place?

Jess Garrett, Hunter Ewen, and Cole Ingraham all had works on the concert that combined a live, solo performer with electronics. Each composer approached this instrumentation differently. Jess’s sound world was awash in electronic tones, like a sonic landscape of contours on top of which a slow melody flowed. Hunter Ewen's piece was like a Zen koan: short text, minimally executed, but with maximum potential. The violist spoke the text while simultaneously playing, and a delay in the microphone attached to the viola created a distant echo effect. The final score to the piece looked like waves in a pond, with beautiful circular notation like a George Crumb work. Cole Ingraham’s final piece challenged the audience the most, but the saxophonist Michael Straub played amazingly. The entire piece felt like a crescendo of sounds not usually heard on the saxophone, employing many alternate fingerings and high altissimo range. Cole meanwhile furiously tapped out changes to the electronic component of the piece on his iPad on stage, raising and lowering the levels of pitch areas that flowed from one section to the next.

None of these pieces really followed a ‘traditional’ form that was apparent upon my first listen. But why worry about old-world forms when you’re working with new-world technology? And I’m not trying to advocate a lack of effort or thought behind the composing process either; it takes a ton of work to write and create solid electronic pieces, perhaps even more time than it does to write a nice oboe line. My point (I think) is that many new-music composers, myself included, find it interesting to explore new ways of making music progress through time. Composer and music writer Robert Morris writes in his book of essays The Whistling Blackbird that in our contemporary world, one way to understand a lot of new and challenging music may be to take in the flow of music without having to place so much value on things like form. Or rather, the Form of the music is the Flow of the music. The sounds themselves become the focus, rather than the structures they are laid upon. This could certainly be a good explanation for how musique concrete is produced, cutting and slicing sounds and piecing them together in interesting ways. Electronic music, and a lot of new music as well, may be more about what’s happening in the ‘now’, progressing from one idea (one ‘now’) to the next, unfolding like a scroll. Was that sound interesting? It changed to this other sound now. Now this. Was that change interesting? We can likely remember back to previous moments, and perhaps imagine future trajectories, but perhaps keeping the overall form in our brains is less essential. It can also be good practice for the ears, just taking in what one hears and trying not to place value upon it so quickly. John Cage (one of Morris’s role models) would likely approve of this Zen-like ‘non-judgment’. By listening to more and more electronic music works, I find myself eager and willing to experience the new and unknown.

Lattice (Cole D. Ingraham)

2011-10-07T18:27:00.005-06:00

Michael Straus, saxophone
Cole Ingraham, elctronics

Circles on Quiet Water (Hunter Ewen)

2011-10-07T18:27:00.002-06:00

Cassandra Mueller, viola & electronics

Void (Jess Garrett)

2011-10-07T18:26:00.002-06:00

Danielle Heath, violin
Jess Garrett, electronics

Sleep (Dan Brandt)

2011-10-07T18:25:00.002-06:00

Yuja Wang - an incredible musician

2011-10-06T12:45:00.000-06:00

I want to write a review of the magnificent concert I saw on Tuesday, 4 October 2011, of Yuja Wang. While I never doubted her abilities as a musician as opposed to just a flashy technician, last night DEFINITELY extinguished any inklings of the sort. She opened with a both transcendental and orchestrally interpreted Beethoven Sonata that's not often performed - op. 27 no. 1, quasi una fantasia. Her pacing, her intimacy, and her command made this performance for me equally a composition lesson and a piano lesson.

Following the Beethoven was an impassioned performance of 3 Etudes-Tableux of Rachmaninoff, and an Elegie (op. 3 no. 1) that is full of anxiety and consternation, as well as a lot of notes! With my feeling of knocking on heaven's door during the Beethoven, I was immediately thrust into a breathlessness of which I've never experienced before in a piano recital - a state of awe combined with a deep appreciation for what Rachmaninoff accomplished in terms of pianism and composition.

She traveled from Bonn to Russia to Spain for her next set. Opening with Albeniz's Triana from Iberia, her control over this disastrously difficult piece was mind-bending. After hearing this piece performed live a couple of times, it was Yuja's performance that made me finally understand this work in its complex and immense melodic and accompanimental layerings - both elements which require seamless maneuvering and switching responsibilities between the hands, bringing out notes within difficult contexts, chords and jumps that are extreme, and a dynamic control for clarity. She moved on to a piece of which I am not fond but was delightfully executed - Evening in Grenada by Debussy (from Estampes), and concluded the first half with a riveting, yet deliciously enticing performance of Ravel's Alborada del Gracioso from Mirroirs. What clean repeated notes, and what a sense of Spanish "joie de vivre!" I was immediately thrust back into Madrid, in the middle of a crowd waiting to see a futbal match at the Real Madrid, eating my torreja de leche!

After the intermission, during which I purchased her Grammaphone debut CD for her to sign after the concert, she concluded the evening with a trajectory of Scriabin. Begining with 3 Preludes, from op. 11 and op. 13, she magnificently displayed a more traditionally impassioned side of this russian master. The Etude showed a development in Scriabin's compositional struggle, yielding this extraordinary other-world quality of his Poeme in F minor, which Yuja mastered with extreme delicateness and a depth of understanding that matches the greatest pianist of history. She concluded the "programmed" set with Scriabin's Sonata No. 5, a one-movement Poeme Fantasy that is similar in aesthetic to the smaller Poeme she played earlier, but excacerbated in scope and emotion. It begins with a riveting, whimsical, mysterious ascent, leading to a the Poeme gesture. Through iterations of tristess and longing, and struggling to find the right notes, Scriabin succombs to ending the work exactly like the beginning, creating this sense of timelessness, endlessness, yet in the context of a deep, intellectual and emotional struggle. What a work - and WHAT A PERFORMANCE!

After enthusiastic applause and a standing ovation, she played three encores: the Liszt transcription of Gretchen am Spinnrade by Schubert, the Prokofiev Toccata, and then a gorgeous, minor, yet light work, Gluck-Sgambati Melody from Orfeo ed Euridice. All magnificent. While the recital was overall dark and impassioned, it was nonetheless awe-inspiring, and impressive from someone who is only 24 years old.

Before leaving, I received her autograph on the leaflet of her CD. I thanked her and told her to "keep on wearing what she wears". She laughed, and it completed the evening.

10/26 Pendulum Performance

2011-10-05T17:08:00.000-06:00

Jess Garrett - Void

2011-09-27T10:43:00.002-06:00

I want to sneak in one more composer profile before the upcoming Pendulum
concert: Jess Garrett, a senior undergraduate at CU. Garrett’s work on this
week’s concert is ‘Void’, composed for solo violin and electronics. Her work
shares ties with Cole Ingraham’s piece ‘Lattice’, composed for a solo instrument
and electronics, and both pieces are relatively short (at least in classical music
terms, if you consider something under ten minutes short. It’s epic when
compared to pop-music time but a fleeting moment in a symphony.)

Garrett’s starting ideas for ‘Void’ are a bit different than Ingraham’s however,
as she started with a conceptual question while Ingraham seems to begin with
an organizational system (i.e. alternate tunings and pitch collections). Garrett
describes her initial spark of inspiration as an

“attempt to musically depict the thing that freaked me out the most as
a little kid and continues to do so to this day, namely the "nothingness"
that would be if there was no universe. What is that nothing? We as
humans don't even have a word for it, the concept is so difficult for us to
grasp. Even our idea of nothing involves other concepts, such as
darkness. But true nothing?”

Garrett began composing ‘Void’ by recording and manipulating found sounds.
The piece took off after the composer heard, of all things, the sound of a
squeaky dishwasher door. As common and familiar as the squeak was, says
Garrett, “for years I'd been saying "What a cool sound, I should do something
with that!"” ‘Void’ also incorporated Jess’s other interests in computer science
and programming. After altering the sounds of the famed childhood dishwasher,
the composer then inserted them into a computer-coded ‘nest’ of sounds, overtop
of which an electronically distorted violin part plays more soloistically. I wonder
if my ears will try to conceptualize what exactly that original dishwasher door
sounded like, and try to trace her evolution of electronic sound to what it is like in
the concert hall when I hear the piece for the first time.

But like Ingraham’s continual back-and-forth dialogue with the saxophonist for
his work ‘Lattice’, when I asked Garrett about what challenged her with this
work, her response was much the same. “The distortion patch for the violin is
capable of some really interesting sounds, but the backing noise is also quite
compelling on its own. So [composing] it required a lot of careful consideration
and tweaking so that neither part overpowered the other.” Finding a balance
between performer and electronics seems to be essential for these works: both the
creators of the pieces and the audiences listening to them want to see an organic
performance emerge, a performance where the player is not overwhelmed by his
or her task (unless of course that may be the point of the piece) but instead the
sounds and performances seem to ‘fit’, or make sense together. Perhaps the ‘nest’
of sounds begins in one place and transforms; perhaps the two instruments will
be in dialogue. Or perhaps the piece will interact in other ways unique to the
language of computer programming. While the electronic components of ‘Void’
and ‘Lattice’ may be voiced by computers, (certainly the lesser-opinionated of

a performer-electronics duo as the computer’s not going to suggest rewrites or
need a coffee break), we human composers still control much about the piece and
desire a fruitful outcome.

Thanks to Jess and Cole for all their feedback to my interview questions. Look for
their works with other great pieces on Wednesday’s concert, 7:30 in Grusin Hall.

September 28th Pendulum

2011-09-21T00:16:00.000-06:00

Pendulum September Concert (Nathan Hall)

2011-09-21T00:14:00.000-06:00

Pendulum’s first concert of the year is almost upon us! This will be my first Pendulum program of all time, being a new DMA student at Boulder this year. Everyone in the halls keeps mentioning ‘Pendulum oh yeah the Pendulum concert oh you should write a piece for the Pendulum concerts I’ll totally play it.” Now is the time for me to hear what all the fuss is about.

To get the concert year rolling, I wanted to introduce a few of the composers whose works will be performed on our September concert. First up is Cole Ingraham, a currently a second-year DMA composer, whose piece ‘Lattice’ is written for saxophone and electronics. Cole is exploring Lou Harrison’s ‘free-style Just Intonation’ in the piece, which the composer tells me in layman’s terms means “music where notes are all tuned to pure intervals based on their neighboring tones rather than a fixed central pitch.” That can also translate to "only using pitches whose frequencies are multiples of all prime numbers less than or equal to thirteen”. Perhaps another translation: Just Intonation can more easily be heard than explained.

I really like to know what challenges composers, and especially about their working processes. In almost all concerts, the audience is presented with a glossy, finished work, not knowing the back story of how the piece was completed, or changes that occurred along the way. Sometimes that’s for the best; who wants to see all of the frustrations we went through along the way to arrive at this point? But sometimes insight into working process can be enlightening. For Ingraham, a challenging part of working on ‘Lattice’ has been

“trying to find ways to use the tuning system in ways that are both interesting and not too difficult for the non-computer performer. In my case, to play a fast passage involving precise complex tuning is easy, as I created a software instrument designed specifically for this task. For the sax, however this is a lot to ask for in isolation but when playing along with the computer you are able to tune by ear in relation to it, which makes it possible (albeit still very difficult).”

Ingraham is playing the laptop during the performance, but the saxophone part will be performed by a phenomenal player known for his talents in premiering new and experimental works for sax, Michael Straus (http://mstraus.net/). Intimidatingly talented, Michael hales from Peabody and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Experimental Music and Digital Media from Louisiana State.

(Above, Michael Straus, from his website.)

Ingraham senses that writing ‘Lattice’ is part of a larger grand plan of learning and creating. CU’s College of Music seems to have a sense of support for explorations that other music programs may shy away from. Cole’s ideas in ‘Lattice’ are one step for him to explore more ideas of alternate tuning systems; he writes:

“when I first got introduced to [alternate tunings] during my masters at Mills College, it fascinated me, but I had no idea how to think outside the usual twelve notes. Gradually after researching what others working in this system had done, and through plenty of my own experiments, I grew more and more comfortable with it and decided that this was a direction I wanted to keep moving in…I continue to look for new and better ways to explore alternate tunings and try to present them in a way that conveys these sometimes difficult ideas in a concise and performable way.”

What better way to hear (and be rewarded by) all your laborious efforts than to witness them live on stage.

Pendulum’s first concert of the ‘11-12 school year will be next Wednesday, September 28^th, at 7:30 in Grusin Music Hall.

2011-2012 Composition Awards

2011-08-03T17:06:00.002-06:00

Congratulations!

George Lynn Prize: Hunter Ewen

Edward Levy Prize: Kari Kraakevik (honorable mention to Steve Sachse and Anthony Green)

Undergraduate Prize: Raechel Sherwood (honorable mention to Mary Mixter)