Program Notes, February 6, 2025
Hannah Kendall (b. 1984)
Known for her attentive arrangements and immersive world-building, British composer Hannah Kendall’s music looks beyond the boundaries of composition. Her work bridges gaps between different musical cultures, both honouring and questioning the contemporary tradition while telling new stories through it. Contrasting fine detail with limitless abandon, she has become renowned both as a composer and a storyteller, confronting our collective history with narratively-driven pieces centred on bold mission statements.
Marked by striking and often polarising dynamics, her large-scale work simmers on the surface, and is upturned by the briefest moments of bombast. Ensemble pieces subvert audience expectations of ‘quiet and loud’, ‘still and moving’; scattering those musical opposites unexpectedly. The sounds are visceral, but their placement is complicated, disclosing the detail that exists beneath. While hinging on intense moments, Kendall’s music is also staggeringly intricate, manoeuvring tiny decisions that reveal themselves on further listens.
Kendall’s recent work has provided a meeting point for different types of music, carrying with it the weight of connected but unharmonised histories. Recently, she’s achieved this by looking beyond the typical tools of composition, using auxiliary instruments that exist outside of the concert hall. In Tuxedo: Vasco ‘de’ Gama, she integrated the spiritual Wade in the Water, transcribing its melody into a delicate music box, contrasting the fragility of the instrument against the song’s resounding place in history. Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water (2020) for solo cello features an ACME Metropolitan whistle, placing a sonic timestamp on the piece; pointing to a year significantly defined by the police’s presence in black communities.
Her Tuxedo series is named after an artwork by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. His eponymous piece provides one of many graphic scores that Kendall has used as inspiration throughout her career. Rather than create ‘representations’ of these images, she uses them to spark her writing process. Building pieces from a place of intuition, her compositions are just as likely to be become abstracted, turned inside out by surprises she finds along the way, as they are to have a firm narrative.
Kendall’s work has been widely celebrated. She has created pieces such as Disillusioned Dreamer (2018), which the San Francisco Chronicle praised for having a ‘rich inner life’, as well as The Knife of Dawn (2016), a chamber opera that received critical acclaim for its involving and claustrophobic representation of the incarceration of Guyanese political activist Martin Carter. A new production was presented on the Royal Opera House’s main stage in 2020. Also, The New Statesman described Where is the chariot of fire? (2021) as ‘searingly impactful’. Her work has been performed extensively, and across many platforms. She has worked with ensembles including London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, LA Phil, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, The Hallé, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, and London Sinfonietta, but you’ll also find her collaborating with choreographers, poets and art galleries; crossing over to different art-forms, and celebrating the impact these unique settings have on sound. Festival appearances include BBC Proms, Berliner Festspiele, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Lucerne Festival, and Tanglewood Music Festival. In 2022, she was the recipient of the Hindemith Prize for outstanding contemporary composers, and nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in the Small Chamber category. In 2023, Hannah won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Large Ensemble Composition for shouting forever into the receiver, and Even sweetness can scratch the throat was nominated for Best Chamber Ensemble Composition. Tuxedo: Dust Bowl #3 was shortlisted for the Best Community and Participation Ivor Novello Award in 2024.
Born in London in 1984, Kendall read music at the University of Exeter before completing a master’s in composition at the Royal College of Music and a doctorate at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her music is published by Ricordi (Berlin).
Verdala (2018)
The Verdala was one of the ships that brought the British West Indian Regiment from the Caribbean to Europe to fight in World War I. Already knowing that I wanted this piece to highlight the BWIR’s involvement in the war, and thinking about titles around the time that the 2018 ‘Windrush Scandal’ surfaced, it seemed fitting to name it so, as a reminder that there have been many ships long-prior to Windrush interweaved throughout British and British-Caribbean history.
I have been particularly drawn to the writings of Caribbean/Guyanese poet and political activist Martin Carter for many years, who expressed his feelings of the British-Caribbean experience, and military presence through powerful and poignant imagery in his texts. Lines from his ‘O Human Guide’ inspired the musical material for ‘Verdala’:
‘In the burnt earth of these years… So near so near the rampart spiked with pain. ..
The guilty heaven promising a star… Each day I ride a wild black horse of terror… ‘
Intricate interweaving woodwind lines feature throughout, often punctuated by strong raw chords in the strings, recurring chimes in the harp, and initial beating from the claves. Highly direct and rhythmic activity dominates following the opening section, which foreshadows this, except when biting ‘jabs’ give way to a softer, quieter ‘chorale’ in the low woodwinds and brass, before building-up again, becoming more unsettled, and culminating wildly and piercingly.
Christopher Trapani (b. 1980)
The American/Italian composer Christopher Trapani synthesizes disparate influences, weaving American and European stylistic strands into a personal aesthetic that defies easy classification. Allusions to Delta Blues, Appalachian folk tunes, dance band foxtrots, shoegaze guitar effects, and Turkish makam can be heard alongside spectral swells and meandering canons. As in Christopher’s hometown of New Orleans, diverse traditions coexist and intermingle, swirled into a rich melting pot.
Consonance is a central preoccupation; microtonality and just intonation are often employed. Timbral explorations are also manifold, from experiments with a wide range of mutes and preparations to an unusual instrumentarium, with works that call for custom electric guitars, dulcimer, qanûn, stroh violin, and retuned autoharps. Several of Christopher’s compositions bear the mark of his training in literature, influenced by novelists and poets including Thomas Pynchon, Geoff Dyer, and C. P. Cavafy. Many recent works also incorporate an idiosyncratic use of electronics, expanding the possibilities of color, pitch, and timing beyond the acoustic realm.
Christopher Trapani was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1980. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, where he studied composition with Bernard Rands and poetry under Helen Vendler. He spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM. Starting in 2010, Christopher spent a decade in and out of New York City, where he completed a doctorate at Columbia University in 2017, studying with Tristan Murail, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fred Lerdahl, and George Lewis.
Christopher is the winner of the 2016-17 Luciano Berio Rome Prize, as well as the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, the first American in over 30 years to win the international young composers’ award. Other honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2015), the Julius F. Ježek Prize (2013), three Morton Gould Young Composers Awards from ASCAP (2005, 2006, and the Leo Kaplan Award in 2009), and a BMI Student Composer Award (2006).
Recent commissions have come from the BBC, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and Radio France, and his works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, the Venice Biennale, Southbank Centre, Ruhrtriennale, Rainy Days Festival (Luxembourg), IRCAM, Ravenna Festival, and Wigmore Hall. In March 2011, Christopher was featured in a portrait concert on the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Music of Today series at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
His scores have been performed by a long list of top interpreters including ICTUS, JACK Quartet, Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble L’Itinéraire, Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, Ensemble Mosaik, ICE, Ensemble C Barré, Talea Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, Zwerm, Earplay, Yarn/Wire, Longleash, Atlas Ensemble, pianists Sergey Schepkin and Marilyn Nonken, singer Lucy Dhegrae, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the American Composers Orchestra. He has held residencies at Copland House (New York), Les Récollets (Paris), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France), and the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy).
His debut CD, Waterlines, featuring performances by Talea Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and others, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018. A second recording of Waterlines by ICTUS was released in 2020.
Christopher is a 2019 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a winner of a 2019 Fromm Commission from Harvard University, along with the 2020 Barlow Prize. Plus for the upcoming season include a new work for Ensemble Nikel and a collection of piano pieces for Benjamin Hochman. His song cycle Noise Uprising is slated for CD release in Fall 2024 on New World Records.
Christopher is currently Assistant Professor of Electronic Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University. He splits his time between New Orleans and his European base in Palermo, Sicily.
Unfeeling (2021)
Unfeeling was written in response to a commission for an homage to Gustav Mahler. It is an inward-looking meditation on withdrawal and isolation, deeply indebted to his spirit.
References to Mahlerian sonorities abound, in a deliberately restrained, sparsely-orchestrated, Fin-de-Siècle atmosphere. A long melody, led by the English Horn, slowly coalesces, smeared with heterphonic doublings and intercut by an insistent harmonium and static noises. Once-vivid sounds are deprived of their vitality, muffled by a wide variety of mutes, providing a strained and distant counterpoint.
The music reaches for those transcendent moments — the coda of Ich bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen, the last bars of Lieder Eines fahrenden Gesellen, the ending of Das Lied von der Erde — but that kind of climax remains elusive. We are grounded in the flat and muddled territory of rumination, unable to muster the strength to break through.
After a while, a second voice emerges: raspy, guttural, full of stutters and slides — a mutually incomprehensible language that fails to communicate or redirect the flow.
Unfeeling was commissioned by Klangforum Wien and premiered on June 29, 2022 at the Konzerthaus in Vienna with Bas Wiegers conducting.
Frederick Fox (b. 1931)
Frederick Alfred Fox, Jr. was born January 17, 1931 and passed away August 24, 2011. He studied composition with Ruth Shaw Wiley at Wayne State University and, following graduation from that institution (B.Mus.), he worked for a year with Ross Lee Finney at the University of Michigan. But with an abiding interest in jazz, Fox soon found himself again touring as a saxophonist. By 1955, however, he had turned his energies to serious composing and enrolled at Indiana University to study composition under Bernhard Heiden.
After acquiring his doctorate in composition from the I.U. School of Music in 1959, Fox began an odyssey that carried him to various teaching and foundations posts around the United States. He initially taught at Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana, where he constituted the entire music faculty. Fox then went to Sam Houston State University in Texas, after which, in 1962, he was one of a handful of composers selected by the National Music Council to serve as composers-in-residence to the nation’s public schools; he accepted a position with the Minneapolis Public Schools. The Ford Foundation then become involved with the project, and Fox assumed a post that took him and family to Washington, D.C.
In 1964, Fox was appointed chair of music theory and composition in the music department at California State University at Hayward (now California State University, East Bay). Later, from 1970–72, he served as chair of the music department itself. During his time at the institution, enrollment in the music department blossomed from 60 students to nearly 500.
When the world renown Indiana University School of Music came calling in 1974, Fox realized it was a dream come true, and he eagerly returned to the school he once attended, as professor of composition. Taking notice that little new music was being performed by the school’s ensembles, one of his first undertakings was the founding of the Indiana University New Music Ensemble in 1975–76, with himself as its first director. During his leadership tenure, the ensemble began to take its place as one of the foremost university ensembles of its kind in the country; it has since toured to cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York, among others. Fox was appointed chair of the I.U. School of Music composition department in 1981, and led that department for 13 years, a period during which it gained increasing recognition and became one of the highest-ranked programs in the U.S.
Throughout his long career, Fox always considered himself a “composer who teaches,” rather than a “teacher who composes.” Again, the maxim “it’s all about the music” comes to the forefront. But Fox took teaching seriously and is proud to have contributed to the musical education of hundreds of students, many of whom graduated from the music school with masters’ and doctorate degrees. Some of his notable students, to name a few, include James Aikman, Margaret Brouwer, David Dzubay, Keith Fitch, Jeffrey Hass, Jeeyoung Kim, Robert Patterson, Mark Phillips, Stephen Suber. Several of his former students have gone on to prominent teaching posts of their own in the United States as well as other countries.
Dreamcatcher (1994)
The dreamcatcher is said to have originated with the Oneida Indians of the northern woodlands, although many tribes have a similar legend. A dreamcatcher may be described, generally, as a circular or oblong hoop, the inside of which is filled with an intricately woven web with a hole in the center.
A dreamcatcher is hung, so that it may move freely in the night air, over the bed of a child to catch dreams, both good and bad, as they float by. Gooddreams know the way and slip through the hole. They slide down so softly that often the sleeping child doesnt even know that he or she is dreaming. Bad dreams, not knowing the way, become entangled in the webbing and perish with the first light of the new day.
Dreamcatcher is shaped into four large sections, delineated by tempo. The third section is a variation of the pitch material of the first section, and the fourth section is an expansion of the principal ideas of the second section. The piece closes with a brief coda recalling the opening moments.
P.Q. Phan (b. 1962)
Recipient of 1998 Rome Prize, ASCAP awards; grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ohio Arts Councils, Charles Ives Center for American Music, and fellowships from the Macdowell Colony. Guest composer: the 99 Asian New Music Festival in Tokyo Japan, the 99 & 97 New Music Festival at Hamilton College (New York), the ’96 residency with the Kronos Quartet at University of Iowa – Hancher Auditorium, the ’95 Asian Composers’ Forum in Sendai – Japan, the ’94 New Music Festival at UC Santa Barbara, the ’92 Music Lives in Pittsburgh. Performances by the Kronos Quartet, the BBC Scottish, Radio France, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, Hanoi Conservatory Orchestra. He has received commissions from the Kronos Quartet, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the American Composers Orchestra, the Greater East Lansing Symphony, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Samaris Piano Trio, the New York Youth Symphony, La Sierra University. Work recorded by the Kronos Quartet for Nonesuch.Former Faculty member, University of Illinois Champaign/Urbana, Cleveland State University.
Violin Concerto (2024)
The violin concerto is written for and dedicated to Chương Vũ, Honna Tetsuji, and the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra. In three-movement, the work conveys three major human behaviors: introvert, intimacy, and extrovert. Of these three movements, the first is about the composer’s personal expression intertwined between extreme delicate and outburst emotions. Micro tones play a crucial role in this movement. The second is a romance, dedicated to Honna Tetsuji and his orchestra, it paints a serenade on a late afternoon boating in Hồ Tây – Hà Nội (West Lake), a famous hangout place for couples. At the beginning, the couple can hear and feel the lake’s surrounding environmental sounds of tingling waves, birds, frogs, and insects. As their emotions heighten, they feel themselves solely. The third conveys an outgoing personality of Chương Vũ, a virtuoso violinist who has a beautiful charisma in human relations. The entire movement’s harmonic, pitches, rhythms are drawn from his name.
Kyung Sun Lee , Violin
Violinist Kyung Sun Lee is professor of music in violin at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
She captured a bronze medal in the 1993 Queen Elizabeth Competition, sixth prize in the 1994 Tchaikovsky Competition, first prizes at the Washington and D’Angelo International Competitions, and third prize in the Montreal International Competition, where she also won the Audience Favorite and Best Performance of the Commissioned Work prizes.
Subsequent to winning these awards, Lee has enjoyed ever-increasing popularity as a performer and received high critical acclaim: “Exceptional tonal suavity and expressive intensity in equal measure.” — The Strad. “Godard’s ‘Concerto Romantique’ could not have had a more outstanding soloist than Kyung Sun Lee.” — Harris Goldsmith, New York Concert Review Inc. “Fluidity and grace; pathos and emotion.” — ThePalm Beach Post. “Lee is the most musical, the most intelligent soloist to have played with the orchestra in quite a while.” — Tuscaloosa News. “Penetrating clarity, a strong sense of style and a technical supremacy that conquered all difficulties with unruffled ease.” — Miami Herald. “Beyond superb execution, she conveyed [Vieuxtemps’s Concerto No. 5] particular Romanticism expertly.” — Dennis Rooney, The Strad.
In addition to being in demand as a soloist and chamber musician, Lee is an accomplished teacher and clinician. After becoming assistant professor of violin at Oberlin Conservatory in fall 2001, then associate professor at the University of Houston in fall 2006, she has been professor at Seoul National University since 2009.
Lee taught for two summers at the Aspen Music Festival and has also been on faculty at the Bowdoin Music Festival and the Heifetz International Institute. In recent, years she has been in demand as a judge of violin competitions including the Joachim International Violin Competition Hannover, Seoul International Competition, and Singapore International Violin Competition.
She studied at Seoul National University, Peabody Conservatory, and Juilliard. Her teachers have included Sylvia Rosenberg, Robert Mann, and Dorothy Delay.
Lee plays a Joseph Guarnerius violin from 1723 and is music director of Changwon International Chamber Music Festival and Seoul Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra.