February 7, 2020
For immediate release:
CORNISH FACULTY COMPOSERS CONCERT
What: A night of original works and world-premieres from Cornish Faculty Composers
When: Friday, February 21, 2020 8PM
Where: Poncho Recital Hall @ Kerry Hall - 710 East Roy Street, Seattle, WA 98102
Who: Tom Baker, Heather Bentley, Kaley Lane Eaton, James Falzone, Ha-Yang Kim, Jarrad Powell
Why: To catalyze the sublime.
How Much: Free! and Free Parking!
Please join us at Cornish College of the Arts for a night of new-music.
World-premieres, repeat performances, and new collaborations on a legendary stage for experimental and creative music. Featuring the music of Cornish Faculty Composers, with performances by faculty, alumni, students, and friends of Cornish College of the Arts.
The program:
In a World of One Color... The Sound of Wind (2014) seven or more unspecified instruments
James Falzone
Cornish Student Ensemble
FREE (2019) World-Premiere piano and electronics
Kaley Lane Eaton
Jesse Meyers, piano
Aeros (2019) solo flute
Ha-Yang Kim
Leanna Keith, flute (faculty)
Traces: Sarah (2019) World-Premiere harp and electronics
Tom Baker
Melissa Achten, harp (alumni)
Winter Walks on the Moon (2019) viola, soprano, flute
Heather Bentley
Heather Bentley, viola (faculty) Kaley Lane Eaton, soprano (faculty) Leanna Keith, flute (faculty)
Simultaneous Broken Symmetries (1990)
piano and vibraphone
I. Simultaneity of the ephemeral
II. Metamorphosis of the repetitive
Jarrad Powell
Adrienne Varner, piano (alumni)
Matthew Kocmieroski, vibraphone (past instructor)
Program Notes and Composer Biographies
In a World of One Color . . . the Sound of Wind is a reflection on a 17th century Haiku by Matsuo Bashō:
Winter solitude—
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.
Also on my mind were qualities in Japanese aesthetic practice known as Shibui: simplicity, implicitness, modesty, silence, naturalness, everydayness, imperfection.
Scored for 7 or more unspecified instruments, the piece is intended more as a sound installation than a traditional composition and there is no development or particular sense of form. The performers inhabit a space, acting like a natural, resonating organism within. The 11 different soundscapes possible are modular and can transpire in any order and for any duration, determined in the performance by a conductor (or conductors) walking among the performers, indicating how to shape the piece. As they unfold, the soundscapes may or may not be in sync at any given moment, resulting in multiple experiences of tempo, volume, and tonal color. The final duration of the work is indeterminate.
The audience is encouraged to experience the piece in a variety of ways: walking in the space, coming in and out of the space, engaging single sound sources, or finding the “meta” sound from a particular vantage point. The sounds are simply there, happening in space and time and the audience member decides how they want to listen. In this way the experience of In a World of One Color . . . the Sound of Wind is akin to walking among plants in a conservatory or garden.
Imitation being a form of flattery, I would be remiss in not acknowledging two important influences on this work beyond Bashō’s poem. The first is the music and thought of John Luther Adams, particularly the essays in his numinous book Winter Music. The second influence comes through composer, cellist, and improviser Fred Lonberg-Holm, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with for almost 20 years. Fred’s 2007 sound installation at the Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago, photo-sound-esis I, was very much in my mind as I worked on In a World of One Color . . . the Sound of Wind.
Clarinetist, composer, and improviser James Falzone is an acclaimed member of the international jazz and creative music scenes, a veteran contemporary music lecturer and clinician, and an award-winning composer who has been commissioned by chamber ensembles, dance companies, choirs, and symphony orchestras around the globe. He leads his own ensembles Allos Musica and The Renga Ensemble and has released a series of critically acclaimed recordings on Allos Documents, the label he founded in 2000.
James performs throughout North America and Europe, appears regularly on Downbeat magazine's Critics' and Readers' Polls, and was nominated as the 2011 Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalist Association. He has been profiled in the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, New Music Box, The Seattle Times, and Point of Departure, among many other publications. Educated at Northern Illinois University and New England Conservatory, James is also a respected educator and scholar and has been on the faculty of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Deep Springs College, North Central College, and was a research fellow at The Center for Black Music Research. At present James is the Chair of Music at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington. Learn more about James Falzone and his work at his website: www.allosmusica.org.
FREE is about free will, or, the “right to future tense” which is increasingly under attack as our economic forces converge to mine our private lives for data (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). When reading Zuboff’s masterful book about the loss of private expression in our impending surveillance economy, I continually thought of my own pianistic metaphor for this kind of freedom - holding the pedal down, playing the black keys, my head inside the piano, bathing myself in a wash of pentatonic sound. This became the foundation of this work. To mirror the idea of human-digital tension, I built a pitch-responsive sine wave that listens to the piano and can only spit out one pitch at a time; as the piano is playing an entire ocean of sound, the theremin generates frantic attempts to replicate it, to no avail, resulting in a strange human-computer counterpoint. This, to me, expresses the experience we are all wading through currently: in danger of losing our private experiences, our private sadness, joy, hope, love, and expression, to mere algorithmic reductions from forces beyond our control.
A conservatory-trained classical pianist and vocalist who fell into creating electronic music shortly after a stint playing Baroque lute, Kaley Lane Eaton creates music that is colored by this eclecticism, expressing a preoccupation with harmony, improvisation, storytelling, emotion, physical gesture, and vocal virtuosity. Her work has been performed across the US and internationally, in venues ranging from Hong Kong concert halls, to the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Her “disconcertingly lovely” (Seattle Magazine) compositions are quickly gaining notoriety for combining innovative digital technology with ancient performance practices, questioning humanity’s growing dependence on technology and the resulting exploitation of human connection.
Eaton's work has garnered recent support from ASCAP (2019 Plus Award), Seattle Office of Arts and Culture (2019 CityArtist Award), the Allied Arts Foundation (2018 Listen Up! Grants for Composers grantee), the International Alliance for Women in Music (2017 Pauline Oliveros New Genre prize for lily [bloom in my darkness]), the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences (2017 Distinguished Holland and Knight Fellowship), the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2017 Associate Artist), and 4Culture (2017 Tech-Specific Grant). Eaton holds a DMA in composition from the University of Washington and is Director of Music Technology at Cornish College of the Arts.
Aeros explores the ever shifting movement and characteristics of air and breath, of flow and disruption. Inspired by zazen.
Ha-Yang Kim creates new music as a composer and cellist, collaborating with ensembles and artists in festivals and performance venues throughout the world. Drawing from a breadth of western classical music, American experimentalism, rock, electronic, noise, avant-improv, to non-western sources, Kim's music is inspired by acoustic phenomena, ritual ceremonial processes, and characterized by an organic visceral lyricism of sound influenced by the East Asian sense of space and emptiness. She teaches at Cornish College of the Arts.
Traces: Sarah is a meditation on loss, grief, and memory. It is a search for what remains in the absence of known things, real things, loved things. It began as an incantation to give voice to the inaudible and form to the imperceptible. It has become a trace, a remnant, that seems to be evolving into a requiem for things lost. Traces: Sarah was commissioned by and is dedicated to Melissa Achten.
Tom Baker is a composer, guitarist, improviser, and educator based in Seattle, Washington. Drawing on a lifetime spent working, living and fly fishing in the Western US, his work has its origins in the landscapes, textures, colors, and stillness of open lands and winding rivers. As a pioneering fretless guitarist with a sensibility forged in the Seattle improvised music scene, Baker performs, leads ensembles, and collaborates with musicians nationally and internationally. His mentors and co-conspirators include Stuart Dempster, William O. Smith, Christian Asplund, Chinary Ung, Ellen Fullman, Anne La Berge, and Henry Threadgill. His compositions “ply the shadowy territory between form, isolation, and silence” (The Stranger) and have been called "the acoustical rendition of a Jackson Pollack painting,” (21st Century Music). He is currently at work on a cycle of string quartets called Invisible Cities, inspired by the novella by Italo Calvino, encompassing 55 individual movements. Baker is the artistic director of the Seattle Composers’ Salon, co-founder of the Seattle EXperimental Opera (SEXO), an advisory board member for the Seattle Modern Orchestra. He is Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts.
Winter Walks on the Moon is the descendent of a piece Kin of the Moon commissioned from Ewa Trebacz. I’m fascinated by the evolving and degradation that happens in making copies and reiteration and imitations of things. I wrote material to fit with Ewa’s fixed media soundscape: Winter Walks is an extraction of only that new material with additional new fixed media in the form of drones I’ve been creating with my electric violin, effects pedals, and looper. In this iteration I am both drone operator and acoustic violist; part of the restriction we create is that the drone operator and vocalist must share one amp with only two channels. There’s a proximity factor of her DPA mic picking up sideways elements of what the acoustic flute and viola that obscures where sound is actually emanating from, echoing the obscurity of the origins of the sound object/thought objects creating this whole chicken and egg situation.
New music violist/improviser/composer Heather Bentley has dedicated herself to chamber music and creative music, as a performer, composer and educator. She is co-Artistic Director of Kin of the Moon, a 501(c)3 not for profit corporation located in Seattle. Kin of the Moon was founded by a trio of performer/improviser/ composers who have created a resonant space where their individual musical inspirations are amplified by the vast possibilities that collaboration fosters. Her KOTM partners are flutist/composer Leanna Keith and vocalist/ composer Kaley Lane Eaton. Their debut album "Funeral Sentences for Damaged Cells” composed by Kaley Lane Eaton, with ultra soprano Emily Thorner, will be released in Fall 2019.
Also a violinist, she is Concertmaster of the improvising string orchestra “Scrape,” which features original music by jazz composer Jim Knapp and recently released its first CD “Approaching Vyones,” receiving a nomination for Earshot Jazz’s Album of the Year 2013. Scrape collaborates with artists such as Mark Taylor, Cherie Hughes, Bill Frisell, Jessika Kinney and Eyvind Kang.
Her commitment to educating young people is reflected in her work at the Seattle Conservatory of Music, where she was Director of Chamber Music from 2001 to 2010. As Conductor of the Northwest School Chamber Orchestra, she organized and led music tours to Europe (2005) and China (2008). She served for many years as Director of Summer at Cornish's chamber music program for teens. She’s currently a faculty member at the Lakeside School in Seattle. In 2018 she became Cornish College of the Arts' Viola Instructor.
Simultaneous Broken Symmetries The term "broken symmetry" is borrowed from modern physics where it is used to describe the more abstract symmetries associated with elementary particles. In nature, symmetry is lost when a structure is damaged or modified. The symmetry is said to be broken. Yet underlying symmetries can be revealed or their presence momentarily glimpsed through the relationship of their fragments or parts. Moreover, in the everyday world we often experience these revelations as moments of simultaneity or synchronicity, when events, following their own course and trajectory, suddenly coalesce. In Part I we have the "simultaneity of the ephemeral." An underlying repeating structure is fragmented into the duality of the two instruments, yet sometimes merges surprisingly into ephemeral moments of unison and resonance. In Part II we have the "metamorphosis of the repetitive." A repeating rhythmic motif is transformed and passed back and forth between two parts as underpinning for moments of more lyrical melody. Titles for these movements are inspired by the work of the composer Bernard Parmegiani. The writing of this piece was made possible by a commission from pianist Kit Young and percussionist Tom Goldstein.
Jarrad Powell is a composer, performer, and teacher. He is currently a Professor in the Music Department at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle where he teaches composition, world music, gamelan, tuning and temperament, and other theory-related classes. He is Director of Gamelan Pacifica and Co-Director of IETI+I, the Institute of Emergent Technology + Intermedia at Cornish. His compositions have been performed and broadcast internationally and include pieces for voice, gamelan, various western and non-western instruments, electro-acoustic music, music for theater, dance and experimental film. His work also includes numerous cross- cultural collaborations, particularly with Indonesian artists, including the innovative theater pieces Visible Religion and Kali. He has studied and performed gamelan music for many years and has worked with such notable artists as K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat, Goenawan Mohamad, Tony Prabowo, Rahayu Supanggah, Didik Nini Thowok, Al. Suwardi, Peni Chandra Rini, and many others. Since the early 80’s he has directed the group Gamelan Pacifica, one of the most active and adventurous gamelan ensembles in the United States. As Music Director and composer for Scott/Powell Performance, a contemporary dance company formed in 1994, he has created over 20 major works with choreographer and visual artist Mary Sheldon Scott.
His work has been commissioned by The Walker Arts Center, Performing Arts Chicago, On the Boards, Music in Motion, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents, the National Performance Network as well as individual performers. He has received numerous grants and awards, including NEA, Arts International, Rockefeller Foundation, Paul Allen Family Foundation, 4Culture/King County, Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs/Seattle, Artist Trust Foundation and Creative Capital Foundation. His most recent recording is Nourishment with Gamelan Pacifica on Blind Stone Records. His recordings, Natural Selection and Stonehouse Songs are available from Present Sounds Recordings; and Scenes from Cavafy, the premiere recording of three major works by composer Lou Harrison with his group Gamelan Pacifica, was released on New World Records. He holds a BA in English and Religious Studies from Rocky Mountain College, a BFA in Music from Cornish College of the Arts, and an MA in Music Composition from Mills College, where he received the Paul M. Henry award for excellence in music composition.