VIDEOS

  • Written for and commissioned by Ensemble Dal Niente

    Carrie Henneman Shaw, Soprano

    Commissioning support made possible by the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University

     

    “giːsuː

    dowræʃ bepiːtʃæam o

    dowræm bepiːtʃæad

    setɒːre æz ɒːb bærdɒːrædæm

    læb be ʃæb betʃasbɒːnæm

    qæriːv bærɒːræm

    tɒː q’ære iːn tɒːriːkiː betærækæd

    tæn boruːn zænæd æz tʃɒːke hær gæriːbɒːn”

     

    “I shall wind my hair around her and

    She shall wind her hair around me

    A star shall raise me from water

    I shall bind my lip to the night

    I shall roar

    Until the pit of this darkness ruptures

    [And] the flesh extrudes from the seam of every collar.”

    —Mohammad Mokhtari

     

  • Black Box Music is scored for percussion solo, amplified box, 15 instruments and video. The starting point is the classical soloist-conductor, only in this case, the conducting and solo part are one and the same. The setting is a traditional theatre stage with curtains, props and light; only in this case, the stage is also an instrument. Black Box Music could be said to be a deconstruction of conducting and puppet theatre as well as an exploration and exploitation of the audio/visual relations inherent in conducting and staging. The “grand show” is in three movements, starting with ‘Ouverture’ and ‘Disambiguation’ and then finishing off with a festive, pompous, self-imploding ‘Finale’.

    -Simon Steen-Andersen

  • In the summer of 2019, before the pandemic, I had a very nice and intense encounter with Ensemble Dal Niente, who performed three of my pieces as part of the De Paul summer course. I was very impressed by their great musicality and sensuality of sound.

    That’s why I focused entirely on the sound and left out extra musical things such as samples, video, and performance. My inspiration is often ignited by noises.

    Sound experiences outside of music challenge me to build a stage for them, to develop a sound space out of it. I track down the personality of the sounds and sort of create scenes in which they can unfold. For example, ‘Pacific Time’ begins with a dense band of noise as if we’re in a very dense fog. Gradually this is exposed differently as if a ray of sun is shining, but we cannot see it.

    I finished Pacific Time at Villa Aurora near Los Angeles, with daily physical contact with the ocean. At the same time, it describes the privileged state of being able to devote oneself entirely to the idea of ​​sound and to finding solutions with instrumentalists in order to bring it to life. I am painfully aware of this privilege in view of the man-made ecological collapse, which is also fogging up and eating away our spiritual and material resources through warlike destruction, which we would have to use with all our might to redirect and repair.

    -    Carola Bauckholt

  • Hilda Paredes’ dizzying harp concerto, in which angular melodies are refracted between the harp and ensemble,is titled Demente Cuerda, which can mean either “demented string” (“demente cuerda) or “of sound mind” (“de mente cuerda”)—reflecting, perhaps, states that many of us vacillated between in this difficult year. A  welcome sense of discovery underlies the piece, as the harp and ensemble continually renegotiate their respective roles and exchange musical ideas.

    *Dal Niente recorded this piece in the middle of the pandemic, when institutions were limiting the number of wind players allowed on one stage at one time. Keep an eye out for the flutist playing from backstage, watching the conductor via cctv.

  • “Jeffrey Mumford's music channels high modernism into imaginative works that are luminously textured….Becoming is a chamber concerto for piano. Winston Choi is the soloist with Ensemble dal Niente, conducted by Michael Lewanski. The overlapping of pitched percussion and piano creates a super instrument redolent of fleet and punctilious articulations. Choi has made a specialty of Elliott Carter's music, and thus has an entryway to Mumford's style that relatively few other artists have. His tone is brilliant and incisive, which better matches the correspondence with the percussionists. Ensemble dal Niente is a go-to group for contemporary music, and Lewanski is the conducting equivalent. Becoming is elegantly shaped and a microcosm of Mumford's music writ large. — Christian Carey, Sequenza 21

  • I began writing Garden of Earthly Desire with the idea of narrating simultaneously many different (musical) stories on many levels. My primary inspiration came from Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies in which sequences of fables arise from the interpretation of arrangements of tarot cards. The stories thrown up by this process intersect and illuminate each other with a multiformity of meanings that Calvino `reads´ from the cards, embedded as they are with memories, centuries-old of Western culture.

    This kaleidescopic patterning of meanings finds accord with my recent aesthetic preoccupations with fragmented, exploded structures that I term `debris´ forms. Central to this area of exploration lies a belief in a hypothetical `wholeness´ of an idea -- the idea that is the underlying principle of the music -- that presents itself, coalesced into a momentary flash of consciousness, in the precompositional stage. In the process of trying to realize this idea however, it becomes splintered and fragmented in a field of technical considerations -- strategies, games, filters -- that is, different readings of possible meanings of the idea. The piece of music therefore is not so much a completed `art-object´ as the resultant `bloody traceries´ of layers of interpretation.

    The work offers no `neat´ final solution but rather, seeks to present a complex flux of expression in time -- a celebration of the multiplicity and richness of the life in and around us. Hence the appeal of the tarot - the characters of these archetypal figures find musical analogies in the work. There is the Juggler - the alchemical, mercurial figure engaging in a dialectic of extremes; the High Priestess – totem of initiation and the gathering of energizing forces; the Empress - fecund, pagan, teeming with life.

    The work's connection with the fifteenth century Flemish painter, Hieronymous Bosch and his tryptich Garden of Earthly Delights was arrived at when I had already completed a substantial part of the work. I saw remarkable correspondences between various aspects of the Bosch - its tripartite structure; the surrealistic richness of the moods explored in the panels; the detailed fantasy figures -- and the characters of the different strands of my music that I had organised into a 3 x 3 x 3 cycle of sections.

    The work is dedicated to Daryl Buckley

    Liza Lim, 1989

  • Matt Oliphant, horn

    This work was commissioned by Nobuaki Fukukawa. It is very rare for an individual person to commission a large scale work like this concerto and I think it is a wonderful thing. I previously wrote a work for him for solo horn called "Poyopoyo" for which we experimented together to find a sound which is the antithesis of the stereotypical horn sound.

    I looked for sensitive, quiet, soft, and poetic sounds to represent poyopoyo. In Japanese the word "poyopoyo" describes something soft and squidgy, with a velvety texture - like the cheek of a four month old baby, which is how old my daughter was when I wrote this work. Over online video conferencing we settled on using a bass trombone harmon mute or a specially made harmon mute for horn to achieve the desired affect. The player can open or close the mute with his hand to make the "wah-wah effect, and throughout this piece the speed of this wah-wah effect varies to represent poyopoyo.

    Based on those experiences, I also made this concerto closely working with Nobuaki over skype, and meeting him in person, spending hours of experimenting to find unusual horn sounds. I think I do this because I generally dislike the typical sound of a classical "Horn Concerto" which often sounds macho and noisy. Like before, I wanted to do something totally opposite to that.

    Part 1 of this concerto is like a "Poyopoyo" concerto. The orchestra sounds like the wah-wah mute on horn. Next I composed a cadenza part of the concerto, which is very new for me as well as for Nobuaki. The sound is nothing at all like a normal horn, nor of European classical music (nor Japanese). We have no idea what it is, but when I found it when we were playing around with Nobuaki with his horn in our friend's apartment, we looked at each other, and I immediately jumped up and down with a joy, and started composing on the spot. He tried it and it sounded wonderful to me. I hope you will wait to hear what it is!

    The cadenza part has became an individual piece called "yurayura", a little sister piece to this Concerto.

    Dai Fujikura

  • Winston Choi, piano

    Chris Wild, cello

    Theo Ramsey, violin

    Ammie Brod, viola

    Katherine Jimoh, clarinet

    Emma Hospelhorn, flute

    Michael Lewanski, conductor

  • World Premiere Performance, 2018

    I notate the vocal sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in order to accurately transcribe both the type of sound and the place of articulation in the mouth. The sounds that I use are often remnants or artifacts of phonemes, however, when placed in a non-semantic context, they float in a liminal space with no overt connection to a language. 

    In the works for voice and ensemble, the articulatory possibilities of the mouth are often mapped onto the instruments, mirroring and expanding the vocal sounds to form a kind of "super-mouth" that can move beyond the physical limitations of a single vocal tract. Merging the voice with both the instruments and with breath, and repeatedly returning to formlessness through “a more (or less) pronounced utterance of the mouth”. Degrees of pronounced utterance.  This has been the main idea behind the entire Mouthpiece series, which began in 1999 and consists of about 30 works for solo voice, voice and ensemble, choir, voice and orchestra, string quartet, opera and other combinations.  Not pre-meaning, simply never in the direction of meaning. 

    —Erin Gee

  • George Lewis’s recent composition, Assemblage, for an ensemble of nine players (in fact three trios -- a woodwind section, a string section and a unique rhythm section consisting of piano, percussion, and harp) is an anxious, impatient, frenetic exploration of rhythmic gesture.  The work opens with two grooves (really, two tempos) attempting to assert themselves: the first a moderate but aggressive lick featuring virtuosic woodwinds, the second a faster-but-related-in-pulse rhythmic motif introduced by the agogo bell.  These two battle for primacy, alternating at a bewildering and unpredictable rate; in the process the figurations of each are transformed beyond recognition.  The tension is dispersed in the guise of much faster, ambiguous shards in the piano and harp.


    A significantly calmer -- but no less groovy -- section begins, eventually revealing itself to be related to the original tempo.  Once again, the sound grows increasingly complex as the texture thickens.  What initially appears to be a middle section leads back to the sudden, obviously recognizable, return of the gesture from the very opening with only minor variation.  This is immediately eclipsed by the second tempo, and the whole thing, again, cannot sustain itself.  More slow music ensues.  


    At last the two tempos are combined; the woodwind and string trios play nervous, pointilistic figures, while the rhythm section intones a steady, confident pulse, as if trying to prove a point.  A seemingly unprepared saxophone freak-out leads to more music of rhythmic uncertainty.  The opening figure interrupts stridently one last time, as if trying to get the situation under control, but all is lost.  The structure dwindles away with an ambiguous nonchalance.   


    Assemblage was written for Ensemble Dal Niente in the fall of 2013 and was premiered in October of that year at the Bowling Green New Music Festival.

    -- Michael Lewanski