New Music Premiere:
Unheard-of//Ensemble
Words: Steve Smith
Image: Michael Yu
Words: Steve Smith
Image: Michael Yu
It’s a modern-music truism: Any successful composition written for an unorthodox grouping of instruments will spawn ensembles built to play that piece, who then will beat the bushes in search of fresh repertoire. The strongest such works often inspire more than one group. Take for example Messiaen’s landmark 1940 piece Quatuor pour la fin du temps (“Quartet for the End of Time”), whose ad hoc grouping of clarinet, violin, cello, and piano provided a template for the groundbreaking group Tashi in 1973, and, more recently, for a promising young group, Unheard-of//Ensemble.
Comprising clarinetist Ford Fourqurean, violinist Matheus Souza, cellist So Sugiyama, and pianist Daniel Anastasio, Unheard-of already has developed an enviable cache of new pieces. Eight of those works – commissioned pieces by Erin Rogers, Christopher Stark, Nathan Hudson, Reiko Füting, Nickitas Demos, and Michael Lanci, plus recent compositions by Tonia Ko and Ben Loory – are featured on the quartet’s debut album, Unheard-of//Dialogues, which is due for release this Saturday, January 19.
And now, thanks to the ensemble’s generosity, you can listen to an exclusive premiere of one track from the album: the scintillating and evocative opening piece, Maple, by Christopher Stark.
Asked to describe the how and why of Maple, Stark provided the following notes via e-mail:
“The Maple Fire of 2016 was the largest forest fire in Yellowstone National Park since 1988. The Mountain West is the most rapidly warming part of the United States, and as a native Montanan who now lives in St. Louis, Missouri, I watch from afar each summer as fires consume my home state. This has brought an anxiety into my life that I wanted to directly import into my work by using field recordings in an attempt to reposition the listener into the context of the work’s creation–like bookends or a frame. The interior musical content of Maple both portrays this anxiety with lamenting, pitch-bent instrumental loops, but also dispels it with playful references to dance music. Maple is ultimately about my relationship to nature and technology, and how these two forces simultaneously inspire and unsettle my creative impulses.
“The opening of the work utilizes sampled looped phrases of slightly bent pentatonic lines, not unlike a subtle LFO on an FM synthesizer, to try and create an ambient texture that is then energized by a synthesizer-esque piano texture. The idea was to move from a lament to a dance. I was listening to a lot of EDM (Jon Hopkins) when I made this and Brian Eno is a constant influence. The piano also plays a sub-bass synth with the left hand when the loops are suddenly glitched and chopped up using an algorithmic rhythm generator in Max by turning the audio loops rapidly on and off.
As with the forest fire sample, I was also listening to a lot of cicada samples, which represent Missouri for me, and also the broader feeling of “heat” in general. I use the same glitch Max patch on the cicadas to tie the two sections together. I also use an EDM ducking technique whereby the volume of the ensemble effects the volume of the cicadas in inverse proportion which creates a rapid reverse-cymbal sort of sound.
Other than that there are also CD glitch sounds inspired by Nicolas Collins and more gliss-y melodic material before the work finally concludes with an EQ sweep on the fire sample’s return.
My harmonic language is not systematic and comes primarily from my background as a rock and jazz musician.”
If you want to hear more from Unheard-of/Dialogues, head over to I Care If You Listen, which posted a premiere by Erin Rogers late last week. Unheard-of//Ensemble will celebrate the album’s release with a concert at Tenri Cultural Center in Greenwich Village on Saturday, January 19, at 8pm; you’ll find more details here.
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