Tuesday Night New Music: Cao, Shimshoni, Kim, Wu, Jia, Li, Dempsey, Dixon

Monstar Cao | Crossing Lights (2022)

Sunrise
Morning
Noon                            
Probably Can Use a Rest
Good Night
 

Program note

Crossing Lights is a piece that presents the possibility of performing a percussion piece but with zero existing instruments. All of the objects can be easily found in our daily lives. Along with the live electronics and the fixed media, those unique instruments will vibrate and create another level of sound.                                     
– Monstar Cao

Tamir Shimshoni | We’re All Individuals! (I’m Not) (2022)

Program note

When I was younger, I used to think that the woodwind quintet is an inherently flawed ensemble. While part of that was brass player snobbery, I also had a more legitimate reason: the differences in timbre between the different members make the ensemble incohesive and difficult to balance properly (it is for those reasons that the woodwind ensemble is frequently used as a challenge by composition teachers). When writing my first woodwind quintet, I have decided to address this problem by not addressing it: instead of attempting to make the ensemble work as unit, I wrote a piece that highlights the individual properties of each of the different members. The result is an eclectic, disjointed, and unusually (for me) light-hearted work, that draws inspiration from such diverse genres as jazz, Balkan folk, Romanticism, and Ligeti-influenced modernism.                                                                
– Tamir Shimshoni

Dohyun Kim | Meadow with Poplars (2022)

Nostalgia
Utopia
Catharsis
 

Program note

This piece was inspired by Claude Monet's painting ‘Meadow with Poplars’, which I saw at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In the work's three movements, I reflect on the scenario in the painting: A person sitting alone. In the first movement, I describe a person who is experiencing nostalgia. This nostalgia could be a memory from childhood or of loved ones, or a longing for home. In the second movement, a man gets lost, but he discovers an unexpected place: An ideal place for the man. We sometimes get lost in life. However, we don't need to collapse just because we're lost. Getting lost could lead to an utopia for us. The third movement conveys catharsis for modern people who are stressed in their relationships with work - in contrast with the idealized situation from over one hundred years ago in the painting. I wanted to depict a modern person who is finally purified from depression, tension, and anxiety, bringing together the experience of the past and present. Meadow with Poplars is about twelve minutes in duration, and was written for Jowen Hsu.                  
– Dohyun Kim

Zining Wu | Ivy (2021)

Program note

Ivy symbolizes willpower and patience.                                                            
– Zining Wu

Tianfang Jia | Piano Concerto, for piano, woofer, and silenced video (2022)

Program note

As a pianist lay dying, his hands were scarred by medical injections. No longer could he play the music, the music he had performed throughout his whole life. Barely eating or speaking, he feels alive only when sitting by the piano,. He is trying his utmost to play and listen to several notes on the piano. With each note, fragments of memory emerge. Painstakingly, he combed the thatch of the past.            
– Tianfang Jia

Pengyi Li | Micro-chromatic (2022)

Program note

This work focuses on the collocation and counterpoint between similar timbres in the same context. In this state, any slight deformation, expansion, and supplement is magnified. This represents my thinking and exploration of the aesthetics of "noiseism": can we construct a "harmonic system" through these unconventional sounds?                  
– Pengyi Li

Pat Dempsey | Solomon Upon Sinai (2022)

"Seneh: thorn-bush...The most probable origin of 'Sinai' is the Seneh or acacia with which we know it then abounded..."
-The Proper Names of the Old Testament, William & Norgate

Text

I.
It has always been in pursuit of me
And now arrived at the final land I wait
For an end to come raging through like a storm,
Like doom so long delayed I have wasted
Several lives in the one span.

The head is sick, the whole heart is faint.
If renewal is to be had, one must start
Again the pained task of learning to move
Through darkness with fascination,
And hope for some center to hold onto,
Something beyond and more perfect even than fear.

So I hoped hurt might heal into wisdom,
Love fix itself for better words to sing;
Pitch the spirit towards articulate song.
I have had to watch love turn
Into every imaginable thing—

II.
All life, all living must
Put away dreams in clay,
Write discouragement in dust.

I was spirit: I will be—
I am. It was the clay that
Mangled me into Man.

Most speech is less than breath.
Learning is less still, knowledge
Remains obscure.
All study repeats the same lesson
Of dim question, dimmer answer.
That is the whole essence.

I saw life — it was darker than described.
I felt death — it was lighter than life.

III.
Now the calm will not keep much longer. I am tired
And ready for sleep at the shade of the tree—
Here is the one place not destroyed
By past, future: High emptiness flows
Through the grass like original song. I did not know
Peace could be so perfectly voiced.
Let sleep itself become bedside priest.

IV.
The past does not pulse
But tauntingly thuds with a
Dull, antagonistic will, lulling
Slow; then reinforcing from afar,
Beats in a near hammer blow.

V.
Let indifference be the
Incorruptible crown:
Love is too difficult—easily angered,
Self-seeking, distraught,
Though the voice of it spoke like sound
Of water through a void wilderness.
Rather the feigned solidarity, fuller
Solitude in preparing for the one true
Grass togetherness.

VI.
Who is my comforter in this world
If no father can prove capable?
There is no other to meet me here,
And comfort in words is impossible.

Though the condition is coldness,
There was never yet any earth
Unfit for reunion, too frozen
For fruition. The spirit is settled
On cool clay—
How strange that renewal
Should seem inevitable. With shade as
Shield, all weight goes unshouldered;
The streams babble through the blades.

VII.
Death the dove bolting through the acacia came
And in a controlled burn its flaring lungs
Pyred the earth into a single tongue,
The grass became a winding sheet of flame.

So Babel and birth were one.
That Man from silence should be torn
The fire father saw it done
By him the most burning thorn.

VIII.
The sun was the first preacher on the hill
From which all else has descended.
Pitched so high the summit—
Immaterial save for songs in waves
To inscribe all the dust on the days.
And in an odd, alienated way
Preaching for life with a desperate sound,
Death and night finally all he can propound.

Before fall and creation were one,
The voice out of the emptiness sang free
Of covenant when the sun was Sinai
And the leaves of the trees remained
Unseared by flames.
Every man was his own priest;
He walked the waves. The bush
Sun blazed with a gemlike flame.

The tongue now can catch no fire,
The voice becomes obstacle,
Impossible to scale.
The world is on fire with birth and death:
Decay turns the day, in dry monotone
The gem is dull oppressive stone.

These still are less than breath.

IX.
Speak longer than allowed
By tongues overbound by flesh,
Ears compromised by earth.
Though familial of earth
And headed for rest,
Past decay try and progress
In sound transcending breath.

Recompose the wasted time as if
You had chosen it so; compile it
Like laurels of a crown.
The thorn is in winter and the leaves
Are despairing, the wind hostile and human.
Let the leaves go on despairing—
It is the best song they can summon.

Sing, but with sincerer rage:
Propound the central sadness
First compounded with the clay,
Cry a sad song strong enough
To resist dumb dust of days.

X.
Come on therefore, try and behold
The original zero emptiness,
The holy fire over the hill.
Conceive a hope without object
Like peace surpassing death.
In highest nihilism see the sun
Once more as Sinai.

Pat Dempsey

Minoo Dixon | Lady of the Mist (2022)

Program note

Commissioned by the Busan Flute Ensemble, Lady of The Mist paints an abstract vision of a beautiful spirit of the mist. Inspirations are visually drawn from my time at Granby Lake and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Early in the mornings, mist would surround me, and losing direction was a certainty as the morning sky only dimly lit the surroundings. Often, it felt as if a Spirit would float around, a separate entity that had ambiguous borders. It is as if the mist birthed her. Following where the wind would carry, the mist would always guide me to the shore of Granby Lake. Here is where the mist would begin melding with the still cold water of the lake, yet the constantly shifting air would create living walls of mist atop the trees of the Rocky Mountains. One could only trust their sight so far. And as if the walls would come collapsing down as the morning sun began shining onto the water, the Lady of The Mist would begin to fade into obscurity, as the wind took its last inhalation before blowing the mist away.                                               
– Minoo Dixon