Monday, April 22, 2024

UB Composers in Action

This Tuesday, April 23 at 7:30pm in Lippes Concert Hall, the extraordinary saxophonist Kyle Hutchins will premier works by the University at Buffalo composition students William Brobston, Maria Lihuen Sirvent, Jackson Roush, Chi-Yen Huang, Francisco Corthey, and Thomas Little. These pieces are the result of Hutchins’ year-long residency at the University, during which time he worked with students on their pieces for this concert and performed Tiffany Skidmore’s The William Blake Cycle, a saxophone opera in five acts, as well as her opera the golden ass (Read more about The William Blake Cycle here and the golden ass here).

Projection from The William Blake Cycle
Photo from Tiffany Skidmore's website

The spring semester also saw an incredible feat by Skidmore’s composition studio, in collaboration with Duo Gelland and Buffalo String Works on April 10 of this year. Buffalo String Works, a local non-profit organization dedicated to enriching the musical education of the community's primary school age children of refugee or immigrant families (read their mission statement here), premiered pieces by composers Francisco Corthey and Jonathan Rainous with Duo Gelland. The duo also premiered pieces by James Falzone, Chi-Yen Huang, Thomas Little, and Tyler Sebastian. (Read more about the UB composition students here.)

Portions of this concert will be performed again on Wednesday, June 5 at 6pm in Lippes Concert Hall. Both concerts are free and open to the public.  


Francisco Corthey (UB composition student)
Martin Gelland and Cecilia Gelland, Duo Gelland
Mason Cancilla (conductor and UB alumnus)

Buffalo String Works students
Photo courtesy of Francisco Corthey


Wednesday, April 10, 2024

From the College of Arts and Sciences: Ming Tsao Appointed as Birge-Cary Professor of Music Fall 2024

 The Center for 21st Century Music is thrilled to welcome composer Ming Tsao to the University at Buffalo. Professor Tsao will be joining the ranks of the senior faculty of the Department of Music in the fall of 2024, and we await his leadership of the vital composition program at UB with great anticipation!



Tsao's artistic philosophy challenges the hierarchical structure of Western art music, forming bridges between genres, techniques, and expressive disciplines from across the world. For more information, visit his website.

Click here to view the College of Arts and Sciences official press release.

Slee Sinfonietta Pan-Americana Part II

 The Center for 21st Century Music looks forward to an electrifying concert by the Slee Sinfonietta on Tuesday, April 16 at 7:30pm in Slee Hall under the baton of Prof. Jaman Dunn-Danger. Featuring the works of Lukas Foss, Su Lian Tan, Chou Wen-chung, and William Kraft, this performance takes as its point of departure the pan-American theme from the Sinfonietta's October 17 concert, now turning our attention to musical interactions between America and Asia.  

 

German composer and conductor Lukas Foss established what became an intimate connection to Buffalo’s music culture after his arrival in 1963 to direct the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the University at Buffalo and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Foss’s compositional style shifted from Western neoclassicism to experimental in the mid-twentieth century.  





Lukas Foss


An elegy for distinguished Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu, For Toru cycles through moods of tender sorrow and longing, punctuated by flickers of joy. Foss evokes grief and signals Takemitsu’s musical lineage through the flute’s melody, which features bent pitches and contrasting soft, fluttered, and sharp articulations. Though the work is overarchingly tonal, Foss provides few moments of resolution, alluding to Takemitsu’s enduring influence.



Toru Takemitsu
 


William Kraft was an American percussionist and composer whose works reflects a variety of genres, including serialism and experimental jazz. The recipient of several awards and grants—a fellowship from the Guggenheim and Ford Foundations and several awards from the Kennedy Center among them—Kraft dedicated his career to absorbing new techniques and creating new music performing ensembles.

 

Encounters V, “In the Morning of the Winter Sea” channels the form and mood of Carl A. Faber’s homonymous poem. To capture the cautious optimism of a soul recovered, Kraft uses starkly contrasting dynamics, juxtaposing articulations for both cello and percussion, and drastic temporal shifts. The piece exhibits his connection to a variety of musical traditions through instrumentation, including an array of four tam tams from Asia. Kraft's influences bespeak the common interests of West Coast composers and performers who borrowed from Asian traditions, including major figures with whom he collaborated, such as Lou Harrison and John Cage.



William Kraft Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images


Chou Wen-chung left an indelible mark on Western and Asian music of the twentieth century. He was born in Yantai, China, in 1923 and relocated to the United States in 1946, around which time he began composing his earliest noted works. The first of his major composition projects, Landscapes, was premiered in 1949 by the San Francisco Symphony. Critics and scholars attested to the unparalleled nature of the work, claiming that it did not abide by either Asian or Western standards.  

 

Chou’s style retained its idiosyncratic lexicon, though he increasingly drew from Asian soundscapes throughout his career. Ode to Eternal Pine (2009) is no exception. Using a variable mode principle he had developed himself, the piece undergoes several transformations, moving fluidly between chromatic and pentatonic tonal formations.  



Chou Wen-chung
Photo courtesy of composer's website

 

Su Lian Tan’s work is similarly biographical. A former student of Milton Babbitt, she combines a German post-modern aesthetic with her childhood soundscape, rooted in China and Malaysia. Tan’s opera, Lotus Lives, was staged earlier this season at the University at Buffalo Center for the Arts. She is the Fletcher Professor of the Arts at Middlebury College and Visiting Slee Professor at the University at Buffalo for the 2023-24 academic year.  

 

Flutist Carol Wincenc personally commissioned Autumn Lute Song and its various recordings; the version we will hear on April 16 includes an obbligato part for the erhu). A flutist herself, Tan was able to capture the instrument’s timbral flexibility and expressivity within the piece. The work centers the pentatonic scale, a tonal system often used to sonically evoke East Asian localities/traditions.



Su Lian Tan
Photo courtesy of composer's website




Carol Wincenc
BURKART/JOVANI