Concert #4

Chamber Music

Friday, October 20, 2023

2:30 P.M. Bryan Recital Hall
Moore Musical Arts Center

Program

Steven Mark Kohn - The Old Things (2023, world premiere)
Keith Phares, baritone; Kevin Bylsma, piano

Christopher Dietz - Force Majeure (2017, world premiere)
Stephanie Titus, piano

Marcos Balter - Landscape of Fear (2015)
Garrett Evans and Sam Valancy, sopranino saxophones

Jeffrey Mumford - two Elliott Carter tributes
I. for Elliott (1983-84)
II. in celebration of Elliott (2006)
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Marcos Balter - False Memories (2022)
Solungga Liu, piano

Anthony R. Green - Collide-oscope IV (2016)
Leah Asher - letters to my future self
(2018)
andPlay
Maya Bennardo, violin; Hannah Levinson, viola

Christopher Dietz holds a Ph.D. in composition and theory from the University of Michigan as well as degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and the University of Wisconsin. He was previously a faculty member at the Oberlin Conservatory and Hillsdale College. He composes music inspired by a wide variety of sources, both real and conceptual. Poetry, sound as sculpture and color, how toddlers play, deep time and the cosmos, rhythm as geometry, religion and politics, animal behavior, and the music of others are a few of the subjects that have informed his musical imagination. A similarly diverse approach to the creation of each new piece has resulted in a collection of works distinct in their surface features yet bound together by a common vitality, nuanced palette, and a commitment to engaging with others. In recent years, Christopher’s works have been premiered in London, Auvillar (France), Montreal, Ottawa, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Houston, Phoenix and Ann Arbor, among others. His music has been performed by numerous contemporary ensembles including Alarm Will Sound, Decoda, The Orchestra of the League of Composers, Ogni Suono, The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, The East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, The Chicago Ensemble, Trio Kavak, Palomar, TACTUS Ensemble, Dark in the Song, The Color Field Ensemble, as well as traditional ensembles such as L’Orchestre de la Francophonie, The San Jose Chamber Orchestra, The Beau Soir Trio, The Orange County Symphony, The Toledo Symphony, the University of Michigan Symphonic Band and additional university ensembles across the United States. Upcoming collaborators include the Deviant Septet and pianist Solungga Liu. His work has been featured at new music festivals such as soundSCAPE (Italy), The Etchings Festival of Contemporary Music (France), The Queens New Music Festival, Florida State's Biennial Festival, Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, Tutti Festival of New Music, MusicX Festival and the New Music Festival at Bowling Green State University.

Residencies at Copland House, Canada’s Banff Centre and The Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France) have been important milestones in the development of Christopher's compositional voice. Recognition of his work has come from honors and awards including ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, The Minnesota Orchestra Reading Sessions and Composer Institute, The Riverside Symphony Composer Reading Project (NYC), The Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music, Random Access Music, The Utah Arts Festival’s Orchestral Commission Prize as well as several academic awards, grants and scholarships. Christopher's music has been released on New Focus, Navona and Cambria Records.

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Force Majeure— Irresistible compulsion or greater force. An event or effect that cannot be reasonably anticipated or controlled.

Steven Mark Kohn has worn several different creative hats. As a composer, he has written music for a number of award-winning children’s films, including Frog and Toad Together, Uncle Elephant, Cousin Kevin, Morris Goes to School, Commander Toad in Space, Ralph S. Mouse and the Emmy-nominated Runaway Ralph starring Fred Savage and Ray Walston. He has composed and arranged commercial music for Wheaties, Arby’s, Volvo, Hickory Farms, TRW, BP, Stanley Steemer, Matrix and many others. His music can be heard nationally on NPR for the Sylvia Rimm Show and on the Time-Warner audio book series “Health Journeys”, which has sold over two million copies worldwide. His “Hymn for String Orchestra” (publ. by Carl Fischer) has been recorded by the San Jose Chamber Orchestra and E. C. Schirmer publishes his art song catalog. His three volumes of American Folk Song arrangements were premiered in Carnegie Hall and have since been performed around the world by a hundreds of artists. Andrew Garland and Donna Loewy recorded the entire set in 2008. Steve has co-written and directed the short films Bugfeast, Lord J’s Wild West Daredevil Show and How’s My Driving?, which have been screened at festivals around the country and in Europe. For the theater, he created lyrics for the musicals The Quiltmaker’s Gift (Dramatic Publishing), Unstoppable Me, Little Mozart, A Beautiful Place, Happy, Texas, and the opera The Tale of the Nutcracker, all to the music of Craig Bohmler. His Mary Chesnut; a Civil War Diary was written for soprano Jennifer Larmore and his "The Trial of Susan B. Anthony" was written for mezzo soprano Adriana Zabala. His short story The Professor’s Diary appeared in National Lampoon magazine. He wrote the libretto for the grand opera Riders of the Purple Sage (music by Mr. Bohmler), which was premiered by Arizona Opera in February of 2017. For 21 years he served on the composition faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music as Director of the Electronic Music Studio.

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THE OLD THINGS

Libretto by Steven Mark Kohn, based on a short story by Jessie Anderson Chase.

In the little village where I live, everyone knows everyone.
Old familiar houses and shops and nooks and byways…
we know them all.

Here is the house of the old man, the one with the stone wall.
And there is where the old woman lives…the one with all the cats.

One day in late summer, while out for my walk, the old man peered over his stone wall and spoke to me.
“Excuse me. You are a lawyer, are you not?” I nodded that I was.
“Can I call upon your services?” he said. “I am near the end of my life. I have no children, and have little to leave behind. Only two things. One is a rocking chair, which my mother would sit in and rock me. I never
felt so safe and warm. There is a mirror, and I, as a lad, would see my face over my mother’s shoulder. It still holds a picture of my mother smiling up at me. These are all I have of value in the world. My chair and mirror.

You may know the old woman down the street. They all call her “Miss Tabby”. But her name is Helen. I’ve known her all my life. In our youth, we were to be married. But time has a way of gently slipping by, and dreams can wither on the vine. We grew old together, here in this small town, like two trees in the same forest. Almost touching. Almost touching…

I was hoping you could help me make my will. I would like to leave them to her. My chair and mirror.”

I assured him it would be done.

Two weeks had gone by, when out for my walk, I came upon the house of Miss Tabby, the one with the cats. She was puttering in the yard when she saw me.

“You are a lawyer, aren’t you?” I nodded, “yes”.

“Ha! Just the one I wanted to see! I am very old, you might have guessed. And I have many cats, you may have heard. And I am near the end of my life. But hey, that’s okay. People die every day. I can live with that.

I have only one concern, my two old cats. The young ones will be fine, they are strong. But the old ones, my angels, they are all I care for in this world. Someone will have to look after them.

Do you know the old man down the street? He lives in the house with the stone wall. We were young together, but we grew old apart. A world away, only three doors down. He was always a kind man. I can trust him.

I was hoping you could help me make my will. I would like to leave them to him, my dear old tabbies.”

I assured her it would be done.

The paperwork was drawn up and signed. The chair and the mirror would go to Miss Tabby, and the two old cats would end up in the care of the old man.

The next Sunday morning, as the church bells faded in the distance, something in the paper caught my eye. An old man and old woman died in the village on the same night. Their houses and possessions went for sale. There was the rocking chair, which his mother would sit in and rock him. And there was the mirror he loved as a lad. They were offered at auction but no one was buying, not one single person was willing to bid for them.

I sit now in his rocking chair. The mirror lies over my hearth. And the two dear cats are mine as well, sleeping by the fire.

These old things cost me nothing. But I would have paid gold. I would have paid gold.

Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of composer Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.

Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Recent performances include those at Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wigmore Hall, ArtLab at Harvard University, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Hall, Teatro Amazonas, Sala São Paulo, Park Avenue Armory, Miller Theater, Villa Medici, Teatro de Madrid, Bâtiment de Forces Motrices de Genève, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.

His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records.

He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago, visiting professorships at the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and a pre-doctoral fellowship at Lawrence University. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards and commissions.

Awards include the "Academy Award in Music" from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition.

Other grants have been awarded by the Ohio Arts Council, Meet the Composer, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music Inc., the ASCAP Foundation, and the University of California.

Mumford's most notable commissions include those from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Library of Congress (co-commission), the BBC Philharmonic, the San Antonio, Chicago & National Symphonies, Washington Performing Arts, the Network for New Music, ‘cellist Mariel Roberts, the Fulcrum Point New Music Project (through New Music USA), Duo Harpverk (Iceland), the Sphinx Consortium, the Cincinnati Symphony, the VERGE Ensemble /National Gallery of Art/Contemporary Music Forum, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Nancy Ruyle Dodge Charitable Trust, the Meet the Composer/Arts Endowment Commissioning Music/USA, Cincinnati radio station WGUC, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, the Fromm Music Foundation, and the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress.

His music has been performed extensively, by major orchestras, soloists, and ensembles, both in the United States and abroad, including London, Paris, Reykjavik, Vienna, The Hague, Russia and Lithuania.

Recent and forthcoming performances include the premiere of let us breathe (solo ‘cello) by Dan Culnan, as part of the Cincinnati Symphony’s “Fanfares’ project, and subsequent performances by Annie Jacobs-Perkins as part of a recital at the New England Conservatory of Music, and by Alan Richardson as part of a residency at Levine Music in Washington, D.C., wending by violist Jordan Bak, undiluted days by the Merz Trio, the premiere of .fleeting cycles of layered air (solo violin) by Miranda Cuckson, as part of the Fromm concert series sponsored by Harvard University, brightness dispersed (‘cello & string orchestra) by Mariel Roberts & The String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and a landscape of interior resonances by pianists Robert Fleitz and Steven Beck. Pianist Pina Napolitano will include his two Elliott Carter tributes in her European concerts this and coming seasons, and has recorded them as part her recently released CD entitled “Tempo e Tempi” (Odradek Records -ODRCD378).

Current projects include a new work for the JACK Quartet, entitled deepening paths of resonant light, commissioned by the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, a new work for solo ‘cello, entitled from within . . . unveiling brightness, commissioned by Alisa Weilerstein as part of her “Fragments“ project, for Clare, a new work for solo piano commissioned by pianist Clare Longendyke as part of “UnRaveling”, a project responding to and reimagining Ravel’s piano music, a new work for the Parker Quartet entitled blossoming fragments of appreciation, a new work for violist Jordan Bak, and harpist Ashley Jackson entitled stillness echoing, a new work for the String Orchestra of New York City (SONYC) and a CD of recent concerti.

He also was featured in masterclasses at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY and Levine Music in Washington, D.C.

During the past two summers his music was featured at the June in Buffalo Festival, Kneisel Hall, Tanglewood, the Cheltenham Festival (Manchester, UK), the Aava Festival in Finland and the HIMA Festival US in Lakeside, OH. His work was also selected for a workshop at the Marlboro Festival.

Mumford has taught at the Washington Conservatory of Music, served as Artist-in-Residence at Bowling Green State University, and served as assistant professor of composition and Composer-in-Residence at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Lorain County Community College in Northern Ohio.

Mr. Mumford is published by Theodore Presser Co. and Quicklight Music and represented by Black Tea Music.
 

The creative output of Anthony R. Green (b. 1984; composer, performer, social justice artist) includes musical and visual creations, interpretations of original works or works in the repertoire, collaborations, educational outreach, and more. Behind all of his artistic endeavors are the ideals of equality and freedom, which manifest themselves in diverse ways in a composition, a performance, a collaboration, or social justice work.

As a composer, his works have been presented in over 25 countries across six continents by various internationally acclaimed soloists and ensembles, including : vocalists Anthony P. McGlaun, Julian Otis, Anna Elder, and Amanda DeBoer Bartlett; violists Ashleigh Gordon, Gregory Williams, Carrie Frey, and Wendy Richman; pianists Stephen Drury, Kathleen Supové, Jason Hardink, Kimi Kawashima, Lewis Warren Jr., Clare Longendyke, Hayk Melikyan, and Eunmi Ko; cellists Matthieu D’Ordine, Patricia Ryan, and Ifetayo Ali-Landing; percussionists Bill Solomon, Michael Skillern, and Dame Evelyn Glennie; saxophonists Neal Postma, Benjamin Sorrell, and Kendra Williams; and ensembles Tenth Intervention (Hajnal Pivnick – violin, and Adam Tendler – piano), ALEA III (with Gunther Schuller, conductor), the Thalea String Quartet, counter)induction, Ensemble Dal Niente, Dinosaur Annex, andPlay, NorthStar Duo, fivebyfive, Transient Canvas, the McCormick Percussion Group, the Icarus Quartet, Opera Kansas (as winner of the 2018 Zepick Modern Opera Contest), the American Composers Orchestra, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, the Minnesota Philharmonic, the String Archestra, the Playground Ensemble, Ossia New Music Ensemble, and Alarm Will Sound, to name a few. He has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation (a 2021 commissioned composer), Community MusicWorks, Make Music Boston, Celebrity Series Boston, Chamber Music Tulsa, Access Contemporary Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Boston University (for the 2023 Richmond Piano Competition), the Texas Flute Society (for the 2021 Myrna Brown Competition), NOISE-BRIDGE duo, Ghetto Classics (for the 2022 Kenya International Cello Festival), and various other soloists and ensembles. In 2021, three portrait concerts featuring his music were presented digitally by Boston University, and in live concerts at UMKC - presented by the saxophone studio, and in St. Paul, Minnesota - presented by the 113 Composers Collective. A fourth portrait concert featuring vocal works will be presented in December 2022 at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA. He has been a resident artist at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Escape to Create (Florida), Visby International Centre for Composers (Sweden), Space/Time (Scotland), atelier:performance (Germany), the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Nebraska), Gettysburg National Military Park (through the National Parks Arts Foundation), and the perfocraZe International Artist Residency (Ghana). Upcoming residencies include the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida) and Loghaven (Tennessee).

As a performer, he has appeared at venues in the US, Cyprus, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Israel, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, South Korea, and Ghana, premiering original works and working with student, emerging, and established composers such as David Liptak, Renée C. Baker, and George Crumb for various performance presentations. Green has participated in consortium commissions organized by Neal Postma (saxophone), Meraki (clarinet and piano duo), and New Works Project (solo percussion). His music has been performed at Symphony Space (New York), Marian Anderson Theater at Aaron Davis Hall (New York), the DiMenna Center (New York), Jordan Hall (Boston), Tivoli Vredenburg (Utrecht), Kunstraum (Stuttgart), Cité de la Musique et de la Danse (Strasbourg), the Shoe Factory (Nicosia), the TWA Hotel (New York), the Edward A. Hatch Memorial Shell on the Charles River Esplanade (Boston), and the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), amongst many others. Selections of Green’s music and performances are on CDs and DVDs on the Navona, Ravello, Stone, and Innova labels. His recent engagement in performance art and divergent theater has yielded presentations of such works in Berlin (Spike Gallery), New York City (Union Square for the Art in Odd Places Normal Project, 2021; JACK in Brooklyn for the 2021 Radical Acts Festival), Oslo (Kulturkirken Jakob for the Periferien “SITES AND SOUNDS” project), and in Kumasi, Ghana. Other visual and sonic art projects have been presented at Galerie Wedding (Berlin), Federation Square (Melbourne), Monkey Bar (Hannover), Alliance Francaise Kumasi, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and venues in Malaysia, Venezuela, Spain, and more.

Through music, text, and entrepreneurship, Green comments on many issues related to social justice. Such issues have included: immigration (Earned - narrator & double string quartet), civil rights (Dona Nobis Veritatem - soprano, viola, & piano), the historical links between slavery and current racial injustice in the US (Oh, Freedom! - spoken word, voice, flute, viola, cello), the contributions of targeted and/or minority groups to humanity (A Single Voice: Solitary, Unified - solo alto sax & fixed media), and more. His ongoing opera-project Alex in Transition highlights the life of Alex - a trans woman - and her journey to truth and authentic living. This opera has been featured in the Ft. Worth Opera Frontiers Festival, presented by New Fangled Opera and One Ounce Opera, and performed in a concert production at the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv. For the Concord Revisited Project, organized by pianists Jason Hardink and Kimi Kawashima at Westminster College (Salt Lake City), Green composed The Baldwin Sonata : a concert-length piano sonata celebrating and musically analyzing the life, legacy, philosophy, and text of the legendary James Baldwin. Other social justice works include: short cabaret operas, which are comedic-yet-piquant critiques on capitalism via corporations (one of which was premiered by Strange Trace for their 2021 Stencils Festival); His Mind & What He Heard in Central Park in the Late 90s for solo voice, concerning a gay Black man’s encounters with queer racism and toxic exotification (premiered by Anna Elder at the 2019 Conference: Music & Erotics at the University of Pittsburgh); To Anacreon in the US for solo piano, concerning nationalism - especially US “patriotism” (premiered by Aristo Sham at New England Conservatory, with subsequent performances by Kathleen Supové at Barge Music, Clare Longendyke at the Mostly Modern Festival, and more); the sax quartet Almost Over, a musical symbol of Black history in the United States (featured in the 2017 Grachten Festival in Amsterdam and the 2017 Gaudeamus Music Week in Utrecht); rest - reflect - reignite, a video work exploring Black rest, inspired by the Nap Ministry (commissioned by the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project for the Re:Sound 2021 Festival); Piano Concerto: Solution, sonifying and visualizing the power of women (commissioned by the McCormick Percussion Group; presented at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and the Milwaukee Art Museum presented by Present Music); and I Returned. I wanted to., a video work examining Black joy, Black queerness, Christianity in Africa, and more (commissioned by CAP UCLA for the 2021 Tune In Festival), amongst others. Publications include text for New Music Box, TEMPO (Cambridge University), Archive Books, Positionen magazine (Berlin), and more.

Green’s most important social justice work has been with Castle of our Skins : a concert and education series organization dedicated to celebrating Black artistry through music. Co-founder, associate artistic director, and composer-in-residence, his work with Castle of our Skins has included concert/workshop curation and development, community outreach, lecturing about the history and politics concerning Black composers of classical music, commissioning and supporting young, emerging, and established composers, curating the BIBA (Beauty in Black Artistry) Blog, and more. The current 10th season will be his final season with CooS, after which he will transition to director emeritus, occasional consultant, and lifelong friend.

His primary teachers include Susan Kelley, Dr. Donald Rankin, and Maria Clodes-Jaguaribe for piano, and Dr. Martin Amlin, John Drumheller, Theodore Antoniou, Lee Hyla, and Dr. Robert Cogan for composition. He has participated in masterclasses with Laura Schwendinger, Paquito D’Rivera, Walter Zimmermann, Jonathan Harvey, the Fidelio Trio, and the JACK Quartet, amongst others. His solo and collaborative work has been recognized by grants from Meet the Composer, the Argosy Foundation, New Music USA, and the American Composers Forum as a McKnight Visiting Composer, among others. A passionate educator, Green has given courses, workshops, lectures, and studio visits at numerous institutions, including Walker West Music Academy, Boston University, the Longy School of Music, the Piet Zwart Instituut, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), UC Santa Cruz, the Eastman School of Music, Northwestern University, the Gotland School of Music Composition (Gotlands Tonsättarskola), Westminster College, the University of Milwaukee, and Columbia University. He has served on the faculty for the Sewanee Music Festival, Project STEP summer program, Really Spicy Opera’s Aria Institute, the Alba Music Festival Composition Program, and the Vienna Summer Music Festival’s Composers Forum. An avid thought contributor, he has appeared on panels concerning various subjects for the Wellesley Composers Conference, the 2020 New Music Gathering (along with Angélica Negrón, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and more), and most recently for the 2022 WASBE Conference in Prague (along with Jennifer Higdon and David T. Little, and more), among others. He has also taught various subjects and given private composition lessons at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music, Theater, and Dance. He is a 2021 graduate fellow (alumnus) of the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Science (BAS) at the Berlin University of the Arts graduate school (Graduiertenschule), and also holds degrees from New England Conservatory and Boston University.

Green was born on Nacotchtank land (Arlington, VA) and raised on Narragansett and Pauquunaukit land (Providence, RI) in a country named by violent Europeans and built significantly by the labor of the enslaved. He currently splits his time mostly between the US and Europe, with ever-increasing travel to Africa. He is married to his occasional piano duo partner and forever husband Dr. Itamar Ronen.

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Collide-oscope IV is the fourth in a set of pieces that explores concentrated colors, concentrated pitch collections, and restrained employment, in order to create textures that spin and collide much like the colors and shards of material found in a kaleidoscope. Each piece in the series has a unique structure, pitch/harmonic focus/and textural employment. Collide-oscope IV employs a microtonal tuning, and incorporates a number of harmonics in an attempt to work with in-between pitches. The voice’s pitches are in relation to the string tuning, thus bringing a human sound also into the microtonal realm. Each piece in the Collide-oscope series is the unraveling of an idea – a static study that is concerned with the existence and creation of absolute sound.

Violinist/violist, composer, and visual artist Leah Asher is an avid performer of contemporary music and creator of new artistic works. Leah has been a member of The Rhythm Method string quartet, an innovative ensemble of composer-performers, since 2016. A sought after performer and collaborator, Leah can be found performing as a regular guest with New York-based ensembles such as International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, and S.E.M. Ensemble. She is also the co-creator of Meaningless Work, an interdisciplinary performance collaboration with Nicolee Kuester.

Leah maintains an international career with performances presented by the Lucerne Festival, Lake George Music Festival, Omaha One Festival, MATA Festival, TriBeCA New Music, Festspillene i Nord Norge, Music Mondays, and Codes d’accès. Leah has equally enjoyed performing at such celebrated venues as The Wiener Musikverein, Disney Concert Hall, Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, and the KKL Lucerne, as well as smaller, more intimate venues such as The Owl Music Parlor, Kimaira, Echoraum, the cell theatre, Konsthall C, and JACK. Leah has been featured as a concerto soloist with the Arctic Philharmonic Sinfonietta and Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Ensemble. Leah formerly served as solo violist of the Arctic Philharmonic Sinfonietta and co-principal viola of the Arctic Philharmonic.

As a guest artist and educator, Leah has given performances and worked with students at universities including Rice University, New York University, Bowling Green State University, Zurich University for Art and Music, Arkansas State University, Tulane University, Peabody Conservatory, Hunter College, Brown University, and Youngstown State University. In the summers, she holds faculty positions at Point Counterpoint, the Composers Conference, and Lake George Music Festival Composer’s Institute.

As a composer, Leah has been commissioned by several ensembles, including andPlay, Chartreuse, Periapsis, NorthArc Percussion Group, The Great Learning Orchestra, Du.0, and solo artists such as Meaghan Burke, Tristan McKay, and Jennifer Torrence. Recent releases include Leah’s solo album ‘Retreat into Afters’ (SCRIPTS Records), and The Rhythm Method’s self-titled debut album (Gold Bolus Recordings). Leah joined the faculty of Manhattan School of Music as of 2022.

Leah completed her undergraduate degrees at Oberlin College and Conservatory, studying violin with Gregory Fulkerson and studio art primarily with John Pearson. As a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, she completed her Master’s in Contemporary Performance at Manhattan School of Music with Curtis Macomber, then continued studies at UCSD under the tutelage of János Négyesy.

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This is a piece about what people want for themselves and want to tell themselves. All of the sounds that aren’t text are written in graphic notation, which means that I have created a pictorial representation of the sounds that I would like to hear.

Thanks for attending this performance. If you have enjoyed your experience, please consider donating to the College of Musical Arts in support of our students and programming. Donate online at bgsu.edu/givecma, or call Sara Zulch- Smith at 419-372-7309.

To our guests with disabilities, please indicate if you need special services, assistance or appropriate modifications to fully participate in our events by contacting Accessibility Services, access@bgsu.edu, 419-372-8495. Please notify us prior to the event.

Audience members are reminded to silence alarm watches, pagers and cellular phones before the performance. As a matter of courtesy and copyright law, no recording or unauthorized photographing is allowed. BGSU is a nonsmoking campus.

Updated: 10/19/2023 05:36PM