The Fourth Concert in the Festival of Contemporary Music

Concert IX
The University of Iowa CNM Ensemble

Sunday, April 5, 2009, 8:00 p.m.
at Macbride Hall

Songs and Dances of Macondo for woodwind quintet (2004)

The fictional town of Macondo is the setting of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. This suite for woodwind quintet (here imagined as a band of street musicians) was conceived as a songbook of sorts, inspired by musical elements and episodes in the novel. For the most part, these songs and dances employ a shared melodic and rhythmic vocabulary; each develops through harmonic and timbral modulations, while collectively, their chronological sequence loosely traverses a broader narrative thread. Songs and Dances of Macondo was commissioned by the Aspen Music Festival and School.

Luna (2008)

is a single-movement work for solo marimba, composed in 2008 at the University of Iowa for Chris Sande. The piece is conceptually simple, yet technically challenging; the straightforward formal design (characterized by motion to and from a central quote) underpins a network of complex rhythmic relationships. The quote, a reference to a popular Guatemalan waltz, is the focal point; the piece is essentially "about" the marimba itself, without actually resembling most standard marimba literature.

Cantus Canti (1991) for six celli

In making distinctions within its definition of cantus the Harvard Dictionary of Music lists among the four groups to which the cantus might belong, a group based upon "abstract subjects. To this group belong various compositions based upon the hexachord."

On the other hand the definition of canto (canti, pl.) is simply "song or melody."

Cantus/Canti combines both these elements. The cantus, unlike those using a diatonic hexachord, utilizes a chromatic hexachord containing all the pitch classes within the interval of a fourth (G-C). The canti which follow are based on that hexachord.

Formally the piece is a set of fourteen variations alternating the appearances of the various canti with the cantus, which is itself varied in each appearance. Additionally, the variations are ordered to form an "inverted arch form," a design in which the related variations use similar material but are presented in a contrasting manner (i.e., slow answered by fast, loud by soft, etc.). The composition is dedicated to the well-known conductor, Frederik Prausnitz (1920-2004).

Through the Turmoil of Liquid Skies (2008)

The title of this piece is taken from The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. In this book, a sailor finds himself stranded on an abandoned ship that is anchored on the international dateline. As he descends into madness, he continually contemplates the idea that he floats in a temporal limbo between yesterday and tomorrow. Of course, it is all a matter of perspective. The dateline does not define the border between past and future, but rather allows for the measurement of the passage of time according to set parameters. However, in his addled state, our hero finds this curious conceptual position a bit too hard to bear.

This piece uses differences in texture, density, and tempo to simulate the flexibility of our perception of time. However, the driving force behind this effect is the harmonic language. This piece is made entirely of harmonies derived through the frequency and ring modulation of a background two-voice framework. Differing levels of tension inherent in these harmonies create a continuum between spectrally-fused sonorities, and discrete harmonic and melodic figures.