Four Fragments In Old Styles

     I. 4.1 (Traditional after Lassus)
     II. 4.2 ( Traditional after Lassus with modern transformation)
     III. 4.0 (Semi-traditional after Lassus)
     IV. 6 (13th Century French morphing into Baroque invention)
 

Alix Bushard, soprano
Kyle Quarles, bass
 

Cirque (Lucy Shirley, b. 1997)
Inspired in part by the 2010 PBS Documentary The Circus and in part by music of twentieth century cabaret, Cirque is a poignant fantasy on otherness and overcoming.
Composer Lucy Shirley’s works are polystylistic and playful, often focusing on language and aspects of the human voice. Shirley’s earliest musical influences were gleaned from long car rides listening to her mom’s mixtapes of showtunes and classic Americana, and she still often finds herself incorporating aspects of theatricality and folk melody into her current music-making. Shirley’s awards include winning IAWM’s 2024 Call for Scores, selection in SOLI Chamber Ensemble’s 2024 30x30x30 Project, a 2022 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and 2nd place in the 2021 UMKC Chamber Music Composition Competition. She has attended festivals such as the Norfolk New Music Workshop, June in Buffalo, HighSCORE, and Nief-Norf, and has worked with artists such as the JACK Quartet, the Imani Winds, the mdi ensemble, Carrie Koffman, Don-Paul Kahl, and the Mammoth Trio. Shirley is currently a PhD student at the University of Iowa where she studies with David Gompper.

This Was a Story (Blake Cordell (b. 1995)
In which we question what a narrative is made from. The words? The letters? The spaces and punctuation in between? Is there coherence in the natural cadence? Is the tale spun inside the rigid framework or beyond? Was this a story?
 

Duet for Ghosts (Jason Wise (b. 2001)
“Boo”, said one ghost to the other. The second ghost contemplated, then responded, “Boo?”
 

Three Grain Etudes (Jeff Martin (b. 1993)
Three Grain Etudes is the result of a summer project in algorithmic granular synthesis. The source material is several gigabytes of audio, which is automatically analyzed and the analysis stored in a database. My database stores analysis data for over two million grains of audio. This makes it possible to find little related bits of sound that can be stitched together to create a larger soundscape. In this piece, you will hear tiny fragments of real-world audio, such as bird chirps, as well as composite sounds from different sources.