Performance Etiquette
So that others around you may enjoy
the performance without distraction,
we ask that you refrain from:
speaking audibly;
taking flash photographs;
entering or leaving the hall unnecessarily;
or any other aural or visual distractions.
Please turn off cellular phones and
all other audible devices.
WESTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY
College of Fine Arts & Communication
& School of Music
present
New Music Festival 2016
Concert III
The use of unauthorized recording devices
is strictly prohibited.
Thank you.
New Music Festival is made possible with support from the
Performing Arts Society and the School of Music.
COFAC Recital Hall
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
7:30 PM
Ushering services provided by the Western Illinois University Chapter of Mu Phi Epsilon.
Pro gram
Collaborations
(Mostly) Fewer Than 60 Seconds Each (2013-15)
George Hufnagl
video by Drew Morton
Nothing Written Real (2015)
I. Nothing Song
II. Lake Song
III. Soft Song
IV. Window Song
Steven Weimer
Tana Field, mezzo-soprano
Christy D’Ambrosio, piano
Square One (2015)
Peter Lothringer
Jeffrey Brown, piano
Rotations, III. (2015)
Jonathan Wilson
Jonathan Wilson, voice, percussion, ARP 2600, radio, fan, electronics
Methods and Interludes (2013)
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
Jeffrey Brown, piano
The Line Begins to Blur (2014)
Steven Weimer
James Romig
Rick Kurasz, vibraphone
Ashlee Mack, piano
Five Pieces for Viola and Piano (2014)
I.
Moderato e espressivo
II. Sostenuto e mysterioso
III. Animato e leggiero
IV. Interludio: Sotto voce - furioso
V. Fuggevole
István Szabó, viola
Liang-yu Wang, piano
Paul Paccione
Both the viola and the piano are on equal footing in this piece. I was very much
interested in exploring different facets of musical/instrumental
characterization as they relate to instrumental gesture. The individual
movements and musical motives are highly characterized and expressive
instrumental gestures. It is a lyrical composition and the individual movements
are highly concentrated. I tried to get at the essence of the expression. The
composition was written for violist István Szabó.
numerous others. Recordings of his music have been released on the Blue
Griffin, First Step, and Navona record labels, and also by Perspectives of New
Music/Open Space. His percussion works are especially well-known and have
received hundreds of performances around the world. Guest-composer visits
include Eastman, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Northwestern, Illinois, and the American
Academy in Rome. Residencies include Petrified Forest National Park, Grand
Canyon National Park, and Copland House. He holds degrees from Rutgers
University (PhD, studying with Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt) and the
University of Iowa (MM, BM). He has been on faculty at Western Illinois
University since 2002.
The Line Begins to Blur, for flute and piano, was commissioned by Zeca
Lacerda for the BGSU/MACCM Bowling Green New Music Festival 2014.
Completed in March 2014, the work lasts approximately nine minutes in one
continuous movement. After an opening section of solo vibraphone articulating
evenly-spaced staccato notes, the piano enters with unisons that break up the
formerly-steady rhythm. As the work continues, the piano introduces sustained
notes and additional space between musical events. Eventually, staccato notes
disappear from the texture and all notes are relatively long. Vibraphone notes
become increasingly rare and ultimately stop completely, leaving the piano
alone, recalling the same pitches that the vibraphone played solo at the
opening, now in reverse order and with extremely long note-values. The title
is a lyric that appears multiple times on the 2005 album With Teeth, by Nine
Inch Nails.
Paul Paccione (www.paulpaccione.com) is Professor of Music Theory and
Composition at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois. He was named
Western Illinois University’s Distinguished Faculty Lecturer for 2002. He has
received degrees in music from the Mannes College of Music (BM, 1974) and
the University of Iowa (PhD, 1984). In 2010, New World Records released a
c.d. recording devoted entirely to his music, titled, “Our Beauties Are Not
Ours.” His recent chamber opera, The World is Round, based on a book by
Gertrude Stein, received its first performances at WIU in December 2015.
Additional recordings of his music are available on the Frog Peak and Capstone
labels. His writings on music have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, ex
tempore, College Music Symposium, American Music, the Journal of Music Theory
Pedagogy, and in liner notes for New World Records. Frog Peak Music
(www.frogpeak.org) publishes his music.
Biographies & Program Notes
If George were to meet you in real life, he would shake your hand and say to you,
“My name is George Hufnagl. It’s great to meet you!” And it would be great, because
meeting new people is great. Once you warmed up to each other, he’d tell you about
his studies in composition at Western Illinois University, how he discovered the
world of sound design at University of Iowa, and how he expanded those interests
with additional coursework at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The
conversation would naturally lead to how, in addition to enjoying employment by
Jellyvision as a composer and sound designer, he delights in working with game
developers, live performers, toy makers, writers and creative people of varying bents
and in varying spaces. If you hit it off, you might share ideas and laugh at all the silly
ones, but then you’d land on something special. There would be a pause... a nod...
and then you’d make something worth creating. True story.
The obnoxiously long title to this video may not be the most elegant, but it is
accurate. Simply put, it’s a summation of a series of short collaborations between
Drew Morton, motion designer, and George Hufnagl, sound designer. Having met
through mutual acquaintances, Drew and George’s impetus to create them was borne
out of respect and curiosity for each other’s discipline as well as a desire to explore
new aesthetics, techniques, and opportunities to discover their creative
commonalities. Without any rhyme or reason to the process other than the joy of
making, they carried out their audio-visual exploration for 2.5 years. While they still
find occasions to work together, this set of videos may be considered as a standalone
effort, representative of the spirit of their collaboration.
Steven Weimer’s music has been performed by the JACK Quartet, Molly Barth,
Fear No Music Quartet, saxophonist Sean Xue, Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival
Chamber Players, CCM Wind Ensemble, CCM Chamber Players, Café Momus, and
many others. Performances of his work span from Alaska to Bulgaria, with premieres
at festivals such as June in Buffalo, Forum-Festival Computer Music Space, North
American Saxophone Alliance, Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium,
Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, and the Music Theory and Musicology Society
Conference. His recent commissions include works for the Kentucky Music Teachers
Association, Vandoren, Inc., the CCM Orchestra Program, and tubist Timothy
Northcut. He has received first-place awards from the Eta Omicron chapter’s Phi Mu
Alpha Composition Contest, the CCM Concerto/Composition Competition, and
placed as a finalist for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s Marilyn Glick Young
Composers Competition. Dr. Weimer has enjoyed recent collaborations with
American poets in Cincinnati and California; his setting of Kathleen Winter’s Eve,
Seducing the Apple will be published in the tenth anniversary edition of the
Cincinnati Review. He is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Murray State
University in Kentucky.
Nothing Written Real is a song cycle based on four poems by Don Bogen.
Each poem contains powerful imagery, sharing themes of memory, time, place,
and transformation. I sought to reflect these ideas in the music through the use
of contrasting harmony and varied textures. The form and shape of musical
elements are a reflection of the text’s rhythm and structure. The work was
commissioned in 2015 by the Kentucky Music Teachers Association in
association with the Music Teachers National Association.
Methods and Interludes is a piece for piano in five short movements. The
“Methods” constitute the first, third, and fifth movements, and are constructed
using a new technique of pitch ordering that I am experimenting with. This
technique incorporates all 12 pitches, which are divided into unequal groups and
ordered according to harmonic sonorities that prevail in different sections of the
movement. It is designed to be a system that controls order and grouping of
pitch, but remains flexible in its application within the formal units of the piece.
Movements two and four are the 'interludes', which are comprised of intuitive,
repeated gestures, and are designed to cleanse the palette between movements
one, three, and five.
Peter Lothringer teaches music theory, composition, and guitar at Southwest
Minnesota State University. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in music theory and
composition from Western Illinois University, and a D.M.A in composition
from the University of Arizona. His composition teachers were Paul Paccione,
Jim Caldwell, and Dan Asia. Lothringer's compositions include works for
orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, and solo instruments, as well as music for
two documentary films. His orchestral music has been performed by the
Southwest Minnesota Orchestra, the Western Illinois University Symphony
Orchestra, and the Orchestra de Camera Ripieno (Panama City, Panama). His
music has also been featured on the Minnesota Orchestra's Perfect Pitch New
Music Reading Session and the Plymouth Music Series' Orchestral Reading
Project. Lothringer has made two CD’s featuring his compositions for solo
guitar, Fingerstyle Forms (2008) and Hymnopedie (2014), and he performs
regularly in a jazz duo with saxophonist/clarinetist Ross Anderson.
In Square One for solo piano, one sonority (a major triad with an added second)
undergoes perpetual variation and continuous transposition up a fourth,
producing what is essentially a long modulating sequence. As the music unfolds,
authentic cadences in third-related keys occur more and more frequently,
creating a long-range tonal motion. While these harmonic events provide an
underlying structure, the movement of the material through different registers
of the piano also shapes the music in a fundamental way.
Jonathan Wilson is a candidate for the doctorate in music composition at the
University of Iowa. With a Master of Music and Bachelor of Music in
composition from Western Illinois University, Jonathan has studied
composition with Josh Levine, David Gompper, Lawrence Fritts, James Romig,
James Caldwell, Paul Paccione, and John Cooper. In addition, Jonathan has
studied conducting under Richard Hughey and Mike Fansler. His compositional
process is derived from a concept, and each concept becomes the foundation for
the structural ideas of his works. His works have been performed at the
Experimental Superstars International Film Festival, the 38th Big Muddy Film
Festival, the 2015 and 2016 SEAMUS National Conferences, the National
Student Electronic Music Event, the Iowa Music Teachers Association State
Conference, and the Midwest Composers Symposium. He is the winner of the
2014 Iowa Music Teachers Association Composition Competition and a runnerup for the 2014 Donald Sinta Saxophone Quartet National Composition
Competition. Jonathan is a member of the Society of Composers, Inc.,
SEAMUS, the Iowa Composers Forum, and the American Composers Forum.
The third movement of Rotations is the culmination of entrainment, live
processing, and the body-machine relationship from the previous movements.
Here, the relationship to the body is expanded to include bodies in a
phenomenally larger realm: space. Space, abstractly, is represented through
fixed media, while the body and the machine are the vehicles of live sound
production. The source material for the fixed media in the third movement
includes recordings of radio emissions of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,
which were made by the Voyager spacecraft and the Cassini orbiter. Unlike the
previous movement, I depart from improvisation and follow a more cohesive
form. In addition, I relinquish control over time, specifically the ability to make
compositional decisions from the computer. I give the computer instructions on
the functions that will be performed, which leaves me with one single task: to
clarify the structure as the performer.
James Romig endeavors to create music that reflects the intricate complexity
of the natural world, where fundamental structures exert influence on both
small-scale iteration and large-scale design, obscuring boundaries between form
and content. His music has been performed in 49 states and more than 30
countries. Notable ensemble performers include the JACK Quartet, Talujon,
Ensemble Chronophonie, Duo Contour, Helix, the Khasma Duo, New Muse
Duo, the Zodiac Trio, Suono Mobile, and the Quad City Symphony Orchestra.
Solo performances include recitals by pianists Ashlee Mack and Taka Kigawa,
flutists John McMurtery and Harvey Sollberger, violinist Erik Carlson, and