TONIA KO: Hush (2012)
Hush, written for the adventurous duo New Morse Code, maps the concept of speech and song onto the instrumental combination of percussion and cello. Taking excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s short story “The String Quartet,” the performers convey the busyness of speech and conversation contrasted with the simplicity of song. The metaphor lends itself to extended roles for both performers—unpitched (un-singing) percussion renders spoken words, while the cantabile cello sound dovetails into vocal singing. The middle movement reminds the listener of the worth in silences, which emerge when we care to hush.
—Tonia Ko, composer
SUZANNE FARRIN: Uscirmi di braccia (2010)
The phrase uscirmi di braccia comes from a Petrarch sonnet and is a reference to Apollo’s arms as they reach to kidnap Daphne. As he nearly captures her after a fierce chase, she transforms herself into a laurel tree in order to escape him. I imagined that the viola (having itself been transformed from a tree), as what Apollo is left holding when Daphne makes her exit.
The Daphne story has been a thread in the human story for millenia. Petrarch romanticizes Apollo's loss, but the sculptor Bernini captures Daphne’s terror and power. I prefer the Bernini, but the Petrarch text swims in my mind and, in the case of this musical work, weaves itself like a vine into the material of Schubert’s Nacht und Trȁume. Both poems take place at night. With only the stars as witness (non ci vedess ‘altri che le stelle), protected by the psychological power of darkness.
—Suzanne Farrin, composer
RYAN CARTER: When All Else Fails (2017)
A sonic landscape downstream from those of John Cage and Henry Cowell. Put in mind of American experimentalists, the listener could well associate the haunted and hollow sound world here with the bracing experience the American ex-periment was undergoing at the time this piece was written. However, the mood is not funereal. The at times asynchronous voices are brought together in stillness near the close with a tempo marking that reads: “Taking a deep breath.”
—Stephen Hammel
LINDA CATLIN SMITH: Morandi (1991) for two pianos and two vibraphones
Morandi (1991) is named after the 20th century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. While I was writing this work, I was thinking about his numerous still life paintings, which reveal a preoccupation with the same objects, in muted colors, painted over and over again. Morandi was commissioned through the Ontario Arts Council by Kitchener-Waterloo’s New Art Quartet.
—Linda Catlin Smith, composer
MISATO MOCHIZUKI: Le monde des ronds et des carrés (2015) for two percussionists and two pianists
Commissioned by Yarn/Wire for a concert at the 2015 Lincoln Center Festival, this 13-minute piece “attempts,” in the composerʼs words, “to install, in space and in music, geometric combinations arising from the shapes mentioned in the title—circles and squares—in exploring the relationships possible among the musicians, whether opposed to one another (square) or united (circle).” Mochizuki adds, “I wrote the piece having in mind the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and asking myself what leads people to slaughter one another.”
