VIRTUAL FALLEN LEAVES

PROGRAM NOTES

Bow Down by Randall Woolf
a Kyo-Shin-An Arts commission

Bow Down is about submission and dominance: feigned and actual, personal and political, current and historical, desired and imposed. I think I am not alone in feeling pushed around by circumstances lately, and trying to learn when to submit, and when to defy. I feel all of the music I am writing lately has been political, though never explicitly, and this piece is no exception. It's dedicated to James Schlefer and Meg Fagan Schlefer, with love and admiration.

MANAS by Masatora Goya
a Kyo-Shin-An Arts commission

MANAS is a Buddhist term indicating a "thinking mind", which often loves to cling onto something. Of course, this is not quite ideal in the Buddhist way of letting go of all worldly things, but it is considered one of the human instincts that remains even after bodily death. Learning this notion, I wondered about Noh plays. In many of them, a once noble person haunts a place and waits for ages for someone to stop by, just to tell their misery. This someone tends to be a Buddhist monk, who takes shelter from rain or needs a roof for a night, meeting a mysterious person (often a lady). And then, this mysterious person starts to remember who she really was, revealing her true self as a ghost and telling her sad story of the past. This strong work of mind that keeps someone's spirit for so long, even to forget the original purpose, seems exactly what the manas is about, and to me it shows the inevitable nature of being human.

 The notion of traveling monks is very closely associated with Komu-So, who played shakuhachi as a part of their discipline. At the time of the commission, the ensemble was supposed to be a quartet with percussion so that blending shakuhachi and Noh music seemed an appropriate idea for the composition. Due to the course of the pandemic, it was modified for a trio without percussion. As the sound of percussion is crucial for Noh music, the initial idea needed a different application. However, the gesture of rhythmic texture in Noh and the entire structure remained the main inspiration of this composition.

 Even though shakuhachi freely floats in the air without any restrictions, the music is essentially built on 2 sets of pentatonic scales. One derives from shakuhachi scale in D, and the other “Black-key” oriented. These 10 notes, a sort of decatonic, may function selectively polytonal, cluster-like, modal, or tonal as the mood of the given moment requires.

Screaming First by Eric Lyon

“Screaming Fist” is the most recent installment of “Earth to Kathy” - an evening long solo piano set for Kathy Supové. Like the title (first a Toronto punk rock song, then a William Gibson moniker for a secret US military operation), my “Screaming Fist” went through a few conceptual stages. In the spring of 2020, when I felt the need to make a new piece for Kathy, the title immediately suggested itself, along with the sensibility of a crazed, dangerously violent update to Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier Sonata.” That treatment for the piece came to seem wrong as I increasingly gravitated to composing indoor music under the shadow of Covid-19. I considered how else a fist could scream, bearing in mind Harlan Ellison’s post-apocalyptic short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” and then the piece was composed rapidly, as if in a dream. 

 If an electric guitar can gently weep, then a fist can quietly, even silently scream.

Poem (Now it is spring) by Ingrid Arauco

Poem (Now it is spring) was inspired largely by honkyoku, with its timeless sense of spiritual longing, subtle chromatic inflections, and haunting recurrence of musical motifs. But I was also struck, in listening to more contemporary repertory, by the virtuosic vitality of which the shakuhachi is capable. My piece is a response to encountering this rich literature. It should be played freely, as the sweep of the musical figures and the breath dictates.

The form is that of a sestet, or six-line poem. Each “line,” or thought, is demarcated in the score with a rehearsal letter. The space between each of the lines is always marked with a rest, whose special, articulative quality should be apparent to the listener.

The subtitle “Now it is spring” is the first line of a poem by Ōtomo Yakamochi (718-785). Its rich imagery, evoking the rebirth of nature, offers hope in this time of fear and anxiety.

PERFORMER BIOGRAPHIES

Kathleen Supové, piano, is one of America’s most acclaimed and versatile contemporary music pianists, known for continually redefining what it means to be a pianist/keyboardist/performance artist in today’s world. In addition to her compelling virtuosity, she is also known for her inventive ways of breaking down the wall between performer and audience. After winning top prizes in the Gaudeamus International Competition for Interpretation of Contemporary Music, she began her career as a guest artist at the prestigious Darmstadt Festival in Germany. Since then, Ms. Supové has presented solo concerts entitled The Exploding Piano, in which she has championed the music of countless contemporary composers. Among these are: Frederic Rzewski, Louis Andriessen, Terry Riley (including the all-star historic performance of “In C” in Carnegie Hall, curated by the Kronos Quartet, with the composer performing), Earle Brown, Chinary Ung, Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis, John Adams, Morton Subotnick, Joan La Barbara, Jacob TV (Ter Veldhuis), Alvin Curran, Randall Woolf, Neil Rolnick, David Lang, Nick Didkovsky, Eve Beglarian, Missy Mazzoli, Mohammed Fairouz, Anna Clyne, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Gene Pritsker, Miya Masaoka, Orlando Jacinto Garcia, Alex Weiser, Dylan Mattingly, Corey Dargel, John Zorn, Carolyn Yarnell, Gene Pritsker, Paula Matthusen, Annie Gosfield, Daniel Felsenfeld, Jacob Cooper, Matt Marks, Marita Bolles, Phil Kline, Lukas Ligeti, Marti Epstein, Arlene Sierra, Patrick Grant, Michael Gatonska, Dan Becker, Elaine Kaplinsky, Dafna Naphtali, Jed Distler, Belinda Reynolds, Isaac Schankler, Gameboy composer Bubblyfish, and many others. supove.com

James Nyoraku Schlefer, shakuhachi, is a Grand Master of the shakuhachi and one of only a handful of non-Japanese artists to have achieved this rank. He received the Dai-Shi-Han (Grand Master) certificate in 2001, and his second Shi-Han certificate in 2008, from the Mujuan Dojo in Kyoto. He has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Tanglewood and BAM, as well as multiple venues across the country and in Japan, Indonesia, Brazil and Europe. Schlefer first encountered the shakuhachi in 1979, while working towards a career as a flute player and pursuing an advanced degree in musicology. Today he is considered by his colleagues to be one of most influential Western practitioners of this distinctive art form. Known to his students as Nyoraku sensei, Schlefer established his own dojo in NYC in 1996. He also teaches shakuhachi at Columbia University, a broad spectrum of Western and World music courses at New York City College of Technology (CUNY), and performs and lectures at colleges and universities throughout the United States. As a composer, Schlefer has written multiple chamber and orchestral works combining Japanese and Western instruments as well as numerous pieces solely for traditional Japanese instruments. In December 2015, he was recognized by Musical America Worldwide as one of their “30 Top Professionals and Key Influencers” for his work both as a composer and Artistic Director of Kyo-Shin-An Arts. His writings about the shakuhachi and his career were published in 2018 on NewMusicBox and he was profiled by the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Arts Works Blog” in May 2016. His programming for Kyo-Shin-An Arts has also been recognized with two CMA/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming (2013 and 2016). His orchestral music can be heard on the recording Spring Sounds Spring Season MSR Classics. nyoraku.com

Hikaru Tamaki, cello, concertizes regularly as a soloist and a chamber musician. He served as the principal cellist of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic and was a member of the Freimann String Quartet. Before joining the Philharmonic, he was an associate principal cellist of the Chicago Civic Orchestra and performed under the baton of Daniel Barenboim at Carnegie Hall. Solo performances with the Philharmonic have included the Dvorak Cello Concerto, Don Quixote among other major concertos. He was awarded a bachelor of arts degree from Rice University and a master of music degree from Northwestern University, where his teachers were Paul Katz and Hans Jorgen Jensen. Hikaru was a prizewinner in the prestigious All Japan Viva Hall Cello Competition. He performs regularly with Yoko Reikano Kimura (koto/shamisen) under the moniker Duo YUMENO, and they were awarded the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program grant in 2014, and received the Aoyama Baroque Saal Award in the following year. hikarucello.com

COMPOSER BIOGRAHIES

INGRID ARAUCO
Ingrid Arauco’s music “opens virtuosity to an inspection that reveals wit, passion, and deep aspiration” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).  Ingrid’s principal teachers were Robert Hall Lewis at Goucher College, and George Crumb, George Rochberg, Richard Wernick, and C. Jane Wilkinson at the University of Pennsylvania.  She has received awards or fellowships from the American Guild of Organists, Yaddo, and MacDowell, and commissions from the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and the Kindler Foundation in the Library of Congress.  Her works have been performed by the Ying and Colorado Quartets, Network for New Music, Third Sound, and the Atlanta Symphony, and featured at Oundle International Organ Week, Festival “Compositores de Hoje” in Rio de Janeiro, and the Festival de Música Contemporánea de La Habana, to which Ingrid traveled as part of an artist delegation sponsored by the American Composers Forum.  Recordings include the solo albums Invocation and Vistas (Albany); individual works are featured on Heard in Havana, Excursions, Florescence, Millennium Crossings and New Music for Oboe.  Ingrid Arauco has taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is currently Professor of Music at Haverford College.

MASATORA GOYA
After chasing a rugby ball and studying sociology, Masatora finally turned to performing arts as his true calling. Trained as a vocal performer, he explores the musical landscape of drama, space, and emotion. Described as a "composer of cultural crossroads" by American Composers Forum, his unique eclecticism has attracted many musicians performing in nontraditional chamber ensembles, such as Alturas Duo, Duo Anova, Bateira Trio, Cross Island, Liberté Mandolin Orchestra, Duo Yumeno, Tomoko Sugawara, Lucina Yue, Hidejiro Honjoh, and Thomas Piercy. Masatora also frequently collaborates with visual artists and film makers, such as Yuki Ideguchi, Sam Platizky, Andre Lewis, Nori Mizukami, Chloe Miller, and Takashi Nasu.

Masatora received a BA in Integrated Human Studies from Kyoto University and studied music at Koyo Conservatory. He earned a Master of Music from New Jersey City University and a Doctor of Musical Arts from Five Towns College, and studied in the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. A PARMA artist and a resident composer of the Kadoma Film Commission, he also formerly served as assistant director of Vox Novus Composer’s Voice. Masatora is a recipient of NYSCA Grant, EtM Con Edison Composer Residencies, The Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota Video Art Award, American Composers Forum Jerome Fund for New Music, ASCAP Plus Award, and Diversity Doctoral Fellowship at SUNY Purchase College. masatoragoya.com

ERIC LYON
Eric Lyon is a composer whose work focuses on articulated noise, chaos music, oracular sound processing, and spatial orchestration for high-density loudspeaker arrays. Lyon’s creative work has been recognized with a ZKM Giga-Hertz prize, MUSLAB award, the League ISCM World Music Days competition, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Lyon has composed for such artists as The Biomuse Trio, The Crash Ensemble, Stuart Gerber, Marianne Gythfeldt, Esther Lamneck, Margaret Lancaster, Ensemble mise-en, The Noise Quartet, Sarah Plum, String Noise, Kathleen Supové, Seth Parker Woods, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Lyon has taught at Keio University, IAMAS, Dartmouth College, Manchester University, and Queen’s University Belfast. Currently, he teaches in the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech, and is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. Eric.Lyon.composer

RANDALL WOOLF
Randall Woolf studied composition privately with David Del Tredici and Joseph Maneri, and at Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. He is a member of the Common Sense Composers Collective. He is the Composer/Mentor for the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from NYSCA, NYFA, Meet The Composer, the Cary Trust, and others.

Woolf has created 3 pieces for video and live instruments with directors Mary Harron (director of “American Psycho”) and John C. Walsh, most recently “Gandharba’s Song”, commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic for concertmaster Deborah Buck. He has written several theatrical chamber music works with author/director Valeria Vasilevski. In 1997 he composed a new ballet of “Where the Wild Things Are”, in collaboration with Maurice Sendak and Septime Webre. He has also written dance music for Lar Lubovitch and Heidi Latsky. He works frequently with John Cale, notably on his score to “American Psycho”. He re-created 4 songs of Nico for Cale’s tribute concert “On the Borderline”, sung by Peter Murphy, Lisa Gerrard, Sparklehorse, Stephin Merritt, Peaches, and Meshell Ndegeocello. He has arranged over 20 of Cale’s song for orchestra, including the entire Paris 1919 album, most recently performed with the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January, 2013.

Woolf’s works have been performed by Kathleen Supové, Jennifer Choi, Timothy Fain, Cornelius Dufallo, Mary Rowell, Todd Reynolds, Ethel, conductor and flutist Ransom Wilson, Present Music, Fulcrum Point, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Seattle Symphony, Sonic Generator, Bang On A Can/SPIT Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, NakedEye Ensemble, and others. randallwoolf.com