Premieres by Victoria Cheah + Shawn Jaeger
JACK NY (20 Putnam Ave. Brooklyn, NY)
October 5th, 2021
7:30pm
Program
embers (2021) by Shawn Jaeger
I. voicing
II. mirror play i
III. drone
IV. mirror play ii
V. slide
A butterfly on your shoulder into years and years to come (2021) by Victoria Cheah
Program Notes
embers (2021)
ember (n.) : glowing material that remains after a fire
embers explores simple materials from which superfluity has burned away. I restrict rhythmic, timbral, dynamic, and textural aspects to foreground subtleties of harmony and intonation. Close hearing and sensitization to change are the goals. What space does restriction enable?
1., “voicing,” consists of different voicings of a single, four-note sonority whose intervals are in the ratios 16:15:14:13—difference in repetition, the feeling of relatedness. Distant forms slowly approaching in darkness—murky, nocturnal, keening...
2., “mirror play i,” explores symmetry in two dimensions: vertically, via the harmonic and subharmonic series; and horizontally, via the sequence of durations and harmonies, which reverse midway through the piece. Pastoral, nostalgic, breathing—a lost, sunlit idyll...
3., “drone,” states a recurring pitch, A4, at successively different positions in close-spaced sonorities derived from the harmonic series. It also explores isomorphisms of pitch, duration, and tempo, gradually relaxing in intervallic closeness, duration, and tempo, across phrases and across the piece in the same ratios of the sonority from “voicing.” A fist unclenching at 60 frames per second...
4., “mirror play ii,” use a four-voice stretto canon to compose out gradually lengthening, alternating subsets of the subharmonic and harmonic series. Echoes of the Terzen-Ketten from Brahms’ sublime op. 119/1. An expanding and contracting kaleidoscope...
5., “slide,” moves down and up at the same time: the implied fundamental of successively lower and lower just sonorities rises successively by half step until the implied and actual meet—a strange marriage of just and equal-tempered procedures. Passing clouds: nothing’s moving, and then the sky’s different...
The sonority 16:15:14:13—a just “cluster,” a pseudo-chromatic scale, a link between tempered and just pitch spaces—occurs throughout.
A butterfly on your shoulder into years and years to come (2021)
This piece consists of six sections, each proceeding to the next without break:
Noise (intro) 6”
Cascade (opening) 5”
Noise (hidden) 4”
Love letters 3”
Cascade (closing) 15”
Into years and years 7”
The title refers to the permanence of a whim, like a tattoo of a butterfly, for example. Maybe it ends up being a choice you regret, or one with which your relationship evolves over time, or one you forget. Or maybe the whim was serious all along, and you needed the energy of frivolity to get in over your head. Clarity and noise aren’t necessarily opposites here; in this piece, both exist within the other and provide context for the work of intent.
Commissioned by andPlay - dedicated with warmest gratitude and friendship to Maya and Hannah.
Bios
andPlay is committed to expanding the existing violin/viola duo repertoire by commissioning new works and actively collaborating with living artists. The New York City-based duo of Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola, first played to an eager crowd on Fire Island in the summer of 2012 and has since commissioned over forty works.
andPlay’s current season includes in-person events in Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and New York. andPlay will premiere new works this season by Shawn Jaeger, James Parker, Mariel Roberts, Lester St. Louis, and Maya Bennardo.
Recent highlights include a five-city tour in Sweden performing their Translucent Harmonies program, appearances on the Oh My Ears Festival (Phoenix) and Re:Sound Festival (Cleveland), and a recording residency at EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY). andPlay’s debut album, playlist (2019, New Focus Recordings), was listed on Bandcamp’s “Best Contemporary Classical: October 2019.”
Beyond the concert stage, Maya and Hannah are passionate educators offering workshops in contemporary string techniques, chamber music coaching and composition notation for strings. Their audience engagement series, andPlay (in) Conversation, includes events like graphic score workshops for children, and opportunities to look inside the collaborative process as composers write new works for andPlay.
Maya and Hannah met while studying at Oberlin Conservatory and continued their educations at New York University and the Manhattan School of Music
Victoria Cheah (b. 1988, New York, NY) is a multi-disciplinary composer interested in boundaries, sustained energy, and social/performance rituals. Her work has been commissioned / presented by andPlay, Yarn / Wire, Wavefield Ensemble, MATA Festival, Guerilla Opera, Ensemble Dal Niente, Vertixe Sonora, Marilyn Nonken, Trio Okho, Transient Canvas, Trio de Kooning, PRISM Quartet, and performed by others. She has attended academies including Sommerakademie Schloss Solitude, Darmstadt, Fontainebleau, VIPA, SICPP, The Walden School, and others. Her teachers and mentors include David Rakowski, Eric Chasalow, Yu-Hui Chang, Steven Takasugi, Chaya Czernowin, Philippe Leroux, Shafer Mahoney, Shawn Crouch, as well as her students and colleagues.
Cheah holds a B.A. in music from City University of New York Hunter College & Macaulay Honors College and a Ph.D. in music composition & theory at Brandeis University. She has taught music, research, and writing related courses as an instructor at Longy School of Music, Brandeis University, and as a teaching fellow at Harvard University. From 2011-2015, Cheah served as the founding executive director of Sound Icon and has worked with new music organizations Talea Ensemble, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Argento Chamber Ensemble, Composit, and others towards the realization of contemporary music events. She currently serves as Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music, a co-director of Score Follower, and a bartender at Winnie’s.
Described as “mournful” (New York Times), “luminous” (Washington Post), and having “a sound world of its own” (Pioneer Press), the music of composer Shawn Jaeger (b. 1985, Louisville, Kentucky) often engages Appalachian folksong, field recording, and sonic ephemera to explore creative placemaking and personal and cultural memory.
He has worked with leading performers, including Dawn Upshaw and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Dal Niente, Longleash, Contemporaneous, Alexi Kenney, Ryan Muncy, and Vicky Chow. His music has been featured at venues including Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall and Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the Morgan Library, (Le) Poisson Rouge, Roulette, Jordan Hall, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, and on such festivals as Tanglewood, MATA, FERUS, and Resonant Bodies. He has received commissions from Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Bard College Conservatory of Music, the American Composers Forum/Jerome Fund for New Music (JFund), Roulette/Jerome Foundation, the BMI Foundation/Concert Artists Guild (Carlos Surinach Commission), and Chamber Music America. His awards include the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, Northwestern University’s M. William Karlins and William T. Faricy Awards, the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and two BMI Student Composer Awards. His opera, Payne Hollow, received coverage in Modern Farmer and a mention in Gene Logsdon’s Letters to a Young Farmer.
Jaeger holds a DMA from Northwestern University, and a BM from the University of Michigan. He has taught music at the Bard College Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division, Tufts University, Princeton University (as a 2016-18 Princeton Arts Fellow), Brown University, and The New School. He lives in Brooklyn.