Perspectives & Disclosures

Program

Toshi Ichiyanagi - Perspectives (1986)
for violin
Diderik Wagenaar - La Caccia (1996)
for trombone
Dorothy Rudd Moore - Moods (1969/2020)
for viola and cello
Paula Matthusen - forgiveness anthems (2010)
for flute and fixed media
Joanna Ward - I AM HOPING I DON'T MISS YOU (2020)
tutti
Mendi + Keith Obadike - Selections from Big House/Disclosure (2007)
tutti

PROGRAM NOTES

  On Friday, May 12, 2023, EO presents Perspectives and Disclosures, a concert organized by the group’s Curator and trombonist Chris McIntyre. The program reaches across stylistic, generational, and demographic difference to create a connective space for listening within the lovely acoustic of historic Speyer Hall at University Settlement House. The evening includes forthright, “composerly” works for solo and duo strings, respectively, by two important, recently passed contemporary music elders: Japanese avant-garde icon Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Perspectives (1986) for violin (Pala Garcia) and African-American composer and organizer Dorothy Rudd Moore’s Moods (1969/2020) for viola (Kal Sugatski) and cello (John Popham). The concert also features solo works by electro-acoustic composer-performer Paula Matthusen and beloved Dutch composer and educator Diderik Wagenaar. Matthusen’s forgiveness anthems (2010) for solo flute and fixed media, performed (and originally premiered) by EO flutist Margaret Lancaster, uses instrumental idiomatics and an ever-evolving electronic score to abstractly consider “...the many ways in which we ask for tiny, often inconsequential pardons throughout the day - from after accidentally running into someone on the sidewalk to asking a stranger for directions.” In the words of the composer, Wagenaar’s La Caccia (1996) is “...a ‘hunting call music’, not for a corno da caccia but a trombone… making such a noise that the lovely birds will escape before the guns of the hunters will be in operation.” Trombonist Chris McIntyre gives the US premiere performance. Finally, all five EO instrumentalists collaboratively interpret two divergently inspired graphic scores (see excerpts below.) I AM HOPING I DON'T MISS YOU (2020) by Joanna Ward, a rising, inventive compositional voice from the UK, is a pandemic era creation inspired by a poem by Ward’s sister. The visual language employed in the graphic scores of interdisciplinary artists Mendi and Keith Odabike’s Big House/Disclosure (2007) is “...inspired by Nigerian nsibidi writing, European music notation, and architectural drawings.” The scores were a core, activating aspect of the Obadike’s 2006 Northwestern University installation commission which was featured during a 2007 conference on slavery and the visual imagination.

Read more about Mendi + Keith Obadike in the words of Christopher McIntyre here.

ARTIST BIOS

Toshi Ichiyanagi

Toshi Ichiyanagi was born in Kobe, Japan, on 4 February 1933. He studied composition under Kishio Hirao, Tomojiro Ikenouchi, and John Cage. He studied piano under Chieko Hara and Beveridge Webster.

He took first place in the composition division of the 18th (1949) and 20th (1951) Mainichi Music Competition (presently the Music Competition of Japan). While studying at the Julliard School of Music in New York from 1954 to 1957, he was awarded the Elizabeth A. Coolidge Prize (1955), the Serge Koussevitzky Prize (1956), and the Alexander Gretchaninov Prize (1957).

Invited by the Festival of Institute of Twentieth Century Music he returned to Japan in 1961 and held concerts and introductions both to his own music and the new music of Japan, Europe and the United States, stimulating activitity in a variety of fields. From 1966 to 67, engaged by the Rockefeller Foundation, he returned to the U. S. and held recitals of his works all over the country.

In 1976 he was engaged by Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) as Composer-in-Residence for the city of Berlin, where he resided for six months. At music festivals all over Europe he held concerts to introduce his own works or the works of other Japanese composers. He visited Europe repeatedly after that, receiving commissions from the European Pro Musica Nova Festival (1976), Metamusik Festival (1978), Cologne Festival of Contemporary Music (1978, 1981), Holland Festival (1979), Berliner Festwochen (1981), etc.

In 1981 he received the 30th Otaka Prize for Piano Concerto No. 1 “Reminiscence of Spaces”. In 1984 he was awarded Grand Prix of the Nakajima Prize for his activities as a composer, performer and producer, and his second Otaka Prize, this time for Violin Concerto Circulating Scenery. This violin concerto was given its American premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York in February of the same year. In June 1984, his numerous works were performed at Seibu Theatre as Theme Composer for the contemporary music festival “Music Today.” Also in June as part of the Japan France Culture Summit, with Toru Takemitsu he held a concert of orchestral works at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris at the request of L’orchestre National de France.

In 2002 he received the 33rd Suntory Music Prize. In 2004 he assumed the post of Composer-in-Residence at the Pacific Music Festival (PMF). In 2006 he premiered his third opera White Nights.

In 1999 he was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon, and again in 2005 the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, by the Japanese Government. He has been selected as one of the Persons in Cultural Merit since 2008.

Currently, he serves as Artistic Director of TIME, Artistic Director of Ensemble Origin― A Millennium of Resonance, as Adviser of the Japan Music Competition, Board Member of Saison Foundation, Councilor of Suntory Foundation for Arts and General Artistic Director of the Kanagawa Arts Foudation.

Diderik Wagenaar

Wagenaar has lived and worked all his adult life in The Hague. Born to a musical family that includes Johan Wagenaar, he began playing piano at the age of eight and by the time he was fourteen had set his sights on a musical vocation. As a teenager in the early 1960s he loved Renaissance music, Bach, Ravel, and Thelonious Monk; at the age of eighteen he began studying music theory with Jan van Dijk, Hein Kien and Rudolf Koumans and piano with Simon Admiraal at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. As a composer he is essentially self-taught.

It was during his student's chamaar years in the mid-60s that Wagenaar began to develop as a composer. Although fascinated by the concerts given by Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna with the Hague Philharmonic, he admits to having "no real grip" at that time on the musical avant-garde, and began to look around for other starting-points for his own music. In addition to his fascination with jazz, an important encounter at that time was with the music of Charles Ives, which taught him the value of inclusivity. It also encouraged his tendency to attempt a synthesis between tonality and atonality, to connect previously disparate systems of musical thought. Today Wagenaar feels that the notion of a "music of inclusion" can be seen as an important aspect of the new Dutch music as a whole.

His music is closely linked with that of his friend Louis Andriessen and treats similar ideas in perhaps an even more rigorous manner. Though the ideas may be complex, they are always presented in a clear and straightforward manner. His other influences include Stravinsky, a key figure for the composers of the Hague school, but also importantly Monk and John Coltrane.

His works include commissions for the ensembles Orkest de Volharding, Hoketus, Slagwerkgroep den Haag and Icebreaker and for the Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Dorothy Rudd Moore

Dorothy Rudd Moore (1940-2022), received commissions from the National Symphony, Opera Ebony, and the Buffalo Philharmonic, among many solo artists. Considered one of her generation's leading composers of color, her music has been performed and recorded world-wide, and includes chamber pieces, song cycles, orchestral music, and an opera, and is admired for its high level of artistry and its seriousness of purpose.  Other awards she has received include an American Music Center Grant, 1972; New York State Council on the Arts Grant, 1985; and several Meet the Composer grants. Two of her works, Dirge and Deliverance, and Songs From the Dark Tower were released by Performance Records in 1981 and reissued in 2021. In 1985, the world premiere of her opera, Frederick Douglass, took place in New York City.

Moore's parents fully supported her ambitions to be a composer. She studied piano at the Wilmington School of Music and became a student of Harry Andrews. Moore learned to play clarinet so that she could join the all-male band at Howard High. She graduated from Howard University in 1963 where she studied with Dean Warner Lawson, Thomas Kerr, and Mark Fax. She received the Lucy Moten Fellowship to study in France where she continued her studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1963 and then with Chou Wen-Chung in New York in 1965. In 1968 she became a co-founder of the Society of Black Composers in New York City. As an educator, she has taught voice, piano, and ear training courses at Harlem School of the Arts, 1965-66; New York University, 1969; and Bronx Community College, 1971. She passed away on March 30, 2022. 

Paula Matthusen

Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered.

Her music has been performed by Dither, Mantra Percussion, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), orchest de ereprijs, The Glass Farm Ensemble, the Estonian National Ballet, James Moore, Kathryn Woodard, Todd Reynolds, Kathleen Supové, Margaret Lancaster and Jody Redhage. Her work has been performed at numerous venues and festivals in America and Europe, including the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the MusicNOW Series of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Ecstatic Music Festival, Other Minds, the MATA Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, the Aspen Music Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music at MassMoCA, the Gaudeamus New Music Week, SEAMUS, International Computer Music Conference and Dither’s Invisible Dog Extravaganza. She performs frequently with Object Collection, and through the theater company Kinderdeutsch Projekts.

Awards include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers’ Awards, First Prize in the Young Composers’ Meeting Composition Competition, the MacCracken and Langley Ryan Fellowship, the “New Genre Prize” from the IAWM Search for New Music, and recently the 2014 Elliott Carter Rome Prize. Matthusen has also held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, create@iEar at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, STEIM, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Matthusen completed her Ph.D. at New York University – GSAS. She was Director of Music Technology at Florida International University for four years, where she founded the FLEA Laptop Ensemble. Matthusen is currently Associate Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, where she teaches experimental music, composition, and music technology.

Joanna Ward

Joanna Ward (b. 1998) is a composer, performer, and writer from Newcastle upon Tyne, currently based in London. 

She was a Junior Fellow at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, learning with Amber Priestley, in 2021-22. She was also a Britten Pears Young Artist for 2021-22. Recent projects have included creating works for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Zubin Kanga's Cyborg Soloists project, the Aldeburgh Festival 2022, EXAUDI for the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, Natalie Burch for her upcoming album on Delphian Records, and a co-creation project with Newcastle Youth Choir for the Newcastle Sings Festival 2022. Upcoming projects include for the Marian Consort with Britten Pears Arts, and for Zeitgeist Online Gallery. 

She graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with a Masters in Composition in 2021.

Joanna makes scores, sounds, and films, very often in collaboration with other performers, composers, and artists. Her work ranges from the relatively conventional to the very open, and recent projects have been additionally contextualised by research around ‘anti-work’ compositional ethics and aesthetics. Her writing has recently been published by I Care If You Listen and TEMPO New Music Journal.

 As a vocalist and performer she is interested in contemporary and experimental repertoires as well as songwriting and improvisation. She performed with experimental duo the mermaid café who released an EP on Takuroku in September 2021.

Mendi + Keith Obadike

Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art and literature. Their early works include The Sour Thunder, an Internet opera (Bridge Records), Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records), Black.Net.Art Actions, a suite of new media (internet art)  works (published in re:skin on M.I.T Press), Big House / Disclosure, a 200-hour public sound installation (Northwestern University), Phonotype, a book & CD of media artworks, and a poetry collection, Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press). They have contributed sounds/music to projects by wide range of artists including loops for neo-soul singer D'Angelo's first album and a score for playwright Anna Deavere Smith at the Lincoln Center Institute. They were invited to develop their first "opera-masquerade" by writer Toni Morrison at her Princeton Atelier. Their recent projects include a series of large-scale sound art works: American Cypher at Bucknell University and The Studio Museum in Harlem, Blues Speaker (for James Baldwin) at The New School in New York, Free/Phase at the Chicago Cultural Center, Sonic Migration at Scribe Video Center and Tindley Temple in Philadelphia, and Fit (the Battle Of Jericho) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Their other honors include a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship, Pick Laudati Award for Digital Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Their intermedia work has been commissioned by The NY African Film Festival and Electronic Arts Intermix, The Yale Cabaret, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), and The Whitney Museum of Art, among other institutions. Their music has been featured on New York and Chicago public radio, as well as on Juniradio (104.5) in Berlin.  They are currently exhibiting in the group show I Was Raised On The Internet at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and developing new work as artists in residence at the Weeksville Heritage Society in Brooklyn, NY.

Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. He is a professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. After working as a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, she became a poetry editor at Fence Magazine and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Mendi and Keith also serve on the boards of Rhizome and The Vera List Center for Art and Politics.