The UW School of Music YouTube channel has been sharing new videos almost every day for a month now, and they recently shared this video of UW percussionists performing Yiheng Yvonne Wu's Violent Tender last academic year. We're excited to be featured on the channel, and really glad that UW has uploaded so many recent performances on their channel (my parents are always bummed that concerts aren't live-streamed).
Violent Tender is a percussion quartet composed by Yiheng Yvonne Wu, composition & music theory professor and ensemble leader at Beloit College in Wisconsin. The composer shares these program notes: "VIOLENT TENDER when political violence parades around like adult civility, when aggression is normalized, how achingly empty is the sound of something pure? in a rare moment of beauty, innocence, joy, must its purity be obscured by the echoes of violence? OR can tenderness do violence to violence?" This performance of Violent Tender was the US Premiere of the work, performed by Ed Cunneen, Mason Lynass, David Norgaard, and Lynn Park, at Katharyn Alvord Gerlich Theatre on November 30th, 2018. I really miss making music together in person and hope we can all rehearse and perform safely soon!
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The UW Percussion Ensemble performs Christopher Burns' work "Three Standard Stoppages" for intonarumori orchestra.
Jonathan Rodriguez performs "Amazonia Dreaming" by Annea Lockwood:
Annea Lockwood's Program Notes - This is a nocturnal piece, evocative of the rich soundscapes of the Amazon forests. It was commissioned by composer-percussionist Stuart Smith for his anthology of new works for snare drum, The Noble Snare. Experimenting with a borrowed drum, I became aware of sonorities available from almost every part of the instrument, a much wider range than I’d associated with it previously. They suggested delicacy, close focus, a sensual world reminiscent of certain vocal sounds, thus, a duet for hands and voice.
Here's a collaborative recording of John Cage's "But What About The Noise...," performed from a distance by the UW Percussion Ensemble.
Since we can't be together on campus, we explored sound walks as a medium to creatively document our individual environments and share our experiences of life disrupted by COVID-19. We studied excerpts from Mark Slouka's "Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life," learned about Max Neuhaus' "Listen" (1966), and listened to creative examples of recorded and modified environments, like Hildegard Westercamp's "Kit's Beach Soundwalk" and Laurie Anderson's "Is Anybody Home?"
Each of us recorded sounds in our own environment and arranged them into personal sound walks before splitting into groups and combining our individual sounds into a new synthetic sound walk.
this is life now - Chase LaPlante, Mason Lynass, Sophie Schmidt
The Inevitable Triumph - Jakob Fortiner, Cyrus Graham, Jonathan Rodriguez
Solitude - Aaron Michael Butler, Calib Byers, David Norgaard, Yongyun Zhang
I've been doing daily improvs for the past month or so (most likely I'll submit several more to this blog). This one, for four flowerpots and chopsticks, was done without a specific theme. I enjoy playing music in nontraditional spaces; it reminds me to not take myself so seriously. Playing outside on my deck barefoot was very peaceful and centering, even with the lawnmower and airplane sounds that come from being outside in suburbia. This academic year, I've been developing my interest in live looping into a creative and personal way that I can make music by myself. I started thinking about the process of live looping by watching musicians like Reggie Watts, Binkbeats, and other independent artists create full-fledged, layered, and complex compositions seemingly from thin air, like some sort of magical musical spectacle. I downloaded Ableton over the holidays and started exploring the software, its unfamiliar interface and seemingly limitless possibilities. I watched a ton of Ableton tutorial videos, replicated some of what I could pick up from this live setup video, and asked some friends for help when I couldn't figure something out on my own. Learning Ableton feels sort of in between learning a new instrument and a computer programming language. The interface isn't totally new if you've used an audio workstation, you just have to get used to a different design. But most of my pre-performance work involves editing clips in Session View, which was a completely new concept for me. Whenever I run into a new problem, I learn about the technology through exploring possible solutions, and even if what I explore isn't useful in that particular situation, it's usually helpful in the future. I haven't been feeling inspired or creative to write my own original music in a long time, long before we were all self-isolating. Instead, I'm listening to music I enjoy, searching for material that I could transcribe and map out and live loop. For now, I am more inspired to learn about the process and the software through attempting to recreate music that I enjoy experiencing. This first song I've ever live looped is a cover of a KAYTRANADA song: 2 The Music. I have a few more covers in mind already, hopefully they don't take as long to develop as this one! Even if they take a long time, I'm enjoying the process of learning and tweaking, and some day soon I'll be able to explain my process and my thoughts clearly to show other people what I've figured out. If you can think of any songs that might be fun to loop, let me know! |