November 8, 2023 | 8:00 PM |Dixon Annex Recital Hall| Tulane University|
Featuring the Versipel Collective and guest artists Reumert/Elten Percussion Duo (Copenhagen) and composer Rand Steiger (UCSD) performing works by Rand Steiger, Kaija Saariaho, Philippe Manoury, and Louis Aguirre.
Program:
Liminalities (2023) | Rand Steiger
Chloe Groth, violin; Jennie Brent, cello; Erin O’Shea, flute; Cari Sands, bass clarinet; Matthew Wright, trombone; Mendell Lee, vibraphone; Philip Schuessler, conductor; Rand Steiger, electronics
Argumenta (2021) | Philippe Manoury
Reumert/Elten Percussion Duo
FANTASY FOR THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY, part 1 (2023) | Louis Aguirre
Reumert/Elten Percussion Duo
BREAK
Nimbus Violin (2022) | Rand Steiger
Chloe Groth, violin; Rand Steiger, electronics
Ariel’s Hail (2000) | Kaija Saariaho
Megan Ihnen, mezzo soprano; Erin O’Shea, flute; Kristina Finch, harp
Grace (2022) | Rand Steiger
Erin O’Shea, flute; Sixto Franco, viola; Kristina Finch, harp; Casey Kearney, English horn; Philip Schuessler, conductor, Rand Steiger, electronics
Program Notes and Bios:
Rand Steiger was born in New York City and lives in San Diego, where he draws inspiration from the natural landscape and the long history of experimental music in Southern California. Many of his compositions combine orchestral instruments with digital audio signal processing. They also propose a hybrid approach to just and equal-tempered tuning, exploring the delicate perceptual cusp between a harmony and a timbre that occurs when tones are precisely tuned.
Steiger was also active as a conductor and led a series of critically acclaimed concerts with the Ensemble Sospeso in New York City in the early 2000’s, and the California EAR Unit in Los Angeles in the 1980’s and 90’s. He holds the titles of Distinguished Professor and Conrad PrebysPresidential Chair in Music at U.C. San Diego. A former Guggenheim and Rome Prize Fellow, he also served as Visiting Professor in 2009 at Harvard University, and was Composer-in-Residence at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology from 2010 to 2013. For further information please see http://rand.info.
Reumert/Elten Percussion Duo consists of the internationally acclaimed Danish soloists, Mathias Reumert (b. 1980) and Anders Elten (b. 1989). A telepathic and virtuoso ensemble, the two musicians explore a repertoire spanning from brand new pieces to transcriptions of classical masterworks.
The duo distinguishes itself from other percussion ensembles by cultivating the more melodic percussion instruments: the warm-sounding marimba and its jazzy relative, the vibraphone. The two musicians collaborate with a number of today’s leading composers, for example Philippe Manoury, whose work Argumenta was written for and dedicated to the duo.
Since its formation in 2017, Reumert/Elten Percussion Duo has been on a mission to open new ears to contemporary music. To this end, not only have they performed in major concert halls and at important festivals, they have also visited hundreds of elementary schools and inspired thousands of children to delve into the world of music.
Liminalities focuses on my interest in limonal conditions experienced in music perception, particularly whether you hear a collection of notes as a chord with clear individual pitches, or when they fuse into a single sound. And also later in the piece, when does complex polyphony go beyond our ability to track individual lines and fuse into one complex texture. At the very beginning of the piece you will hear a series of short chords that will gradually reveal their inner voices by echoing the individual instruments in the electronics. And later, there are a series of short solos for each performer that gradually stack up on top of each other to reach maximum polyphony before disolving into slowly evolving harmonies. The instruments all play into microphones, and their signals are digitally processed to create various transformations of the sound including spatialization, resonance, ring modulation, echoes, and just-intonation pitch shifting.
-Rand Steiger
Argumenta synthesizes, in a way, all my previous compositions for keyboard percussion. From Le livre des claviers (1988), via Neptune for percussion trio and electronics (1991), and États d’alerte — concerto for two percussionists and orchestra (2014), I have always been enthusiastic about writing for keyboard percussion. Written for the outstanding Reumert / Elten duo (who perform my works from memory!), Argumenta incorporates many of the techniques and ideas I had experimented with in previous works.
The marimba is a simple instrument:tuned wooden bars amplified by tube resonators. One would think that it wasn’t possible to create a legato phrasing with this construction. However, the virtuosity of today’s marimbists has transcended the limitations of the instrument. This extraordinary development has allowed me to articulate musical ideas that I previously wouldn’t have considered realizable. I am fighting against the fact that the marimba is a simple construction! I try to give the instrument a form of ductility. Concerning the vibraphone, I am particularly interested in the cut-offs: in controlling the duration of individual tones by way of mallet damping instead of pedal damping.
In the slow middle part of Argumenta, the extinction of the sounds is as important as their being set into vibration and corresponds to a sort of polyphony parallel to that which usually prevails.
The title “Argumenta” is quite abstract but implicitly evokes a kind of joust or conversation in which the two musicians exchange ideas and proposals that will serve as a basis for confrontations. Sometimes the two protagonists ‘talk’ about the same thing in the same voice; sometimes they continue to talk about the same thing, but in more individual ways, and sometimes they oppose, pursue, interrupt, or influence each other.
-Philippe Manoury
In 2016 I was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to create an installation (in collaboration with opera director and MacArthur Fellow Yuval Sharon). The resulting project Nimbus embedded 32 loudspeakers in clouds hanging 40 feet above the atrium of the Frank Gehry designed Walt Disney Concert Hall playing a series of 21 compositions throughout the day for the entire 2016/17 season. One of these composition was based on music I recorded with the concertmaster of the Philharmonic (Martin Chalifour). Later, I repurposed material from that composition into a concert work Nimbus Violin for solo violin and electronics.This more recent piece was based on the following imagined scenario.
A violinist enters a canyon, or a room for that matter, with magical qualities. She plays sounds to provoke the resonance of the space and it responds with surprisingly rich echos. Then she begins to make music with the echos, but along the way she plays something that is a key to the space magically transforming itself, and it starts to make its own sounds and music that she plays along with. Finally she goes back to the sound that unlocked the magic and returns to the previous state where the sounds are completely hers and she brings the piece to an end as it began.
-Rand Steiger
ARIEL’S HAIL
from Shakespeare’s The Tempest
All hail, great master, Grave Sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be it to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curled clouds; to thy strong bidding task
Ariel, and all his quality …
I boarded the King’s ship. Now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement: sometime I’d divide,
And burn in many places…
… Then I beat my tabor,
At which like unbacked colts they pricked their ears,
Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses
As they smelt music, so I charmed their ears.
Grace is my love song to California. When I moved to Southern California from New York City to attend graduate school in 1980, I assumed that I would return East two years later. But I ended up staying, first due to professional opportunities in Los Angeles, followed by my appointment to the faculty of UC San Diego in 1987. I am incredibly grateful for the inspiration I have drawn from California’s natural landscape, from collaborators, friends, and students here, and from the persistently progressive outlook, musically and politically. All of these blessings were in my mind as I set out to write this piece for the extraordinary Myriad Trio and Andrea Overturf. Thinking of their sound and imagining their performance was also a great source of inspiration.
-Rand Steiger
Versipel New Music 
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