Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics as well as for chamber ensembles, orchestras, choir, and film. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2) while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise.” Negrón has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, loadbang, Prototype Festival, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, LA Philharmonic, NY Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Opera Philadelphia, Louisville Orchestra and the New York Botanical Garden, among others.  Angélica received an early education in piano and violin at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico where she later studied composition under the guidance of composer Alfonso Fuentes. She holds a master’s degree in music composition from New York University where she studied with Pedro da Silva and pursued doctoral studies at The Graduate Center (CUNY), where she studied composition with Tania León. Also active as an educator, Angélica is currently a teaching artist for New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program.  She has collaborated with artists like Sō Percussion, Lido Pimienta, Mathew Placek, Sasha Velour, Cecilia Aldarondo, Mariela Pabón, Ana Fabrega & Adrienne Westwood, among others and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún.  She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at WNYC’s The Greene Space working on El Living Room, a 4-part offbeat variety show and playful multimedia exploration of sound and story, of personal history and belonging. She was the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize. Upcoming premieres include works for the Seattle Symphony, LA Philharmonic, Louisville Orchestra and NY Philharmonic Project 19 initiative and multiple performances at Big Ears Festival 2022. Negrón continues to perform and compose for film and is currently a 2024 Collider Fellow at Lincoln Center.

This work is part of a series of works for open instrumentation using graphic symbols as a way for performers to compose improvised musical structures that range between small, pitch-based motives and more noise-based sound blocks. The players move through sections of the piece at their own rate such that spontaneous musical interactions occur and are variable from one performance to the next.

This work was composed for the Versipel New Music Collective and was premiered on February 27, 2021 on the Versipel New Music: In the Multi(stream)verse 2 streaming concert.

Philip Schuessler’s music, ranging from soloists to orchestra, often has sense of delicate urgency and rhythmic energy that is characterized by intricate instrumental writing and subtle timbral design. He takes inspiration from a variety of sources, including popular and rock music traditions, experimental improvisation, spectralism, natural and scientific processes, and countercultural political theater.

Many world-renowned artists and ensembles have championed his music over the years. These include such artists as Yarn/Wire, Loadbang, Hypercube, Unheard-of//Ensemble, Mantra Percussion Ensemble, Dither Guitar Quartet, Pesedjet, Iktus Percussion, violinist Graeme Jennings, cellist Craig Hultgren, pianist Mabel Kwan, and soprano Tony Arnold.

He is currently an instructor of music theory and composition at Southeastern Louisiana University where he was honored with the President’s Award in Artistic Excellence. His music is published by his own Pendula Music publishing company, as well as Society of Composers, Inc., Alea Publishing, T.U.X. People’s Music, Murphy Music Press, and Potenza Music, and recordings of his compositions can be found on the New Focus, Centaur, Navona, Janus, Curvepoint Media, and Capstone labels. Most recently his work Splintered Refrains is featured on the upcoming Phasma Music release Viola +.

The original version of Fog Tropes (1982) was written for brass sextet and tape; it has been one of my most popular pieces, enjoying numerous performances and two recordings. Because of the timbral unity of brass and foghorns there is a built-in wholeness to the music. The idea of a new version for strings and tape (the tape part is identical to the original) is predicated on an opposite supposition: that the pre-recorded sounds and the live sounds would be of contrasting natures.

It is, really, a different piece of music despite the common background. Even though the strings follow harmonic-melodic paths similar to the brass of version I, and the underlying effect is the same, the result is wholly different. In the original version, the tape sounds appear first and the brass parts creep in underneath. Hereit is the opposite; the strings begin and it is the foghorns and allies that subtly emerge underneath.

The tape part existed independently as a composition created in 1981 as an accompaniment to a performance are event. The collage of sounds from the maritime areas of San Francisco – they are mostly foghorns, but sea birds and other ambient sounds of the Balinese flute. When I added the brass parts in 1982, I troped the music – in the medieval sense – with a new layer. Now it is twice troped.

• Ingram Marshall (liner notes to Kingdom Come)

INGRAM MARSHALL, composer, lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1973 to 1985 and in Washington Sate, where he taught at Evergreen State College, until 1989.  He studied at Lake Forest College, Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts, where he received an M.F.A., and has been a student of Indonesian gamelan music, the influence of which may be heard in the slowed-down sense of time and use of melodic repetition found in many of his pieces. In the mid-seventies he developed a series of “live electronic” pieces such as Fragility Cycles, Gradual Requiem, and Alcatraz in which he blended tape collages, extended vocal techniques, Indonesian flutes, and keyboards. He performed widely in the United States with these works. In recent years he has concentrated on music combining tape and electronic processing with ensemble and soloists.

His music has been preformed by ensembles and orchestras such as the Theatre of Voices, Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, and American Composers Orchestra. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Fromm Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent recordings are on Noneseuch (Kingdom Come) and New Albion (Savage Altars). Among recent chamber works are Muddy Waters, which was commissioned and performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and In Deserto (smoke Creek), commissioned by Chamber Music America for the ensemble Clogs. January 2004 saw the premiere of Bright Kingdoms, commissioned by Meet the Composer, and performed by the Oakland-East Bay Symphony under Michael Morgan. The American Composers Orchestra in New York premiered his new concerto for two guitars and orchestra, Dark Florescence, at Carnegie Hall in February 2005. Orphic Memories, commissioned by the Cheswatyr Foundation, was composed for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and premiered in Carnegie Hall in April 2007. 

In the music of Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, Washington USA), the mathematics of harmony are explored through the physicality of the material world. Lamb gives voice to crystalline structures of the harmonic series through subtleties of friction, pressure, breath, and bow changes that shape how the idealized harmonies speak. The musical forms she constructs connect the sonic with the tactile and the visual, rendering transparent what once was opaque, transmuting flesh to bone, passing from shadow into light. These dualities and metaphors reflect Lamb’s deep interest in the fundamental nature of sound and often find themselves in the titles of her pieces: shade/gradient (2012), point/wave (2015), interius/exterius (2022). 

Lamb’s approach to tuning and pacing are informed by her studies with microtonal composer James Tenney and experimental filmmaker and Dhrupad musician Mani Kaul at the California Institute of the Arts. Like her mentors, Lamb has been a champion of the music of others, an ardent collaborator, and a key figure in various vibrant musical communities. While living in Los Angeles, Lamb co-founded singing by numbers, a women’s choir that aimed to create new pedagogical approaches to microtonal singing with vocalists from a wide range of musical backgrounds. The convergence of musical explorations with feminist practices is also found in her collaboration with violinist and violist Johnny Chang, in which they “recover and interpret” the long-forgotten music of a fictitious female musician, Viola Torros. In doing so, they question and blur the origins of early European music and call attention to the exclusion of real female musicians in the historical record.

Lamb is one of the most celebrated and in-demand composers of her generation. Her work has been commissioned by premiere new music ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Dedalus, and Ensemble Musikfabrik. Her writings and recordings are published in KunstMusik, Open Space Magazine, New World Records, Another Timbre, Other Minds, Sound American, and Sacred Realism. In 2016 to 2017, she was an artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2018, she was given a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists. In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Composer’s Prize. She currently resides in Berlin where she contributes to many new-music initiatives including the experimental music label Sacred Realism and the Harmonic Space Orchestra.

-written by friends Laura Steenberge and Michael Winter, summer 2023

Creating the appearance of motion with stasis, a logic of unrelated facts. It may seem like an irreducible paradox, but it is the spell that has been assigned to me.
Rhythm is abolished: the succession results from a polyphonic gravitation, like the signs in the sky – in the same way the horizon adds multiple profiles of mountains.
The desert lets physiology emerge. Pulsating islands of sound crawl lakes of silence, and in the silence we find the sounds of the body and recognize them as ours, we listen to them, finally.
Now we feel even the slightest tensions of the intervals as new. And the gestures, emptied of the original drama, are not considered true, and their intrinsic representativeness glimmers.
The rarefaction is such that it emanates, each time, a space all its own where the composition breathes, far from the usual music. Extraordinary, standing out even against the sounds of everyday life, of which it is paradoxically constituted.
The persistence, at times, of events, of lines in mid-air like suspended horizons will provide the coordinates to our ear.
Whereas once the face of the work had to compose itself unitarily, as if isolated in the void, now that desire for form is reversed. And the margins of thought, already created as such, are simply brought together.
No longer concealed, they will produce impossible differences in level – the caesuras – violent scars in the foreground. Almost as if the layers of consciousness had multiplied, superimposed, the work represents its own processes, traces upon traces, to resemble a notebook of torn universes. In particular, we recognize two distinct dimensions: one is slightly darker, more feral. Neither continuity, nor fragments, nor dialectics. Developments are avoided, and in reality only affinities or links are suggested, between one moment and the next.
Arousing the space where there is only a mental dimension may seem like a surrogate in the absence of ancient music. Yet the same awareness of the mental process is enough, through a capillary attention to perceiving – and the awareness that the network of senses also organizes disorder, and chaos is readable. By virtue of all this, this music is different, its law is new, and its fake story is rendered, however large or tiny, at the threshold of the century.
A melody of emptiness. By circling it for years, its lyricism is evoked. Only the aura, almost magically, since even the prerequisites for a labored sequence are missing. Our mind is generous.
This feeble music turns to it. No longer made to put wild beasts to sleep. Indeed, it equally puts the wild beast, an instrument of knowledge, to sleep in us.

-Salvatore Sciarrino (via Google Translate)

Salvatore Sciarrino (Palermo, 1947) boasts of being born free and not in a music school.
He started composing when he was twelve as a self-taught person and held his first public concert in 1962.
But Sciarrino considers all the works before 1966 as an developing apprenticeship because that is when his personal style began to reveal itself. There is something really particular that characterizes this music: it leads to a different way of listening, a global emotional realization, of reality as well as of one’s self. And after forty years, the extensive catalogue of Sciarrino’s compositions is still in a phase of surprising creative development. After his classical studies and a few years of university in his home city, the Sicilian composer moved to Rome in 1969 and in 1977 to Milan. Since 1983, he has lived in Città di Castello, in Umbria.

He has composed for: Teatro alla Scala, RAI, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Biennale di Venezia, Teatro La Fenice di Venezia, Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova, Fondazione Arena di Verona, Stuttgart Opera Theatre, Brussels La Monnaie, Frankfurt Opera Theatre, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, London Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Suntory Hall. He has also composed for the following festivals: Schwetzinger Festspiele, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Witten, Salzburg, New York, Wien Modern, Wiener Festwochen, Berliner Festspiele Musik, Holland Festival, Alborough, Festival d’Automne (Paris), Ultima (Oslo).

Sciarrino taught at the Music Academies of Milan (1974–83), Perugia (1983–87) and Florence (1987– 96). He also worked as a teacher in various specialization courses and masterclasses among which are those held in Città di Castello from 1979 to 2000 and the Lectures at Boston University. He currently teaches in the summer masterclasses at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena.