Tuesday Night New Music

Tuesday Night New Music is a student-run, faculty-supervised concert series that offers the opportunity to hear music by the next generation of composers: current NEC composition students. The series is directed by Stephanie Economou '12 and Katherine Balch '14 Tufts/NEC, under the supervision of composition chair Michael Gandolfi.

The notes on these works were written by the respective composers.

Nell Shaw Cohen Setsugekka:
Mountain and River on the Kiso Road
Panorama of the Eight Views of Kanazawa under a Full Moon
The Whirlpools of Naruto in Awa Province
Samantha Bennett, violin
Wesley Chu, piano

Setsugekka (Snow, Moon, and Flowers) is an 1857 series of three triptychs (artworks in three panels) by the Japanese master Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858). These woodblock prints, or Ukiyo-e ("pictures of the floating world"), convey Hiroshige's vision of three landscapes representing the traditional thematic triad of snow (setsu), moon (getsu), or flowers (ka). Each of the movements in my piece responds to the atmosphere and mood of the individual prints in this series. I composed this piece last spring as a birthday gift for my boyfriend, John, who is a dedicated aficionado of Japanese prints. Find images of the triptychs, as well as further information about Hiroshige and a video introduction to Japanese woodblock prints, here (the website is also phone-friendly mobile app).

Setsugekka will be featured in my November 2 recital Beyond the Notes: Music Inspired by Art, a multimedia concert of seven chamber pieces I composed in reference to visual artists including Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Burchfield, Thomas Cole, and Michelangelo.

Stephanie Economou Parallax
Samantha Bennett, Annie Chen, violin

Xiaoxia Zhang The Holy Land
Christine Lamprea, cello

Katherine Balch Three Impressions
Matthew Vera, Jiwen Lei, violin
Kurt Tseng, viola

This piece for modified string trio was written for my dear friends Akemi Leung, Jiwen Lei, and Kurt Tseng. The movements were composed fairly hastily while I was immersed in a study of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. Each song in Bartók's seven-volume collection is so full of coherence and innovation, simplicity and subtlety all at once. I see Mikrokosmos as an assemblage of self-contained, highly poetic aphorisms.Three Impressions is my pithy attempt to create something as concentrated and musical as each of Bartók’s songs. Of course, I steal as much as I can along the way.

Jason Belcher Donald Miller Piece
Full Circle Time Machine
Tara Mueller, violin, voice
Jason Belcher, chord organ, voice

The structure of my piece lies in the phonemes of the name DONALD MILLER, which we move through vocally while playing simple harmonies (a G major sixth chord, a C major triad, and then the G major sixth chord again).

Donald Miller was a retired engineer who lived in the NEC area for many years before his death from complications of diabetes last February. He was an amateur visual artist who suffered from bipolar disorder. He often spent several hours a day sitting on the bench on the corner of Gainsborough and St. Botolph streets. He had a great interest in our studies, and was eager to talk to students, faculty, and staff about their work. His artwork was very simple, and mathematical in proportion. Usually, each work contains no more than four colors, and was based on simple shapes and figures. He gave his work to several students at NEC and Northeastern, and it can sometimes be seen on display at the Espresso Royale Cafe.