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 Katherine Balch '14 Tufts/NEC and Neal Markowski '13, under the supervision of composition chair Michael Gandolfi.

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

Jonas Tarm Las Ruinas Circulares
Allison Poh, flute
Shengnan Li, violin
Ye Young Yoo, cello
Chris McCarthy, piano

Las Ruinas Circulares is based on a short story by the celebrated Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Since the story is from Argentinean culture, the piece is influenced by Latin and Argentinean music, such as the tango, and also by the composer Astor Piazzolla. Borges paints a landscape of a surreal world, and he challenges the concept of what is real and what is not. To incorporate this, different types of music are put against each other: tonal, chromatic, atonal, graphic, and more. Each one tries to find the answer to the question—"What is real?" Completed when I was sixteen, it was premiered in Chicago in 2011 at the Music Institute of Chicago and broadcast on Chicago classical radio 98.7, WFMT.

Krish Jaiman Dance of the Mothers
Jiwon Sun, violin
Natalie Alper-Leroux, viola
Taeguk Mun, cello
Tong Wang, piano

I composed this piece during my time at Mannes College of Music. It is a dance piece that has rhythmic references to the syncopated Bharatanatyam Hindustani form of classical dance of South India. While it is presented as a Western Classical piece in instrumentation and form, it is a first effort of combining Northern Hindustani theoretical concepts with a Classical medium. I chose to used Rag Hindol, a raga in Hindustani music that is meant to depict "Kama," or desirous love, in its variety of human expression. The raga is used more as a scale form than the typical performance of a raga.

Sam Taylor A Burning Essence
Tingting Wu, piano

Neal Markowski 161/322-D
Maria Finkelmeier, instrument
Neal Markowski, non-instrument

Attempts at singular instrument manipulation. “If this is not an exercise, could it be a drill?”

Mollie Budiansky They’ve Gone and Sunk the Planetarium
(Celestial Music for the Underwater Variety)
Mollie Budiansky, electronics

Ari Sussman The Last Twilight
Meghan Jolliffe, Alexandra Gilliam, Kathryn Price, Amanda Levy, Arielle Armstrong, soprano
Elizabeth Wendt, Katherine Crabill, Vivian Buchanan, Jessica Rost, alto
Timothy Ayres-Kerr, Thomas Joseph Cienki, Eric Bowles, Michael González, tenor
Dylan Evans, Zachary Johnson, Zachary Crowle, Wenceslas Ostasenko, bass

I decided to set John Frost’s The Last Twilight to music when I wanted to experiment writing choral music in English as opposed to writing in Hebrew. I picked The Last Twilight because it brilliantly depicts the time between the sunset and the sunrise with such beautifully daunting yet somehow inspiringly encouraging visual images of “bursting clouds,” the “evening sun,” and “twilight’s colors.” I felt that text painting was very indispensable for this poem, as it really sheds a wonderful light on brilliance and splendor of the poem.

David Lien B-62
Tina Kambil, soprano saxophone
David Lien, alto saxophone
Eckbert Sierra, tenor saxophone
Mike Zhou, baritone saxophone