Callithumpian Consort

NEC faculty Stephen Drury created the Callithumpian Consort in the belief that new music should be an exciting adventure shared by performers and listeners alike, and that the brand new masterpieces of our day are beautiful, sensuous, challenging, delightful, provocative, and a unique joy.

Callithumpian’s repertoire is the new and unusual, encompassing a huge stylistic spectrum from the classics of the last 100 years to works of the avant-garde and experimental jazz and rock. It is grounded in the musical discoveries of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Zorn, Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, and Iannis Xenakis.

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council and administered by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture.

Artists

  1. Carson Cooman (b. 1982) | Quidnet Shadows (2009)

    Kyle Spraker, trumpet
    Maria Rindenello Spraker, harp

    The title refers to Quidnet, a region of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. This work is one of a variety of pieces deeply connected to the landscape of Nantucket.

    Specifically, it is music inspired by beach shadows cast in evening light. A ritornello opens the piece and returns twice. In between these ritornelli are two mobiles, in which the music of the ritornello is developed in a freely, shadowing discourse between the two instruments.

    – Carson Cooman

  2. Elliott Carter (1908–2012) | Figment III (2007)

    Edward Kass, double bass

    The contrabass has always interested me for its special tone color and range. Having written solos for it in several pieces, I decided to write this for the instrument alone. It was composed during June 2007 for the outstanding performer Don Palma. 

    – Elliott Carter

  3. Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) | Hymnus II (2007)

    Edward Kass, double bass
    Julia Yang, cello

    Like the first of Alfred Schnittke's four Hymns, the second (1974) is at first a strikingly uncharacteristic piece. Its inwardness, its tantalizing sense of mystery, rite, and sincerity, seem to come from a wholly different mind than the one that produced the giddy stylistic terrors of Quasi una Sonata, Serenade (both from 1968), or Schnittke's apocalyptic tragicomedy, Symphony No. 1 (1972). Next to these wild birds, Hymn II for cello and double bass seems like an self-evacuating about-face.

    But Schnittke has faces to write "about," and when one listens closely the second hymn one can discern a palpable personality all Schnittke 's own, still weaving expressive but equivocal structures which tread the line between strained authenticity and beautiful (or not-so-beautiful) illusion. This hymn's rite seems in earnest, but its temple is not quite a safe-haven; it floats too much to attain the security of liturgical rite.

    The seven-minute work generally operates on a two-fold constructive principle. The first, more meditative aspect begins the piece, starting with the static pedal of the low bass and materializing, with relishing gradual-ness, a series of chords, which ultimately become pristine but unrooted triads. Interpolated with this a kind of promenade-music, by which the cello and bass work like a journeyman and his ground; yet these attempts at searching mobility curtail themselves before they can really get anywhere. Only once does a force seem to puncture the cryptic serenity of this vision, as the cello rises to an outburst in the middle, employing one of Schnittke 's most faithful imprimaturs, the semi-tone wail. A rapt, eerie ending follows in which the cello climbs into the stratosphere in slow, Parnassian steps, followed by the double bass. But as the bass reaches its own ethereal plateau, it falters with that same semi-tone pattern. Is this a crack in a beautiful illusion? The pain of revelation? Like countless other Schnittke endings, it disintegrates into defiant irresolution.

    – Seth Brodsky, AllMusic

  4. Nikolaus A. Huber (b. 1939) | In Pain and Sorrow (Aus Schmerz und Trauer) (1982)

    Philipp Stäudlin, alto saxophone

  5. Eun Young Lee (b. 1967) | EunHaeng II (2019)

    Philipp Stäudlin, alto saxophone

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