Performances + Events
[nec]shivaree: Lei Liang's "Six Seasons"
Jordan Hall
![[nec]shivaree: Lei Liang's "Six Seasons"](https://necmusic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/DgAAA4XJB3nbCCRv76RSyE3R.jpg)
The Chukchi Sea, north of Alaska, is one of the most inaccessible places to humans on earth. Six seasons in the Arctic, according to the Inuit, are not demarcated by a fixed calendar, but by what we hear in the changing environment.
Hydrophones were placed about 300 meters below the sea surface at a seafloor recording location 160 km north of Point Barrow. They capture the sound of sea ice, marine mammals, and the underwater environment throughout an entire year.
— Lei Liang
A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons (2022) is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history’s established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, George Crumb, John Cage, and Pauline Oliveros come most directly to mind, given their penchants for the enlarging of an instrument’s sonic palette in the service of extra-musical concerns.
At the heart of Liang’s vision is an all-inclusive and ever-evolving concept of presence in dynamism. When describing the experience of performing and recording Six Seasons, it is the idea most often revisited by the Mivos Quartet. To be present as listener, as reactor, performer, and planetary citizen is paramount. Liang’s goal is to create a totality, an experience to be shared in a common space.
— Marc Medwin
The live stream of this event is available to NEC Community members only. To watch the stream, please click the “Streaming Access” button at the top of the page and enter the NEC Community streaming password on the video window labeled “NEC-Produced Stream” when prompted.
Artist(s)
Rachel Brake '24 MM, French horn
Nicolette Sullivan-Cozza, viola
Kei Otake, cello
Mark Abramovski, double bass
Kai Burns, Evan Haskin, guitar
Jessica Yuma, Ranfei Wang, piano
John Mallia, electronics
Special guest: Joshua Jones, oceanographer
Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang is the winner of the Rome Prize, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto for saxophone and orchestra, Xiaoxiang, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
Lei Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. Other commissions come from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, among others. Lei Liang’s fourteen portrait discs have been released by several prestigious labels. As a scholar, he has edited and co-edited eight books and editions, and published more than fifty articles.
From 2013-2016, Lei Liang served as Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute/Calit2 where his multimedia works preserve and reimagine cultural heritage through combining scientific research and advanced technology. In 2023, the Institute launched “Lei Lab” where he continues to collaborate with engineers, geologists, oceanographers and software developers, to explore what he calls “the unique potential for learning offered by creative listening.”
Lei Liang’s recent works address issues of sex trafficking across the US-Mexican border, America's complex relationship with gun and violence, and environmental awareness through the sonification of coral reefs.
Lei Liang received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (B.M. and M.M.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.). He is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. His catalogue of more than a hundred works is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York).
Joshua Jones has spent the last 28 years working on the ocean, studying marine mammals and their environment through underwater sound. Jones received his PhD in oceanography from the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). His current research programs at SIO are focused on the California Current ecosystem and the Arctic, where he directs a long-term study of climate change and shipping impacts on Arctic marine wildlife. This international, collaborative work in the Arctic is conducted in close partnership with Inuit community members and organizations and with regional governments in Canada.
From 2004-2014, Josh directed and produced the interactive exhibit, Whales: Voices in the Sea, which has been installed in nine US public aquariums. He also developed the SeaTech program at SIO, a research internship and technology training program based in Sitka Alaska, where primarily Alaska Native youth conduct research into marine mammals. Josh has developed innovative software and hardware for acoustic observation of the ocean. He is a licensed captain who has worked in all the world’s oceans. Along with his ocean science career, Josh has continued to work annually as a charter fishing and wilderness guide in southeast Alaska since 1995.
Josh is the scientific advisor to the Arctic Six Seasons and other underwater listening projects at “Lei Lab.” He provided ocean sound recordings, audio engineering assistance, and relevant information about the acoustic data to Lei Lab’s sound team.
[nec]shivaree, NEC's student avant-garde ensemble, is the attack wing of NEC's new music program, performing the modern, the new, and the avant-garde. Sounds are provided by such composers as John Cage, Steve Reich, Morton Feldman, George Crumb, Galina Ustvolskaya, and Giacinto Scelsi. The players of [nec]shivaree have worked with composers John Zorn, John Luther Adams, Christian Wolff, and Frederic Rzewski. The group gives concerts both inside and outside of the Conservatory, and has performed regularly at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge and Tonic and The Stone in New York.
The Chukchi Sea, north of Alaska, is one of the most inaccessible places to humans on earth. Six seasons in the Arctic, according to the Inuit, are not demarcated by a fixed calendar, but by what we hear in the changing environment.
Hydrophones were placed about 300 meters below the sea surface at a seafloor recording location 160 km north of Point Barrow. They capture the sound of sea ice, marine mammals, and the underwater environment throughout an entire year.
— Lei Liang
A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons (2022) is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history’s established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, George Crumb, John Cage, and Pauline Oliveros come most directly to mind, given their penchants for the enlarging of an instrument’s sonic palette in the service of extra-musical concerns.
At the heart of Liang’s vision is an all-inclusive and ever-evolving concept of presence in dynamism. When describing the experience of performing and recording Six Seasons, it is the idea most often revisited by the Mivos Quartet. To be present as listener, as reactor, performer, and planetary citizen is paramount. Liang’s goal is to create a totality, an experience to be shared in a common space.
— Marc Medwin
