[nec]shivaree + Callithumpian Consort

[nec]shivaree

Alvin Lucier | Music for Cello with One or More Amplified Vases (1993)

Lior Navok | Mysterious Pond (2004)

Program note

Mysterious Pond was written during my artist residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, USA. From my studio which was sited in the midst of the forest I could hear remote sounds that came from the nearby pond: Frog peepers created a most haunting sound texture, the sounds of night birds and the distant howls. My mind started to work towards imagining the pond and its mysterious atmosphere at different times of the day, but especially from dusk to sunrise. I imagined small episodes, involving the water creatures, their sounds, the lighting, rustle of the leaves and the whisper of the water. All these created a continuum of musical scenes, woven one into the other.                                                                                      
– Lior Navok

Alvin Lucier | Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings (1995)

Program note

Years ago I met a music critic who said he didn’t like music made with wires. He was referring to my Music on a Long Thin Wire which had just been installed at the Landmark Center in Saint Paul, as part of New Music America Minneapolis 1980. I retorted that he must not like the piano; it contained over two hundred and fifty of them.
       When Lois Svard asked me to write her a piece, my mind flashed back to that encounter and I imagined a work in which the strings of a piano would sound by themselves. In Music on a Long Thin Wire a large horseshoe magnet straddles the wire creating a flux field around it which, in conjunction with a current from an oscillator, causes the wire to vibrate and sound. For a piano work I would need several small magnets to activate more than one string at a time. I bought several EBows, small electromagnets used primarily with electric guitars. I experimented, placing them on the strings of my piano. I discovered that if I waited long enough, certain strings would begin sounding.
        I wrote Lois a prose score, describing the process and suggesting she freely position and reposition five EBows on the piano strings, creating strands of sounds of varying density and texture. Much of her time was spent listening for harmonics, audible beating, occasional rhythms produced as one or more magnets vibrates against adjacent strings, and other acoustic phenomena.
       Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings was first performed by Lois Svard on the Interpretations Series, Merkin Hall, New York, May 11, 1995.                    
– Alvin Lucier

Elliott Carter | Figment No. 1 for solo cello (1994)

Program note

The idea of composing a solo cello piece had been in the back of my mind for many years, especially since many cellists had been urging me to do so. When Thomas Demenga asked me for this at my 85th birthday concert in Basel (in 1994) for a concert he was giving sponsored by the Naumburg Foundation in New York, I soon set to work. Thomas Demenga had already impressed me greatly when he played some of my chamber works at my 80th birthday concert in Badenweiler, Germany and especially by his wonderful recording of these works for ECM, New Series.
        Figment, for solo cello, presents a variety of contrasting, dramatic moments, using material derived from one musical idea.                                             
– Elliott Carter

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The Callithumpian Consort

György Ligeti | Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano (1982), “Hommage à Brahms”

Andante con tenerezza
Vivacissimo molto ritmico
Alla Marcia
Lamento: Adagio
 

Program note

In 1982, Ligeti completed his Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano, a piece which was a turning point in his career. Ligeti had composed little since he completed his opera, Le Grand Macabre, in 1977, having only finished a few smaller pieces, like Hungarian Rock (chaconne) and Passacaglia ungherese for harpsichord. Influenced by sources as diverse as sub-Saharan African drumming, the music of Conlon Nancarrow, and the piano music of Chopin and Schumann, the Trio is considered to be the watershed moment that opened up his "third way," a style that Ligeti claimed to be neither modern nor postmodern.
       Ligeti wrote the Trio at the suggestion of pianist Eckart Besch as a companion to Johannes Brahms' Horn Trio, one of the few other examples in the genre, which is why the Ligeti Trio is marked Hommage à Brahms. Ligeti recalled his reaction to the suggestion: "[a]s soon as he pronounced the word 'horn' somewhere inside my head I heard the sound of a horn as if coming from a distant forest in a fairy tale, just as in a poem by Eichendorff.”                                                                                              
– Wikipedia