Tuesday Night New Music: Engelhardt, Qin, Bettany, Lanning, Guan
The newest works from the next generation of composers.
Tuesday Night New Music is a student-run, faculty-supervised concert series directed by student composers Andrew Minoo Dixon '23 and ChangJin Ha ’24 under the supervision of composition chair Michael Gandolfi.
This is an in-person event with a private stream available to the NEC community here: https://necmusic.edu/live.
Austin Engelhardt | Press (2021)
Artists- Nozomi Murayama, violin
Yu Hayley Qin | Paper-sorting Man on the One Bus (2022)
Program note
This is a solo piano’s musical depiction of a night journey on the One Bus, where an elderly black man was sorting out cardboard and newspapers that he collected into five bags. This 8 minute-long piece starts and ends with calm, meditative progressions that portray the night and the water of the Charles River. The main part in the middle, however, is made of four sections that show two contrasting patterns: first, the improvisation part that imitates the motions of a hand by uneven rhythms and the unexpectedness of the man’s action by different combinations of chromatic notes. Second, a short, beautiful, folk-tune-like pattern that mimics the man’s singing. The whole piece is about the tension between the two patterns, and how chaos, awkwardness, complexity, and beauty gradually transform into understanding and reconciliation.
– Yu Hayley QinArtists- Avi Randall, piano
Stellan Connelly Bettany | Aedh Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven (2022)
Program note
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats (1899)Artists- Kayden Carter, soprano
- Caroline Smoak, Sarah Campbell, violin
- Philip Rawlinson, viola
- Sophia Knappe, Zanipolo Lewis, cello
- Colby Heimburger, double bass
Mathew Lanning | Tales from the Fens (2023)
A Pond of Fish
Exotic Trees
The Thinking Gargoyle
Lonely Swan
Pipe and Tabor
Program note
The Fenway Victory Gardens stretch from one side of the famous city park to the other. Plotted here and there are little pieces of people's lives in the form of little gardens. Each garden is decorated to the fancy of the gardener, and thus has become a little piece of living artwork amongst the trees of the Fens. These five short pieces are tales from the little conservatories, each told by a character somewhere in that expansive grassy neighborhood.
– Mathew LanningArtists- Mathew Lanning and Changjin Ha, piano
Amelia Guan | Blues (2022)
Program note
"I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world."
Maggie Nelson, BluetsArtists- Haowen Wang, guitar