Tuesday Night New Music: Engelhardt, Qin, Bettany, Lanning, Guan

Austin Engelhardt | Press (2021)

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 Qin

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)

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 Lanning

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, Bluets