Tuesday Night New Music: Meeker-Cummings, Carroll, Vetterlein & Wiese

Robin Meeker-Cummings | Parapraxis (2021)

Two entangled particles behave as a single physical object, no matter how far apart they are.                                                                                                 
– Robin Meeker-Cummings

Marie Carroll | the stone on top of my heart is shaking (2020)

Kurt Vetterlein | Mortals' Lament (2021)

I was inspired to write this piece by Stravinsky's Elegy for Solo Viola. This piece is an homage to that work. I find the viola can be a painfully beautiful and lyrical instrument. It evokes bitter longing and heartbreak.                                        
– Kurt Vetterlein

Ian Wiese | A Prairie Sunset (2021)

A Prairie Sunset was written for the virtual collaborations as part of the 2021 Sewanee WinterFest, under the direction of festival composer Dr. Jorge Variego. Inspired loosely by techniques utilized in Luciano Berio's Sequenza III, this solo piece highlights many of the colors presented in Walt Whitman's poem of the same name. Printed in his seminal volume Leaves of Grass, this poem was written by Whitman in 1879 while he was travelling out into the American west, combining the sights he had seen from three different vibrant sunsets into one poem full of images of stirring night colors as the sun descends over the horizon line. Some historians also believe that Whitman wrote the poem as a method of unifying America under a single sunset, a sentiment echoed in the fact that he had written this poem in the aftermath of the American Civil War.                                               
– Ian Wiese

Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn,
The Earth’s whole amplitude and Nature’s multiform power consign’d for once to colors;
The light, the general air possess’d by them—colors till now unknown,
No limit, confine—not the Western sky alone—the high meridian—North, South, all,
Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.

Walt Whitman