Roberta Michel
Jan 30th and Feb 1st 2025
Dixon Annex Recital Hall, Tulane University
Program 1 (Jan 30th)
(tap/click dropdowns to expand program notes and composer bios)
Pendant for piccolo (2017) - Amadeus Regucera Written as a coda to the solo bass flute piece, The trauma you keep…, Pendant modulates the urgency and anxiety from the depths of the diaphragm to the claustrophobic aperture of the piccolo. The heavy music of the companion piece is thinned out in a kind of instrumental filter – by giving this music to the piccolo, it is emptied out and all that is preserved of the old music is a threadbare, frantic cycle that threatens to wipe itself out into silence. Of course it eventually does. — Amadeus Julian Regucera (they/he) engages with the embodied and acoustical energy of sound and the erotics of its production through concert music, installation, performance art, and video. Their music has been commissioned and performed by musicians and ensembles such as Ensemble Linea, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Intercontemporain, EXAUDI vocal ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, violinist Jennifer Koh, Splinter Reeds, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Duo Cortona, Third Sound, and the University of California, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. Over the last 15 years, Amadeus has also produced and commissioned work by countless musicians and artists and is currently Music Curator at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. amadeusregucera.com And for you, castles for flute and electronics (2023) - Victoria Cheah And for you, castles for solo flute and playback explores intimacies in close quarters of the touch of a sound, the promise of communication, and the possibility of stability without fulfillment. Commissioned by and written for Roberta Michel with the utmost gratitude and friendship. — Victoria Cheah is a composer whose work concerns boundaries, transitions, sustained effort, and intimacies within social-performance rituals. Her work has been commissioned and/or featured by ensembles and presenters including Talujon, Either/Or, Non-Event, Switch Ensemble, Line Upon Line, The Rhythm Method, Roberta Michel, New Thread Quartet, Han Chen, andPlay, Yarn/Wire, Wavefield Ensemble, MATA Festival, Guerilla Opera, Ensemble Dal Niente, Vertixe Sonora, Marilyn Nonken, PRISM Quartet, and performed by others. Recordings of their music can be found on Dinzu Artefacts, New Focus Recordings, and XAS Records. Cheah currently serves as Assistant Professor of composition at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory, as well as Director of Production of Talea Ensemble. From 2011-2015, Cheah served as the founding executive director of Boston new music sinfonietta Sound Icon. She has worked with ensembles and festivals including Composers Conference, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Argento Chamber Ensemble, Composit Festival, and Cantata Profana towards the development and realization of contemporary music events in New York, Boston (USA) and Rieti (IT). Previously, Cheah has taught music, research, and writing related courses as an instructor at Longy School of Music, Brandeis University, and as a teaching fellow at Harvard University. As a composer, she has attended academies including Sommerakademie Schloss Solitude, Darmstadt, Fontainebleau, VIPA, SICPP, The Walden School, and others. Cheah holds a B.A. in music from City University of New York Hunter College (Macaulay Honors College) and a Ph.D. in music composition & theory from Brandeis University. victoriacheah.com Three Creepy Lullabies for Roberta for flute and cassette tape (2024) – Erica Dicker Program Notes/Bio Three Creepy Lullabies for Roberta (2023-24) were inspired by childrens’ books our mothers thought were clever and scintillating – and that they insisted on reading to us again and again! – despite the fact that Roberta and I, their respective children, found these presonabambulant literary selections a bit weird if not slightly off-putting. The title of each “lullaby” is taken from these aforementioned books: Cabbage Moon (1965) by Jan Wahl, illustrated by Arden Johnson-Petrov; Starcleaner Reunion (1979) by Cooper Edens; Balloonia (1981) by Audrey Wood. The cassette player itself is a set-piece and the track it plays, an atmosphere. Pied-Piper-like, the performer lures us back in time to that uncomfortable yet incredible moment when we first noticed the power and autonomy of our young imaginations. -E.D. — Erica Dicker works in a wide variety of settings, bridging the realms of notated and improvised music. Taking Auspices (Tubapede Records), her “knockout solo debut,” [Bandcamp Daily] features her own solo compositions for violin. As an improviser, she lends her distinctive voice to the Brandon Seabrook String Society, Blood Luxury, and her electro-acoustic trio Vaster Than Empires. A dedicated proponent of new music, Erica is a member of the commissioning horn-trio Kylwyria, Wavefield Ensemble, and serves as an educational ambassador for composer Anthony Braxton’s nonprofit Tri-Centric Foundation. She writes about and curates performances of Braxton’s work and has given lectures and master classes at conferences including SEAMUS (The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States), NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), and institutions such as Dartmouth College, New York University, University of Virginia, and Wesleyan University. She served as associate concertmaster of the Peoria Symphony, held section positions in regional orchestras in the Midwestern US, Germany, and continues to perform with the Grand Rapids Symphony and the New York City Ballet Orchestra. Festival appearances include Bachakademie Stuttgart, Berlin Jazz Festival, Jantar Festival (Poland), Music Unlimited Wels (Austria), Ojai Music Festival, Skopje Jazz Festival (Macedonia), the Venice Biennale, and Warsaw Autumn Festival. Recent releases on which she appears can be found on Cantaloupe Music, Intakt Records, New Focus Recordings, Pi Recordings, and Tubapede Records. Erica holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the University of Minnesota and her doctoral degree from the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. She also attributes a significant part of her early musical education to the Illinois Wesleyan University college radio station 88.1 WESN (Radio to the Far Left) FM, reaching her in her hometown of Normal, Illinois. bioluminescence for flute (2019) - Liza Lim Bioluminescence, for solo flute (2019) was written for Paula Rae and explores flickering, shimmering qualities. Bioluminescence is the emission of light by organisms such as fireflies, fungi, algae and many sea creatures. A famous example is the Hawaiian bobtail squid which carries bacteria whose luminescent specks act as a form of ‘invisibility cloak’. The squid blends with moonlight on a starry night seeming not to cast a shadow from the perspective of any prey below. While sailing in these latitudes on one very dark night, the sea presented a wonderful and most beautiful spectacle. There was a fresh breeze, and every part of the surface, which during the day is seen as foam, now glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the reflected glare of these livid flames, was not so utterly obscure, as over the rest of the heavens. Charles Darwin, Journal (1832-1836) Pick any path of concrete or — Liza Lim is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works. Her work Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally. Extensively commissioned by some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles, Lim is Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Lim’s catalogue ranges from solos and chamber music embedded in essential repertoire lists worldwide, to five strikingly different operas. Her music is published by Ricordi Berlin. Quintet for bass flute and four loudspeakers (2021) - Mert Morali Quintet for bass flute and four loudspeakers began as an attempt to explore as many musical relationships as possible in a medium consisting of a performing body and four loudspeakers playing pre-recorded material. As the piece progressed, the medium became a means to re-imagine the corporeality created by the clash of acoustic and virtual spaces, which helped me narrow down the range of relationships I wanted to present. In the end, the piece embodied a somewhat naïve and intuitive positioning of the musical material, introspective directness, and the illusions of corporeality. Mert Moralı is a Berlin-based composer from Izmir, Turkey, whose current research and artistic focus lies on prosthesis and corporeality in-relation and how this relationship is conditioned by space and particularly its socio-political connotations. He studied composition primarily with Tolga Yayalar at Bilkent University in Ankara and with Eun-Hwa Cho at “Hanns Eisler” Berlin School of Music. He also studied Electroacoustic Music at “Hanns Eisler” Berlin School of Music under the supervision of Wolfgang Heiniger. He is the recipient of first prize in the duo category at Wilde Lieder – Marx.Music Composing Competition and J.J. Strossmayer Prize at Novalis Festival. He was a composition fellow at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Künstlerhof Schreyahn, and Villa Aurora Los Angeles. Moralı’s works have been heard at many festivals, such as Bauhaus Festival, Festival Mixtur, Klangwerkstatt Berlin, KONTAKTE Festival, protonwerk, and Ultraschall Berlin, and performed by Ensemble Dal Niente, ensemble proton bern, georg katzer ensemble, hand werk, Unheard of-, das Neue Ensemble, Hezarfen Ensemble, KNM Berlin, modern art ensemble, United Instruments of Lucilin, and many others. He attended workshops led by composers, including Mark Andre, Franck Bedrossian, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, Brian Ferneyhough, Mauro Lanza, Liza Lim, Isabel Mundry, and Marco Stroppa. soundcloud.com/mert-morali Program 2 (Feb 1st) Desiderium (2025) – Robert Forman Seven Birds (2025) – Sullivan Westerfield Exigence (2025) – Claude DiTanna The Halo Fragments (2025) – Kari Besharse Neon Lights (2025) – Mingshu Xie Cacophony (2025) – Eduardo Haegler Pilnik Leaf (2025) – Mendel Lee CYOA – Escape (2025) – Will Kiel Performer Bio Brooklyn-based flutist Roberta Michel is dedicated to the music of our time. She has commissioned and premiered hundreds of new works and has worked with many notable composers of our day. Roberta is the flutist and Co-Director of Wavefield Ensemble and is a member of Da Capo Chamber Players, PinkNoise, and Duo RoMi. Roberta has also performed with: Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cadillac Moon Ensemble (founding member), SEM Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Ecce Ensemble, Portland String Quartet, Newspeak, Wet Ink Ensemble, Argento, Iktus, Wordless Music Orchestra, Ensemble LPR, and Cygnus Ensemble among others. Recent venues include: Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Alice Tulley Hall, Merkin Hall, The Kennedy Center, Roulette, Issue Project Room, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She can be heard on New Focus, Chandos, Innova, Tzadik, Bridge, Wide Hive, New Dynamic, and Meta Records. She played on the 2021 GRAMMY-winning album of Dame Ethyl Smyth’s The Prison with Experiential Orchestra. Her recently released solo album Hush, on New Focus Recordings, “digs deep into the possibilities of flute on this gripping solo recital.” Originally from Maine, Roberta attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and SUNY-Purchase College and has studied with Robert Dick, Tara O’Connor, Alexa Still, and Jean Rosenblum. She holds a doctorate in music performance from the City University of New York Graduate Center and is a winner of the NFA Graduate Research Competition for her dissertation on the flute music of Salvatore Sciarrino. Roberta currently teaches flute at Sarah Lawrence College, Brooklyn College, and music courses at St. Francis College and maintains a private music studio in Brooklyn. She plays a Brannen flute with a Mancke headjoint. nF Acknowledgements nienteForte would like to give heartfelt thanks to our Season 15 donors and sponsors. We would also like to give acknowledge the following people and organizations who have offered their time and resources to make this season possible:
crock to this spirited place
whose orchard-body belongingly
offers that flickering, altered aroma
– groves on fire
Sappho/ Petrucci version (2008)