Author: Mendel

Improvisation

breathe; get intune with the rhythm of your body.
once you find body tempo, make eye contact.
explore cells and improvise in between.
try to observe the rhythm of your breath without controlling it.
leave space where desired.
Play to the length of your breath.

Exhale 2 is an exploration of sound, listening, and breath. Inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations and performing with Byron, this piece features cells of instructions and melodies that the performers can visit between improvised material.

Graves’ stated that his research:
“…[O]riginate[d] from a belief that music is a universal language, and a curiosity to define the primary building blocks of that language…Exploring these universals led me to what believe is the common denominator: the human heartbeat. ” (https://www.milfordgraves.com/pageab)

Inspired by the musical and medical research of Milford Graves, Daniel Meinecke and I will perform improvisations that explore the healthy unevenness of heart rhythms.

Dr. Barbara B. Brown, a research psychologist that popularized the use of biofeedback and first president of the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback stated in her text New Mind, New Body (1974):

“Emotional judgements expressed by the skin and those expressed by words are often at great odds. And more often than not the voicing of the skin cut through convoluted language and the pressures of consciousness with a remarkable accuracy about the nature of reality. Has man been so inordinately proud of his conscious mind that he has abnegated the beauties and extraordinary abilities of the subconscious? Is it possible that the genuine evolution of mind has taken place below the level of a consciousness busy with applying socially created brakes to the natural development of the psyche?” (88)

Throughout this piece, Erin and I will explore alternative methods of ensemble communication and communicate through the voices inside our skin. This piece is my 3rd exploration improvisation exploring these ideas, and the first time I will be performing them with a duo partner.

Subaqueous is defined as existing, formed, or taking place underwater. This piece is a multimedia exploration of the literal definition of the word – water is abstracted into patterns, textures, and unnatural time and the deeply personal, musical expression of embodying music and being present in a space. This piece was one of my first experiments making musical environments that could help me channel affect and explore ideas that often felt too vulnerable for me to express in front of an audience. Originally written for processed flugelhorn, projections, and 4 channel audio, this revision will be performed with trumpet and my wearable electronics.

Our Full Selves is an improvisation for quartet that was added to the set the day of the concert. A celebration of the individual and collective vision, energy, and talent of our four performers, we hope that Our Full Selves will provide to be a memorable send off for the end of nienteForte’s 13th season.

Praised by The New York Times for her “appealingly melancholic sound” and “entertaining array of distortion effects,” Alexandria Smith is a multimedia artist, audio engineer, scholar, trumpeter, and educator that enjoys working at the intersection of all these disciplines. Her creative practice and research interests focus on building, designing, theorizing, and performing with wearable electronics that translate embodied, biological data into interactive sonic and visual environments. To explore how electronic music is embodied through practice, she has been experimenting with ways to integrate biofeedback training and sensor observation into her electronic music, build controllers that go beyond keyboards and drum pads, and perform with interactive visual environments. Her research in this interdisciplinary area was recently published in Arcana Musicians on Musicians X and presented at MOXsonic. She is currently on faculty at Loyola University New Orleans and will be joining the faculty of the School of Music at the Georgia Institute of Technology in August 2023.

Byron Asher is a saxophonist and clarinetist and composer based in New Orleans. Raised in Maryland, he has performed across Europe and the US at major festivals and art centers including the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival as well as at dive bars and DIY spaces. He is a 2022 OneBeat Fellow, a program of the US State Department. As a composer, Byron’s work has been supported by MacDowell, South Arts, and A Studio In The Woods (New Orleans), among others. He leads Skrontch Music, an experimental large ensemble, and Basher, a “free jazz party band,” and is an equal collaborator in Flaxan, a brass and woodwind chamber quartet, among many other projects. Also an educator, Byron is adjunct faculty in the music department at the University of New Orleans.

Erin Demastes is an experimental composer, performer, and instrument maker whose research combines sound and technology with humor, drama, and absurdity. She uses everyday, household objects and hacked electronics for her installations and performances and subverts their use and perception with play and experimentation. Erin received an M.F.A. in Experimental Sound Practices and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, a B.M. in jazz studies and piano performance from Loyola University New Orleans, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in experimental music and digital media at Louisiana State University. She worked as an audio technician, artist, and educator for five years in Los Angeles and as a jazz and classical pianist, composer, and arranger for ten years in the New Orleans area.

Daniel Meinecke is a pianist and composer currently living in New Orleans. Mr. Meinecke was one of the recipients of the Detroit Jazz Festival’s New Voices Series in 2016. At that performance he premiered his Big Band project where he brings his original voice to a large ensemble format. Mr. Meinecke received his Masters of Music from Wayne State University in 2016. Mr. Meinecke’s original composition “In The Clouds” was featured by the Pan-American Detroit Big Band at the 2016 Panama Jazz Festival featuring Danilo Perez as a soloist. He now teaches piano skills, ensembles and private piano lessons at Loyola University and has found success performing around the world with Quiana Lynell an award-winning jazz vocalist. He also performs his own original music in the New Orleans area as the Daniel Meinecke Ensemble.

nienteForte would like to give heartfelt thanks to our Season 13 donors and sponsors. We would also like to acknowledge the following people and organizations who have offered their time and resources to make this season possible:

• Hotel Peter and Paul
• Kappa Kappa Psi Rho Chapter
• Tulane University’s Music and Science Technology Program
• Versipel New Music

dedicated to Emiliano Gavito

In her series of pieces (more than 30) entitled Mouthpiece, composer and vocalist Erin Gee uses the voice in hushed nonverbal sounds supported by subtle instrumental effects to project an intimate sound world, as if she were revealing her innermost but inscrutable feelings. The result is original, powerful, and haunting.

In the Mouthpieces, the voice is used as an instrument of sound production rather than as a vehicle of identity. Linguistic meaning is not the voice’s goal. The construction of the vocal text is often based on linguistic structure—vowel-consonant formation and the principle of the allophone—and is relatively quiet, with a high percentage of breath.

The Mouthpieces presuppose a state of listening. They engage physiology rather than psychology. The construction of the vocal text is relatively quiet, with a high percentage of breath: „lightness, and merging, about formlessness.“

The sounds that she uses are often remnants or artifacts of phonemes, however, when placed in a non-semantic context, they float in a liminal space with no overt connection to a language.

Merging the voice with both the instruments and with breath, and repeatedly returning to formlessness through “a more (or less) pronounced utterance of the mouth”. Degrees of pronounced utterance.  This has been the main idea behind the entire Mouthpiece series, which began in 2000 and consists of about 30 works for solo voice, voice and ensemble, choir, voice and orchestra, string quartet, opera and other combinations.  Not pre-meaning, simply never in the direction of meaning.

After working with lovemusic on Mouthpiece 37, commissioned by the collective, Erin Gee wrote Mouthpiece 38 for their flautist, Emiliano Gavito, incorporating and condensing elements from two previous ensemble mouthpieces that use the bass flute in very effective and original way amalgamating its sound with that of the performers voice.

lovemusic have been working in close collaboration with Santiago Díez Fischer since the collective was founded. Later this year a monographic CD of the works the collective has created with the composer will be released on the NEOS label. This duo for bass clarinet and electric guitar is based on a poem Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin (by Anne Carson). The poem consists of a series of open-ended conditional clauses numbered from 1 – 72 creating a weightless and ethereal atmosphere. Here is a an excerpt with the numbers surrounding the section of the poem which the composer choose for the title of the piece:

12. If interrogation is a desire to get information which is not given or not given freely.
13. If buried all but traceless in the dark in its energy sitting, drifting within your own is another body.
14. If at first it sounded like rain.
15. If your defense is perfect after all it was the trees that walked away.
16. If objects are not solid.

As a descriptive or metaphorical title, Cove seemed to encapsulate a broad set of colors, themes, and concepts explored in the work. Just as its coastal recesses amass driftwood and oceanic material over time, my experience in writing Cove reflected a fluid creative environment which collected and fused many disparate musical ideas. As the initial premiere of the work was postponed due to the pandemic, I took advantage of the fluid timeline to gather new materials and shape the work in an entirely different fashion from how I initially intended it. The activity explored in the piece depicts a dense and symbiotic one, with performers often playing in strict relationship with one another, much like the symbiotic relationships found in coastal ecosystems or the intricate biological art of Ernst Haeckel. The balance between system and expression also seemed to be a common theme, with many features of the work structured around a distinct tone row. Despite being a reasonably active piece, Cove draws its most significant inspiration from themes of seclusion, intimacy, and memory, as well as my experiences of exploring tide pools as a child and the feeling of being isolated from my family in Southern California due to the pandemic.

Commissioned by lovemusic

Within eyes on the trio is asked to be staged closely to each other and within close proximity to a variety of small electronics to become, as I think of it, an interconnected “machine.” In this “machine” each performer engages with each other in new and compelling ways. By blending sound from electronics with instruments, use of mimicry, tape playback, and purposeful obfuscation,
the impression of one cohesive unit rather than three individual performers arises. Yet, importantly, each performer keeps their individual identity,
often giving agency to improvise and make decisions regarding the overall soundscape.

This, to me, forms an environment that is at once mechanical but avoids the methodic and encroaches on wonder. Overall, this “machine” merges lo-fi technology with acoustic instruments to form new sound worlds, controlled
unpredictability, and a tape cassette that, by the double bar, will be entirely warped and brand new.

Due to the nature and fragility of the feedback and lo- electronics incorporated in this work, the entire performance hinges on acoustics, prescribed proximity, discovery, and connection. With these aspects at play each action and sound of the trio can be predicted but not assured.

Fairytales for performers:

Descent into the nightmare’s urn
Heads bobble as assistants churn
a cup of fullsome wholesome song-
the terror near the end forgotten

Wistful falling delicate screech
Possess the nightmare’s careful essence!
A troubled unison assistants find-
deeper through the nightmare reach.

The lady learns each gesture slowly
absorbs and tears the notes asunder
Shortly she will be abandoned
to the nightmare’s terrific thunder.

Dedicated to Kiku Enomoto

The Hyacinth Garden grew from themes explored within T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: the author’s apparent disillusionment with British society, is mournful, yet at times a derisive critique. The poem was written soon after WWI and while the Eliot was recovering in a sanatorium, following a nervous breakdown experienced during his work as a clerk in London’s financial district. Vignettes of the 1922 poem punctuate the work: an incompetent clairvoyant, references to the myths of Hyacinthus and Tristan and Isolde, and the recurring theme of water as a mark of regeneration as well as drought.
Finbar Hosie’s new work invites us on a political and sensuous exploration through wastelands and gardens, in search of togetherness and separation in space and sound

lovemusic is a collective of musicians specialised in new music based in Strasbourg.

Working with composers on new and exciting works that will enrich the musical world is at the heart of what we do. This means collaborating with artists who wish to create new music together in which both the composer and musicians are actively involved in the creative process. We have had the pleasure of working with Santiago Diez Fischer, Michelle Agnes Magalhaes, David Bird, Erin Gee, Jesse Broekman, Michele Abondano, Finbar Hosie, Annette Schlünz, Jérôme Combier, Malin Bång, Philip Venables, Kelley Sheehan, Raphael Languillat, Maria Laura Dissandro…

We want to dismantle the patriarchal and hierarchical systems engrained in the new music world, creating a safe and inclusive environment in which musicians can decide for themselves how they contribute to each project, the music they want to perform and the composers they wish to work with.

The members of lovemusic have diverse backgrounds and tastes which nourish the choices of the music we perform. We welcome the multiplicity of aesthetics that new music today offers and our programmes are the result of extensive research which allows us to programme creatively, bringing new voices to new audiences. Diversity is important and we strive to programme music that takes into consideration ethnicity, gender and sexual identity.

The way in which we present music on stage is always taken into consideration. We perform un-conducted, which creates not only intimate bonds between the musicians but also an active and exciting connection with the public. We like working with lighting, video and scenography which contribute to creating an immersive listening experience. lovemusic concerts are colourful, fun and innovative drawing the public into our diverse musical world.

collectivelovemusic.com

nienteForte would like to give heartfelt thanks to our Season 13 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:

• Hotel Peter and Paul
• Kappa Kappa Psi Rho Chapter
• Tulane University’s Music and Science Technology Program
• Versipel New Music

the love light is beaming throguh and gassing the whole scene

Matthew Wright (trombone)

with: mendel lee, kyle peeples, hayden outlow, heather penton, sydney rust, samuel tyree

and dakota wilburn as “the bass trombone player”

in and out of the game (2010) – eve belgarian

the hip gan (2007) – mw

mauf (2022) – mw

yonder (1995) – jane ira bloom

i have something to tell you – mw

in the silver forest (1983) – yehuda yannay

sol (1972) lr

Matthew Wright:

plays trombone

performer/composer/pedagogue 

joined the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in 2011. previously held a position with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra and was a soloist with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra on their 2022 summer tour. performed with numerous orchestras, big bands, and chamber ensembles from Birdland to Beijing to New Orleans. made Carnegie Hall debut turning pages in recital. was in the first horn section to play with the band CAKE. recorded with Bela Fleck. recorded for Tyler Perry. recorded for Verve records. once shook Sparky Lyle’s hand. command performance for Solange Knowles. opened for the Gypsy Kings. opened for Jim Gaffigan. soloist with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra while dressed as Santa Claus. premiered pieces by a few Pulitzer finalists, the fastest guitarist in the world, and some real jerks. does a mediocre JJ impression. played in orchestras backing James Moody, Andy Williams, Yo Yo Ma, Randy Newman, and Placido Domingo. as a composer, writes and arranges many pieces for solo recitals and for Versipel New Music. Eagle Scout. caught a foul ball at mlb game. Michael Jordan’s former roommate. saw Jimmy Carter’s bible study. smoked a cigarette with Fred Rzewski. teaches privately online and as an adjunct at Loyola University New Orleans, the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, the University of New Orleans, and at Tulane University. primary teachers are Jeannie Little, Matthew Vaughn, Per Brevig, Steve Norrell, and Scott Hartman. as seen on Wrestlemania 30 (40:50).

Matthew Wright would like to give special thanks to Mendel Lee and nienteForte.

nienteForte would like to give heartfelt thanks to our Season 13 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:

• Hotel Peter and Paul
• Kappa Kappa Psi Rho Chapter
• Tulane University’s Music and Science Technology Program
• Versipel New Music

Admired for her “pure poetry” and “beautiful technique and sound” (NFA Chronicle), Ji Weon Ryu holds The Mary Freeman Wisdom Chair as the Principal Flute of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra since 2019 and serves in the same capacity with the Grammy-winning Albany Symphony Orchestra since 2017. 

Over the course of her young career, Ji Weon has been a guest flutist with distinguished ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic and the Verbier Festival Orchestra and has been a featured soloist with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. As a principal flutist of various ensembles, she has performed in venues including Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, David Geffen Hall, Dvorak Hall (Prague), The John F. Kennedy Center, Musikverein (Vienna), and Seoul Arts Center and has worked with many acclaimed conductors such as Alan Gilbert, David Robertson, Fabio Luisi, Matthias Pintscher, Manfred Honeck, Thomas Daasgard, Tugan Sokiev, and Valery Gergiev to name a few.

A devoted orchestral musician, her performances have been broadcasted live on Medici TV and released to an exclusive album by iDAGIO. Her captivating control of tonal palette can also be heard on the world premiere recording with solo violist Richard O’Neill of Christopher Theofanidis’ Concerto for Viola and Chamber Orchestra, which has won the 2021 GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo category.

With her unparalleled flexibility and virtuosity in a diverse panoply of musical styles, Ji Weon has won First Prize at the 2017 Artur Balsam Duo Competition, the 2016 New York Flute Club Competition, and the 38th National Flute Association Soloist Competition along with the Best Performance of Newly Commissioned Piece Award, and has received the 2017 Young Artist Award from the Kumho Asiana Cultural Foundation in South Korea.

Ji Weon has performed extensively as a recitalist and a chamber musician all over the US and South Korea. She regularly tours with the Frisson, an “explosive” New York City-based chamber ensemble as a founding member, and is a co-founder and the artistic committee of the Ensemble Blank, a contemporary group based in Seoul that strives to push boundaries of classical music repertoire and searches for unconventional concert venues. 

In addition to her appearance on stage, Ji Weon is also committed to teaching. She has given guest lectures and masterclasses at The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Berklee College of Music, Louisiana State University, Tulane University, and the University of Kansas. 

Apart from sharing classical music with audiences, Ji Weon enjoys arranging and performing pop tunes at the popular Instagram/YouTube channel, JHM Jams. One of the videos she featured has over 52k views and has been recognized by entertainment studio, Lionsgate and fashion magazine, Glamour.

​
Ji Weon holds a Master of Music degree in orchestral performance from Manhattan School of Music and both a Bachelor of Music degree and an Accelerated Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School. Her principal teachers include Robert Langevin, Carol Wincenc, and Young Ji Song.