NO EXIT new music ensemble performs works by The Collective in two New York City concerts, May 11 at Queens College and May 12 at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.
The Collective, founded in 2019 by composer Douglas Knehans, is an international cooperative of composers seeking to give a platform to and highlight the diversity and quality of powerful, individual artistic voices. Composers from diverse backgrounds and practices come together to project broad currents of compositional practice. The composers hail from all over the USA as well as Greece, the Netherlands, and Poland.
The program includes four World Premieres, two US Premieres, and five New York City Premieres. The World Premieres include Blackwork, Scarletwork for violin, viola, and cello by Cindy Cox, Sonic Entanglement for piano and electronics by Spiros Mazis, Unnatural Tendencies for piano solo by Amelia Kaplan, and Lines of Desire for bass clarinet, viola, and cello by Jack Vees.
Mist Waves is a kind of loose chaconne whose veiled repetition of the initial eight bars forms the basis for the work. Sometimes this initial idea is repeated entirely, sometimes truncated sometimes expanded and all of the time at close interplay with the freely evolving violin line which acts as the expressive core of the work.
Mist Waves is really about land-based cloud and how this forms in waves sometimes thick and predictable and at other times lightening up and revealing more to us. This serves as a metaphor for me of a type of human consciousness and how things are known and unknown to us in mixtures—sometimes equal, frequently unequal—which creates the mystery and magic of life.
The work is dedicated to the wonderful British violinist Madeline Mitchell in commemoration of her 2019 visit to the United States.
Sonic Entanglement, for piano and electronics is inspired by the theory of entanglement, a prediction of quantum theory that Einstein couldn’ t quite believe, calling it “spooky action of a distance”. Entanglement refers to “connections between separated particles that persisted regardless of distance”.
In the piece, a similar connection refers between separated harmonic partials of the piano that interact, simultaneously, on the electronic part of it, as harmonics or sub-harmonics. The piece is written in one of the multiharmonic, multi-spectral modes that I have devised and use.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention