Meet the Composer

First, a disclaimer. I wanna make something clear right off the bat here: I'm completely in the tank for Nico Muhly. We went to college together and he has been one of my best friends and most frequent collaborators ever since. But! He is deeply gifted creator, and honestly I'd feel insane not featuring him just because we're close. Okay. Nico is a composer with a very specific point of view – a rabid communicator whose personality factors massively in his work. Nico works extremely well with others; his collaborators live and create in an environment that is just foreign enough to instigate surprising, brilliant results. He curates community on a grand scale, corresponding with dozens of people a day, and is the hardest working person I have ever met. Nico lives his life out loud, and his music is stunning, hilarious, touching, and brilliant.

This week’s Meet the Composer Bonus Track is a world premiere recording of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s piano work Scape. Scape, like many of Anna’s works, uses extended techniques to create unique, otherworldly textures. For this piece, Anna demands quite a bit of playing INSIDE the instrument, as well as a few somewhat unconventional preparations to the instrument itself. Prepared piano basically means a piano with stuff in it, screws, thimbles, tin foil, pieces of paper, the type of thing that’ll make a piano technician start to sweat. The first couple people to do this type of thing were crazy Americans, Henry Cowell and John Cage. Definitely take a moment to check those guys out, if you have a sec. Anna, very much in keeping with her timbral language, uses these techniques to carve out massive swaths of sonic texture, creating a huge universe in a relatively limited time frame. A couple weeks ago, Cory Smythe, pianist for the International Contemporary Ensemble, stopped by the Q2 Music studios to create the beautiful world premiere recording. 

Anna Thorvaldsdottir is an Icelandic composer whose work conjures entire environments of sound, surrounding the listener in a dark and forbidding landscape. Anna thinks sonically; her music comes from a deeply non-verbal place, and she has developed a brilliant workflow which allows these ideas to remain mostly whole and unmolested through her creative process. Anna often favors massive ensembles, writing delicate and detailed parts for every player, but even when she is writing for smaller forces, she somehow summons these massive sonorities — detailed, elegant tapestries with a seductive gravity, which pull the listener in with their gradually revolving color and texture.

Today's MTC bonus track is a WORLD PREMIERE! Or, apropos of its October release, we might call it a movement brought back from the dead. This undead movement was born back in 1981, when Ingram Marshall wrote a string quartet for the Kronos Quartet called Voces Resonae. The piece employed, among other things, very complicated choreography for a sound engineer operating delay units (big physical boxes about the size of say a DVD player), a task which, at the time, was completed by Ingram himself. However, when the third movement of this work, "Turbulent but flowing," proved too logistically complex to be performed, it was essentially put in a drawer, where it has remained for the last thirty-some years. That's where we come in! MTC has enlisted the fabulous Parker Quartet to help us rescue this lost movement, with the help of MTC producer Curtis Macdonald playing the role of, as Ingram put it, "the mad scientist in the middle." Except in our contemporary take on the piece, all the delays and echoes are created with software instead of hardware. The Parker Quartet is: Daniel Chong, violinYing Xue, violinJessica Bodner, violaKee-Hyun Kim, cello We hope you enjoy the Lost Movement!- Nadia Sirota

Ingram Marshall is often called a California Minimalist, a title which, while not exactly geographically accurate, allies him with a loose cadre of artists writing ambient, visceral scores. It's a title he'll happily wear, but it only vaguely describes they art he makes. Ingram is kind of a throwback - a free-thinker making music on his own, music that accesses a deep, emotional place. His music leaves the listener gutted, keyed into something beyond consciousness. It's ambience with a purpose, slowly inevitably unfolding towards a climax. --- About the podcast: Meet the Composer is a Peabody Award-winning podcast that takes listeners into the minds and creative processes of the composers making some of the most innovative, compelling, and breathtakingly beautiful music today. Follow Meet the Composer on Twitter: @MeettheComposerLike Meet the Composer on Facebook: www.facebook.com/meetthecomposer --- Q2 Music is WQXR, New York's multi-platform home for dynamic modern music. Discover countless new artists via our 24/7 music stream – hand-crafted daily to reward your curiosity – and surprise your imagination with a world of exhilarating new music. Produced by Q2 Music. www.q2music.orgFollow Q2 Music on Twitter: @Q2MusicLike Q2 Music on Facebook: www.facebook.com/q2music

I'm thrilled this week to give you a sneak peek of a new Q2 Music podcast called LPR Live coming out this Fall. It's hosted by Conor Hanick, a longtime friend and radio colleague, brilliant pianist, and all-around passionate and insightful advocate for new music. The performances will come from Greenwich Village's Le Poisson Rouge, a stalwart showcase for new music in New York City and a trendsetting venue that's been "serving art and alcohol since 2009." Here's a quote from Conor about the show: "This is not your typical pre-concert hosting, and the content is not your typical pre-concert banter. Each episode of LPR Live will weave together a variety of voices that bring you into the heart of the beast of this dynamic downtown, underground performance space and into the personal aspects of the music's creation and presentation. This is a podcast that will let this exciting new music take its first (digital) breath. Production will create a sonic space where each strand is able to converse with its surroundings, and the richness and multi-dimensionality of the voices themselves will create the form, almost like eavesdropping on a conversation in the performer's greenroom."

I am so thrilled to bring you this Meet the Composer Bonus Track! We are extremely lucky to present this recording of Kaija Saariaho's piano trio Light and Matter, taped live at the Coolidge Auditorium in the Library of Congress, just this past May 22 by the world-class ensemble of violinist Jennifer Koh, cellist Anssi Karttunen and pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute. It's lovely, colorful, and you are some of the first people to hear it! Light and Matter (2014) is published by Chester Music, Ltd.

Kaija Saariaho's music evokes all sorts of natural sounds, the kinds of complex, white noise-y sounds that we often tune out. She's able to take the instruments of the orchestra and pull out of them the sound of wind rustling through trees, or waves hitting the shore. She's got this ear that can hear the music in everything, but in not in a John Cage way — she's not putting all sounds on an equal playing field. Instead, she teases harmonies out of these sounds, finding notes that were aaaalmost there to begin with. Kaija is famous for writing moving, visceral works full of difficult new instrumental techniques. She often writes for acoustic instruments with almost subliminal electronic manipulation — it's hard to tell where the performer leaves off and the electronics begin, and she's written full scale operas, often with strong, historically-inspired female protagonists, grappling with huge themes, love and death, that kind of thing. - Nadia Sirota

I am absolutely thrilled to present this week's bonus track, an exclusive in-studio performance of Meredith Monk's transcendent string quartet Stringsongs. Stringsongs is Meredith's first string quartet. Written in 2005, the piece was premiered by the Kronos Quartet. Until now, however, no recording of this entire work has been available to the public. Meet the Composer is extremely proud to present this recording, by the inimitable ACME (American Contemporary Music Ensemble). In the MTC Monk episode, we spent a considerable amount of time focusing on the fascinating processes Monk has employed constructing some of her vocal music - namely, her using her vocal ensemble to workshop ideas in the air. Stringsongs is an example of a completely different working style; these days, Monk has been writing more and more scored, instrumental music, and Stringsongs was developed very much that way. The piece is in four movements: "Cliff Light," "Tendrils," "Obsidian Chorale," and "Phantom Strings." This work is a gorgeous example of Meredith lending her gilded aesthetic to a very Classical format. The composer's program note is below: In Stringsongs, my first piece for string quartet, I explored using instruments to create unexpected textures and sounds in much the same way that I have worked with the voice over many years. I was inspired by the profound musicianship and passionate commitment of the Kronos Quartet. During the rehearsal period, as I got to know the players, the music came to life in surprising ways, colored by the distinctive "voice" of each musician.

Living legend Meredith Monk is a composer, vocalist, dancer, choreographer and filmmaker. While all of these descriptors are technically on point, none quite gets to the bones of who she is as an artist. Meredith seamlessly blends these media into arresting performance pieces that feel like rituals – rites from another dimension.  Take a tour with Meredith of her longtime Tribeca home-studio: http://bit.ly/1f0Urxo