Coastal Futures & Arctic Bridging Concert featuring Eight Blackbird

2019-10-09 (Creation date: 2019-09-23)

McIntire Department of Music

Blue Desert (video installation presented in the OCH Lobby)
Peter Swendsen, music; Rian Brown Orso and Geoff Pingree, video

Migration Patterns (part 1) 
    Leah Barclay

Eroding
    Fjóla Evans, composer 
    Eighth Blackbird

>19980
    Lemon Guo and Mengtai Zhang

Festival of Whispers - 
    Matthew Burtner, composer 
    Eighth Blackbird

~Intermission~

Migration Patterns (part 2) 
    Leah Barclay

The Clarity of Cold Air
    Jonathan Bailey Holland, composer 
    Eighth Blackbird

Migration Patterns (part 3) 
    Leah Barclay

Under the Sea Ice
    Christopher Luna, composer 
    Rivanna String Quartet

Inlets
    John Cage, composer 
    group performance

Program Notes

Blue Desert (2012)
Peter Swendsen, music; Rian Brown Orso, and Geoff Pingree video
A multi-channel video installation (seen here in triptych) shot with high- resolution cameras, BLUE DESERT was created during a two-week expedition to Antarctica in November of 2009 aboard the National Geographic Explorer by Geoff Pingree and Rian Brown-Orso. The team worked with Peter Swendsen to create the installation’s soundscape using field recordings from Antarctica as well as Swendsen’s library of sounds from Arctic Norway. The three first installed the work, for three-channel video and four-channel sound, at the Laconia Gallery in Boston in November of 2011. Antarctica is a uniquely vast and haunting panorama of ice, water, and sky. To visit this place is to glimpse a world without human beings, to observe a planet in its most primitive and elemental state, to witness the mysteriously beautiful and fearsome power of the earth. Although any attempt to represent the Antarctic is, in some sense, futile – an exercise in framing the unframeable—BLUE DESERT provides a provisional window onto a wondrous landscape that embodies, paradoxically, the ancient permanence and never-ending flux of our physical environment.

Migration Patterns: Saltwater (Queensland Coastline) (2019) Leah Barclay

Aquatic ecosystems are complex acoustic environments, where species are reliant on sound to communicate and survive. Sound propagates underwater at different speeds, affected by temperature, pressure, and salinity. The impacts of climate change are often visible in terrestrial environments, yet dramatic changes in aquatic ecosystems go unnoticed simply due to visibility. Increased anthropogenic noise and rising temperatures cause ecological disruptions that are dramatically transforming the acoustic ecologies of our oceans, rivers, and wetlands. This work explores the fragility and complexity of life in a world of sound and vibration. Drawing on a large database of hydrophone recordings from the Queensland coastline, this work traces sonic migration patterns and shifting ecologies from the smallest micro crustaceans to the largest marine mammals on the planet. The recordings focus around the Great Barrier Reef and K’Gari (Fraser Island), a major transitory point for humpbacks. The whale song adapts in response to changing environments and the recordings contribute to ongoing scientific research on the value of aquatic acoustic ecology in climate action. This sound work immerses listeners in the depths of aquatic ecosystems alongside the coastline of Queensland and transposes infrasonic and ultrasonic recordings into perceptible ranges for humans.

>19980 - Into Silence They Appear (2017-2019) Lemon Guo, music; Mengtai Zhang, video “Ten thousand things are heard when born, But the highest heaven’s always still.
Yet everything must begin in silence, And into silence it vanishes.”
-Wei Yingwu, On Sound

In Taoist macroscopic ideology, the richest sound cannot be heard, but felt. Human hearing is limited to a narrow frequency range between 20Hz and 20kHz, which split the sound not only from the maker but also from its nature. The sound exceeding this range would not be heard by the ear, but felt by the body. In this universe, infinite things are producing ultrasonic and subsonic waves around us all the time. While it has been an ancient source of poetic inspiration, the inaudible world is far from being innocent, having been exploited for its physical potential as weaponry and for surveillance since World War I. Then, what is this inaudible world really like? Driven by this question, “>19980” is an ongoing series of audiovisual exploration following the idea of the inaudible soundscape. As the first piece that started this project, “Into Silence They Appear” explores the inaudible world underwater through the call of the orca, while incorporating computer-generated imagery as an imagination of such sound world.

During the EcoSono Institute in Alaska in 2013, we collectively recorded the orca vocalization, which is much wider than the human hearing range, with hydrophones and portable recorders. While listening to bird calls in New York one day in 2017, out of curiosity, I time-stretched the inaudible frequencies from the orca recording. Incredible things happened quickly. Chords and melodies emerged. I felt like I had stumbled into an entire sound world in those perceived silence. So I simply layered the sounds, hoping to convey the sense of wonder that struck me at that moment. The visual projection employs algorithmically generated imagery, utilizing techniques such as fractal noise, geometric distortion, and particle systems. The work extends the Taoist ideas on music, reimagining sound unheard, that transcends the human experience, transforming with time and space.

Fjóla Evans: Eroding (2017)
Over thousands of years the glacial river Hvítá in Iceland has carved a deep gorge into the surrounding landscape. At one particular twist in the river, the erosion has left several huge pillars of hyaloclastite rock, which look as they were flung haphazardly into the riverbed. In fact they were revealed slowly over time from the process of the river carving away their surroundings. In Eroding, the players create a dense mass that gets worn down over time in order to reveal the spiky formations beneath the surface.

Festival of Whispers (2017) Matthew Burtner, composer
performed by Eighth Blackbird
Festival of Whispers was commissioned by the Athenaeum Library of Art and Music in La Jolla, CA as a sound installation for the SoundON Festival of Modern Music. The piece is about coastal erosion as cultural erosion. It includes a chamber ensemble work (expanded in 2019), a multichannel sound installation, and a series of headphone listening stations, any part of which can be presented independently. Listeners hear the sound of the coast through the walls and floor, as if the ocean is pushing up under the building, pulling it out into the sea stone by stone. Whispered texts drawn from the music library stacks (the writings of composers) wash off the shelves and drift out to sea. As the ocean erodes the performance space, the musicians and audience members spread whisper chains around the hall, creating a festival of whispers. The ensemble music, while evoking the collapse of culture through coastal erosion, also develops its own musical content and community, contributing to that culture even as it too is washed away. Festival of Whispers explores the quiet loss of rare cultural artifacts, an outcome of climate change often overlooked in the face of the humanitarian and economic devastation global warming brings.

Note to the audience: The musicians will cue you to whisper to your neighbor, according to the individual audience-member scores included in your program. The audience will create “whisper chains” that they pass around the hall by whispering to their neighbors. These whispers mix with the oceanic sounds projected through the speakers, a sea of water and whispers.

The Clarity of Cold Air (2013)
Jonathan Bailey Holland, composer performed by Eighth Blackbird
Jonathan Bailey Holland’s works have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, including the Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Minnesota, and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestras, as well as numerous chamber groups and soloists. A recipient of a 2015 Fromm Foundation Commission, he has received honors from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, American Music Center, ASCAP, the Presser Foundation, and more. He has served as Composer-in-Residence for the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota, Ritz Chamber Players, Detroit and South Bend Symphony Orchestras, and the Radius Ensemble. Recent highlights include the premiere of Equality for narrator and orchestra for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and the premiere of Forged Sanctuaries by Curtis on Tour, commissioned to commemorate the centennial of National Park Service. Holland is Chair of Composition, Theory and History at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Faculty Chair of the Music Composition Low Residency MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Previously he served as Professor of Composition at the Berklee College of Music. About The Clarity of Cold Air, Jonathan writes:

Inspired by many a cold, Northern Midwest or New England day, this work is primarily atmospheric, focusing on the sonorities achieved by blending the instruments of the ensemble in various ways. There are many stark sounds - high, glassy harmonics from the strings, bowed metallic percussion instruments, harsh multi-phonics from the winds, airy cymbal rolls.

Under the Sea Ice (2015)
Christopher Luna-Mega, composer performed by Rivanna String Quartet
Few sounds I have found to be as fascinating as those of the bearded seals from the Chukchi sea in the Arctic Ocean. My first encounter with them was a recording by Ray, Watkins and Burns. It came to me that the sounds of the bearded seals would be ideal material for strings – the constant glissandi and the high resolution microtonal nuances characteristic of seal songs can be performed by no other acoustic instruments as idiomatically. All the music performed by the string quartet derives from transcriptions of several bearded seal songs, which were generously provided to me by Joshua Jones, researcher at the Scripps Whale Acoustic Lab, University of California, San Diego. Variations of the transcriptions (mainly in pitch and duration) were based on statistics of the bearded seal repertoire from 2008-2009, included in the Jones et al. article: Ringed, Bearded, and Ribbon Seal Vocalizations North of Barrow, Alaska: Seasonal Presence and Relationship with Sea Ice. The electronics for this piece consist of a hydrophone recording of sea ice from the Chuckhi sea, also a contribution of the Scripps Whale Acoustic Lab.

John Cage, Inlets (1977)
John Cage’s Inlets for water-filled conch shells is a listening meditation to consider your personal relationship with your environment. Cage instructs that the sound of burning pine cones be played as an interlude, a sound with renewed meaning in the context of our climate crisis.

Notes on Ensembles

The Rivanna String Quartet brings vibrant concerts to Central Virginia on the grounds of the historic University of Virginia. Quartet members are dedicated to promoting collaboration, quality performances, and education throughout the community. The Rivanna String Quartet looks to find the balance between the old and new, bringing a fresh look to the string quartet’s robust and varied repertoire through collaborations with living composers and guest artists. Rivanna is the resident quartet for the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia, where the members serve as faculty and as principal musicians of the Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia. Individually each musician maintains an active teaching and performing schedule within the community collaborating with such organizations such as the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Ash Lawn Opera, Monticello, Charlottesville and Albemarle school systems, and the Richmond Symphony. Members of the quartet include Daniel Sender (violin), David Sariti (violin), Ayn Balija (viola), Adam Carter (cello).

Eighth Blackbird’s mission is to move music forward through innovative performance, advocate for new music by living composers, and create a legacy of guiding an emerging generation of musicians. Eighth Blackbird, hailed as “one of the smartest, most dynamic contemporary classical ensembles on the planet” (Chicago Tribune), began in 1996 as a group of six entrepreneurial Oberlin Conservatory students and quickly became “a brand-name defined by adventure, vibrancy and quality” (Detroit Free Press). Over the course of more than two decades, Eighth Blackbird has continually pushed at the edges of what it means to be a contemporary chamber ensemble, presenting distinct programs in Chicago, nationally, and internationally, reaching audiences totaling tens of thousands.

The sextet has commissioned and premiered hundreds of works by composers both established and emerging, and have perpetuated the creation of music with profound impact, such as Steve Reich’s Double Sextet, which went on to win the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The ensemble’s extensive recording history, primarily with Chicago’s Cedille Records, has produced more than a dozen acclaimed albums and four Grammy Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance, most recently in 2016 for Filament. Longstanding collaborative relationships have led to performances with some of the most well- regarded classical artists of today from heralded performers like Dawn Upshaw and Jeremy Denk, to seminal composers including Philip Glass and Nico Muhly. In recent projects, Eighth Blackbird has joined forces with genre-fluid composers and performers including The National’s Bryce Dessner, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Perry, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, My Brightest Diamond frontwoman Shara Nova, Will Oldham aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Iarla Ó Lionáird of The Gloaming, among others. Eighth Blackbird’s most recent album, When We Are Inhuman, a collaboration with Oldham and Dessner, was released on August 30, 2019 on 37d03d/Secretly Canadian. Singing in the Dead of Night, written for the ensemble by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe, will be released on Cedille Records in spring, 2020.

Eighth Blackbird first gained wide recognition in 1998 as winners of the Concert Artists Guild Competition. Since 2000, the ensemble has called Chicago home, and has been committed to serving as both importer and exporter of world class artistic experiences to and from Chicago. A year- long pioneering residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago in 2016, during which the ensemble served as a living installation with open rehearsals, performances, guest artists, and public talks, exemplified their stature as community influencers. Receiving the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, Chamber Music America’s inaugural Visionary Award, and being named Musical America’s 2017 Ensemble of the Year have supported Eighth Blackbird’s position as a catalyst for innovation in the new music ecosystem of Chicago and beyond.

Eighth Blackbird’s impact extends beyond recording and touring to curation and education. The ensemble served as Music Director of the 2009 Ojai Music Festival, has held residencies at the Curtis Institute of Music and at the University of Chicago, and holds an ongoing Ensemble-in-Residence position at the University of Richmond. In 2017, Eighth Blackbird launched its boldest initiative yet with the creation of Blackbird Creative Laboratory, an inclusive, two-week summer workshop and performance festival for performers and composers in Ojai, CA.

The name Eighth Blackbird derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens’s evocative, imagistic poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.”

Nathalie Joachim is a Burkart Flutes & Piccolos artist. Matthew Duvall proudly endorses Pearl Drums and Adams Musical Instruments, Vic Firth Sticks and Mallets, Zildjian Cymbals, and Black Swamp Percussion Accessories. Lisa Kaplan is a Steinway Artist.

Eighth Blackbird is managed by David Lieberman Artists’ Representatives.

McIntire Department of Music; Leah Barclay (Composer); Matthew Burtner (Composer); Christopher Luna (Composer); John Cage (Composer); Fjola Evans (Composer); Jonathan Bailey Holland (Composer); Peter Swendsen (Composer); Rian Brown Orso (Cinematographer); Geoff Pingree (Cinematographer); Lemon Guo (Composer); Mengtai Zhang (Composer); Daniel Sender (Performer); David Sariti (Performer); Ayn Balija (Performer); Adam Carter (Performer); Nathalie Joachim (Performer); Matthew Duvall (Performer); Lisa Kaplan (Performer); Nick Photinos (Performer); Matt Albert (Performer); David Wetzel (Performer)

University of Virginia Concert Recordings

Music Library

InC - http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en Performers grant the University of Virginia permission to use, reproduce, exhibit or distribute in any medium the recorded performance for non-commercial educational, documentary, and promotional purposes.