Suggestioni, a Festival of Italian Music

The festival of Italian Music Suggestioni is taking place this week-end at Harvard, and on Monday and Tuesday at Columbia University and at the Italian Institute of Culture in New-York.

This event has been organized by composer Gabriele Vanoni, a friend of mine at Harvard. He invited great composers:

• Pierluigi Billone
• Stefano Gervasoni
• Fabio Nieder
• Davide Rondoni
• Paolo Valesio

If you're around Boston or New-York, seize the opportunity to meet with the composers, and to enjoy their music during the concerts!

Dancing the Swing

You are invited to enjoy the music and the dance:

Dudley House - Harvard Yard
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
8:30pm - swing dance lesson
9:30 pm - party with live big band

Live music for a great dance party

The Spring Swing is a great tradition at Dudley House. I would be happy to see such events appear in France someday. In many conservatories, where jazz is taught, that would be a fun way to have a party involving students, parents, teachers...

Before coming on Saturday, look at Jonathan Ruel's pictures from last year:

Homage to Debussy with contrabass clarinet & live electronics

In the Fall of 2009, I was a Teaching Fellow for Professor & Pianist Robert Levin's course Chamber Music from Mozart to Ravel.

In the syllabus, Pr. Levin included the study of Claude Debussy's Cello Sonata. Along with many students, I found this rebel piece wonderful. So, I decided to compose an homage to Debussy for the Harvard Hydra Winter 2009 concert. I entitled this new work for contrabass clarinet and electronics Electroclarinet 2. This composition is directly inspired by the second and third movements of Debussy's Sonata for cello and piano.

Electroclarinet 2 video on youtube

Inspired by Debussy

Sonate pour violoncelle et piano
First pages of Debussy's score, with my annotations

The Cello sonata was and remains a modern piece of music. In the first movement, you can hear a D dorian / Eb modal juxtaposition that we will later associate to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. But to find such adventurous moves as the ones in the second and third movements, we may have to study the music of the radical artist John Zorn and his friends of Naked City.

Electroclarinet 2 - First page of the manuscript.
That was also my performance score for the première.

Contrabass clarinet microtones

A microtone is an interval smaller than a semitone. When composers use microtones, they play notes "in between" the black and white keys of piano (well, with a fluid piano, you can actually play quarter tones and micro tones, but I'm talking about a good old well-tempered piano here).

Playing with microtones is a very old technique on wind instruments, and clarinet players usually enjoy playing many types of microtones. When transforming the cello sonata into Electroclarinet 2, I used some of the microtonal possibilities of the contrabass clarinet to extrapolate from Debussy's original sound. Here are a few passages that you can check out on both the annotated Debussy score and my manuscript:

• measures 1 & 2: microtones & quarter tones. The first bars are a microtonal interpretation of the cello's first bars. Microtones are possible on the contrabass clarinet, as it is with all the clarinets. When I write microtones in this score (including written quarter tones), I don't ask for a precise pitch, but rather an inflexion of pitch and timbre, obtained mostly through fingering variations.
• measure 3: microtonal trill. Just written as "trill with D key". D is the lowest pitch on my Leblanc contrabass clarinet.
• measure 7: microtonal grace notes. I added quarter tone grace notes to Debussy's original staccato descending gesture.
• measure 30: fast bisbigliando - many alternate fingerings. On higher harmonics, and open fingerings, the composer can leave more freedom to the performer. I used here the term bisbigliando in the meaning understood by flutist Mario Caroli & composer Salvatore Sciarrino. I guess I should write fingered trill or multiple trill or fast timbre trill using many alternate fingerings. bisbigliando indeed means literally "whispered", that is really the opposite of what I'm after at this transitional passage.

Electroclarinet 2 - Video

In case you could not attend the Hydra December 2009 concerts, here is the video of Electroclarinet 2, a composition for contrabass clarinet & live electronics:

I play a Leblanc paperclip contrabass clarinet, augmented with live electronic sound processing.

Electroclarinet 2 is an homage to Claude Debussy. Do you hear that in the music?
More about this side of the story next week...

Fulbright Afternoon of Music 2010

The annual Fulbright Afternoon of Music organized by the Massachusetts Fulbright Chapter is taking place this Sunday at 3pm (see June Park's poster at the top of this page).

If you missed yesterday's concert of world premieres at Dudley House, we'll be performing again two versions of Acquainted with the night.

Program

Jean-François Charles (basset-horn)
Bert Van Herck – Acquainted with the Night
Jean-François Charles – Acquainted with the Night
with Michael Barrett, voice & Miriam Conti, piano

June Park (piano)
Frédéric Chopin – Nocturne Op. 9, Nr. 2
June Park – Secrets of Life (2010-02-28)
ARIRANG ~ 아리랑 ~ (Violin: June Park, Piano: Veronica Villegas Rojas)

Katherine Lee (piano)
Frédéric Chopin – Waltz in C# minor, Op. 64, No. 2
Claude Debussy – Bruyères [“Heathers”] from Préludes, Deuxième Livre
Olivier Messiaen – La Colombe [“The Dove”], from Préludes

Veronica Villegas Rojas (piano)
Charles Koechlin - Epitaphe de Jean Harlow
with Lindsey McChord, flute & Matthew Kim, saxophone
Claude Debussy - Two Songs from Ariettes Oubliées
  C'est l'extase langoureuse
  Il pleure dans mon coeur
Lee Hoiby - The Doe
with Jodie Fernandez, soprano

Carlos Mendivil anaya (piano)
Johann Sebastian Bach - Italian concerto in F, first movement
Adolfo Mejia - Pasillo

Ariana Falk (violoncello)
Franz Schubert – “Arpeggione” Sonata in A minor
with Robert Merfeld, piano

Acquainted with the night - 5 new compositions!

Composer, conductor, pianist, and music educator Bert Van Herck is a colleague of mine at Harvard Dudley House, where he is the musical director of the classical orchestra. He conceived the "Acquainted with the night" project:

Acquainted with the Night
Thursday, March 4th, 2010, 8 pm
Dudley House Common Room
Free admission

In an experiment of collaboration and improvisation, each of the Dudley Music Fellows composed a song on the same text by Robert Frost.

Five world premières in one concert!

You will hear Robert Frost's poem Acquainted with the Night, in new musical versions by:

• Behtash & Mehrtash Babadi (saroud, tanbour & recitation)
• Jean-François Charles (voice, basset-horn & live electronics)
• Bert Van Herck (voice, piano & basset-horn)
• Gabriele Vanoni (voice & piano)
• Jan Kennard (voice & piano)

Musicians:

• Michael Barrett, voice
• Anney Gillotte, voice
• Maryam Vaziri, voice
• Miriam Conti, piano
• Mehrtash Babadi, tanbour
• Behtash Babadi, saroud
• J-F Charles, basset-horn