Seattle Modern Orchestra opens its 2014-2015 season with a U.S. premiere from Rome Prize winning American composer Huck Hodge. Hodge’s Alêtheia for ensemble is a communicative, powerful and dramatic work that recently won the International Society for Contemporary Music’s League of Composers Competition. Also on this program are Hodge’s Zeremonie, as well as works from two celebrated composers, Pierre Boulez and Tristan Murail. These two works, composed only 6 years apart, helped shape the progression of avant-garde music in France during that time. Boulez’s jubilatory late period work Dérive 1 (1984) exults warmth and radiance with simmering and shimmering textures of ornate melodic figures supported by rich harmonic progression. Murail’s 1978 work Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (thirteen colors of sundown) is a key piece from the early Spectralist movement that plunges the audience into the evocative resonances of sound.

*pre-concert presentation at 7:30 pm

Palace of Lights recording artists Marc Barreca and K. Leimer will be joined by guitarist and photographer Tyler Boley for a very rare live performance of new generative music based on the techniques used in their recent CD Premap. Textura says that “A sense of tentative calm pervades the duo’s electro-acoustic material, despite the fact that it’s marked by constant change and a restless shape-shifting quality.” PoL label-mate and MAX/MSP innovator Gregory Taylor shares the bill with his gamelan-tinged electroacoustic music.

The Frank Agency and Nonsequitur have joined forces to present People. Make. Awesome. — a three-part series of pairings rooted in sound, curated by Beth Fleenor. The theory: give people a place to make awesome, and they will. Each event features three pairings of stellar, highly individualistic artists, given opportunity to communicate freely. Tonight: Sound + Movement.

FEATURED PAIRINGS:

Ezra Dickinson (MOVEMENT) + Chris Credit (SOUND)
Karin Stevens (MOVEMENT) + Michael Owcharuk (SOUND)
Paris Hurley (MOVEMENT) + Hanna Benn (SOUND)

Artist bios here.

The virtuosic Fidelio Trio perform diverse repertoire internationally and features Irish musicians Darragh Morgan (violin), Mary Dullea (piano), and cellist Deirdre Cooper. Tonight they perform Bulb by Donnacha Dennehy, Typical Music I by Evan Ziporyn, Piano Trio by Charles Wuorinen, Für Bálint András Vargas by Johannes Maria Staud, and Piano Trio No. 2 by John Harbison.

Presented by WA Composers’ Forum and Jack Straw Productions as part of the Transport Series, with support from Culture Ireland.

Kim Myhr is an active voice of the creative music scene in Norway, both as a composer and as a guitarist, with frequent performances throughout Europe, Australia, Asia and the Americas.

Myhr’s first solo record, All Your Limbs Singing – “A delirious love letter to the 12-string acoustic guitar,” WIRE Magazine – explores the acoustic possibilities of the 12-string guitar, and can remind the listener of early music of Ligeti and of Morton Feldman, but it also contains a driving minimalist energy and simplicity similar to American folk music.

Kim was last heard here at the Chapel as one third of MURAL, a trio with Australian wind player Jim Denley and percussionist Ingar Zach. The trio have worked together since 2007, and have released two CDs; the last one, Live at the Rothko Chapel, is a documentation of a continuing relationship with the Rothko Chapel in Houston. In April 2013, MURAL played a four-hour concert there, which is planned to be released in 2014 as a 3CD-box set.

As a composer, Myhr wrote “stems and cages” for the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra in 2009, a large ensemble including Sidsel Endresen, Christian Wallumrød, and Jim Denley among others. The music was released on the CD stems and cages in 2010, and received wide critical acclaim. Kim wrote another piece for the orchestra for the 2012 Ultima festival called “In the end his voice will be the sound of paper”, this time featuring the voice of Jenny Hval. More activity is expected for this project in 2014. Myhr works frequently with dance, notably writing music for productions by Italian choreographer Francesco Scavetta, and in 2014 a new collaboration with dancer Orfee Schuijt.

Eclectic Seattle composer/pianist/vocalist Stephen Fandrich opens with a set of piano improvisations and original compositions, as well as music by David Milford and John Seman. Fandrich is a long-standing member of Gamelan Pacifica, and for ten years he directed the Seattle Harmonic Voices, a choir devoted exclusively to diphonic singing.

Presented by Nonsequitur. (photo: Dawid Laskowski)

An evening of music and discussion with Seattle composers:

Jacob Zimmerman
Nat Evans
Keith Eisenbrey
S. Eric Scribner

The Seattle Composers’ Salon fosters the development, performance and appreciation of new music by regional composers and performers. At bi-monthly, informal presentations, the Salon features finished works, previews, and works in progress. Composers, performers, and audience members gather in a casual setting that allows for experimentation and discussion. Everyone is welcome!

Clarinetist Carol Robinson and trumpeter Nate Wooley give American and world premiere performances of new works by iconoclastic French composers Eliane Radigue and Denis Dufour. The program opens with Dufour’s fascinating Cinq forms d’appel for bass clarinet and trumpet, and continues with Radigue’s OCCAM XVI for solo bass clarinet, OCCAM X for solo trumpet, and OCCAM River III, an amazingly beautiful duet for trumpet and birbynė (the keyless Lithuanian folk clarinet). The Occam pieces are part of a substantial set of new works composed in conjunction with a small group of the world’s finest contemporary musical voices. This is a rare opportunity to hear new French works played by the cutting-edge performers for whom they were written.

Franco-American clarinetist Carol Robinson is known for her eclectic approach to performing, composing and improvising. Equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms, she appears in festivals, concert halls, and alternative spaces the world over. Her recordings of Feldman, Nono, Berio, Scelsi, Niblock, and of her own compositions, are widely acclaimed. One of Eliane Radigue’s most virtuosic and consistent collaborators, she has premiered Naldjorlak and numerous pieces from Occam Ocean.

New York-based trumpeter Nate Wooley has performed on over 100 recordings. Increasingly acknowledged internationally, Wooley’s specific style is part of a burgeoning revolution in experimental trumpet technique with the likes of improvisers Evan Parker, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, and Thurston Moore. His own compositions expand conceptions of linguistic based embouchure manipulation and utilize the trumpet to control amplified feedback.

Presented by Nonsequitur with support from French American Cultural Exchange

In “battle trance,” combatants enter a mental zone, and so it is on the bandstand with this genre-defying tenor saxophone quartet of Travis Laplante, Matthew Nelson, Jeremy Viner, and Patrick Breiner. Their Palace of Wind debut album reveals them as closer to Evan Parker’s whirling electronica than to, say, the World Saxophone Quartet: swirling ambience, bleating epiphany “with the ephemeral and unquestionable logic of a dream” (AdHoc).

Presented by Earshot Jazz Festival.

Seattle percussionist and composer Paul Kikuchi presents chamber works for woodwinds, strings, and percussion with Taina Karr (oboe), Greg Sinibaldi (bass clarinet), Ivan Arteaga (clarinet), Natalie Mai Hall (cello), John Teske (contrabass). Film projection by James Reeves.

Also: Rob Millis (Climax Golden Twins/Sublime Frequencies) solo, and pianist Tiffany Lin plays J.S. Bach and Gyorgy Kurtag.

The Seattle Composers Alliance presents its first-annual, international Call for Scores Competition: Works for String Quartet. Ten winning scores will be performed by the Saint Helens String Quartet:

Susan Maughlin Wood, Mirasteros
Paul Reale, Simplexity
Michael Kovell, Minuet
Victoria Malawey, Vestiges
Daniel Webbon, Three Short Songs for String Quartet
Heidi Fivash, Indecision
Daniel Espen, Danza visionaria
Michael Zapruder, Tritone Arch
Jiyoung Kim, Grey-Ari and Red-Ari
Michael Moore, Habanera Celestial