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Shrinking world/expanding for solo percussion by Josh Levine
“At the root of this piece’s conception was noticing how my parents’ worlds changed as they got old, how some things seemed to close in on them but time somehow opened up. Such thoughts manifest themselves in the piece through various interlaced processes of compression and rarefaction, and the changing weights of silence and resonance.” -Josh Levine
Each instrumental family — the almglocken, wooden slabs, and metal planks — are subject to their own temporal processes: compression, expansion, rarefaction. Furthermore, each instrument group resides within one of three crotales which articulate the larger temporal framework. This framework is taken from an earlier piece of Levine’s entitled Timepiece for Chaya consisting of twig snaps set apart by considerable lengths of silence. Here, each crotale attack corresponds to a twig snap in Timepiece for Chaya. Rather than silence between each point of demarcation, ongoing temporal processes from the different instruments sound.
Lengua Encubierto for solo percussion by Lewis Nielson
Concerning our Poetic Morality | Sobre Nuestra Moral Poética
Not to be confusing, but we are poets who write Clandestinely, being still alive.
We are not, then, anonymously comfortable and unaffected: We are facing the enemy
And ride next to him on the same trail.
And the system and its creatures
We attack through our poetry,
With [through] our lives we give them the opportunity to convert, Day after day. - Roque Dalton (Lewis Nielson, trans.)
Bass Clarinet & Percussion - Morton Feldman
Urlicht for vibraphone trio - Richard Barrett
“urlicht for percussion trio (3 vibraphones and auxiliary instruments) takes its title from the second movement of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony (188894), although it is not intended to be associated with the text from Des knaben Wunderhorn which Mahler sets to music in that piece. It is concerned rather with the metaphor of an evolving universe, with a focus on the unfolding of asymmetry from an initially symmetrical condition (the “Urlicht”, so to speak), the “special conditions” in Roger Penrose’s view of cosmology.” -Richard Barrett
Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil for soprano and ensemble (1998) - Gérard Grisey
Of whom owes it to himself / to die / like angel
like he owed it to himself to die / like angel / I owe it to myself / to die / myself
he owes himself his dying, / his angel is to die / like he himself died / like an angel
Four places, many more times - Josh Levine
musica ricercata | musica poetica for viola, clarinet, and vibarphone - Daniel Tacke
Capacity for percussion trio and fixed media - Katherine Young
Six Legs and an Amphibious State of Mind for Percussion Sextet and Electronics - Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh
einsamkeit for solo percussion - Daniel Tacke
“After all, the performance environment is wrought with peril and the audience is extremely dangerous as well ⏤ you can’t let your guard down.” -Daniel Tacke