• → 2021–2022 Season
• ← 2019–2020 Season

At long last, in January we were able to offer events in person: the marvelous and ground-breaking flutist Claire Chase joined us for an Artist Conversation and then two days later performed a solo concert to a limited-number of people outdoors and to hundreds in our live-stream on YouTube.

The concert opened with Felipe Lara’s beautiful and haunting Meditation & Calligraphy for solo bass flute, which was punctuated with explosions of breath.

Next came Du Yun’s Fast if the Century for contrabass flute—an instrument taller than Chase herself—and electronic playback. Chase explained to our audience that the contrabass flute had a name: Big Bertha, and that name was bestowed by none other than Pauline Oliveros.

Suzanne Farrin’s The Stimulus of Loss for flute and pre-recorded ondes Martenot was next. Ondes Martenot is an electonic instrument of the early twentieth century, famous for giving its player control over many aspects of its sound. Farrin herself plays the ondes Martenot on the recording that Chase performed with, as the flute danced and glided (Chase played a flute with a sliding mouthpiece, enabling her to bend notes) in and out of the electronic sounds.

Chase followed this with excerpts from her latest commission, Sex Magic by Liza Lim. Chase performed the world premiere of the entire work just this past December in a live-stream (with no audience) from New York’s The Kitchen at Queenslab. We got to witness two movements, Throat-Song for ocarina and Moss—on the Sacred Erotic for contrabass flute.

The concert ended with two excerpts from Marcos Balter’s Pan. Echo for flute and electronics had a sparkling and mysterious electronic track that seemed to flow out of the movements of the flute, and Soliloquy for solo flute used delay and reverb to turn one flute into multiples.

Claire Chase with her contrabass flute “Big Bertha”

Photo credit: Nancy Nassiff

Event Sponsors: Arlene and Larry Dunn

Once again outdoors with a distanced audience, we presented two works for ensembles where the instrumentation is open, i.e. not predefined by the composers.

The intrepid group of performers was comprised of students, faculty, and staff at New College; members of the Sarasota Orchestra; a faculty member from State College of Florida; and a professional musician from the community. Together they performed pieces that each have unusual compositional techniques.

Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union has its rhythm fully notated, but the pitch is only implied. Every person plays the rhythm in unison (except for some small sections where the group splits in two), but the pitches played are chosen by each player. The score indicates only how far above or below they are from whatever each player considers their “center” pitch.

The performers were Peter Carney, saxophone; Lee Collings, flute; Mark Dancigers, electric guitar; Rachel Halvorson, viola; Ash Hoffman, cello; John Miller, bass; Aaron Nix, drums; and R. L. Silver, synthesizer.

The concert closed with Modul 22 by Nik Bärtsch, a piece with both jazz and rock influences, where the players move through rhythmic and harmonic modules. Unlike the rhythmic unity of Workers Union, this work involves improvisation, and our version ended with an extended saxophone solo.

Event Sponsor: Bernard Friedland

For our final concert of the season, pianist Vicky Chow filmed a performance just for New Music New College, which we streamed on YouTube and projected in the Mildred Sainer Pavilion to a small, distanced live audience.

The concert opened with five etudes by Philip Glass, each exploring a different technique. Chow then performed Caroline Shaw’s luminescent Gustave Le Gray.

For the third piece of the concert in Sainer we spliced in Chow’s world premiere performance of Michael Abels’s Anguish from Falling Sky, which she performed for the Bang On a Can Marathon less than a week before. You can see that video right below our concert video.

Next was Tomeka Reid’s Lamenting G.F., A.A., B.T., T.M., which managed to be both moving and violent.

Chow ended the program by playing against multiple recordings of herself in Steve Reich’s Piano Counterpoint. We can’t speak for people watching on YouTube, but this brought the audience watching the screening in Sainer to their feet.