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Presented as part of the Bowdoin International Music Festival since 1965, the Charles E. Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music represents a sustained commitment to nurturing and promoting the music of our time. It is programmed by Festival composers-in-residence Derek Bermel and Andreia Pinto Correia.
All works in this concert are composed by alumni of the Festival’s composition program.
NINA C. YOUNG
Fleeting Musings and a Restless Pause
Christian Whitacre, bassoon • Alexander Day, flute • Jack Kessler, viola • Arielle Zakim, bass • Sebastian Gobbels, harp
Alexander is sponsored by Howard & Mary Jane Rosenfield, Christian is sponsored by Debbie Schall, and Jack is sponsored by Tod & Lyn Rodger.
MELISSA HUI*
And Blue Sparks Burn
Daniel Dastoor, violin • TianYi Li, piano
Daniel is sponsored by Lewis & Adria Kaplan, and TianYi is sponsored by Barbara & John Norton.
MATTHEW SCHULTHEIS*
Omniscience
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Hayoung Moon, cello • Matthew Schultheis, piano
Hayoung is sponsored by Margot Stiassni & Chris Sieracki, and Matthew is sponsored by Lorna & Jack Flynn.
ELIJAH DANIEL SMITH
Stagnation Blues
Anne Chao, flute • Abraham Schenck, clarinet • Rachel Yi, violin • Hayoung Moon, cello
Anne is sponsored by Liza & Reid Thompson, Abraham is sponsored by Doug Collins, Rachel is sponsored by Lewis & Adria Kaplan, and Hayoung is sponsored by Margot Stiassni & Chris Sieracki.
NINA SHEKHAR*
Above the Fray
Ugnė Liepa Žuklytė, Yip-Wai Chow, violin • Chi-Yun Liu, viola • Camden M. Archambeau, cello • Electronic Multitrack
Ugnė is sponsored by Sharon Abbott, Yip-Wai is sponsored by Barbara Gauditz, Chi-Yun is sponsored by Dominique van de Stadt & Octavio Pajaro, and Camden is sponsored by Margy Burroughs.
MICHAEL FIDAY*
Dharma Pops
Rachel Yi, Ugnė Liepa Žuklytė, violin • Matthew Schultheis, narrator
Rachel is sponsored by Lewis & Adria Kaplan, Ugnė is sponsored by Sharon Abbott, and Matthew is sponsored by Lorna & Jack Flynn.
TIMO ANDRES
Listen to the Radio a Lot
Jack Fischer, percussion • Electronics
*Composer will be in residence at the concert.
NINA C. YOUNG
Fleeting Musings and Restless Pause — A Bassoon Pocket Concerto (2015)
The following note was provided by Nina Young on Fleeting Musings and Restless Pause:
Many of my pieces are inspired by extra-musical concepts: memories, text, scientific ideas, processes, narratives, etc. This work, however, was inspired by the incredible bassoonist Brad Balliett who commissioned the work. We met in Paris in 2008, and I was enamored by his musical abilities, unique speech, and his general mannerisms. This concerto is a gift for him, and I view it as a type of portraiture that imbues his one-of-a kind personality and way of interacting with the world into the musical fabric.
In commissioning the work, Brad was looking for ways to expand the concerto repertoire for the bassoon with economical instrumentation. He was intrigued by the Debussy Sonata for flute, viola, and harp (1915), and wanted to be immersed in that soundworld. I wished to balance the instrumentation with more sonic possibilities in the lower register, so we agreed to include his twin brother Doug (who plays the bass) in the project.
Fleeting Musings and Restless Pause – A Bassoon Pocket Concerto was commissioned by Brad Balliett and Steve Dibner for the Metropolis Ensemble. It was premiered by Brad on October 11, 2015 at (le) Poisson Rouge, New York, NY.
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The music of composer Nina C. Young is characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her musical voice mixes elements of the classical canon, modernism, spectralism, American experimentalism, minimalism, electronic music, and popular idioms. Young’s works have been presented by Carnegie Hall, the National Gallery, the Whitney Museum, LA Phil’s Next on Grand, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, among others. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Young has also received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Award, Aspen Music Festival’s Jacob Druckman Prize, and honors from BMI, IAWM, and ASCAP/SEAMUS. A graduate of McGill University and MIT, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University. She is an Associate Professor of Composition at USC’s Thornton School of Music. She serves as Co-Artistic Director of New York’s Ensemble Échappé. Her music is published by Peermusic Classical. Young is a 2002 & 2008 alum of the Festival’s Composition Program.
MELISSA HUI
And blue sparks burn (2002)
The following note was provided by Melissa Hui on And blue sparks burn:
And blue sparks burn was commissioned by Friends of Today’s Music of the Music Teachers’ Association of California for premiere at the 2002 MTAC Convention.
The work was conceived in October of 2001, soon after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, in New York City and Washington, D.C. While the nation was mourning the tremendous and senseless loss of lives, I was haunted by the images of dust and eerie calm that permeated the news coverage in the aftermath of the disaster. This is my personal response.
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Canadian composer Melissa Hui was born in Hong Kong and raised in North Vancouver, BC. Initially inspired by the haunting music of the Mbuti of Central Africa, Javanese gamelan and Japanese gagaku court orchestra, she strives to create a personal music of ethereal beauty, intimate lyricism and raucous violence. Her work has been commissioned and performed throughout North America, Europe and Asia, including performances by the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, St. Lawrence String Quartet, Esprit Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, National Arts Centre Orchestra, Focus Festival in New York City, Oregon Symphony, International Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, ISCM Festivals in Croatia and Switzerland, and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. The recipient of awards from the Guggenheim and Fromm Foundations, and a doctorate from Yale University, she was on the composition faculty at Stanford University for ten years before moving to Montreal. Melissa joined the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in 2010. She is a founding member of the Common Sense Composers’ Collective. Hui is a 1993 alum of the Festival’s Composition Program.
MATTHEW SCHULTHEIS
Omniscience (2023)
The following note was provided by Matthew Schultheis on Omniscience:
The title of this work is derived from an interview with the filmmaker David Fincher, in which, talking about his use of camera movement, he says:
“I just love the idea of this omniscience, like, the camera goes over here kind of perfectly, and it goes over there — and it doesn’t have any personality to it, it’s very much like what’s happening was doomed to happen.”
There are films whose cinematography immerses the viewer in the narrative with its use of movement, hand-held shots, and close-ups; and there are films in which static or slowly moving tracking shots, which give no hint of a human being behind the camera, predominate.
This work endeavors to capture the unfeeling, chilly, detached aesthetics of the latter.
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The music of American composer Matthew Schultheis is driven by a love of visual art and literature, a preference for dramatic, rich, sometimes opulent textures, a reverence for present-day musicians’ inheritance of past musical idioms, and a fascination with the connections performers and listeners make between deeply familiar and newly-heard pieces. Born in the Washington, D.C. area and based in New York City, Matthew is a C. V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at The Juilliard School, having completed his master’s degree there in 2022. He earned his BM in composition, additionally studying piano full-time, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Matthew has collaborated with the Tokyo Symphony and Juilliard Orchestras; Ensemble intercontemporain; Attacca, Mivos, JACK, and Hausmann Quartets; IU New Music Ensemble, and Sound Icon. Matthew’s music has received three consecutive BMI Student Composer Awards and additional honors from ASCAP, the Society of Composers, Inc., the Music Teachers National Association, and the IU composition department. Both of his works for orchestra, Columbia, In Old Age (2020) and Governing Forces (2023), received awards from Juilliard. Schultheis is a 2018 Festival alum, and is the 2024 Festival Composition Fellow.
ELIJAH DANIEL SMITH
Stagnation Blues (2024)
The following note was provided by Elijah Daniel Smith on Stagnation Blues:
Growing up playing electric guitar in Chicago, the Blues were my natural first musical stop. As I got older and fell in love with other genres and traditions, Blues fell by the wayside, at least until a few years ago. During the long overdue reckoning with America’s racist history following George Floyd’s murder, I decided to dig a little deeper into my own family’s history and lineage.
Blues originated in the early 1900s in the Mississippi Delta, and it eventually made its way north to Chicago (and I guess St. Louis too) during the great migration. All of my grandparents passed away before I was born, but my dad’s parents were born in the heart of the Delta, and both came to Chicago during the Migration. It was the realization that my musical roots in the Blues were more than just a geographic circumstance, but a cultural and hereditary tradition that goes deeper than I had previously realized. This piece explores the way in which Blues has subtly and subconsciously influenced my compositional voice while also experimenting with the sound of iconic blues riffs and licks.
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Elijah Daniel Smith is an American contemporary composer whose music has been described as “gnashing and relentless” (Chicago Tribune), “Seductive” (Gramophone), and as “an ingenious study in clarity and distortion” (San Francisco Classical Voice). His music ranges from orchestral compositions to multimedia and interdisciplinary collaborations and his affinity for dense and complex textures, rhythmic ambiguity and fluidity, and rich gravitational harmonies shines through in all of his creations. His music has been premiered and performed by world renowned ensembles including The Chicago Symphony Orchestra for MusicNOW, the American Composers Orchestra, and the New England Philharmonic, among others. Elijah was the Composition Studies and Ensemble 20/21 Associate at the Curtis Institute of Music, and he is currently pursuing his PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University as a President’s Fellow. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Composition from the Boston Conservatory in 2017, and a Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University in 2020. Elijah’s music is published by Project Schott New York. Smith is a 2023 alum of the Festival’s Composition Fellowship Program.
NINA SHEKHAR
Above the Fray (2022)
The following note was provided by Nina Shekhar on Above the Fray:
From today’s orchestras to the Titanic, classical musicians respond to catastrophe in the most peculiar way — play some Bach tunes. As intensely, beautifully, devotedly, and ignorantly as possible. Because Bach must be our universal healer, our vaccine, our band-aid, our paycheck. Above the Fray pokes fun at this phenomenon by warping and distorting Bach’s famous “Prelude” from Cello Suite no. 1, unraveling its passages into threads that transform, detune, and degrade at different rates for different performers over the course of the piece. Unlike Western art tradition which believes that classical music is a one-size-fits-all solution, this piece dares to ask what if we all are not the same? What if we each have infinitely unique identities that morph differently under different circumstances? What if our responses to a piece of art wildly differ from each other and change over the course of our lives? And what if art itself is not a static monolith, but rather something dynamic that we allow to breathe, reshape, decompose, and reincarnate into new lifeforms over time?
This piece was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, designed to be configurable for remote performance or standard live concert settings.
Many thanks to the JACK Quartet and National Sawdust for commissioning this piece.
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Nina Shekhar explores the intersection of identity, vulnerability, love, and laughter to create bold and intensely personal works. Described as “tart and compelling” (New York Times) and an “orchestral supernova” (LA Times), her music has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, LA Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Eighth Blackbird, International Contemporary Ensemble, The Crossing, and Alarm Will Sound. Recent and upcoming events include a Germany tour with the New York Philharmonic, her Hollywood Bowl debut with the LA Philharmonic, and performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, and LA Phil (joined by soloists Nathalie Joachim and Pamela Z). Shekhar is the recipient of the 2021 Rudolf Nissim Prize, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards (2015 and 2019), 2022 BMI Student Composer Award, and the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Leonard Bernstein Award, funded by the Bernstein family. Shekhar is a PhD candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University and is on the Composition faculty of Mannes School of Music at The New School. She is currently serving as Composer-in-Residence of The Crossing and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s 2023-2024 Sound Investment Composer. She is a first-generation Indian American and a native of Detroit, Michigan. Shekhar is a 2016 alum of the Festival’s Composition Program.
MICHAEL FIDAY
Dharma Pops (2006)
The following note was provided by Michael Fiday on Dharma Pops:
POP – American (non-Japanese) Haikus, short 3-line poems or “pomes” rhyming or non-rhyming delineating “little Samadhis” if possible, usually of a Buddhist connotation, aiming towards enlightenment.
— Jack Kerouac
Dharma Pop s are musical reactions to haiku by Jack Kerouac. As alluded to in Kerouac’s definition above, “pops” can be taken to mean spontaneous written observations — thoughts that “pop” into mind. The musical reactions to each play out in a flash, few lasting much more than a minute. In addition to the ten haiku that form the basis of the music, the opening of Kerouac’s 239th Chorus from Mexico City Blues — “Charlie Parker looked like Buddha” — also provided an important springboard. I liked how this one brief line seemed to place starkly opposed characteristics — urbane with pastoral, velocity with stillness, unfettered with centered, etc. — on the same ground together. Many of the miniatures bear references to bebop era jazz, some literal, some disguised, and others unrecognizable beneath the surface. I liked to imagine that, though Kerouac’s haiku may have been written in a meditative state high on a mountain somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, the buzz of 52nd Street was never that far behind.
Dharma Pops was originally composed for Sweden’s Duo Gelland.
Charlie Parker Looked like Buddha
Charlie Parker, who recently died
Laughing at a juggler on the TV
After weeks of strain and sickness,
Was called the Perfect Musician.
And his expression on his face
Was as calm, beautiful, and profound
As the image of the Buddha
Represented in the East, the lidded eyes,
The expression that says “All is Well”
– This was what Charlie Parker
Said when he played, All is Well.
You had the feeling of early-in-the-morning
Like a hermit’s joy, or like
the perfect cry
Of some wild gang at a jam session
“Wail, Wop”
– Charlie burst
His lungs to reach the speed
Of what the speedsters wanted
And what they wanted
Was his Eternal Slowdown.
Jack Kerouac
from ‘Mexico City Blues’
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Michael Fiday’s music has been commissioned and performed extensively throughout the United States, Europe and elsewhere by a diverse range of performers such as Cincinnati Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, Oakland East Bay Symphony, Percussion Ensemble of The Hague, pianists James Tocco and Marc-Andre Hamelin, and electric guitarist Seth Josel. His principal teachers in composition have included Richard Toensing at University of Colorado, George Crumb at University of Pennsylvania, and Louis Andriessen, with whom he studied in Amsterdam under the auspices of a Fulbright Grant. Mr. Fiday is the recipient of numerous awards, grants and residencies from, among others, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, Barlow Foundation, American Composers Forum, BMI, ASCAP, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council. He is currently Professor of Composition at the College-Conservatory of Music at University of Cincinnati. Fiday is a 1990 alum of the Festival’s Composition Program.
TIMO ANDRES
Listen to the Radio a Lot (2017)
The following note was provided by Timo Andres on Listen to the Radio a Lot:
Listen to the Radio was inspired by one of Woody Guthrie’s exhortations in his “New Years Rulin’s.” The piece is a part through-composed and part Cage-ean chance operation, in service of recreating the atmosphere of a drive through unfamiliar country, flipping through radio stations. The snare drum plays along to a prerecorded electronic track, its music both imitating and accompanying the wisps of music and bursts of static.
The extended piano sample (“tempo di valse”) is from Robin Holcomb’s Wherein Lies the Good.
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Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
2023–24 season highlights include a recital debut for Carnegie Hall including the premiere of a new piece by Andres, Fiddlehead, and the New York premiere of Gabriella Smith’s Imaginary Pancake; a tour with the Calder Quartet including a new piano quintet by Andres; the world premiere of a piano concerto written by Andres for Aaron Diehl, led by John Adams at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A new album of orchestral works, with cellist Inbal Segev and Metropolis Ensemble, was released in March 2024 on Nonesuch Records. Notable commissions include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia, and The Blind Banister, a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is a Yamaha/Bösendorfer Artist and is on the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music at the New School. Andres is a 2003 & 2004 alum of the Festival’s Composition Program.