Department of Music

• Thursday, April 4, 2013
• Old Cabell Hall
• 8:00pm
• Free

The New Music Ensemble, directed by I-Jen Fang, present a concert of compositions by 20th and 21st century composers. Some of the composers featured will be Erik Satie, Cornelius Cardew, Pierre Boulez, Louis Andriessen. There will also be two new works by UVA composers Chris Perk and Kevin Davis, created especially for the ensemble, and an arrangement by UVA composer Kristina Warren.

In most of the works on this concert, the composer has left some important dimension of the music open to interpretation by the performers. Louis Andriesson's "Worker's Union" for instance has very specific and demanding rhythmic notation but only general guidelines in regards to pitch; "Octet '61" by Cornelius Cardew uses graphic notation consisting of cryptic signs derived from conventional musical notation; "A Maze (With Grace)" is literally a maze of musical fragments to be navigated by the musicians. Peck's piece consists of strcutures for collective improvisation built around gesture-based cueing games, while Davis' consists of canonic explorations of polyrhythm and timbre, resulting in dense fields of sonic activity structured through a network of individual choices. Also included on the concert will be a suite of pieces for indeterminate instrumentation by Canadian composer Jordon Nobles, an excerpt from La marteau sans maître, a classic work of integral serialism by Pierre Boulez, and some musique d'ameublement by Erik Satie.

Current members of the ensemble are: Kevin Davis, Stephanie Doktor, Emily Gale, Stuart Jackson, Chris Peck, Zachary Porter, Robert Stein, Paul Turowski, and Kristina Warren.