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Posts Tagged ‘cello’

Sounds EXCLUSIVE: Hannah Addario-Berry plays Eric Kenneth Malcolm Clark

Oh boy, this is exciting. The bay area’s Aerocade Music offered us an exclusive, early stream of LA composer/violinist Eric Kenneth Malcolm Clark‘s Ekpyrotic: Layerings IV, from cellist Hannah Addario-Berry‘s record Scordatura, which comes out on May 20.

The liner note for the piece reads:

Clark’s Layerings series calls for the soloist to record the same material multiple times, allowing natural divergences to cause an indeterminate overlapping of musical material. In Ekpyrotic, the cello is prepared with miniature clothespins on the strings, creating bell tones almost like a gamelan in timbre.

Scordatura is available for pre-order now.

Vera Ivanova: Bachiolage

Synchromy and I are hosting a house party/concert in December. One of the pieces on the program will be Vera Ivanova’s Bachiolage, which I love. Here’s what Vera says about it:

“Bachiolage” was composed in 2014 for and dedicated to Maxim Velichkin. The piece refers to J. S. Bach on several levels: harmonically (it is rather tonal), through the use of Bach’s motif (i.e., the letters of his last name, B-A-C-H, which translate to the notes as B-flat, A, C and B-natural), and through a performance technique, which stylistically belongs to the Baroque era: bariolage. In The Oxford Companion to Music, bariolage (Fr.) defined as “a special effect in string playing, used to produce a contrast in tone-colour. It is achieved by playing the same note alternately on two different strings, one stopped and the other open; the term is also used for a repeated passage played on different strings.”

In my piece “bariolage” is applied to a combination of open strings and harmonics, thus emphasizing even stronger the contrast in tone-colour. The title plays with two words: Bach (the BACH motif) and “bariolage” (technique), merging the two words into one, just like the a fast alteration between open strings and harmonics merge in a contrasting tone-colour texture throughout the composition.

Gabriel Prynn is the cellist in this recording.

Nicholas Deyoe: Erstickend

Ashley Walters and Derek Stein, cellos, and Ryan Nestor, percussion, performed Nicholas Deyoe’s piece Erstickend at WasteLAnd’s concert back in April at Art Share. It was such a cool piece and killer performance that I thought it deserved to be heard/seen on here.

WasteLAnd’s second season at Art Share starts next Friday, September 19, with Justin DeHart performing John Luther Adams’ The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies. Details are at wastelandmusic.org.