New Music: March 29

Music, like all arts, has the profound ability to reflect humanity and each half of the third New Music concert is almost like an inverse of the other in terms of perspective. The first two works, Andy Akiho’s Lost on Chiaroscuro Street and Patrick Castillo’s Incident, have a sort of “outside-in” sensibility about them: how an environment or an external situation affects a person or highlights something within oneself. Meanwhile, Carl Vine’s The Village as well as Pierre Jalbert’s Street Antiphons are more of an inside-out experience, reflecting how humans create and respond to their environment through their interactions and beliefs.

This will be the New York premiere of the Akiho. His work is directly inspired by chiaroscuro, the renaissance technique in visual art of using light and shadow to create dimension. He discusses the way this relates to life: there are certain factors that are stable (in the piece, this is depicted by stability in one instrument while other instruments are more hectic or restless). The musical contrast creates a similar experience to the contrasts seen in works employed by artists such as Caravaggio or da Vinci- they shape the viewer or listener’s perception by adding dimension.

Regarding Incident, New York based composer Patrick Castillo discusses the nature of an incident as being an external occurrence that brings out something within us, or in his words, “any incident, when deeply considered may reveal some underlying truth (gravity, impatience) beyond its superficial details.” Similar to the Akiho, Incident isn’t inherently programmatic- it doesn’t have a specific narrative- but Castillo suggests removing the external aspect of it and focusing on the “underlying phenomenon.”

Meanwhile, shifting to the “internal-to-external”, the program continues with Carl Vine’s The Village. Vine considers the nature of a village and how people interact as he uses motivic material to create a temporal experience. The work is less about a traditional formal structure, but rather, smaller cells of related material develop over time resulting in a cohesive musical structure. And finally, the program ends with Pierre Jalbert’s Street Antiphons. This work explores another kind of human interaction- that of spirituality or lack thereof. Jalbert juxtaposes secular music with sacred music: the sacred being represented by more suspended themes giving the listener a feeling of timelessness while the secular is more rhythmic and moves in time.

Join us on March 29th at 6:30 or 9 pm for this program that offers four different perspectives on universal human themes.

Buy Tickets to the 6:30 PM Concert

Buy Tickets to the 9:00 PM Concert

Article by Beth Helgeson, Director of Artistic Planning and Administration