New Music Festival 2022—Boston Conservatory Percussion Ensemble

ANDY AKIHO (b. 1979) Pillar II (2020)
Xin Yi Chong, Xingyue Xue, Chu Wen (April) Ong, and Ming Yang

JOHN PSATHAS (b. 1966), Fragment (2005)
Linus Adler and Alexa Clawson

ALYSSA WEINBERG (b. 1988), Table Talk (2016) 
Christian Wiemer and Ritvik Yaparpalvi

LEI LIANG (b. 1972), Lakescape II (2013) 
Chandler Beaugrand, Margot Takeda, and YueYang (William) Shi

ANN SOUTHAM (1937-2010), Natural Resources or What to Do till the Power Comes On (1981)
Chu Wen (April) Ong, Linus Adler, Alexa Clawson, Christian Wiemer, and Ritvik Yaparpalvi

GEORGES APERGHIS (b. 1945), Kryptogramma (1970)
Ashley Ridenour, Davis Nickles, Eric Puente, Yun Hao (James) Koo, Christian Bartholomew, and Harold Rivas

ANDY AKIHO (b. 1979) Pillar II (2020)

Pillar II is a movement from Akiho’s recent massive 80 minute work for percussion quartet “Seven Pillars”.  Composed in 2020 during the pandemic in NYC in close collaboration with Sandbox Percussion, this is a massive work and a hugely ambitious project. Pillar II finds the performers using only 2 instruments, vibraphone and crotales. The performers are often using bows to play the instruments, and unlike most bowed percussion parts, they are asked to perform very rhythmic hocketing passages. This is a beautiful and groovy piece that requires extreme connection between the members of the quartet.

—Kyle Brightwell

Described as “trailblazing” (LA Times) and “an imaginative composer” (NY Times), ANDY AKIHO is a composer and performer of new music. 

Recent engagements include commissioned premieres by the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony, China Philharmonic, Guangzhou Symphony, Oregon Symphony with Soloist Colin Currie, American Composers Orchestra, Music@Menlo, Chamber Music Northwest, Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, LA Dance Project, and experimental opera company The Industry.

Akiho has been recognized with many prestigious awards and organizations including the Rome Prize, Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize, Harvard University Fromm Commission, Barlow Endowment, New Music USA, and Chamber Music America. Additionally, his compositions have been featured on PBS’s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” and by organizations such as Bang on a Can, American Composers Forum, The Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong, and the Heidelberg Festival.

Akiho is also an active steel pannist and performs his compositions with various ensembles worldwide. He has performed his works with the Charlotte Symphony, South Carolina Philharmonic, Grand Rapids Symphony, Nu Decco Ensemble, LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Scharoun Ensemble, Miyamoto is Black Enough, the International Drum Festival in Taiwan, and has had four concerts featuring his compositions at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Akiho’s recordings No One To Know One (innova Recordings) and The War Below (National Sawdust Tracks) features brilliantly crafted compositions that pose intricate rhythms and exotic timbres inspired by his primary instrument, the steel pan.

JOHN PSATHAS (b. 1966), Fragment (2005)

Fragment is an adaption of a piano duet originally composed to commemorate the retirement occasion of the composer’s first piano teacher, Peter Williams. At the time of its composition, Psathas was engaged in writing his double concerto for percussion, piano and orchestra, View From Olympus, and in mood and musical material, Fragment is related to the second movement of that work. One of a few Psathas works suitable for performance by young players, it is a simple and tranquil meditation in which gently pulsing chords provide hushed support for a delicate melody.  This version, for marimba and vibraphone, was arranged by percussionist Jeremy Fitzsimons.

—from the composer’s website

NZ-Greek composer JOHN PSATHAS shot to worldwide attention when his music was heard by an audience of more than a billion during the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, and during the intervening years his music has been continually  commissioned and performed by top musicians around the globe. The NZ Arts Foundation Laureate has achieved a level of international success unprecedented for a NZ composer, his music having moved concert audiences in more than 50 countries on all 7 continents, even Antarctica. He is now also considered one of the three most important living composers of the Greek Diaspora.

Psathas was a sought-after faculty member at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University Wellington for 25 years, before closing the door on that chapter in 2019 to devote all his time to composing, and embark on a return to performing onstage. 

When glancing over Psathas’ career, one element impossible to overlook is the scope and sheer variety of his collaborations. He has collaborated on a Billboard classical chart-topping album with System of a Down front man Serj Tankian, has written feature-film scores, collaborated with the Grand Mufti in Paris’s Grand Mosque, crossed into jazz in projects with luminaries Michael Brecker and Joshua Redman, and collaborated on an e-book project with Salman Rushdie. There are few composers who cross the boundaries of musical genres to the extent that Psathas does, and with such ongoing global success. 

His music emerges from a dazzling 21st century backdrop, where dynamic collaboration with creative masters from all corners of the physical and artistic globe result in outcomes that are visionary, moving, and inspired. Early collaborations included working with such luminaries as Sir Mark Elder, Kristjan Jarvi, the Takacs Quartet, Lara St. John, the Netherlands Blazers Ensemble, Evelyn Glennie, Edo de Wart, Pedro Carneiro, Halle Orchestra, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra of Emilia Romagna, Alexej Gerassimez, and Michael Burritt, amongst others. Then followed a period of intense creative exploration in electronica and jazz, and a series of mega-projects (like scoring much of the opening ceremony of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games). All of which has led to an explosion of first-hand collaborations with artists from dozens of musical traditions spanning Asia, Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Australasia.

Percussion has always been a strong feature of Psathas’ output, with a consistent schedule of new percussion commissions from many of the world’s top players. The emergence of COVID-19 also served to further broaden the scope of Psathas’ work, with the 2020 release of long-distance collaborative albums It’s Already Tomorrow, and Last Days of March.  He has continued to mentor a wide range of composers and performers, as well as hosting composer retreats at his own haven at Waitarere Beach, and he was recently named one of 12 recipients of the 2021 Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian Awards

ALYSSA WEINBERG (b. 1988), Table Talk (2016) 

Table Talk was commissioned by Arx Duo in 2016 with the goal of exploring the concept of percussion "4-hands." Taking the idea of piano 4-hand music and applying it to a shared percussion set-up, I was inspired to make one more parallel to a technique common to modern piano repertoire, that of "preparing" the instrument. Composed at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute, this piece for prepared vibraphone evolved as an attempt to stretch the idea of what a vibraphone could sound like, from exploiting the subtle timbral shifts of a single note to masking its identity completely through the combinations of other items placed on top of it. 

—from VicFirth.com

ALYSSA WEINBERG’s music “...succeeds at the challenge of being at once contemporary and classic” (Ouest France) and has been described as “fearless... unapologetic... beautiful... transforming” (Kaleidoscope). Her work is deeply influenced by collaborations with other artists from literature, dance, and visual arts.

Recent projects and performances have included works for the Aizuri Quartet, Arx Duo, Contemporaneous, Curtis 20/21 Ensemble, the Dover Quartet, Ensemble39, ensemble mise-en, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra, PUBLIQuartet, Sandbox Percussion, and Shattered Glass, as well as musicians Ricardo Morales, Philip Setzer, and Shai Wosner. She has received commissions from the Barnes Foundation, the Curtis Institute of Music, FringeArts and the Pennsylvania Ballet, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, LiveConnections, Music from Angel Fire, Nadia Sirota, and One Book One Philadelphia.

In 2013 Weinberg founded “duende,” a series for experimental music and dance in Philadelphia along with cellist Gabriel Cabezas and dancer/choreographer Chloe Felesina. The group presents events in a variety of settings and alternative venues, emphasizing equality between movement and music, with a deep exploration into the intersection of those two disciplines. “...informal settings can create a less elitist atmosphere and be the catalyst for meaningful conversations about art. With their commitments to creative collaborations and bringing their audiences physically closer to the art they create, duende is not just a show but a full artistic experience.” (Broad Street Review) 

Weinberg received an Artist Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music, her M.M. in Composition from the Manhattan School of Music, and her B.M. in Composition and Theory at Vanderbilt University. Her teachers have included Richard Danielpour, Jennifer Higdon, Stan Link, David Ludwig and Michael Slayton. Weinberg began her studies as a doctoral fellow at Princeton University in the fall of 2016. 

LEI LIANG (b. 1972), Lakescape II (2013) 

Having been interested in Mahayana Buddhism for a number of years, I went to a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York to study meditation in 1999. One evening, while walking alone by the side of the lake, I caught the sight of a “V” shape floating and extending on the surface of the water. It was a beaver taking a swim under the moon. This image gave me insight into my relationship with silence: underneath the music I write is a profoundly deep silence upon which I seek to inscribe my signature through sound. It inspired me to compose a number of works. 

Lakescape II was written for the Rootstock Percussion (Chris Froh, Dan Kennedy, Loren Mach) who gave its world premiere at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, University of California, Davis on January 31st, 2013. 

—Lei Liang

LEI LIANG (b.1972) is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been described as “hauntingly beautiful and sonically colorful” by The New York Times, and as “far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous” by The Washington Post.

Winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Lei Liang is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto Xiaoxiang (for saxophone and orchestra) was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. 

Lei Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. Other commissions and performances come from the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Thailand Philharmonic, the Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Shanghai Quartet, the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New York New Music Ensemble and Boston Musica Viva, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, violinist Cho-Liang Lin, among others. 

Lei Liang’s ten portrait discs are released on Naxos, Mode, New World, BMOP/sound, Albany, Encounter and Bridge Records, along with more than a dozen compilation discs. As a scholar and conservationist of cultural traditions, he served as editor and co-editor of five books, and published more than thirty articles. In 2020, Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press publishes a biography of Lei Liang, with essays by composers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, performers, music critics, literary scholars, poets, and scientists. The book was edited by Prof. Qin Luo of Shanghai Conservatory.

From 2013-2016, Lei Liang served as Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute where his multimedia works preserve and reimagine culture through combining advanced technology and scientific research. In 2018, Liang returned to the Institute as its inaugural Research Artist-in-Residence.

Lei Liang's recent works address issues of sex trafficking across the US-Mexican border (Cuatro Corridos), America's complex relationship with gun and violence (Inheritance), and environmental awareness through the sonification of coral reefs. 

Lei Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM and MM) and Harvard University (PhD). A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he held fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships. Lei Liang taught in China as a distinguished visiting professor at Shaanxi Normal University College of Arts in Xi'an; served as honorary professor of composition and sound design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music and as visiting assistant professor of music at Middlebury College. He is Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where he served as chair of the composition area and Acting Chair of the Music Department. Starting from 2018, Lei Liang serves as the Artistic Director of the Chou Wen-chung Music Research Center in China. Lei Liang's catalogue of more than a hundred compositions is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York).

ANN SOUTHAM (1937-2010), Natural Resources or What to Do till the Power Comes On (1981)

Southam describes "Natural Resources" as a sound game, the rules of which "are intended to function as a simple means whereby 'found sound' can be organized into musical patterns." She adds, "these rules should be employed in the event of a power failure." Written for the Canadian Electronic Ensemble, a group that focuses on works that require electrical power, Natural Resources was offered as a solution if/when a concert-time technical failure occurred.

—Samuel Solomon

ANN SOUTHAM (4 February 1937 – 25 November 2010) was a Canadian composer and music teacher. She was born Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1937, and lived most of her life in Toronto, Ontario. Her father, Kenneth Gordon Southam, was a great-grandson of newspaper baron William Southam.She began composing at age 15 after attending a summer music camp at the Banff School (now known as The Banff Centre). She studied composition with Samuel Dolin at the Royal Conservatory of Music. She studied piano with Pierre Souvairan and electronic music with Gustav Ciamaga at the University of Toronto from 1960 to 1963. She began teaching at the Royal Conservatory of Music in 1966.She was a founding member, first president (1980–88), life member (2002) and honorary president (2007) of the Association of Canadian Women Composers. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010. She was also an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre, which named its recording collection the Ann Southam Digital Audio Archive. She began a collaboration with the New Dance Group of Canada (later known as Toronto Dance Theatre) in 1967, where she became composer-in-residence in 1968. Southam was awarded with the Friends of Canadian Music Award in 2001. She died, aged 73, on 25 November 2010. In her will she left $14 million to the Canadian Women's Foundation.

GEORGES APERGHIS (b. 1945), Kryptogramma (1970)

Kryptogramma: what is written in secret characters, in code, in encrypted language. Indeed, this work (written for the Percussions de Strasbourg) is constructed from rhythms borrowed from classical masterpieces which are codified in such a way that they become indecipherable. At the beginning of the score, a certain number of simple rhythms are exposed and then, as they develop, a canvas of ascending movements and large fluctuations in density begin to appear. From then on, the work develops through a series of variations (continuous or interspersed) on the relationships of intervals and rhythms arising from the ascending movements.

—Percussions de Strasbourg

Born of a sculptor father and a painter mother, GEORGES APERGHIS hesitates long between expression and the composition. Essentially self-taught, he discovered music through radio and piano lessons given him by a friend of the family. In 1963, Aperghis was introduced to the seriation of the Musical Domain, to the concrete music of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry , to the researches of Iannis Xenakis, which he drew inspiration from his first works. 1970, to develop a freer and more singular language. The Tragic History of the Necromancer Hieronymus and his mirror , his first musical theater piece in 1971, closely links music to text and to the stage and prefigures his search for an original musical dramaturgy that he continues until today . In 1976, Georges Aperghis created Atelier théâtre et musique, Atem, based in Bagnolet and then at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre (1992 to 1997) devoted to musical theater. He renews his work as a composer, who, according to his motto, must "make music of everything", while at the same time inventing new forms of work where musicians, singers, actors and plastic artists meet. His pieces integrate the vocal, instrumental, gestural, narrative and scenic elements in a unique expressive setting. Les Récitations (1978), for solo soprano, explores all affects, all human expressions. The musical elaboration and the emergence of a signifying language grasped in its nascent state, progress together with the repetition of textual fragments and sound cells, arranged like construction sets playing with expectation and sense. A large number of works of musical theater have marked this journey, among them the opera I tell you that I am dead (1978), the Sextuor The Origin of Species (1992), or Machinations (2000). It is at the opera that he realizes the synthesis of his experimental works: here text is the unifying and determining element, the voice, the main vector of expression. He composed eight lyrical works, including Avis de Tempête (2004), created at the Lille Opera, which received the Grand Prix de la critique in 2005. He also composed numerous pieces for solo instruments, chamber music, vocal works for orchestra. His instrumental music itself includes theatrical or verbal elements, as suggested by the title of Quatre Récitations pour violoncelle (1980). More than a hundred pieces compose his catalog. The year 2000 was marked by two creations, heard throughout Europe: Die Hamletmaschine-Oratorio , on a text by Heiner Müller and the musical show Machinations , commissioned by IRCAM, which was awarded by the Sacem Award for Best Creation of the Year.