MACHINE (Philadelphia, pay-what-you-wish)

Please note that this concert is at the Germantown Branch of Settlement Music School, not the Mary Louis Curtis Branch.

MACHINE
/məˈSHēn/

A: an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task.

B: an assemblage of parts that transmit forces, motion, and energy one to another in a predetermined manner

C: a coin-operated device

PRISM Quartet presents a program of new music from an extraordinary collection of composers: Augusta Read Thomas, Bill Ryan, Renee Baker, Julius Eastman, and Aaron Nichols, winner of The PRISM Quartet/Walden School Student Commissioning Award. The program is titled MACHINE, a nod to Mr. Ryan’s work, Tiny Machines. Patented in 1846, the saxophone is, after all, a product of the Industrial Revolution, standing apart from instruments like the flute and drums that evolved over millennia. Its inventor, Adolphe Sax, combined a woodwind and brass instrument to form a hybrid machine capable of soaring lyricism, blinding speed, and an enormous range of color and sound. The works on the program demonstrate a vast range of possibilities.

 

About the Music

Winner of the American Composers Forum Champion of New Music Award, Bill Ryan creates music rooted in minimalism, jazz, and popular music. His music is energetic, evocative and deeply personal, and has been described as “constantly threatening to burst at the seams, were those seams not so artfully structured…rarely has music this earthy been so elegant.” (Gramophone Magazine). Ryan describes Tiny Machines: “A few years ago I visited the Ford truck assembly plant in Dearborn, Michigan to make field recordings of its massive assembly line. I was led by a plant manager on an elevated walkway above the various stations so I could observe and record. Each station along the line had a singular, focused goal, which was realized in about a minute. Station after station, it was a complex web of equipment, robotics and personnel. There was a beautiful rhythm and choreography to it all, with a completed truck coming off the line every 53 seconds. Tiny Machines is my nod to this process. It is a collection of ten miniature musical ‘machines.’ Through carefully constructed interlocking parts and gestures, each movement is an energy-filled study of musical mechanisms.” (Adapted from a piano work by the composer for the Sinta Quartet)

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was a pioneering composer-performer, a graduate of the Curtis Institute, member of the SUNY Buffalo Creative Associates, and a fixture of New York’s downtown scene. In 1976, he described his personal motto to the Buffalo Evening News: “to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.” British-Ghanaian writer, theorist, and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun noted that “Wherever he was, he had a disruptive quality and it was also virtuosic. He was just a virtuoso. He was better than everybody, but he was also better at complicating everything.” Eastman died alone, in poverty and obscurity at the age of 49, many of his scores lost. His work has recently seen a resurgence of scholarly attention, recordings, and performances. (Read composer Mary Jane Leach’s description of searching for his scores here.) PRISM’s program features Eastman’s Joy Boy (1974), written for four indeterminate treble instruments and arranged for saxophones in 2023 by the Masso Quartet. The single-page score instructs the players to “create ticker-tape music” and offers shimmering harmonies with space for improvisation. NPR’s Harmony Holiday interprets the piece’s title and context: “Between the hostile diminutives of Southern U.S. racism that give the term ‘boy’ its fraught legacy, and the reclamation of Black innocence and enjoyment by Black people who demand the language back on its own terms, lives Julius Eastman’s Joy Boy — a composition that objectifies the ecstatic self in order to reclaim it in a world that projects suffering onto the Black psyche before it even has a chance to assert jubilance. Echoes of vocals that mimic displaced giggling give the composition a haunted atmosphere, as if the sound’s potential for conjuring joy is smeared with dread for its very own delights — or the dread of the backlash that Black delight might inspire. Is Black joy an indulgent form of self-deception, this music asks. Can its subject, a self-actualized Black man, override its stigma without succumbing to rage or self-sabotage? There can be no answer but to play and replay it, to meet doubt with the resolve to go again, and fear with an allegiance to pleasure.” Miki Cloud and Kathryn Bacasmot note that Joy Boy “operates on Eastman’s principle of organic composition, with layer after layer being added as a shimmering totality slowly morphs and emerges. Aside from being a structural technique for his compositions, Eastman’s vertically additive approach expresses a deeper, profoundly emotional, desire toward wholeness—to embrace his entire being and embodied experience as a gay Black man in the mid-20th century.”

The American Academy of Arts and Letters describes Pulitzer Prize finalist Augusta Read Thomas as “one of the most recognizable and widely loved figures in American Music.” The program features her Shakespeare’s Jesters (2023). She writes, “the work unfolds a labyrinth of musical interrelationships and connections that showcase the musicians in a virtuosic display of rhythmic agility, counterpoint, skill, energy, dynamic range, timbre, clarity, and majesty. Throughout the kaleidoscopic journey, Shakespeare’s Jesters passes through many lively and colorful episodes, never losing its sense of dance, caprice, and effervescence. [The work] falls loosely into three arcs played without a pause. The opening three minutes is an exposition of animated materials with rhythmic vitality featuring contrapuntal hockets that ping-pong between players. Following are three contrapuntal phrases (lasting respectively 60, 120, and 90 seconds) throughout which the musical ingredients are further transformed and elaborated. The final 120 seconds, a mischievous caper.” (Composed for ~Nois Quartet.)

Aaron Nichols is the winner of the 2024 PRISM Quartet/Walden School Student Commissioning Award, presented annually to a current or recent student of the acclaimed Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire. PRISM Quartet presents the world premiere of Mesovortex, which Mr. Nichols describes as “inspired by, and structured loosely around time lapse footage of tornadogenesis. When sped up, one can clearly see the ordinary cloud formations caught in an inexorable, yet invisible pull towards themselves–one that is less obvious in real time. This process feels analogous to the unraveling of human emotions: normal events, aligned properly, can grind against one-another, creating anger or fear out of virtually nothing. Musically, I feel the saxophone quartet’s capacity to melt into itself–to form more of a mercurial, polyphonic plasma than four distinct voices–will lend itself well to this concept.” Mr. Nichols is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in music composition at Oberlin Conservatory, studying under professors Stephen Hartke, Jesse Jones, Michael Frazier, and Soomin Kim.

Composer Renee Baker is the founding music director and conductor of the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project, a polystylistic orchestra that grew from the plums of both classical music and jazz. A practicing Sannyasi, she contributes a new adaptation of her work, Hikikomori: Silent Disappearance (2024), to the program. She penned a poem as a program note for the work:

Hikikomori: Silent Disappearance

Retreat
A dimly lit room
Air feels heavy, almost suffocating.
Burden of a thousand thoughts
Weight of existence dulling senses.
Softly, almost whispering
I have chosen to disappear
To fade into the walls.

To silence the noise of the world.
Here, where time stands still
Unravel the knots of my mind.
I cannot escape
The silence is too loud
Gnawing at my sanity
Echoing my own madness

Desperate, almost screaming
I cannot escape
The silence is too loud
It pierces through me
Gnawing at my sanity.
I thought I could find peace here

I am alone.
Truly alone.
But in this solitude, a strange comfort.
I am no longer fighting the silence.
I am becoming it.
Fading to Silence….
Off into Nothingness..

(Arranged for PRISM Quartet)

 

PROGRAM
Hikikomori: Silent Disappearance (2024) by Renee Baker (world premiere, new arr.)
Joy Boy (1974, Arr 2023 by Masso Quartet) by Julius Eastman
Mesovortex (2024) by Aaron Nichols (world premiere)
Tiny Machines (2017/2024) by Bill Ryan (NYC & Phila. Premiere)
Shakespeare’s Jesters (2023) by Augusta Read Thomas (NYC & Phila. Premiere)

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This program is made possible with generous support from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University.

ACCESSIBILITY
PRISM Quartet welcomes all individuals to our concerts, and provides a variety of accommodations for those with disabilities in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. For specific accommodations, please contact info@prismquartet.com or 215.438.5282.

Settlement Music School is fully wheelchair accessible.