HELLO EVERYONE!

Thank you for visiting our Kickstarter page and considering a donation to our campaign. We are Musicians from SoundSCAPE, a trio consisting of Tony Arnold, voice Aiyun Huang, percussion and Thomas Rosenkranz, piano.

Each summer at the soundSCAPE Festival in Italy we get together for two weeks with emerging composers and performers to collaborate, teach, and make music together. We formed this group in 2009 to tour highlights from this festival and to bring it to audiences in the United States and Canada.  We are committed to bringing contemporary music to the public’s awareness through our performances and the commissioning of new and exciting composers.  

We are currently raising funds to record from July 16th-20th at McGill University. With your financial help we will be able to help pay for the recording and production of these wonderful pieces for a future release. 

soundSCAPE is committed to developing the careers of young artists through performance and commissioning. No funding is used for personal profit. 

The Recording

Mark Applebaum-Curb Weight Surgical Field

Richard Carrick- Notebook, Bedside

Josh Levine- Breathing Ritual (Inflorescence V)

Lei Liang- Lakescape  

Anton Webern- Vier Lieder op. 12

About the pieces and the composers

Mark Applebaum is Associate Professor of Composition at Stanford University where he received the 2003 Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching. He was recently named the Hazy Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and Leland & Edith Smith Faculty Scholar. Applebaum’s solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout the world. Many of his pieces are characterized by challenges to the conventional boundaries of musical ontology. He is also an accomplished jazz pianist and builds electroacoustic sound-sculptures out of junk. At Stanford he is the founding director of [sic]—the Stanford Improvisation Collective.

Curb Weight Surgical Field was composed for the extraordinary players Aiyun Huang and Thomas Rosenkranz in memory of great conductor and dear friend J. Karla Lemon.  The work is scored for grand piano and two players who alternate turns at the upper register of the keyboard and playing “inside the piano” directly on its strings, soundboard, tuning pins, lid, and casting beams.  Scratching, tapping, wiping, plucking, strumming, thumping, and other techniques are explicitly notated, at times in conjunction with a bevy of mallets, chopsticks, plectra, lengths of chain, tennis balls, and other doodads.  Throughout the piece the players are called upon to vocalize sounds—tongue clicks, whistles, bilabial lip pops, kissing sounds, noisy inhalations, and short phonemes notated in the international phonetic alphabet—in unison with their piano articulations.  Despite its mercurial, glitchy sound world, the piece is very focused, the effect being a compressed, highly disciplined but twitchy ensemble coordination.

Described as “charming, with exoticism and sheer infectiousness” by Allan Kozinn of The New York Times, Richard Carrick's music has been performed throughout the Americas, Europe, and Japan by the New York Philharmonic Ensemble Series, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, ISCM World Music Days, Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Nieuw Ensemble, the JACK Quartet and others. As founder/co-artistic director of the experimental music ensemble Either/Or, and a critically acclaimed pianist and conductor, he has championed works by Lachenmann, Czernowin, Greenwood, Radulescu and many others. A 2011 Fromm Foundation commission recipient, Richard is currently Visiting Professor of Composition at Columbia University and Adjunct Professor at New York University.

Notebook, Bedside

I kept a notebook in the hospital room during the last three days of my father's life. A year and a half later I returned to this notebook. Apart from many sentences with incomplete thoughts, there were a number of single words scattered throughout the pages. Some of these single words are used in this piece. There is a Japanese tradition of poets writing a final poem while on their deathbed; a tradition so important that some poets prepare their final poem months in advance. “The fierce last stand” of their artistic essence, to quote another poet used in this piece. Tojun, Toko, and Bufu haiku's are used in their entirety. “Well, I Wonder,” and “Asleep” by The Smiths, Paul Celan, Miland Kundera, and the jazz standard “Just Friends” are briefly referenced or quoted musically. This piece is lovingly dedicated to the memory of my father Richard John Carrick (1940-2001).

Josh Levine (b. 1959 in Corvallis, Oregon) trained in Switzerland as a classical guitarist before studying composition there with Balz Trümpy. Further studies took him to the Paris Conservatory (1985-86 with Guy Reibel) and IRCAM (1994-95). In 2002, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, where his thesis adviser was Brian Ferneyhough. He lectured in composition, electronic music, and music theory at San Francisco State University from 2000-08 and has also taught composition at UCSD and Stanford University. Currently he is Assistant Professor of Composition at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music.

Breathing ritual (Inflorescence V) (2012), for soprano voice, percussion, and piano, is the most recent and presumably final piece in a series of works begun twenty years ago whose title, “Inflorescence,” signifies the process of flowering. The five works, most of which were written in the past few years, share two particular attributes. One of these characteristics is that their identities emerge through the compositional process itself, which is to say, I do not have a clear idea where the pieces are going or what they are “about” before embarking on them. The other commonality is that their germinal pitch resources refer to borrowed material, be it a “found” twelve-note series in the first (for flute and percussion), the harmony of a piano miniature I had written many years earlier in the second (for piano), the opening pitch class collections and dilated temporal structure of Varèse’s Density 21.5 in the third (for flute and piano), or, in the fourth (for two flutes), the melodic material of a twentieth-century popular tune with its descending minor-scale accompaniment. The present piece draws upon all four of the preceding ones for its materials, as well as my fragmentary recollections of ideas for a never-finished composition that was based on the same original French-language text heard here. The poem, “Respiration,” permeates not only the vocal part of Breathing ritual, but the instrumental parts, as well, where its sounds served in many places as a compositional guide to both melodic inflection and harmonic “quality.”

 Breathing ritual (Inflorescence V) (2012) was commissioned by the 2012 soundSCAPE Festival. It is dedicated in friendship and admiration to Tony Arnold, Aiyun Huang, and Thomas Rosenkranz.

Winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Lei Liang (b.1972) has been heralded as “one of the most exciting voices in New Music” (The Wire). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Aaron Copland Award. He was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. Other commissions and performances come from the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, Thailand Philharmonic, Berkeley Symphony, Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Shanghai Quartet, among others. Lei Liang’s music is recorded on Mode, New World, Innova, Telarc, and Naxos (forthcoming) Records. 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 Harvard Society of Fellows. Lei Liang currently serves as Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. His music is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation, New York.

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.  This image inspired me to compose a number of works. 

Lakescape was commissioned by the SoundSCAPE Festival and was written for Tony Arnold, Aiyun Huang and Thomas Rosenkranz.

About the soundSCAPE Festival

soundSCAPE facilitates the exchange of new music, ideas, and culture between musicians of tomorrow’s generation, providing an international platform for performances of new music. Now in its eighth season, the festival attracts composers and performers from around the world for two weeks of inspiring concerts, lectures, master classes, and workshops.