GLACIAL FADING

Glacial Fading is a new multimedia program for solo piano, electronics, and video designed to raise awareness of the rapidly changing climate and the direct and lasting effect our civilization has on the deterioration of our planet. Curated and performed by Karl Larson, this program features music by Olivier Messiaen, Ravi Kittappa, and Annie Gosfield, as well as newly commissioned works by composer Finola Merivale and visual artist Katie Bullock, dealing with the natural world, the shadow cast on the environment by humanity, and the irreversible passage of time. Glacial Fading is currently in a creative phase and will be available for booking during the 2021-2022 concert season.

Program

• Olivier Messiaen: Catalogue d'oiseaux, livre VII, no. XII - ‘Le courlis cendré’ (1958)

• Ravi Kittappa: Diasporas (2013)

• Annie Gosfield: Shattered Apparitions of the Western Wind - nos. 3 + 4 (2013)

• Finola Merivale: Glacial Fading (2020)

Narrative

Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Le courlis cendré’ from the Catalogue d'oiseaux depicts the brutal vitality of Ushant, a small, rocky island off the coast of Brittany. This brilliant work takes the listener through a day on the island, depicting the sounds of the sea and the surf bookended by dawn and dusk birdsong choruses featuring the calls of many bird species indiginous to the island. The only traces of human interference in this work are the periodic interruptions of the foghorn on La Jument, Ushant’s iconic lighthouse. These interjections are violent and startling – an ominous foreshadowing of things to come.

While Messiaen’s work takes place over the course of a day, Ravi Kittappa’s Diasporas spans the entire human epoch. This work, composed for Karl Larson in 2013, is a chaotic representation of the human diaspora. Kittappa takes scales and harmonic systems from a wide variety of cultures and juxtaposes them on top of one another. While some combinations manage to meld without much conflict, many more depict a cultural clash through the resulting dissonance of Kittappa’s polytonality. The work grinds to a halt with a violent cascade of notes plummeting towards its ultimate conclusion – an explosive sforzando on the lowest note of the piano, the same gesture as Messiaen’s foghorn. 

Annie Gosfield’s Shattered Apparitions of the Western Wind explores the dramatic events that can occur when the natural world and the human diaspora clash. A recent work for solo piano and fixed electronics, Gosfield’s composition is an artful combination of Ce Qu'A Vu Le Vent D'Ouest, Debussy’s untamed and imaginative Prelude depicting the destructive forces of nature, and field recordings made by Gosfield during Hurricane Sandy, which heavily impacted New York City (where both the composer and pianist Karl Larson reside) in 2012. The resulting music is a foreboding depiction of nature and its effect on human culture. Throughout the piece, memories of Debussy’s Prelude are constantly at odds with Gosfield’s heavily processed hurricane recordings; Debussy’s masterpiece is often drowned out by the sounds of the howling wind.

The relationship between the natural world and humanity is further represented in the world premiere of Finola Merivale’s Glacial Fading for piano and electronics, which concludes the program. Like Messiaen’s ‘Le courlis cendré,’ the work reflects a soundtrack of the natural world, but a foreboding one that acts as a harbinger of humanity’s own destruction. It portrays the evanescence of the Arctic and Antarctic in a brutally exacting way, as the listener is sonically immersed in the underwater cacophony of melting icebergs in Svalbard, Norway. Geophysicist and climate change expert Oskar Glowacki made these recordings for his research, and they will provide the source material for the electronics. He writes that “ocean tides are conductors of underwater icy concerts” due to the density and variety of noises that the melting ice creates.

About the Composers

Olivier Messiaen (December 10, 1908 – April 27, 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11, and numbered Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré among his teachers. He was appointed organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris in 1931, a post he held until his death. On the fall of France in 1940 Messiaen was made a prisoner of war, and while incarcerated he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps(“Quartet for the end of time”) for the four available instruments, piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners to an audience of inmates and prison guards. Messiaen was appointed professor of harmony soon after his release in 1941, and professor of composition in 1966 at the Paris Conservatoire, positions he held until his retirement in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Pierre Boulez, Yvonne Loriod (who later became Messiaen’s second wife), Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and George Benjamin.

Messiaen’s music is rhythmically complex (he was interested in rhythms from ancient Greek and from Hindu sources), and is harmonically and melodically based on modes of limited transposition, which were Messiaen’s own innovation. Many of his compositions depict what he termed “the marvellous aspects of the faith”, drawing on his unshakeable Roman Catholicism. He travelled widely, and he wrote works inspired by such diverse influences as Japanese music, the landscape of BryceCanyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Messiaen experienced a mild form of synaesthesia manifested as a perception of colours when he heard certain harmonies, particularly harmonies built from his modes, and he used combinations of these colours in his compositions. For a short period Messiaen experimented with the parametrization associated with “total serialism”, in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His style absorbed many exotic musical influences such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works), and he also championed the ondes Martenot. Messiaen found birdsong fascinating; he believed birds to be the greatest musicians and considered himself as much an ornithologist as a composer. He notated birdsongs worldwide, and he incorporated birdsong transcriptions into a majority of his music. His innovative use of colour, his personal conception of the relationship between time and music, his use of birdsong, and his intent to express profound religious ideas, all combine to make it almost impossible to mistake a composition by Messiaen for the work of any other western composer. (Bio Credit: Universal Edition)

Ravi Kittappa is a composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, and electronic music currently residing in California. His works often focus on the uniqueness of each performance by utilizing contrasting juxtapositions of transitional processes within shifting pulsations, harmonies, gestures, and timbres while drawing upon the various musics of his diverse background. His music has been heard across the US, Europe, and Asia. The New York Times described the “vivid soundscapes” of a recent performance of his work, Decantations III, as ”alluring” and “meditative”. He has been commissioned and performed by violist Garth Knox, Hasco Duo, andPlay, Talea Ensemble, Ostravská Banda, The Janacek Philharmonia, Quince Vocal Ensemble, Color Field Ensemble, Concert Black, TIGUE, and Parias Ensemble, among others. He has had sound art works commissioned and installed by The Baltimore Museum of Art, The American Visionary Art Museum, The United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation, and the Columbia University Computer Music Center. He has been honored to be selected as a participant at international festivals like Ostrava Days, Bowling Green New Music Festival, Etchings Festival, Omaha Under the Radar, MATA Festival, World Saxophone Congress, New Music Gathering, The Darmstadt Summer Courses, and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute. Also active as a guitarist and improviser, Ravi has performed alongside artists such as Fred Frith, Myra Melford, J. A. Deane, Daniel Carter, and Ritwik Banerji, among many others. In the spring of 2012, Ravi founded the bicoastal (NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles) performance series, Permutations, which he currently curates along with pianist, Karl Larson. Ravi created the soundtrack for director Jake Boritt’s 2013 film, The Gettysburg Story, a documentary narrated by Stephen Lang, that aired on Public Broadcasting stations throughout the US to coincide with The 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.

Ravi has a Ph.D in music composition from University of California, Berkeley. He studied philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University and music at Columbia University. His composition teachers include Tristan Murail, Arthur Kampela, Franck Bedrossian, Myra Melford, David Wessel, and Ken Ueno. He has lectured on his work at academic institutions such as The Janacek Conservatory (Ostrava, Czech Republic), Columbia University, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, Akademie für Tonkunst (Darmstadt, Germany), HAMU (Academy of Performing Arts, Prague), Silpakorn University (Bangkok, Thailand), Mahidol University (Bangkok, Thailand) and KM College of Music and Technology (Chennai, India). During 2018/19, Ravi was a visiting composer at Academy of Performing Arts, Prague (HAMU) through a fellowship from the J. William Fulbright Commission.

Annie Gosfield, whom the BBC called “A one woman Hadron collider,” lives in New York City and works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. Her music is often inspired by the inherent beauty of found sounds, noise, and machinery. In 2017 Gosfield collaborated with Yuval Sharon and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the multi-site opera “War of the Worlds” that incorporated three defunct air raid sirens that were re-purposed into public speakers to broadcast a free, live performance to the streets of L.A. from Walt Disney Concert Hall. She has composed site-specific music for factories; researched jammed radio signals; led a band driven by vacuum, machine, and analog synth sounds; and developed two orchestral pieces during a 2016 residency sponsored by the League of American Orchestras. Annie has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Academy in Rome (2015), American Academy in Berlin (2012), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2008), New York Foundation for the Arts, the Siemens Foundation, the MAP Fund, NYSCA, Meet the Composer, and others. Gosfield’s discography includes four portrait CD’s on Tzadik, and compositions on Sony Classical, EMI, Innova, CRI, Mode, ReR, Harmonia Mundi, Wergo, CRI, and ECM. She has worked with The L.A. Philharmonic, Bang on a Can All-Stars, JACK Quartet, MIVOS Quartet, FLUX Quartet, Talujon Percussion, So Percussion, Joan Jeanrenaud, Kathleen Supové, Lisa Moore, Felix Fan, FrancesMarie Uitti, Stephen Gosling, Anthony DeMare, James Ilgenfritz, String Noise, and Jennifer Choi. Active as a writer and teacher, she contributes to the New York Times series “The Score,” and has been the Milhaud Professor of composition at Mills College, a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and a visiting artist at Cal Arts. www.anniegosfield.com

Finola Merivale is an Irish composer currently living in New York. She is pursuing a DMA in Composition at Columbia University, where she is studying with George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas and Zosha Di Castri. Her music is fuelled by her thoughts on social injustices and climate change. She has lived in four countries across three continents, and a sense of place – both real and imagined – also greatly inspires her work.

Merivale’s music has been performed internationally and featured at festivals such as Huddersfield, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, the Contemporary Music Festival of Buenos Aires and Vox Feminae Festival in Tel Aviv. Her works have been performed by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Talea Ensemble, PRISM Saxophone Quartet and Crash Ensemble. 2020–2021 projects include commissions from Rebekah Heller, Karl Larson and Adam Groh, and her first multimedia piece entitled Trash Vortex for the Real Loud Ensemble. She has been awarded a month-long residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in the summer of 2020. www.finolamerivale.com

About the Artist