Tag: featured

We are delighted to announce we’ll be performing on the Kettle Corn New Music Series at the DiMenna Center in New York City, Saturday April 6th at 7pm. We’ll be performing an unusual program of contemporary four-hands works (candelabras, step aside!), featuring Emily Cooley’s Phoria, Walter Zimmerman’s AS A WIFE HAS A COW. A LOVE STORY, George Crumb’s Makrokosmos IV (“Celestial Mechanics”), and the world premiere of Loren Loiacono’s Primum Non Nocere. For more information, visit https://kettlecornnewmusic.com/, and for tickets https://www.artful.ly/store/events/16617.

We were ecstatic in our successful application to the Fromm Foundation commission prize with John Liberatore, and he has delivered us a beautiful new work for two pianos and electronics, Sedgeflowers––a companion piece to MANTRA, of course––to be performed in the 2019-20 season. You can read more about the piece here, and performances of this new work will be announced soon (hopefully we can put out a video sneak peak in the coming months). You can also check out John’s beautiful new album on Albany Records, Line Drawings––Chamber Music of John Liberatore, featuring none other than Ryan from HNH.

When it comes to MANTRA, bigger is usually better, so it was a particular delight for us to be invited to perform this larger-than-life work in Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall for NUNC3!. The hall was really a dream for this piece… feedback is typically a fearsome creature in electro-acoustic music, but at several points in MANTRA Stockhausen was evidently interested in the unpredictability and nebulous harmonicity that can emerge from over-driving the ring modulators with a little feedback. Pick-Staiger was large enough to avoid any direct feedback (which is unpleasant), but the resonance of the room made for some especially beautiful “ringing tones” at these particular points in the piece. We’re grateful to the faculty and staff of Northwestern for their help, and especially to Hans Thomalla for being a superb host.

Pianists Steve Beck and Eric Huebner gave a spectacular performance of Stockhausen’s MANTRA in Lippes Concert Hall, using the electronics solution developed by Ryan from HNH (this time behind the mixing desk instead of Piano 2). This patch, built within the Max/MSP platform, was developed in collaboration with the Stockhausen Foundation in Kürten with advice and input from Benjamin Kobler and Kathinka Pasveer, integrating modifications made by Stockhausen later on in his life, as well as the [totally bonkers] morse code track he recorded for MANTRA.

The brains of this patch is pretty simple––ring modulation is the signal multiplication of a simple waveform (in this case a sine wave) with any other input signal (e.g., a piano), and is perfectly implemented in the digital domain[*]. The tricky part is developing a user interface that is intuitive and easy for the pianists to manipulate while negotiating woodblocks, crotales, and the intricate piano writing of MANTRA. This interface was developed and tweaked during HNH’s rehearsals of MANTRA, with many modifications made after performances, and uses Cycling74’s MIRA iPad platform for seamless wireless interfacing with the Max patch.

[*The sound diffusionist Jan Panis was telling us that Stockhausen himself was evidently skeptical of anything digital, but once before a performance of MANTRA his analog ring modulators died, and Panis proposed using a digital version he had built in an early version of the Max/MSP platform. Stockhausen grumbled, but ultimately consented, and Panis recounted (with some relish) how Stockhausen was delighted at the clarity and cleanliness of the sound, and was henceforth more trusting of digital audio.]

Thanks to the magic of academic research funding, we were lucky to made a trip to Kürten, Germany, Stockhausen’s bucolic home about 30 minutes outside Köln, to attend the semi-annual Stockhausen courses sponsored by the Stockhausen foundation. The organization was kind enough to connect us with Ellen Corver and Benjamin Kobler, both long-standing collaborators with Stockhausen (Corver’s recording of MANTRA with Sepp Grotenhuis was evidently Stockhausen’s favorite performance of the work), and over the course of a week we spent innumerable priceless hours with them pouring over this extraordinarily detailed score. By week’s end, we had endured approximately 12 hours of public coaching on this work; Ryan attended the sound diffusionist workshops, receiving invaluable input on the electronics he designed HNH’s performances of MANTRA, as well as general techniques for sound diffusion in Stockhausen’s work; and Andrew received additional coachings on two of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke. We are incredibly grateful to the generosity of Ellen Corver, Benjamin Kobler, Kathinka Passveer, Ralph Knapp for hosting us, and Florian Zwißler for being our patient sound diffusionist for the week.

We were thrilled to be delighted to be invited for a workshop and concert to the Kent State Vanguard New Music Guest Artist series, giving the world premiere of Chris Stark’s new work Foreword and Stockhausen’s MANTRA. The space was fantastic, students and faculty receptive and welcoming, and house engineer Craig Adams was patient and super accommodating to the technical demands for this piece (as you can see in the photo, MANTRA is pretty gear-hungry).

Rehearsing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s MANTRA in the E. Desmond Lee Concert Hall at Washington University, St. Louis, MO on November 19th, 2016. We were delighted to be hosted by the Wash U Music Department and composer Christopher Stark, where we performed works by Harold Blumenfeld, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and, of course, MANTRA. Chris has blessed us with a wonderful new work for two pianos, Foreword, which will be premiered at Kent State University in January of 2017.

There is nothing wrong with your [hearing, yet]. Do not attempt to adjust the [sound]. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the [pedal], make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next [eternity], sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your [hearing, yet]. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to — [HereNowHear].

Photo credit Michael Small, 2017