ISSUE Project Room presents three ensembles exploring and pushing the boundary of contemporary vocal music: Ergodos, a production company and ensemble based in Dublin, Ireland; The Ascoli Ensemble, a vocal sextet performing medieval and contemporary work based in The Netherlands; and New York's own Ekmeles, led by baritone Jeffery Gavett. They take inspiration from Greek theory, medieval manuscripts, and the 12th-century music of the French organum master Léonin. The performance will take place at ISSUE's future home at 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn, one of a handful of authentic European style chamber halls in the United States.
Ergodos, a music production company and record label based in Dublin, presents All the Ends of the Earth, featuring new work and arrangements by Irish composers Benedict Schlepper-Connolly, Garrett Sholdice and Linda Buckley. The backbone of this production is the music of twelfth century French master, Léonin, in particular his elegant and suave organa on the plainchant Viderunt Omnes. Léonin’s music represents an elemental purity of counterpoint, seeming ever more transcendental as time passes – a transcendentalism that has captured the aural imagination of several composers.
All the Ends of the Earth connects the elemental purity of medieval vocal music with three contemporary Irish compositional voices. Fresh and dynamic chamber group Ergodos Musicians, featuring vocalists Michelle O’Rourke and Nora Ryan, present a programme of arrangements of, and new works inspired by, music by medieval French master, Magister Léonin.
The backbone of the presentation is one of Léonin's elegant and suave organa on the plainchant Viderunt Omnes, the first words of which, in fact, translate as "All the ends of the earth". Léonin time-stretches the original plainchant tune and places beautiful lyrical counter-melodies on top of it. The result is music of great purity and transcendence – it seems even more transcendent as time passes.
It is this transcendentalism that has captured the aural imagination of several young composers. All the Ends of the Earth showcases three Irish composers who have found inspiration in the clarity of Léonin's constructions, and the quality of his simple materials: Garrett Sholdice’s work represents a new and personal conceptualization of Léonin's forms; Benedict Schlepper-Connolly’s language resonates with the austerity of Léonin – Schlepper-Connolly continuously re-shapes, and strips away, searching for an essence; Linda Buckley’s slow-burning, almost gothic works invoke the muscular harmonic world of medieval organum.
The programme is presented as a seamless multi-movement whole: three specially-composed works from Sholdice, Schlepper-Connolly and Buckley are threaded through new arrangements of portions of Léonin's organum, each arrangement by one of the composers in question. The duration, instrumentation, tone and sequence of these individual movements are crafted to form a coherent, and multi-layered narrative, but above all a beautiful and relevant experience for the audience member.
All the Ends of the Earth is an Ergodos production curated by Benedict Schlepper-Connolly and Garrett Sholdice.
Ekmeles: in Ancient Greek music theory, an adjective used to describe tones of indefinite pitch and intervals with complex ratios, tones "not appropriate for musical usage." In New York City, a new vocal ensemble breathing life into those disallowed tones, new and old.
Ekmeles is dedicated to the performance of new and rarely-heard works, and gems of the historical avant garde. New York is home to a vibrant instrumental New Music scene, with a relative paucity of vocal music. Ekmeles was founded to fill the gap by presenting new a cappella repertoire for solo voices, and by collaborating with these instrumental ensembles.
Recent performances include two sold out nights of Christopher Cerroneʼs Invisible Cities with Red Light New Music, a sold out collaboration with violinist Mary Rowell of Knee Plays from Philip Glassʼs Einstein on the Beach at Issue Project Room, and a trio concert featuring regional and US premieres by Aaron Cassidy, Kenneth Gaburo and Mauricio Kagel. Their inaugural season also featured three world premiere commissions by British and American composers, ranging from a game piece with video for two singers to a work for five voices and 15 wine glasses.
Program:
Peter Ablinger - Studien nach der Natur
Pascal Dusapin - Two Walking
Johannes Schöllhorn - Madrigali a Dio (US Premiere)
James Tenney - A Rose Is a Rose Is a Round
James Tenney - Hey When I Sing These 4 Songs Hey Look What Happens
Performers:
Mary Mackenzie, soprano
Lucy Shelton, soprano
Eric Brenner, countertenor
Matthew Hensrud, tenor
Jeffrey Gavett, baritone and director
Steve Hrycelak, bass
Director Jeffrey Gavett brings a hybrid vision to the group: he is an accomplished ensemble singer and performer of new works, and holds degrees from Westminster Choir College and Manhattan School of Music's Contemporary Performance Program. He has assembled a virtuoso group of colleagues who bring their own diverse backgrounds to bear on the unique challenges of this essential and neglected repertoire.
The Ascoli Ensemble is a Holland-based vocal ensemble specialized in the performance of rare and unknown music from the Middle Ages. The ensemble gained international recognition in 2009 for its reconstruction and modern world premiere of a recently discovered 14th-century Italian manuscript. Its first CD, "I Frammenti Ascolani," came out in 2010 with a world premiere recording of late medieval polyphony. Since then the ensemble has been in high demand in Europe and beyond for its unusual combination of musicianship and scholarly rigor. This concert is part of the Ascoli Ensemble's first US tour, which will culminate in a residency at MIT. Artistic director and tenor Sasha Zamler-Carhart is a professor of medieval music and Latin at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague and all the singers are former students of the Royal Conservatoire. Each singer is both a specialist of early music performance and a scholar, contributing to the ensemble's musicological work of deciphering, transcribing and interpreting medieval manuscript sources. The ensemble consists of six singers from different countries:
Niels Berentsen (tenor, Netherlands)
Benjamin Eastley (tenor, England)
Marine Fribourg (soprano, France)
Oscar Verhaar (countertenor, Netherlands)
Alejandra Wayar Soux (mezzo-soprano, Bolivia)
Sasha Zamler-Carhart (tenor and director, France)
Sasha Zamler-Carhart (Paris, 1975) is a French composer, scholar and ensemble director, dividing his time between France, the Netherlands and the US. His latest opera "I Fioretti in Musica", was performed 12 times at La MaMa Theater in New York City last fall. Major compositions premiering in 2012 include the ballet "Le Pli" based on Gilles Deleuze's work on Leibniz, the oratorio "Sponsus" on the biblical parable of the wise and foolish virgins, and an oratorio on Joan of Arc commissioned for the 600th anniversary of her birth. Premieres scheduled for early 2013 include a choral work in Old Church Slavonic to be premiered in Serbia for the Orthodox Christmas and a book of piano pieces for American pianist Leo Svirsky due to tour the East Coast in the Spring. In addition to his career as a composer, Sasha Zamler-Carhart has been teaching medieval music and Latin at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague since 2007 and is frequently asked to give lectures and masterclasses at other institutions. An ethno-musicology enthusiast, he has done fieldwork research on traditional music in Cameroon, Gabon and Madagascar. He is the founder and director of the medieval vocal group the Ascoli Ensemble. Originally a tax attorney, he attended Harvard and Stanford Law School and briefly worked for the law firm of Baker & McKenzie before giving up law and focusing entirely on music.