Neversink (Reservoir) by Gabriela Salazar
Vessels
ensemble violin, viola and piano
duration 10 minutes
written January 2008
premiere Miki-Sophia Cloud, violin; Anne Lanzilotti, viola; Jessica Osborne, piano
Sprague Hall, New Haven, CT, April 2008
publisher Unsettlement Music
recording Hazy Heart Pump (New Focus Recordings, 2019)
some additional performances:
Red Light New Music, Chelsea Art Gallery, New York, February 2009
Erin Wight, Caroline Shaw and David Broome, Littlefield, Brooklyn. February 2011
Wet Ink Ensemble (Joshua Modney, Miranda Sielaff, Eric Wubbels)
Gaudeamus in New York at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, January 2012
Present Music, Milwaukee, February 2013
Aperture Duo + Richard Valitutto, LA, Nov. 2015
program notes by Josh Davidoff:
Ted Hearne writes:
“I conducted the Red Light Ensemble in their first concert in 2005. The group was started by Scott Wollschleger and Vince Raikhel, two of my best homeys from Manhattan School of Music, who had asked me to conduct Gerard Grisey's Vortex Temporum on their first concert. That experience - learning, rehearsing, performing such an incredible work of contemporary music with my friends - was super important for me, and after that, the fun never stopped.”
Although that blurb is meant as a plug for Red Light New Music’s latest album, Barbary Coast (2015), Hearne cites the experience of conducting Vortex Temporum (1995) as a formative creative moment in the chain of events which led to the composition of Vessels. Vortex, a seminal work by French spectralist Gerard Grisey, utilizes distinct textures to demarcate its various sections. Although Grisey dedicated Vortex Temporum to prominent Darmstadt School composers Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino, he buried hidden influences of Impressionism– particularly, an extended homage to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe (1912) – amongst its largely atonal and microtonal vocabulary.
Grisey’s concept of buried material patiently stuck around while Hearne left the Manhattan School for further graduate work at Yale and wrote the comparatively large-scale, style-hopping Katrina Ballads (2007). Once he returned to a smaller, more traditional chamber instrumentation with Vessels, Hearne sought to reapply that layered effect in his own work. In a literal sense, the composer describes “masking the core sound of the instruments” with hazy textures he denotes in the score as ‘flickering’, ‘otherworldly’, and ‘dreamy, breathy’. These eventually give way to the “protected, rich material” – the core of the sound – which lies underneath. The structure of this narrative, driven entirely by shifts in the timbres produced by the violin and viola, is itself indebted to Grisey’s Vortex as well as to the work of Hearne’s fellow Red Light member, Scott Wollschleger.
Located further below what Hearne hears as the core sound of the trio is the influence of the minimal, groove-based textures of Michael Gordon and the rest of the Bang on a Can collective. Although these sounds are not strongly audible in Vessels, Hearne wanted to “bury that American influence and discover what ways its head would pop out” over the course of the piece. The composer explains the benefits of a diverse palette of inspiration in a blog post:
“Our divisions and alliances, our segregations and minglings, our power dynamics, our setbacks and progresses — they are all traceable in our musical decisions, and in the ways we choose to classify them. People identify with music that reflects some part of themselves. […] The composer’s (and performer’s) choices about how to express their ideas factor into their engagement of different genres or stylistic signifiers, and are usually inextricable from it.”
Vessels was written for Anne Lanzilotti and Miki Sophia-Cloud, who were some of the biggest new-music advocates during Hearne’s time at Yale and remain two of his closest friends and collaborators.
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Katrina Ballads (2007, 60 min.)
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ORCHESTRA
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CHAMBER MUSIC
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MEDIUM TO LARGE ENSEMBLE MUSIC
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CHORAL MUSIC
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Fervor (2018, 3 min.)
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Privilege (2009, 14 min.)
Mass for St. Mary’s (2008, 10 min.)
Music for youth choir:
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Because (2006, 6 min.)
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SONG AND SOLO VOICE
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Warning Song (2006, 7 min.)
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Miami in Movements (2017)
The Answer to the Question That Wings Ask (2016,)
Hand Eye (2015)
New Dances for the League of David (2014)
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R WE WHO R WE (2013)
Histories (2012)