Schreiner - Autumn Vistas (2022)
Winner of the 2023 LCO Call-for-Scores
These three musical images were inspired by the New England autumn countryside. To create a context for hearing the music, I fashioned a haiku with particular suggestive imagery. The title for each of the three movements is a line from the haiku:
movement 1 . (largo) . . . . Fall leaves, dawn unfolds
movement 2. (andante) . . Wings resound as flocks take flight
movement 3. (allegro) . . . Leaves like confetti
This work features the piano as a solo instrument. However, unlike a traditional concerto, the piano and the chamber string orchestra with the harp function like complimentary palettes of sound color. Together they render a sonic painting that unfolds in the patterned musical gestures, shifting rhythms, and vague implied melodic fragments that evolve into fuller themes.
Martin Max Schreiner is a composer of music for Western symphonic instruments and traditional instruments of Japan. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (BM ‘76) where he was a composition student of Philip Bezanson and Robert Stern, and the New England Conservatory of Music (MM ‘86) where his principal teachers were Arthur Berger, Pozzi Escot and Malcolm Peyton. Martin was drafted into military service in 1970 and served as a U.S. Army bandsman clarinetist. After discharge from active duty his career has included: Community Artist with the Mayor’s Office for Cultural and Community Affairs in Springfield, Massachusetts; freelance saxophonist, clarinetist and composer; managing editor of Sonus; music and media librarian at Harvard University; composer for a Boston area concert series Afternoon of Shakuhachi and Koto Music (1994-2012). His music has been recorded on the MMC, Stone Records and New Ariel Recording labels. His music has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council; New England Reed Trio International Chamber Music Composition Competition; a Bryant Fellowship from Harvard University; and a finalist certificate from the 21st Century Music Project Competition of the International Center for Japanese Culture in Yokohama, Japan. His composition for vibraphone My Heart with Jakarta Sinks in Rising Seas was selected for the Vibraphone Project, Inc. Centennial Compendium of Scores in 2021.
Séjourné - Concerto for marimba and strings (2005 - 2015)
Nikki Huang, marimba
Winner of the 2023 LCO Concerto Competition
Nikki Huang, Taiwanese percussionist, is currently completing a Master’s degree in Percussion Performance at the University of Toronto. She is a research assistant in Technology and Performance Integration Research Lab. Her teachers include Prof. Aiyun Huang, Prof. Charles Settle and Prof. Beverley Johnston. As a percussionist, she is passionate about exploring the realm of story-telling and attempts to portray different characters through her performance. Nikki is also thrilled to collaborate with different art forms. She has been involved in diverse performance settings, including original music, children musical theater, and interdisciplinary workshops.
Perry - Symphony for Violas and String Basses (1961)
Julia Amanda Perry was an American composer, conductor, and teacher. Born in 1924 in Lexington Kentucky, she achieved acclaim for works that blended 20th-century European techniques with the music idioms of her Black American heritage. Her compositions include three operas, 14 choral works, 12 symphonies, many vocal works, and several chamber works for eclectic instrumental combinations. The Symphony for Violas and String Basses is one of the works that Perry wrote after returning from Europe, where she lived for about a decade thanks to two Guggenheim fellowships that she received to study in Florence, Italy under the tutelage of Luigi Dallapiccola and in Paris, France with Nadia Boulanger. This symphony exemplifies an advanced harmonic and rhythmic experimentation that would permeate her works during the 1960s. While the symphony has the subtitle “in one movement,” there are three very distinct sections, albeit they are connected to each other - the first, majestic, exploring the relationships between 7ths and 9ths; the second section is short, slow, almost completely still; the third and final section is a contrapuntal feast that ends with a powerful homophonic finale.
Bartók - Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
One of Béla Bartók’s most famous pieces, Music for String Instruments, Percussion, and Celesta, is also at the crossroads between chamber music and orchestral music, folk music and a very personal writing style. This four-movement work sets two string orchestras mirroring each other, separated by a piano, a celesta, a harp, and an assortment of percussion instruments. With this unusual combination, Bartók will create one of his earlier mature works, in which he revisits well-known forms - a fugue in the first movement, sonata form in the second movement, for example - will devise new ways to organize musical material, conceive new sounds, and end up with a composition that even today, almost a hundred years after its composition, is studied worldwide for its complexity and creativity. It is also a very accessible work, able to convey a wide range of complex emotions; so effective that you might recognize some of it from Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
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