adama / for soprano and ensemble
premiered at soundSCAPE festival
kolot / for three voices and ensemble
premiered by Contempo
Breaking Ice /
for cello, live electronics and video
premiered by Fused Muse Ensemble
falling out of time /
for cello and electronics
premiered by Russell Rolen / ensemble dal niente
kolot
for three voices and ensemble
kolot (2015)
video from premiere performance by Contempo;
Ganz Hall, Chicago, May 15, 2015
Cliff Colnot, conductor
Nina Dante, voice
Amanda DeBoer, voice
Elisa Sutherland, voice
Tim Munro, flutes
Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets
Minghuan Xu, violin
Sibbi Bernhardsson, violin
Masuri Per Rostad, viola
Brandon Vamos, cello
Robert Dillon, percussion
Doug Perkins, percussion
Program Notes:
"Between the lips and the voice, something goes dying," wrote Pablo Neruda. It's true, isn't it? Perhaps many ‘somethings,’ in fact, go dying within that tiny, enormous space. And yet many 'somethings' are also being born at any moment?
Kolot ("voices" in Hebrew) is designed as something of a journey within that space; no more than a dip of a toe into the seemingly boundless wilderness between lips, voices, voicelessnesses, silences, ears. Seventeen short text fragments (all excerpted from much longer texts), in ten languages, lead the way (using words, of all things). And still, at its core, this space seems helplessly, magnificently uncharted. So how come it also feels so familiar it hurts? "Something with the wings of a bird,” continued Neruda, “the way nets cannot hold water.”
Fragments of texts are by (in order of appearance): Jorge Luis Borges, Rainer Maria Rilke, Orhan Veli Kanik, Mahmoud Darwish, Avraham Halfi, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Pablo Neruda, James Jeremiah Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), Fernando Pessoa, Almog Behar, Zelda, Roland Barthes, Paul Celan, Wislawa Szymborska, Forough Farrokhazad, Yuval Ido Tal, Leonard Cohen.