78TH SEASON OF

CONCERTS

national gallery of art | february 16, 2020 
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PROGRAM

Eighth Blackbird

Ice ‘n’ SPICE

February 16, 2020 | 3:30 p.m.

West Building, West Garden Court

Nina Shekhar (b. 1995)

Ice ‘n’ SPICE (2018)

Fjóla Evans (b. 1987)

Eroding (2017)

Andy Akiho (b. 1979)

Karakurenai (2007)

Holly Harrison (b. 1988)

Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup (2016)

Intermission

David Lang (b. 1957)

wed from memory pieces

Viet Cuong (b. 1990)

Electric Aroma (2017)

Jonathan Bailey Holland (b. 1974)

The Clarity of Cold Air (2013)

Julius Eastman (1940 – 1990)

Stay On It (1973)

Ice ‘n’ SPICE, Electric Aroma, and Eroding were commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus 

Schlichting for the Blackbird Creative Lab. Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup was commissioned for Eighth Blackbird by Musica Viva Australia, with support from Geo6 Stearn 

and the Hildegard Project. 

Eighth Blackbird, photo by Saverio Truglia
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THE MUSICIANS

Eighth Blackbird, hailed as “one of the smartest, most dynamic ensembles on the 

planet” (Chicago Tribune), began in 1996 as a group of six entrepreneurial Oberlin 

Conservatory students and continues today under the leadership of founding 

members Lisa Kaplan (executive director) and Matthew Duvall (artistic director).

Eighth Blackbird has won four Grammy Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber 

Music Performance over its twenty-three-year history and has become “a brand-name 

defined by adventure, vibrancy, and quality” (Detroit Free Press). The group has commissioned and premiered hundreds of works by established and emerging composers, 

including Steve Reich’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Double Sextet and pieces by Andy Akiho, 

Bryce Dessner, Michael Gordon, Jennifer Higdon, Amy Beth Kirsten, David Lang, David 

T. Little, Nico Muhly, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Julia Wolfe, and Pamela Z. Through 

performances in its Chicago home base and at venues across the United States and 

around the world, Eighth Blackbird has brought innovative presentations of works by 

living composers to tens of thousands of music lovers.

The ensemble’s extensive recording history, primarily with Chicago’s Cedille Records, 

encompasses more than a dozen acclaimed albums. Its most recent release, When 

We Are Inhuman, is a collaboration with The National’s Bryce Dessner and Will Oldham 

(aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) that features new arrangements by Lisa Kaplan, who also 

coproduced the album with Dessner. The album Singing in the Dead of Night, written for 

Eighth Blackbird by Michael Gordon and Pulitzer Prize winners David Lang and Julia Wolfe, 

releases in June 2020. Other collaborations with some of today’s most well-regarded 

artists include the heralded performers Dawn Upshaw and Jeremy Denk, the seminal 

composers Philip Glass and Nico Muhly, and the genre-fluid composers and performers 

Dessner, Oldham, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, My 

Brightest Diamond’s frontwoman Shara Nova, and Iarla Ó Lionáird of The Gloaming.

In addition to its Grammy Awards, Eighth Blackbird’s many honors include winning 

the 1998 Concert Artists Guild Competition; pioneering a year-long residency at the 

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2016, during which the ensemble served as 

a living installation with open rehearsals, performances, guest artists, and public talks; 

receiving the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions and 

Chamber Music America’s inaugural Visionary Award; and being named Musical 

America’s 2017 Ensemble of the Year.

The members of Eighth Blackbird value their roles as curators, educators, and 

mentors. The ensemble was named music director of the 2009 Ojai Music Festival, has 

held residencies at the Curtis Institute of Music and at the University of Chicago, and 

serves as ensemble-in-residence at the University of Richmond. In 2017 and 2018, 

Eighth Blackbird led its boldest initiative yet, the Blackbird Creative Lab, an inclusive, 

two-week summer workshop and performance festival for performers and composers 

in Ojai, California. During the 2018  –  2019 season, some of the Lab’s network of sixty 

alumni presented regional events and side-by-side concerts across the United States 

and in Melbourne, Australia, with members of Eighth Blackbird. In the 2019 – 2020 

season, Eighth Blackbird performs works by Lab alumni Fjóla Evans, Nina Shekhar, and 

Viet Cuong. In 2020, it offers the world premiere of Cuong’s new work for sextet and 

the U.S. Navy Band, in conjunction with Chicago’s Year of Music.

The name “Eighth Blackbird” derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens’s 

evocative, imagistic poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I know noble 

accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is 

involved / In what I know.”

Molly Barth, flutes 

Zachary Good, clarinets

Elly Toyoda, violin

Nick Photinos, cello

Matthew Duvall, percussion

Lisa Kaplan, piano

For this concert, flutist Molly Barth, clarinetist Zachary Good, and violinist Elly Toyoda 

perform with Eighth Blackbird.
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PROGRAM NOTES (MATA) Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, Ung Nordisk Musik, and the American 

Composers Orchestra’s SONiC Festival. She studied composition with Julia Wolfe and 

cello performance with Matt Haimovitz and completed a graduate degree in composition at the Yale School of Music in 2018. Evans is the 2017 winner of the Robert Fleming 

Prize, an annual award given to one composer by the Canada Council for the Arts. 

About Eroding, Evans writes:

Over thousands of years, the glacial river Hvítá in Iceland has carved a deep 

gorge into the surrounding landscape. At one particular twist in the river, 

the erosion has left several huge pillars of hyaloclastite rock, which look as if 

they had been flung haphazardly into the riverbed. In fact, they were revealed 

slowly over time from the process of the river carving away their surroundings. 

In Eroding, the players create a dense mass that gets worn down over time 

in order to reveal the spiky formations beneath the surface.

Karakurenai

Described as “mold-breaking,” “alert and alive,” “dramatic,” and “vital” (New York Times), 

Andy Akiho is an eclectic composer and performer of contemporary classical music. 

Recent engagements include commissioned premieres by the New York Philharmonic, 

the National Symphony Orchestra, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and Carnegie 

Hall’s Ensemble ACJW, as well as performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and 

at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Akiho has been recognized with numerous 

awards, including the 2014 – 2015 Luciano Berio Rome Prize. Additionally, his compositions have been featured on PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer and by organizations 

such as Bang on a Can, American Composers Forum, and the Society for New Music. 

He is currently pursuing a PhD in composition at Princeton University and is composerin-residence at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute. Akiho’s debut CD No One to Know 

One features brilliantly crafted compositions that pose intricate rhythms and exotic 

timbres around his primary instrument, the steel pan. About Karakurenai, Akiho writes:

Karakurenai (Japanese for “foreign crimson”) was originally written for solo 

prepared steel pan during a visit to Rochester, New York, in June 2007, as 

part of the Synesthesia Suite; however, this piece can be performed on any 

combination of instruments and can include elements of improvisation if the 

performer desires.

Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup

Holly Harrison is a young Australian composer whose music is driven by the nonsense 

literature of Lewis Carroll, embracing stylistic juxtapositions, the visceral energy of rock, 

and whimsical humor. Her work has been played extensively throughout Australia and 

the world by ensembles and artists that include the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, 

the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, orkest de ereprijs, Alarm Will Sound, and the Riot 

Ensemble. Harrison was the inaugural winner of both the Pyeongchon Arts Hall 

Ice ‘n’ SPICE

Nina Shekhar is a Michigan-based composer whose music explores the intersection 

of identity, vulnerability, love, and laughter. Her works have been performed by leading 

artists such as ETHEL, soprano Tony Arnold, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, and 

saxophonist Jan Berry Baker and have been featured by the Metropolitan Museum 

of Art, the National Flute Association, the North American Saxophone Alliance, I Care 

if You Listen, the TUTTI Festival, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and New 

Music on the Point. Shekhar has also previously collaborated with the JACK Quartet, 

and her piece Quirkhead, about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and mental illness, is 

scheduled to be featured in an upcoming PBS documentary. Current projects include 

a choral commission for The New York Virtuoso Singers, an electroacoustic commission 

for Third Angle New Music, and a piece for Vanguard Reed Quintet, as well as performances at Carnegie Hall and National Sawdust. Shekhar is a recipient of the 2015 ASCAP

Morton Gould Young Composer Award and a finalist in the 2017 and 2018 Morton Gould 

Awards. She was a composer fellow at the 2018 Blackbird Creative Lab. Aside from 

composing, Shekhar is also an accomplished flutist and pianist, including performances 

at the Poland International Piano Festival as a soloist with the Lublin Philharmonic and 

at the Detroit International Jazz Festival as lead alto saxophonist with her jazz band. 

Shekhar completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, graduating 

summa cum laude with dual degrees in music composition and chemical engineering. 

About Ice ‘n’ SPICE, Shekhar writes:

When I was younger, I remember eating my dad’s chicken patties, which 

were loaded with green chilies and garam masala. My brother and I would 

then run to the freezer to fill our mouths with ice in a rash attempt to cool 

down the fire on our tongues. Ice ‘n’ SPICE captures both the before and 

the after aspects of this memory, contrasting fiery and explosive sections 

with frigid, sparse, and glassy textures. May everyone enjoy the spice of life, 

so long as we also remember to keep things cool! Many thanks to Eighth 

Blackbird, Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting, and everyone at the Blackbird 

Creative Lab for commissioning this piece.

Eroding

Fjóla Evans is a Canadian/Icelandic composer and cellist. Her work explores the visceral 

physicality of sound while drawing inspiration from patterns of natural phenomena. 

Commissions and performances have come from musicians such as Bang on a Can 

All-Stars pianist Vicky Chow, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and the Winnipeg 

Symphony Orchestra. Her work has been featured on the Music at the Anthology 
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Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a Critics Choice. Lang’s the little match girl 

passion won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and the recording was awarded a 2010 

Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. Lang has also been the recipient of the Rome Prize, Le Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and Musical America’s 2013 

Composer of the Year. Recent premieres include his opera the loser, which opened 

the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and for which Lang 

served as composer, librettist, and stage director; the public domain for one thousand 

singers at the Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; his chamber opera anatomy 

theater at the Los Angeles Opera and at the Prototype Festival in New York; and the 

concerto man made for the ensemble Sō Percussion and a consortium of orchestras, 

including the BBC Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In addition to his 

work as a composer, Lang is artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in 

Princeton, New Jersey, and is a professor of composition at the Yale School of Music. 

Lang is cofounder and coartistic director of New York’s legendary music collective 

Bang on a Can. About wed, the composer writes:

My piece wed is from a larger series of piano works, called memory pieces, 

each work written after the death of someone close to me, someone with 

whom I had a relationship that I wanted a way to hold on to. Kate Ericson, to 

whose memory wed is dedicated, was a young conceptual artist and a close 

friend of my wife. In her hospital bed, just before she died, she was married 

to her boyfriend and longtime collaborator, Mel Ziegler. A wedding is usually 

a joyful event, full of hope and optimism, but this wedding, of course, had 

something much darker hovering around the joyfulness. In my piece, the 

four independent lines of the piano part are made of small changes — a half 

step up, a whole step down, and each line by itself is not that interesting. 

Put together, however, they allow the music to rock oddly back and forth 

between major and minor, between consonance and dissonance, between 

hope and despair.

Electric Aroma

Called “alluring” and “wildly inventive” by the New York Times, Viet Cuong’s music has 

been performed on six continents by a number of soloists and ensembles including Sō 

Percussion, the PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, Sandbox Percussion, and Mimi Stillman, 

and in venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center. Cuong’s 

awards include the ASCAP Morton Gould Award, the Theodore Presser Foundation 

Music Award, the Cortona Prize, the Walter Beeler Memorial Prize, the Boston GuitarFest 

Competition, and the Prix d’Été Competition. Cuong has held artist residencies at Yaddo, 

Ucross, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts and was a scholarship student at the Mizzou 

International Composers Festival, the inaugural Blackbird Creative Lab, Copland House’s 

CULTIVATE Institute, and the Aspen and Bowdoin music festivals. Currently a Naumburg 

International Chamber Music Composition Competition with Red Queen, White Queen, 

Alice and the 2017 Sue W Chamber Music Composition Prize for her work for Eighth 

Blackbird’s Lobster Tales and Turtle Soup, which was featured on Eighth Blackbird’s 

Australian tour as part of Musica Viva’s 2017 International Concert Season. Harrison 

currently teaches composition at MLC School, Burwood, Australia, and completed a 

Doctor of Creative Arts under the supervision of Bruce Crossman and John Encarnacao 

at Western Sydney University, where she is currently a sessional academic. About the 

work, Harrison writes:

The piece is inspired by chapters nine and ten of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense 

book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), “The Mock Turtle’s Story” 

and “The Lobster Quadrille.” Along with Alice, the main characters in these 

chapters are the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle. Both creatures are composites of two animals: the Gryphon an amalgam of an eagle and a lion, the 

Mock Turtle a cow and a turtle. I see these chimera characters as a type of 

metaphor for the amalgam of musical styles in the piece: rock, jazz, metal, 

hip-hop, pop, blues, and funk. The Gryphon and Mock Turtle scold Alice for 

imagined slights, tell long stories and sing long songs that never quite end, 

order her to recite poetry (which comes out all muddled), and insist on her 

taking part in an unusual dance: the “Lobster Quadrille.” In capturing these 

happenings, I’ve set the piece with a type of stop-start momentum and 

spattering of rhythmic hiccups. The piece is split into four main sections, 

and there are four main melodic/rhythmic threads that continue throughout. 

These threads are woven across each other, intertwining at times, as well as 

appearing as discrete sound blocks, positioned side-by-side, and/or careening 

off into another direction/thread at the last possible moment. These threads 

include: a bluesy piano and slap cello refrain — Alice’s hurrah!; lyrical string 

lines and long glissandi, mirroring the exaggerated and “mock” emotion of 

the Turtle’s sad story and heavy sobs; funky bass lines with flashes of disco — 

a reimagining of the “Lobster’s Quadrille”; and metal-inspired bursts of 

sounds with trashy cymbal stacks — the continual “little arguments” and 

misunderstandings that take place. At the same time, these four ideas draw 

influence from the branches of arithmetic studied by the Mock Turtle: 

“Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.” These titles are, of course, 

a parody of the traditional branches, and together inform how I have 

approached the four sections in the way of tempo changes, time signature 

shifts, and the warping of phrases — though I won’t say in which order they 

appear or to which musical thread they relate!

wed from memory pieces

David Lang is one of the most highly esteemed and performed American composers 

writing today. His works have been performed around the world in most of the great 

concert halls. Lang’s simple song #3, written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino’s 

acclaimed film Youth, received many honors in 2016, including nominations for an 
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and Roger Sessions Doctoral Fellow at Princeton, he holds bachelor’s and master’s 

degrees from the Peabody Institute of Music, and his Doctor of Musical Arts from 

the Curtis Institute of Music. About Electric Aroma, Cuong writes:

Between painting, sculpting, and printmaking, Pablo Picasso found the time 

to write some very intriguing poetry. Electric Aroma was creatively sparked 

by a line Picasso wrote on October 10, 1936: “an electric aroma a most 

disagreeable noise.” By using electronic-inspired sounds such as buzzy snare 

drum and vibraphone effects, glitch-like flutter tonguing, and raucous 

multiphonics, the piece forces some disagreeable sounds to agree with each 

other as they are woven into a distorted tango-like romp.

The Clarity of Cold Air

Jonathan Bailey Holland’s works have been commissioned and performed by numerous orchestras, including the Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, 

Minnesota, and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestras, as well as numerous chamber 

groups and soloists. A recipient of a 2015 Fromm Foundation Commission, Bailey has 

received honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Music 

Center, ASCAP, the Presser Foundation, and more. He has served as composer-inresidence for the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota, the Ritz Chamber Players, 

the Detroit and South Bend Symphony Orchestras, and the Radius Ensemble. Recent 

highlights include the premiere of Equality for narrator and orchestra for the Cincinnati 

Symphony Orchestra and the premiere of Forged Sanctuaries by Curtis on Tour, 

commissioned to commemorate the centennial of the National Park Service. Holland 

is Chair of Composition, Theory, and History at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, as 

well as Faculty Chair of the Music Composition Low Residency Master of Fine Arts at 

Vermont College of Fine Arts. Previously he served as a composition professor at the 

Berklee College of Music. About The Clarity of Cold Air, Holland writes:

Inspired by many a cold, Northern Midwest or New England day, this work is 

primarily atmospheric, focusing on the sonorities achieved by blending the 

instruments of the ensemble in various ways. There are many stark sounds — 

high, glassy harmonics from the strings, bowed metallic percussion instruments, harsh multiphonics from the winds, and airy cymbal rolls.

Stay On It

Julius Eastman was a composer, singer, and pianist whose compositions drew from 

twentieth-century classical music, as well as from free jazz, improvisation, new wave 

rock, and disco. He grew up in Ithaca, New York, began piano lessons at fourteen, and 

later attended Ithaca College and the Curtis Institute of Music, where he graduated in 

1963. In the late 1960s, Eastman was invited by composer-conductor Lukas Foss to join 

the Creative Associates, an ensemble based at SUNY Buffalo, where he also joined the 

music faculty. His time in Buffalo, until the mid-1970s, was incredibly fruitful and included 

touring with the ensemble and composing many of his famous early works for them, 

such as Thruway, Trumpet, Colors, and Stay On It. He later moved to New York City, 

where he became part of the “downtown” New York scene through his own music and 

in collaboration with artists such as Meredith Monk, Arthur Russell, Peter Zunmo, and 

others. Eastman often wrote his music following what he called an “organic” principle, 

where each new section of a work contained all the information from previous sections, 

though sometimes removed. This principle is most evident in his three works for four 

pianos, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla, all from around 1979. By the 1980s, 

he was touring internationally but struggled with a series of personal misfortunes that 

led to his premature death in 1990 at age forty-nine. 

Stay On It, one of Eastman’s best-known works, is among the first to presage 

postminimalism and one of the first art music compositions inspired by pop music 

progressions. The work features an upbeat riff heard at the very start that permeates 

the majority of the work. This riff stays constant while being layered upon by additional 

notes and rhythms, later being spliced with silence, and at times becomes buried under 

other riffs trying to assert dominance, or by howling glissandos trying to drown it out. 

After repeatedly reasserting itself, it eventually subsides, introducing another slower, 

gentler riff that grows and fades, ending the work. 

Program notes by Eighth Blackbird 
NGA.GOV/MUSIC

Upcoming Events of the SeventyEighth Season of The William Nelson 

Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin Concerts

Unless otherwise noted, concerts 

are held in the West Building, West 

Garden Court.

Third Coast Percussion

Music of Devonté Hynes (aka Blood 

Orange), Ryan Lott (aka Son Lux), 

and iconic composer Philip Glass. 

February 23, 3:30 p.m.

Sound Sketch 

Suspicious Cheeselords

From the Heavens

Music illuminating the Gallery’s holdings 

of images of heavenly beings. 

February 28, 12:10 p.m.

West Building Rotunda

McGill/McHale Trio

Music by Poulenc, Debussy, and contemporary composers Chris Rogerson, 

Valerie Coleman, Guillaume Connesson, 

and Paul Schoenfield.

March 1, 3:30 p.m.

Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano

A New Country

Together with a chamber ensemble 

consisting of piano, strings, and flute, 

Cano performs a program featuring 

American works. 

March 8, 3:30 p.m.

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art 

and all of its programs is free of charge, 

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording 

equipment during the performance 

is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic 

devices are turned off.

—

Concerts are made possible in part 

through the generosity of donors to the 

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition 

of their support. Please contact the 

development office at (202) 842-6450 or 

circle@nga.gov for more information.

—

The department of music produced 

these program notes. Copyright © 2020 

Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, 

Washington

cover Benton Murdoch Spruance, 

Arrangement for Drums (detail), 1941, 

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Reba 

and Dave Williams Collection, Florian 

Carr Fund and Gift of the Print Research 

Foundation, 2008.115.269