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performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

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Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, dc

www.nga.gov

Concerts are made possible in part through the generosity of donors

to the National Gallery ofArt through The Circle. Reserved seating is

available in recognition oftheir support. Please contact the development

office at (202) 842-6450 or circk@nga.gov for more information.

The Seventy-Third Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

3,022nd Concert

National Gallery ofArt New Music Ensemble

Steve Antosca, Artistic Director

November 16, 2014

Sunday, 3:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Joan La Barbara (b. 1947)

Flash!* (2006)

Mario Lavista (b. 1943)

Lamento a la muerte de Raul Lavista * (1981)

Jaime E. Oliver (b. 1979)

gridi * (2014)

David Felder (b. 1953)

Another Face (1987)

Mario Lavista (b. 1943)

Noctumo * (1982)

Steve Antosca (b. 1955)

Elements-fve transfigurationsfor cello and computer (2009-2014)

i.flow-water

ii. drift-time

in.floats cloud

Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University

* Washington premiere performance

This concert is sponsored in part by the Randy Hostetler

Living Room Fund.

The Musicians

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE

Formed in 2010 to present new music in the vibrant architectural environments ofthe National Gallery ofArt, the Gallery’s resident New Music

Ensemble has presented critically acclaimed concerts that feature strategic

placement ofmusicians throughout the spaces and utilize computer controlled transformations and spatialization ofsound. The group’s 2011 tribute

to the Gallery’s seventieth anniversary, staged in the West Building Rotunda,

was hailed by the Washington Post as “a spectacular, wonderfully provocative”

concert, which transformed the Rotunda into “an immense temple ofsound, 

presenting a program oftheatrical new works that married humans with

computers, and ancient myths with contemporary aesthetics.”

Members ofthe National Gallery ofArt New Music Ensemble performing 

in tonight’s concert are violinist Lina Bahn, computer musician William Brent,

flutist Lisa Celia, saxophonist Noah Getz, percussionist Ross Karre, composer 

and computer musician Jaime E. Oliver, and guest cellist Tobias Werner.

STEVE ANTOSCA

Named artistic director ofthe National Gallery ofArt New Music Ensemble 

in 2010, composer Steve Antosca was the Gallery’s composer-in-residence 

in fall 2013. His residency included the performances of his work habitat,

composed for performance in the East Building Atrium, and my end is my

beginning, commissioned by Chamber Music America. Antosca has received

awards and commissions for new works from Meet the Composer, the 

National Endowment for the Arts, and the Randy Hostetler Living Room

Music Fund. Formerly the artistic director ofverge ensemble, with which 

he performed several times at the National Gallery and on numerous

occasions at the Corcoran Gallery ofArt, he was a co-director ofthe 2012

John Cage Centennial Festival Washington, dc.

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Program Notes

Flash! was composed for violinist Ariana Kim and premiered at her recital in

Juilliard’s Paul Hall in December 2005. The piece begins with a startled gasp 

and hurtles forward at breakneck speed, fingers flying through flashing runs

until the final strum and rapid snap pizzicato. It is a briefsonic animation in

the spirit of classic thriller films. Composer and performer Joan La Barbara

is renowned for her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal

techniques. Her awards and prizes include: Premio Internazionale Demetrio

Stratos; DAAD-Berlin Artist-in-Residence; Civitella Ranieri; Guggenheim; and

seven nea fellowships. She has composed numerous commissioned works

for chamber ensembles, theater, orchestra, chorus, and interactive technology,

and soundscores for dance, video, and film, including an electronic/vocal

score for Sesame Street. Her multi-layered textural compositions have been

premiered at Festival d’Automne a Paris, Brisbane Biennial, Lincoln Center, 

MaerzMusik Berlin, Warsaw Autumn, and other international venues.

Exploring ways ofimmersing the audience in her music, La Barbara placed

the American Composers Orchestra around and among the audience in

Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, building her sonic painting in solitude thisfear

is lived, inspired by Agnes Martin’s minimalist art. La Barbara teaches music

composition at New York University and is composing a new opera.

Born in Mexico City, Mario Lavista enrolled in the Composition Workshop

at the National Conservatory in 1963, under the guidance ofCarlos Chavez. 

In 1967 he received a scholarship from the French government to study at

Schola Cantorum in Paris. During his time in Europe he attended courses

by Henri Pousseur, Nadia Boulanger, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1982 he

founded Latin American music journal Pauta and continues to serve as its

chief editor. He has received multiple awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for his opera, Aura, the Tomas Luis de Victoria Composition

Prize, and membership in the El Colegio Nacional since 1998. Lavista’s works 

are performed in Europe and throughout the Americas. Since 1970 he has

taught music analysis composition at the National Conservatory in Mexico

City. He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in the

United States and Canada.

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Lamento a la muerte de Raul Lavista (Lament on the death of Raul Lavista)

for bass flute inaugurates a series ofworks composed in memoriam. The

composer sought to recover the original fourteenth-century tradition that

began when Franciscus Andrieu composed a lament on the death of Guillaume de Machaut. Lamento is an intimate work and offers an invitation for

reflection, with each phrase separated by silences. The epigraph included in

the score says:

In this silence

I dare not raise my voice

for fear I will disturb 

the dwellers ofthe heavens.

— Li Bai (701-762)

A native of Peru, Jaime E. Oliver is assistant professor of composition at 

New York University and co-director of nyu’s Waverly Labs for Music and

Computing. He obtained a PhD in Computer Music from the University of

California, San Diego, where he studied with Miller Puckette, and was also a

Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Columbia University. Oliver’s work has been

featured in many international festivals and conferences, involving collaboration with composers, improvisers, and other artists ranging from sound

performance and installation to composing and performing music, as well

as programming open-source software. He has received scholarships and

grants from the Fulbright Commission, the University ofCalifornia, Meet the

Composer, and Spain’s Ministry ofCulture.

Oliver’s gridi refers to the problem offitting sound material into the

grids of bars and holes, pitches and durations; ofmeasuring time in discrete

integer divisions. A computer program written in Pure Data (Pd) was used

to generate the musical material ofthis work, which was then translated

into a musical score using the custom software notes and lilypond. gridi

explores the outcomes of a system in equilibrium, of events floating without

directionality. The real-time interactive computer system uses William

Brent’s timbreiD software to classify percussive attacks and to generate

sounds that shift between rhythmic patterns and timbre.

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David Felder has been recognized as a leader in his generation of

American composers. His works have been featured at leading international

festivals for new music and have earned continued recognition through

performance and commissioning programs. Felder’s work is distinguished

for its highly energetic profile, its frequent employment oftechnological

extension and elaboration ofmusical materials, and its lyrical qualities. The

composer has received numerous grants and commissions, including awards 

from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council, the

New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Guggenheim, Koussevitzky, Fromm, 

Rockefeller, and Mary Flagler Cary foundations, among others. In 2010 he

received the American Academy ofArts and Letters Music Award. He serves 

as Birge-Cary Chair in Composition at suny, Buffalo, and since 1985 has been

Artistic Director ofthe June in Buffalo Festival.

Felder wrote Another Face in 1987 for violinist Janos Negyesy. Commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, the work is a musical

response to Japanese novelist Kobo Abe’s The Face ofAnother. Abe’s book

raises profound questions about identity, prompting a composition that

proposes small musical modules juxtaposed in coded sequences as the small

building blocks contained within extended lines. Each ofthe small modules

consists of a pair—two pitches and two distinct rhythmic values, which are

repeated locally (for memory’s sake), and transformed formally through four

passes through the sequence.

The focus ofthe work is the emergence of an unnamed “third force,” a

certain lyrical entity that is contained within the somewhat more fiercely 

deterministic materials. The transformed and reconciling materials appear

prominently at the end ofthe work, which is, ultimately, a fiendishly difficult 

virtuoso piece. Noting the important collaboration of Negyesy and virtuoso

performers Karen Bentley and Moyses Pogossian in the creation ofAnother

Face, Felder dedicated it to those artists in admiration and gratitude.

Mario Lavista composed Noctumo for alto flutist Marielena Arizpe, who, 

according to the composer, “showed me some ofthe extended techniques:

multiphonics, whistle tones, microtones using non-traditional fingerings,

singing and playing simultaneously, and so on. In composing the piece, I

have wanted to establish a close relationship, deeply emotional—loving

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I would say—between the performer and his or her instrument. I have also 

wanted the piece itselfto build a space in which an intimate dialogue between

the instrument and the player can take place.”

The score bears an epigraph by Sia Ching, a contemporary Chinese poet:

The sun takes back its shadows

the air contains its breath

the dream brings out the Green pupils ofthe cat

with its nocturnal gold.

Steve Antosca’s elements-five transfigurationsfor cello and computer was

commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. 

Composed for and dedicated to cellist Tobias Werner, elements explores

aspects of extended techniques, timbre, sonic characteristics, and computer

processing for the cello. American University professor and computer

musician William Brent developed the technology for elements in close

collaboration with the composer.

The blending and spatialization ofsonorities in elements form a vibrant

sonic environment where evolving textures emerge from a delicate interaction ofvarying combinations. This technique creates intense effects where

the cello at times is immersed in the processed sounds, and at times the

processing fades as the cello reveals its sonic image.

The first three movements of elements are presented in today’s concert.

The remaining two will be performed at the next nga New Music Ensemble

concert on February 15, 2015.

Program Notes are based on materials provided by the composers.

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