- Dance of Fire (2012)
-
Rahilia Hasanova
for solo violin
ca. 7'38"
Click here to listen to a recording of Airi Yoshioka performing this piece.
- Alla Meykhana (1996)
-
Rahilia Hasanova
for solo piano
ca. 8'00"
Alla Meykhana means "like meykhana" or "sort of meykhana." Meykhana is the folk genre based on rhythmical beats of Aruz/ghazal form of poetry through minimalistic repetitions of simple melody. Mostly developing around the Absheron region of the capital city of Azerbaijan, Baku, meykhana performers used a large spectrum of social, political, humanistic, satirical, and romantic subjects, accompanying themselves with simple drums or just with finger snapping (findiqcha). Alla Meykhana for solo piano represents the special expressive atmosphere of meykhana events, musical declamation, and typical rhythmical beats of this old traditional genre.
Performer: Rena Rzayeva
Video and some photos by Rahilia Hasanova
Click here to listen to a recording on YouTube.
- Autumn's Palette (1975/79, rev 2011)
-
Rahilia Hasanova
for solo piano
ca. 19'10"
The fall foliage is a natural yearly but not simple event of the play of the colors. At the same time this is a mystical process of the work of solar energy producing chemicals for plants. Less sun energy means less chlorophyll, or green pigment. Less transportation of green pigment means more appearance of the hot register of thelight spectrum:red, orange, yellow, pink, purple, and brown pigments gradually playing bronze, gold, and silver. Autumn's palette is always vibrating unexpectedly different colors and depends on how sunny, dry, or rainy a previous summer has been. Nobody knows what the palette of the next foliage will be. And any color will have its own story.
Click here to listen to a recording of Umber.
Click here to listen to a recording of Yellow.
Click here to listen to a recording of Ochre (alternate title Amaranthe).
Click here to listen to a recording of Terracotta.
Click here to listen to a recording of Sienna.
- Monad: Sonata for Piano (1993)
-
Rahila Hasanova
for solo piano
ca. 17'00"
Monad means "Unit," and everything is connected in this Unit via frequencies, vibrations, numbers, forms, forces that are building and shaping the Unit–Monad where all of us and everyone exists.
The recording is of performer Rena Rzayeva.
Click here to listen to the recording.
- New Baroque Fugues and Postludes for Piano (2011)
-
Rahilia Hasanova
for solo piano
ca. 1hr 7'00"
New Baroque Fugues and Postludes is a cycle of 22 polyphonic piece for solo piano. This cycle consists 11 Fugues and accompanying to each fugue 11 Postludes. Each pair of Fugues and Postludes has to be regarded as a unit that expresses individual characters, forms and structures, and emotional states.
Why the forgotten fugue form? Because I found inside of this ancient antique composition form a great and maybe not seen potential for the future development, reconstruction, and kind of rehabilitation. By my new vision I was trying to bring this baroque form to a new level of an unconventional contemporary approach. Therefore, I named my piano cycle New Baroque Fugues and Postludes.
Why not traditional preludes? Because concluding each fugue by its own Postlude I was highlighted my idea and my new vision of updated polyphonic cycling. Why not 24 or 48? And again, because, not regarding to their colorfulness and rhythmical differences, compositional techniques, representation of different feelings and conditions between them, I wanted all of them to be performed during the one concert event. Because... New Baroque Fugues and Postludes would speak with an audience in new undivided mixed classical, neoclassical, polyphonic, harmonic but contemporary language.
The piece was recorded by Ruth Rose and Francesca Hurst, and can be heard when viewing the score.
Click here to view the score and listen to the recording.
- Music from "The Proclamation" (1966, rev. 1968)
-
Eleanor Hovda
for solo flute
Written for David Gilbert
Music from the Proclamation was composed in 1966 as the musical component of a play "The Proclamation" by Iva Martirano. The script called for a flutist, a man (mime), and a woman (actor). The Flute, played and acted by David Gilbert, presided over the flow of action between the Man and the Woman, and had continuous shifting role-involveent throughout the play. It was performed at the Roundhouse, in Urbana, Illinois. It was revised, in concert version, in 1968.
I had become interested in considerations of breathing with respect to sound production, energy shape composing, and timbral painting as well as to the problems of periodicity (a natural resultant of inhale/exhale cycles of wind and brass players and singers). The necessity of producing a long (ca. 25 minutes), evolving statement for the flute character provided a "psychological form," a theatrical context, within which some ways to foil periodicity in a flute solo could be developed and shaped.
David Gilbert, a flutist and composer, had already developed new techniques using inhale and exhale melodically, vowel and consonant sounds, and alternate methods of sound production to enlarge the timbral palette. These included "air" sounds, combinations of air/pitch, pitch color, and weight change by alternate fingerings, "chords," etc. The compositional availability of "air" sounds combined with vowel and consonant articulations (which can be produced during inhale as well as exhale cycles) served to free me from the inevitability of the "sound/take-a-breath, sound/take-a-breath...n" loop.
Factors governing the durational limits of inhales and exhales were explored. For example, the greater the "force" required to play an inhaled/exhaled segment, the shorter the possible duration of that segment. Parameters which combine to determine the total "force" include registral placement, dynamics, density (ex.: single pitches/"chords"; flute alone/flute with humming; method of sound production (modo ordinario, pitch, and "air" combinations); phonetic articulation (vowel and/or consonant sounds, simple or complex, such as Ho versus rtchu with a rolled r).
This piece has been a process, in three general stages: First, by developing sound materials from combinations of parameters which focused on extents of time, weights and energy, and flow shapes, I hoped to avoid the natural periodicity of inhale and exhale cycles. Second, the sound material took shape and life when molded within the theatrical context/content (psychological form) of the play. Third, the flute music was revised into a concert version wherein the interaction between the performer and the material became the event, and the "meaning" is a timbral/energy flow soundscan.
Click here to view the script.
- Spring Music with Wind (1973)
-
Eleanor Hovda
for solo piano
ca. 11'45"
Piano piece for Carla Hübner
This piece uses seven areas of the inside of a grand piano. These seven areas are played by five different mallets and a glass bottle. Voice sounds ("air" sounds, humming, whistling) are used to amplify or extend piano textures.
Click here to view the performance notes.
Click here to listen to the recording by Lee Humphries on the Eleanor Hovda Collection CD (Spotify).
Click here to listen on Innova Recordings.
- Piece for Flute Alone (1963)
-
Eleanor Hovda
for solo flute
- Iki Ma (1985)
-
Eleanor Hovda
for shakuhachi
ca. 4'35"
- Cymbalmusic (1982 - 1985)
-
Eleanor Hovda
for double-mounted cymbals, bass bows, and friction mallets
ca. 9'15"
I. Centerflow/Trail I
II. Centerflow/Trail II
III. Lemniscates with Breath
IV. Ecce
V. Montemarte
The Cymbalmusic Series developed out of ensemble music that I've been making since 1972. The various pieces are made for a cymbal soloist who elicits sounds from the metal using bass bows and superball friction mallets. The cymbal player also uses voice sounds, such as whistles, hums, and vowel/consonant "breath" sound shapes as extension and counterpoint to the metal sounds. The player always works collaboratively with the space in which the pieces are performed, and in several of the pieces there are collaborations with dancers and audiences.
- Lady Astor (1975)
-
Eleanor Hovda
for solo guitar
Guitar music for Bill Heffernan
- Composition for Solo Flute
-
Eleanor Hovda
for solo flute
- Breath Dancing (1987)
-
Eleanor Hovda
for solo flute
- Yeah Yeah Yeah (1991)
-
Lois V Vierk
for solo piano
ca. 4'30"
When pianist Aki Takahashi talked to me in 1990 about commissioning a short piece inspired by a Beatles tune, I enthusiastically began going through all my old favorites from teenage years. I chose "She Loves You" and got to work. The first phrase of this tune, an ascending scale, is stretched out with tremolos and arpeggiated embellishments over the beginning 43 measures of my piece. After that, my composition follows the harmonic structure of "She Loves You", with melodic fragments woven in. At the very end of the piece the musical phrase "yeah yeah yeah" is whispered briefly by the piano.
This recording is by pianist Sachiko Kato, recorded live in concert on Aug. 20, 2008 at the Phoenix Hall in Osaka, Japan.
Click here to view the score and listen to the recording.
Click here to download all performance materials.
- Blue Jets Red Sprites (1996)
-
Lois V Vierk
for solo accordion
ca. 12'12"
The myriad timbres and expressive dynamics of the accordion have always been a wonder to me. The instrument's deep and powerful sounds, its penetrating middle register with octave doublings, its high-pitched soft, fragile, colors are all full of interest and are gorgeous. Unlike a piano, where the struck notes die away, an accordion held-note can dramatically or gently crescendo and decrescendo. Many kinds of accents and dynamic shapes are possible. Dynamics make the music flow.
Blue jets and red sprites are two kinds of lightning that flare at the outer limits of earth's atmosphere. They flash high above a thunderstorm, appearing over the part of the storm that is producing the most powerful cloud-to-ground lightning. One theory of jets and sprites holds that after a strong lightning bolt there is an upward rush of electrons. As the electrons surge upward in a kind of upside-down avalanche they eventually collide with nitrogen molecules. This makes them glow blue or, at higher altitudes, flash bloodred.
These descriptions of visual and aural events were my starting points in writing the music.
Blue Jets Red Sprites was commissioned by Guy Klucevsek.
Recording is by Guy Klucevsek, accordion
Please note that the score has been slightly updated. The recording does not contain those updates so it will not completely match the score.
from CD:
Starkland ST-209 "Guy Klucevsek: Free Range Accordion"
http://www.starkland.com/st209/index.htm
Click here to view the score and listen to the recording.
Click here to download all performance materials.
- To Stare Astonished at the Sea (1994)
-
Lois V Vierk
for piano played entirely on the strings
ca. 6'36"
When it is calm the ocean is gentle and inviting. It can be mysteriously majestic or humblingly powerful. Sometimes it thrashes about frighteningly. The title of my piece was inspired by the W. B. Yeats poem "Her Triumph". Yeats' words say to me that the energy of life itself is untamed and often wilder and more beautiful than what shows on the surface.
The piece is played entirely inside the piano on the strings. It is composed in three sections, beginning percussively in the lowest register, adding "tremolos" and "trills" (no pitches here are notated exactly). The music moves to higher strings and develops tonally with plucked string phrases and dynamic glissandos. lt ends with a flurry on the highest strings.
To Stare Astonished at the Sea was commissioned for pianist Margaret Leng Tan by Barry Goldberg on the occasion of Gayle Morgan's birthday.
Recording is by Claudia Rüegg, pianist
New World Records 80766 "Lois V Vierk: Words Fail Me"
Click here to view the CD on New World Records.
Click here to view the score and listen to the recording.
Click here to download all performance materials.