Don’t Look Down

Yaz Lancaster (they/them/theirs) is a Black transdisciplinary artist. They are most interested in practices aligned with relational aesthetics & the everyday; fragments & collage; and anti-oppressive, liberatory politics. Yaz performs as a violinist, vocalist

& steel-pannist in a wide variety of settings including DIY/indie venues, contemporary chamber music, and steel bands. Their work is presented in many different mediums & collaborative projects, and often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of identity & liberation to natural phenomena and poetics. Most recently, they have been developing the pop/post-genre duo laydøwn with Canadian guitarist- producer Andrew Noseworthy. Yaz has had the privilege & opportunity to build community in the US, Canada, Europe & Trinidad and Tobago—they have created with artists like Andy Akiho, Contact (with Evan Ziporyn), Contemporaneous, George Lewis, JACK Quartet, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Miss Grit, Rohan Chander, Skiffle Steel Orchestra, and Wadada Leo Smith. Their record of commissioned music for violin/voice & electronics AmethYst is forthcoming on people | places | records in 2021.

Yaz holds degrees in violin performance & poetry from New York University where they studied with Cyrus Beroukhim, Robert Honstein & Terrance Hayes (among others). They are the visual arts editor at Peach Mag & a contributing writer at ICIYL. Yaz loves chess, horror movies, & bubble tea.

for any even # of percussionists + fixed media/electronics, 6-7min, written for Western Carolina University

The redwood species contains the largest and tallest trees in the world. These trees can live thousands of years. This is an endangered subfamily due to habitat losses from fire ecology suppression, logging, and air pollution. Since logging began in the 1850s, 95% of old-growth coast redwoods have been cut down.

(b. 1988) writes music characterized by “jagged declamations and muffled filigree” (Gramophone) with the aim of striking a distinctive balance between the stylistic immediacy of modernism and the dramatic power of romanticism. Max’s music has been performed by a wide range of prominent and emerging ensembles—including the New York Philharmonic, Contemporaneous, Yarn/Wire, Quince Ensemble, New Thread Quartet, and Flux Quartet—and has been featured at numerous music festivals across the country, including the Tanglewood Music Center, the Resonant Bodies Festival, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Current and upcoming projects include collaborations with Hypercube, enSRQ, Decoda Ensemble, bassoonists Cornelia Sommer and Kathleen McLean, and pianist Benjamin Hochman. Max is a founding member of New York-based composer collective ICEBERG New Music, which is preparing to launch its fourth season. Max’s music appears on commercial recordings by the New York Philharmonic, Quince Ensemble, Duo Entre-Nous, pianists Jenny Lin and Mika Sasaki, and harpist Emily Levin.

Max has received several of the most prestigious awards available to emerging American composers, including a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a William Schuman Prize from BMI, two consecutive Palmer Dixon Prizes from the Juilliard School, and a Morton Gould Young Composer Award from ASCAP.

Max is a member of the music faculties at Montclair State University and the Kaufman Music Center. He received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Juilliard School in 2018, a Master of Music degree from Juilliard in 2013 and a Bachelor of Music degree from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in 2011. Further studies have taken place at Mannes College of Music, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the Tanglewood Music Center.

Shadow Theater is an exploration of one of my core artistic beliefs: that music as an art form occupies a dramatic or narrative space on a fundamental level, even more so than a sonic or temporal one. As the title suggests, a plotless play of sorts unfolds over the course of the piece whose only characters are the three instrumentalists, sometimes in intricate dialogue with each other, sometimes left to expound on their thoughts alone. The music itself provides the only narrative structure that this pseudo-play has, but in combination with the movements of the musicians—all performing on some of the most visually dynamic instruments in the western tradition—this makes for a dramatic experience just as compelling as a staged theater piece. Shadow Theater is dedicated to the memories of Christopher Rouse and Steven Stucky, who taught me to think of music, above all else, as a way to tell a story.

-Max Grafe

Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact, and interiority, Cerrone’s GRAMMY-nominated music is utterly compelling and uniquely his own.

In the 2020–21 season, Cerrone composes a new antiphonal brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony featuring principal trumpet Robert Sullivan and principal tubist Chris Olka, a new work for Hub New Music premiered via Livestream with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, and begins work on In a Grove, a new opera composed with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann that was commissioned by LA Opera and will premiere at Pittsburgh Opera in February 2022.

The 2020–21 season will also see the premiere of The Last Message Received, jointly commissioned by Northwestern University and the Yale Symphony Orchestra and Glee Club, as well as new works for pianist David Kaplan, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, cellist Johannes Moser, Lorelei Ensemble, cellist Inbal Segev, and pianist Anthony DeMare (the Liaisons project, adapting the music of Stephen Sondheim).

Recent highlights include The Air Suspended, a piano concerto for pianist Shai Wosner, who gave the world premiere performances with the East Coast and Cayuga Chamber Orchestras, and the Phoenix and Albany Symphonies; Don’t Look Down, a concerto grosso for Conor Hanick and Sandbox Percussion that premiered at Caramoor; The Insects Became Magnetic, an orchestral work with electronics for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Meander Spiral, Explode, a percussion quartet concerto co-commissioned by the Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony and the Britt Festival; Breaks and Breaks, an acclaimed violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony; a Miller Theatre Composer Portrait performed by Third Coast Percussion; Will There Be Singing, premiered by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; and Can’t and Won’t, commissioned for the Calder Quartet by the LA Phil.

Cerrone’s opera, Invisible Cities, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist, was praised by the Los Angeles Times as “A delicate and beautiful opera…[which] could be, and should be, done anywhere.” Invisible Cities received its fully-staged world premiere in a wildly popular production by The Industry, directed by Yuval Sharon, in Los Angeles’ Union Station. Both the film and opera are available as CDs, DVDs, and digital downloads. In July 2019, New Amsterdam Records released his GRAMMY-nominated sophomore effort, The Pieces that Fall to Earth, a collaboration with the LA-based chamber orchestra, Wild Up, to widespread acclaim. His most recent release is The Arching Path, released on In a Circle Records. Cerrone is also the winner of the 2015-2016 Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition.

Christopher Cerrone holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. His work is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York. He currently teaches at Mannes School of Music, along with having an active private studio. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Carrie Sun.

Premiered via livestream on August at Carmoor on August 6, 2020

Commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting for Conor Hanick and Sandbox Percussion, with additional support provided by Sandbox Percussion.

Don’t Look Down is an accidental diary of having lived through the worst pandemic of the last hundred years. When I started writing this piece in February 2020, it would be inconceivable to imagine the world we live in now. The one thing that kept me sane during this period was clocking into work—that is, working on this piece. So looking back, it’s not at all surprising the piece would wind up reflecting both the strangeness and the instability of the world we live in.

The title of the work takes its name from an article by the economist Paul Krugman, himself referring to the moment when the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote would look down and suddenly realize he’d fallen off a cliff, at which point he would actually drop. The first movement, “Hammerspace,” is the world before: all grooving and relentless energy. The pianist hammers away at the high notes of the piano which have all been muted with putty. I imagined his part as like a drum solo performed in an echo chamber—the rhythmic muted notes create unique and fantastic sympathetic resonances with the lower strings of the instrument when the pedal is held down. A variety of percussion instruments support him, from the more traditional to drum set to other oddities like a bicycle pump and sandpaper block. 

The piece “looks down” at the start of the second movement, “The Great Empty,” when all of sudden, all of the energy stops and we are left with an uncertain and static soundscape: instead of playing the piano, the pianist “bows” the instrument by drawing fishing tackle over the strings. The percussionists play cheap harmonicas and blow over the tops of wine bottles alongside other instruments to create a dissonant and deliberately out-of-tune sound world. 

The piano part that interjects halfway through is similarly out-of-tune: the pianist has placed small pieces of putty, causing the piano to sound as out of tune as the percussion instruments. The title of the movement is drawn from a photographic series that was shown in the New York Times of city centers devoid of people.

The final movement, “Caton Flats,” refers to a construction site active on my block in Brooklyn. When I was working on this movement in my studio, my partner, Carrie, walked into the room and remarked that the music “sounds like the construction going on outside”! I loved the idea so much that I had to include it in the piece. I also loved the idea that the things that most drive us crazy—like noisy construction on our street—could become a thing of nostalgia when it’s gone.

Don’t Look Down was commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting for Conor Hanick and Sandbox Percussion, with additional support provided by Sandbox Percussion.

-Chris Cerrone