enSRQ + Chroma Trio

Tyson Gholston Davis (b.2000) is an American composer in his junior year at the Juilliard School. He began composing at the age of eight years old and entered the University North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) as a high school freshman, studying with Lawrence Dillon. He has taken advantage of numerous opportunities at the school, writing for Eighth Blackbird, the Attacca String Quartet, UNCSA Cantata Singers and the UNCSA Symphony Orchestra. In the summers, he attended Interlochen Summer Music Camp, where he had works for chorus and percussion ensemble premiered and earned the Fine Arts Award, Curtis Summerfest. In the summer of 2019 Tyson worked with the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (NYO-USA) and Antonio Pappano to premiere his work, Delicate Tension, a piece that was commissioned by the American Embassy in Berlin for the 30th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.The work was performed in Berlin, Edinburgh, and Hamburg. Since then,Tyson has started as an undergraduate at The Juilliard School where he continues his studies in composition and is a recipient of the Jerome L. Greene Fellowship. His work Delicate Tension recently won the 68th BMI Student Composer Awards as well as the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards.”

My String Trio, written for Chroma Trio and ensembleNEWSRQ was composed between January and May of 2021. The work is in seven continuous movements that have interrelating ideas, gestures, and motives.The work is semi-programmatic as the main movements, Synchromisms I, II and II and Nocturnes I and II get their names from two American artistic movements from the beginning of the 20th Century. The Synchromisms are informed by the synchromist paintings and ideas of MacDonald-Wright and Russel. The concept of these works juxtaposed bright and neutral tones in a completely abstract form.The works have sharp lines and shapes that create a variety of moods and intensities. MacDonald-Writght’s “Synchromy No. 3”, which is on display at the Brooklyn Museum in NewYork was the work I took my main inspiration. Nocturnes I and II are informed by the American Post-Impressionist works of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. These paintings are extremely murky with dark tones. The dark tones that are accented with touches of gold or white that blur the context of the paintings. These works were the early stages of abstraction that would influence schools of thought, such as the Synchromists and the Abstract Expressionist. Nocturnes I and II are works that float and suspend time in an attempt to focus in on the colors and murkiness of the Whistler paintings. Whistler’s “Nocturne in Gold and Black” was the main painting I thought of while writing Nocturnes I and II.

Andreia Pinto Correia (b. 1971) The prestigious literary magazine Jornal de Letras describes Andreia Pinto Correia’s compositions as “a major contribution to the dissemination of Portugal’s culture and language, perhaps a contribution larger than could ever be imagined.” Her music — described by the Boston Globe as “compellingly meditative” and by the New York Times as an “aural fabric” — is characterized by close attention to harmonic detail and timbral color. Following a family tradition of scholars and writers, her work often reflects the influence of literary sources from the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.

Honors include a 2020 Arts and Letters Award in Music by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and commissions from the European Union Presidency, League of American Orchestras and the Toulmin Foundation, Washington Performing Arts (Kennedy Center), Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Tanglewood Music Center, Boston Symphony Orchestra Brass Quintet, American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Chamber Music America, Albany Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony and National Dance Company of Portugal, and Culturgest/National Bank of Portugal, among others.

Her concerto for orchestra, Timaeus, commissioned by the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood Music Center in memory of Elliott Carter, was premiered at the opening concert of the Festival’s 75th anniversary. In addition, her work Reverdecer, Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra, co-commissioned by the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo (OSESP) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and written for American virtuoso Jay Campell, will have its European and South American premieres during the 2022-23 Season. Upcoming commissions include a new string quartet for Brooklyn Rider as part of their new project The Four Elements.

Her works have been performed by the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Orchestra, Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa, Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the JACK, and Borromeo String Quartets. She has also been the recipient of a League of American Orchestras/ New Music USA Music Alive Composer Residency, a Rockefeller Foundation Center Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, the Alpert Award in the Arts/Ucross Residency Prize, a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, and the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award by the Japan Society. She was the curator of the Fertile Crescent Festival for Contemporary Music at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and composer in residence with contemporary music ensemble OrchestrUtópica (Lisbon). She has collaborated with an array of artists and scholars including historian Prof. Ann McGrath (Australia), marine biologist Dr. Claudio Campagna (Argentina), filmmakers Daniel Blaufuks and Salomé Lamas (Portugal), writers Mia Couto (Mozambique), Ondjaki (Angola), Betty Shamieh (Palestine/USA), João David Pinto Correia (Portugal), and choreographers Omayra Amaya (Spain/USA) and Victor Pontes (Portugal).

Ms. Pinto Correia received the Honorary Title of Fellow of the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, where she was a guest of the ARC Laureate Program for the Deep Human Past and the Indigenous Linguistics Alliance (Fall 2018). Additional recent highlights include the world premieres of Night Migrations, a piano trio commissioned by Chamber Music America for the Horszowski Trio, and a string quartet for the JACK Quartet (String Quartet No.1, Unvanquished Space), commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The year of 2018 also saw a world premiere of Ciprés given by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra under the baton of maestro Rossen Milanov, a work commissioned by the League of American Orchestras and the Toulmin Foundation. 

Born in Portugal, Andreia Pinto Correia began her musical studies in her native Lisbon at the Academia de Amadores de Música and at the Escola de Jazz Luíz Villas-Boas. She received her Masters and Doctoral of Music degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music in Composition as a student of Bob Brookmeyer and Michael Gandolfi, having received additional mentorship from composers John Harbison and the late Steven Stucky. She attended the Minnesota Composer Institute, the European Network of Opera Academies (ENOA), the American Opera Projects (AOP), the Composers Conference, and the Tanglewood and Aspen Festivals. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

(2009) Fragmentos Múltiplos (Multiple Fragments) is a violin-viola duo inspired by the renowned painting (of the same title) by Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992). This miniature also reflects my interest in folk traditions and uses the structure and gestures of the Tralhoada — a work song from the south of Portugal — as a point of departure for deconstruction, replication, and fragmentation.

Freya Waley-Cohen is a British-American composer living in London. Described as ‘at once intimate and visionary’ (BBC Music Magazine), her music is full of kaleidoscopic colours and patterns anchored around twisting melodic lines, and characterised by contrasts between earthy rhythmic play and fragile luminous spaces, with a sense of the otherworldly. Many of her recent works play with myths, magic and the occult as lenses through which to look at the contemporary world.

Freya’s music has been commissioned and performed by by institutions and ensembles including the LA Philharmonic (cond. John Adams), BBC Proms (cond. Ryan Wigglesworth), Wigmore Hall, San Francisco Symphony (cond. James Gaffigan), London Philharmonic Orchestra (cond. Ed Gardner), Philharmonia Orchestra (cond. Anna-Maria Helsing), The Britten Sinfonia, London Chamber Orchestra (cond. Oliver Zeffman & Christopher Warren-Green), King’s Singers, Manchester Collective, The Hermes Experiment, the Aldeburgh, Presteigne, Santa Fe, and Cheltenham festivals, and released on Signum, Nimbus, Nonclassical, Delphian and NMC records.

Freya was the 2019-20 Associate Composer of the Wigmore Hall, where the 2019 season featured a day of concerts focusing on her music. She is also associate composer of St. David’s Hall’s contemporary music series, Nightmusic. Winner of a 2017 RPS Composition Prize, she held an Open Space Residency at Snape Maltings from 2015-2017 and was 2016-18 Associate Composer of Nonclassical. She is a founding member and artistic director of Listenpony concert series and record label.

While writing Conjure, I was listening a lot to Beethoven’s Op. 109 and 110 - his penultimate and antepenultimate piano sonatas. Various rhythmic patterns and ways of moving from phrase to phrase struck me, and have made their ways into the piece. I was also thinking of the idea of a Séance, and the various meanings of that word: originally from ‘sedere’ - ‘to sit’, also meaning ‘a session’, and most commonly a meeting in which people talk to the dead. In folklore and mythology, the idea of three people facing each other, with their thoughts pointed towards one purpose, brings up images of magic and conjuring. Writing this trio, I started to think of the archetypal magical beings who are represented in threes, three graces, three witches, three muses, three little pigs, three fates, three furies.

(b. 1977):  born and raised in Shanghai, China and currently based in New York City, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, who works at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, musical theater, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise. 

Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker),  Du Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone, won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 2017. In 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow; and in 2019 she was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category. She has been hailed by the New York Times as a groundbreaking artist, was listed by the Washington Post as one of their Top 35 female composers, and selected by Rolling Stone Italia in their decade review as one of the composers who defined the 2010’s. Known as chameleonic in her protean artistic outputs, Du Yun’s works are championed by some of today’s finest performing artists, ensembles, orchestras, museums, and organizations around the world. Her albums Dinosaur Scar and Angel’s Bone were named in the New Yorker’s list of Top 10 Albums of the Year in 2018 and 2017, respectively.

At first glance, the one predictable thing about Du Yun, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and multimedia artist, is her unpredictability. Dig deeper, though, and you can sense the conjoined strands of curiosity and compassion that run through everything she makes.

An avid performer, she has appeared in many assorted holes and halls, sites and museums. Her onstage persona has been described by the New York Times as “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge.” As a performance artist, engagements include the 2012 Guangzhou Art Triennial (Guangzhou Opera House, China),the 2018 Lahore Biennial (Pakistan), the National Academy Museum (USA), the inaugural Shanghai Project (China), and Contemporary Arts Center Córdoba (Spain). Her ongoing collaborations with Pakistani-American visual artist Shahzia Sikander have shown around the world, including the Popular Award at the Karachi Biennial, and are permanent collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Du Yun also leads her band Ok Miss, which exists as both rock band and chamber ensemble—from post-punk, metal,  to trip-hop, from electronica to improvisation—all while fostering all that exists in-between. 

Du Yun’s works…are elaborately theatrical, full of collaborations with visual and performance artists and bursting with virtuosic extended techniques. It makes sense that a musician so keen on multimedia approaches would identify a broad range of cultural influences on her style.

As a featured composer, selected commissions and venues: LA Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Carnegie Hall, London Southbank Centre, Kennedy Center, Whitney Museum, Baltimore Symphony, Festival d’Avignon, Ultima Norway, Salle Playel Paris, Darmstadt, Musica Nova Helsinki, Lincoln Center, RedCat, Kimmel Center, Cabrillo Festival, Detroit Symphony, Shanghai Symphony, Shanghai Opera Orchestra, Beijing Music Festival, Hong Kong New Vision Festival, Mann Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), Trinity Wall Street, Beth Morrison Projects, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Salzburg Aspekte Festival, the Bolshoi Orchestra (Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow), and BAM NextWave.

Du Yun’s  theatre credits include original music for Kung Fu (by David Henry Hwang); and Dim Sum Warriors (by Yenyen Woo and Colin Goh), which in 2018 toured to 25 major cities in China. 

An alumna of Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Oberlin College (BM), and Harvard University (MA, PhD), Du Yun is currently Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

As a curator and activist for new music and art, she was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE); served as the Artistic Director of MATA Festival (2014-2018); conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival (inaugurated at National Sawdust); and founded an ongoing multi-year FutureTradition Initiative in China where she works with folk musicians from around the world in order to champion more cross-regional collaborations. Future curatorial engagements include the LA Phil Green Umbrella Series (April 2020), Göteborg Art Sounds Festival (Sweden, Oct 2020), the centennial edition at the Donaueschingen Festival (Germany, Oct 2021),  and an article in OnCurating,edited by Rob Young. In 2018 Du Yun was named one of 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation, and in 2019 the Beijing Music Festival named her “Artist of the Year.”

Du Yun’s staged and concert works are exclusively published by G. Schirmer. For scores, please contact G. Schirmer Promotion. 

i am my own achilles heel, 
a form that would never shape.

I am always fascinated by a fantastical world that lies in a reality,  a liminal state that lies at the edge of half fantastical, half hallucination. Years go by,  I am told this could be a condition and there is a term for this condition: it is the world of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.

According to the medical journal, although the cause of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is unknown, the condition typically accompanies episodes of migraines. Affected individuals report feeling that different parts of their body are disproportionate in size and proximity and that their overall surroundings are “warped.” Specifically, these patients perceive objects as larger or smaller than they really are, thereby earning the syndrome its characteristic name. 

There are many parts of the world, mental health is still considered as a taboo in the society. To share a piece of music is to say, we might all have fascinations, some real some really out there, you and I, us without them. Let’s share, let’s talk about it, let’s help each other out. 

I am here for you, and you will I.