The Composers' Alliance presents:

MIVOS quartetOlivia De Prato, violinJoshua Modney, violinVictor Lowrie, violaIsabel Castellvi, cello

Movement André Brégégère

"thou like adamant" John Wykoff

String Quartet No. 2 David Salvage

–intermission–

Quartet Brian Coughlin

Parábasis Roberto Barnard Baca

String Quartet No. 1 Cynthia Lee Wong

The Ph.D./D.M.A. Programs in Music

December 9th, 2009, 7:30 p.m. Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall

Please switch off your cell phones and refrain from taking flash pictures.

Program Notes

"thou like adamant", John Wykoff

"But our old subtile foe so tempteth meThat not one hour myself I can sustain.Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart." – John Donne (From Holy Sonnets, No.1)

Quartet (1996), Brian Coughlin

This short one-movement string quartet, one of my very first compositions, was sketched during my senior year as an undergraduate at Williams College and completed the following year for a performance by the Penderecki Quartet at the Oregon Bach Festival. As with many works from my early student days, the piece pays homage to the quartets of my major influences at the time, particularly Bartok and Debussy. An opening gesture, an aggressive whole-tone triplet motive, and a gypsy-tinged melody are gradually developed and elaborated, eventually culminating in a slow Barber-esque fugato on a tonal version of the main theme. Among the various emulations of early 20th-century masters, the seeds of my more recent work can still be heard, particularly in the development sections in which the quartet turns the theme into something similar to a drum groove, and in the expressive, tonal fugato section near the end.

String Quartet No. 1, Cynthia Lee Wong

I began sketching the Quartet as early as January 2009 and finished a complete draft in May. Among the preliminary sketches were a slow, middle-section fragment, a bold opening idea, and a smattering of fast, playful passages. As is often the case during the early stages of the process, I heard several ideas at once and later untangled and organized them. The form of this 12-minute, one-movement work can be interpreted as a fast-slow-fast structure, with a quick fugato in the middle.

As I have already experimented in previous compositions with highly complex and colorful orchestrations and textures, I decided to concentrate more on mastering core elements and less on expanding my palette of distinct, disparate surface sonorities. The compositional goal for the Quartet was simply to create a piece which incorporates a clear sense of direction and which maintains a high level of intensity from the beginning to the end. The piece also expresses my love of traditional string quartet writing and is a study in mastering some of these techniques.

The Quartet was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center and was premiered by the New Fromm Players in August 2009.

Bios

André Brégégère was born in Paris, France, in 1975. In 2002, he moved to the United States and entered the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied Jazz composition with Ken Pullig and Greg Hopkins—earning his BM in 2005. He joined the Aaron Copland School of Music in 2006, where he studied composition with Bruce Saylor. In 2008, he was awarded the Enhanced Chancelor’s Fellowship from the City University of New York, where he is now working towards his

Ph. D, studying composition with Jeff Nichols. Mr. Brégégère is currently serving as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Queens College.

As a composer, Mr. Brégégère's work has been recognized with several awards, including the George Perle Composition Prize (2008), and the Charles Mingus Composition Award (2005). His works have been performed throughout Boston and New York City by ensembles including Ken Pullig's Jazz Composers Orchestra, Cygnus, New Music Singers, and Second Instrumental Unit, His quartet, Vol de nuit, was featured at the ACA festival in June 2008.

A founding member of Dr. Faustus, Mr. Brégégère has also been involved for the past three years in the organization and promotion of new music concerts in NYC, featuring, among others, David Fulmer, Marc Williams (Second Instrumental Unit); William Anderson; Cynthia Powell (Stonewall Chorale); Tom Palny, David Lisker (Trofeo String Quartet).

John Wykoff is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Described by Tom Manoff of NPR as "a talented and interesting composer...possessing something that cannot be taught: a real gift for melody," Brian Coughlin (1973) has composed for groups ranging from major classical ensembles such as The Eugene Opera, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, The Berkshire Symphony, Cygnus Ensemble, and Basso Bongo, to popular and jazz groups such as the Pacific Rim Gamelan, The Island Breeze Steel Band, and the rock band Oneida. His work has been featured on Minnesota Public Radio, NBC's "The 10! Show," has been used to accompany fashion shows by Vogue Fashion Award-winners Trovata and Philip Lim, and has been performed at major venues throughout the United States including Carnegie Hall, The Lied Center of Kansas, and the Library of Congress. Mark Greenfest of the New Music Connoisseur described a recent portrait concert of Coughlin's music as "like a great Beatles standard. Captivating, but impossible to pin down, Coughlin's music is pleasurable as well as subtle." Recent awards include the 2009 League of Composers/ISCM Award (finalist for "Sextet"), the 2008 Bakersfield Symphony New Directions Composition Competition (winner for the chamber music piece "Sextet"), and the 2008 Long Island Arts Council Composition Competition (winner for the song "America"). Coughlin's trio "Red Weather", commissioned by the Kandinsky Trio with beat boxer Shodekeh, was premiered at the Virginia Tech Artsfusion 2009 Festival in April, and he is currently completing a commission from the Fader/Creviston guitar and saxophone duo.

An accomplished double and electric bassist as well as a composer, Coughlin has performed hundreds of concerts throughout the United States in venues ranging from venerable classical music institutions such as the Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, to prominent jazz venues such as the Saratoga Jazz Festival, to major rock clubs such as Toad's Place in New Haven. He has appeared as a soloist with the Berkshire Symphony, and has premiered over fifty new solo works written for him.

Coughlin is perhaps best known as the director and bassist of the New York new music ensemble, Fireworks (www.fireworksensemble.org). Founded with the goal of creating a single, small ensemble capable of representing the full scope of today's musical diversity, Fireworks combines the talents of eight classically-trained but musically omnivorous young virtuosi who pride themselves on being able to play just about anything, regardless of style, time period, or instrumentation. Since 2000, Coughlin has written extensively for Fireworks, composing or arranging a majority of the ensemble's repertoire, and producing at least one major new project for the group each season. Fireworks burst onto the music scene in 2002 with Coughlin's rock-inspired reinvention of Stravinsky's masterpiece, The Rite of Spring. Called "Brilliant" by CD Baby

and "Brave, skillful and refreshing" by the Berkshire Eagle, the work quickly drew critical attention and diverse, enthusiastic audiences. Since then, the ensemble has developed a national reputation as one of the premiere ensembles of its kind with its acclaimed programs created by Coughlin such as "Dance Mix" (featuring seven hundred years of dance music from around the world and called "the most madly eclectic program of the year" by Alex Ross of the New Yorker), "Cartoon" (celebrating music inspired by and written for classic shorts from the golden age of animation, and hailed as "serious fun of the highest (and funniest) order" by the Topeka Capital-Journal), and its portrait of iconoclast Frank Zappa (including the composer's challenging instrumental rock). In her review of the group's sold-out portrait concert of Frank Zappa in New York, Anne Midgette of the New York Times wrote "Brian Coughlin, Fireworks' director and bass player, produced some hell-for-leather arrangements that the players, now relaxed and grooving, played the heck out of, down to show-stopping solos in "The Purple Lagoon/Approximate." Finally labels did indeed cease to matter: this was just music, and it sounded like music to keep."

Brian holds both a Master of Music degree in Composition from the University of Oregon and a Master of Music degree in Double Bass Performance from the Hartt School, and is currently completing his DMA at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he studies with David Del Tredici. His teachers have included Robert Black and Milt Hinton (bass), and David Kechley, Robert Kyr, and George Tsontakis (composition).

Commissioned twice by musica viva and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Cynthia Lee Wong has received praise for her "shamelessly-beautiful" music as well as her devotion toward "not only the avant-garde audience, but all classical enthusiasts or indeed all music lovers" (Süddeutsche Zeitung). Her music has been performed in Spain, France, Canada, Russia, Bulgaria, Germany, and the United States. Current commissions include works for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival in conjunction with La Jolla Music Society, pianist SooJin Anjou, and the Duo Slaato Reinecke. Past commissions include works for the Tanglewood Music Center, New Juilliard Ensemble, and the Cincinnati College-Conservatory Orchestra. Wong is a graduate of the accelerated Bachelor-Master program at the Juilliard School. She studied composition with Milton Babbitt, David Olan, David Del Tredici, Samuel Adler, and Larry Bell as well as piano with Tatyana Dudochkin, Martin Canin, and Frank Levy. She has taught at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. Currently, Wong is an Enhanced Chancellor's Fellow at the Graduate Center and teaches at Baruch College.

MIVOS quartet is devoted to performing contemporary music. It was founded in 2008 by violinists Olivia De Prato and Joshua Modney, violist Victor Lowrie, and cellist Isabel Castellvi. They met while pursuing a master’s degree at Manhattan School of Music in the Contemporary Performance Program. Since their inception they have performed and premiered works by both young and established composers including Anna Clyne, Juan Calderon, Luke DuBois, Huang Ruo, Tony Conrad and Kirsten Broberg. They have performed at venues such as The Stone, Issue Project Room, the Chelsea Museum for the American Music Center, and the Bretch Forum. They have been collaborating with clarinetist Ned Rothenberg for performances and an upcoming recording on the Tzadik label of his Clarinet Quintet.