Sunday, May 25 2025, at 4:30PM at the DiMenna Center's Cary Hall, Ekmeles performs a program of premieres exploring novel approaches to tuning and pitch in unaccompanied singing.
The world premiere of Catherine Lamb's moveable frames anchors the program. The new work, commissioned by Ekmeles with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, continues the composer's long-standing exploration of the mathematics of harmony through voices. Her work, parallel to that of Ekmeles, has to do with finding the creative tension between the idealized rationality of tuning, and its real-world expression in breath and voice.
The rest of the program consists of New York premieres, tied together by common themes of religious ceremony, and memorials. Joël-François Durand has written Messe à six voix, a missa brevis setting that is focused on the very closest intervals between voices. Unisons pull barely apart to reveal rhythmic beating interference patterns, specifically defined by the composer.
William Dougherty's Memento Mori, Latin for "remember, thou shalt die", sets fragments of the requiem mass and related texts. He has devised a system of cascading glissandi, constantly in motion, where familiar harmonies maintain their identity and integrity, but shift constantly in pitch.
Huck Hodge's matrix matrī takes as its inspiration the composer's loss of his mother, and explores the shifts between incoherence and poetic lucidity that can occur at the end of life. Babbled and childlike phonemes and sparkling textures give way gradually to an enigmatic text, questioning and bridging the gap between pure sound and the metaphorical depth of communication.
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