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[00:00:00]
Jason Croft: Good evening from Urbana and the University of Illinois, it's Prairie Performances. WILL's weekly show presenting classical and jazz from the heart of the prairie in central Illinois. Prairie Performances is made possible in part by funding from the John Frayne Graduate Student Classical Music Work Experience Endowment.

[00:00:28]
Mel Miller: Good evening and welcome to Prairie Performances. I'm your host, Mel Miller. On tonight's episode, it's the University of Illinois' new music festival. Currently in its 2nd year, the new music festival was started by associate professor of percussion at the School of Music, Josh Graham, with the goal of bringing more new music from living composers to Urbana-Champaign. Here's Josh Graham to tell you more.

[00:00:54]
Josh Graham: Well, when I arrived here, this is my 3rd year teaching at the University of Illinois, I was surprised that we didn't have kind of a standing new music festival. We have something called the Martorano Award which honors Sal Martorano, who is a longstanding composition professor here. That's a great way to bring in young composers and kind of highlight some of the talent in the field, but we didn't have a way that we were bringing in more opportunities for our faculty, for our students, for guests to be engaging with some of the great voices of today. And especially at a school like Illinois where we have multiple Pulitzer Prize winning composers who graduate from our program, we have two of the composition faculty at Princeton University are graduates of our program right now, you know, we have just such a lineage and a history of composition and new music here it felt odd to me that we didn't have that. So I, I wanted to find a way for more of our faculty, our students, for the community to engage with new music in a regular and standing way and not just the kind of one-off opportunities that we might have from bringing in a composer every now and then.

The first consideration of this was last year and we brought in an Irish composer named Donnacha Dennehy. Uh, Donnacha is a graduate of the University of Illinois and teaches at Princeton University right now, and he's become a friend of mine and he wrote a piece for my violin clarinet percussion trio F-PLUS, and we got a grant from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress for him to write us this piece. And it felt like an opportunity for us to bring back someone from Champaign in a way, you know, originally from Ireland, obviously, but spent a lot of time here and a lot of formative time here. A chance for us to bring Donnacha back to a place that meant a lot to him, to premiere a new piece by him and then get a lot of students and faculty also engaging with him while he was here. And we had just such a great week with him when he was here last year.

It felt like an opportunity for us to kind of keep building on the festival and thinking, how do we continue to grow this and how do we highlight voices from the university, but also across the state. So the focus of the new music festival is generally, and I, I don't think of this as a hard and fast rule, but that we're going to have this primarily focused on composers who are graduates of the University of Illinois or reside in the state of Illinois or have roots or ties to the state of Illinois. So that we're we're kind of keeping it focused for the most part on folks who have some sort of connection with our state or our community. If there was the right composer who who we want to bring in, we'll break the rule for sure. But I think that's kind of our starting point for the festival.

[00:03:26]
Mel Miller: As Josh Graham mentioned, last year's new music festival brought Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy to his old stomping grounds in Urbana-Champaign, where Graham's trio F-PLUS performed one of his original compositions titled Moire. You can hear that performance up next here on Prairie Performances.



If you're just now joining us, that was Moire by Donnacha Dennehy as performed by F-PLUS at last year's annual new music festival.

This year, the new music festival is bringing in two composers with ties to the University of Illinois. One of those is London-based American composer Arlene Sierra. What's Sierra's connection to Urbana-Champaign? Associate professor of percussion Josh Graham can tell you more.

[00:20:56]
Josh Graham: Arlene Sierra is a U.S. composer based in London. She teaches at the University of Cardiff and she is part of an exchange program that we have between the University of Cardiff and University of Illinois. You know, in the past we've had some of our faculty work with the faculty there and and this exchange program has done some really great things. So our bassoon professor Ben Roidl-Ward had reached out to Arlene about this possibility of collaborating on something, and they decided on a piece for bassoon and string quartet. So they're going to give the U.S. premiere of Arlene's work at the Krannert Center on Tuesday, October 20th, which is going to be really exciting. We're going to hear a variety of works by Arlene on the other two programs as well performed by a mix of faculty and students.

[00:21:45]
Mel Miller: If you're not yet familiar with Sierra's music, a considerable number of her compositions are inspired by nature, in particular birds and insects. First up is a live recording of Urban Birds performed here by Sarah Nichols, Xenia Pestova, Kathleen Supove, and Jose Miguel Fernandez. After that, Thermometer Cricket as performed by Sarah Cahill on piano. That's coming up next here on Prairie Performances.



Arlene Sierra's Thermometer Cricket with Sarah Cahill on piano. Before that, Urban Birds, also by Arlene Sierra.

You're listening to Prairie Performances. I'm your host, Mel Miller. Tonight's episode is all about the University of Illinois upcoming new music festival. Arlene Sierra is one of the guest artists this year. The other composer whose work you'll hear performed is Shulamit Ran, a faculty member at the University of Chicago's Department of Music. Ron's new composition Quadrophony for solo marimba will be performed at the upcoming festival by percussionist Josh Graham, who worked closely with Ran during the composition process. You'll hear Graham talk more on that later in the hour. But first, here's the Jupiter String Quartet performing Ran's 3rd string quartet, Glitter, Doom, Shards Memory here on Prairie Performances.



Glitter Doom Shards Memory by Shulamit Ran as performed by the Jupiter String Quartet. You can hear them perform that piece at the upcoming new music festival at the University of Illinois. Shulamit Ran will also be giving a Q&A session on October 19th from 4 to 5 p.m. at the Music and Performing Arts library. That event is free and open to the public and a good opportunity to interact with the composer herself.

You're listening to Prairie Performances. I'm your host, Mel Miller. In addition to Ran's 3rd string quartet, the new music festival will also include a performance of her new work, Quadrophony for Solo marimba. This is Ran's first composition for marimba. In writing it, she worked closely with Josh Graham, an associate professor of percussion at the University of Illinois, as well as the founder of the new music festival. Here's Josh Graham now speaking on how this collaboration came to be.

[00:46:28]
Josh Graham: The way this came about was that I had been doing some collaborations with Shulamit colleague Marta Ptaszynska who was professor of composition along with her at the University of Chicago. Shulamit came to some of these concerts of Marta's work that I was doing, and we got to know each other that way, and I half jokingly told her, you know, the world would be a better place if you wrote a marimba solo, and she kind of batted me away like, oh, ha ha ha. And I kept kind of gently pestering her over time, saying, you know, it'd be amazing if you would be interested in writing a solo work, and she told me, you know, I've never written for solo guitar or solo marimba because I just feel like those are instruments you have to play to really know how to write well for them. And I didn't take that as an acceptable answer. And I kept saying, well, I think, you know, why don't I send you some pieces you can check out and some recordings and things like that. Uh, and eventually she was like, you know what, I think I do want to write this piece. And so we got a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, which funded the commission and also the recording of the work, which was very generous of the Arts Council.

It was maybe the most collaborative process I've had with a composer, and I've, I've worked with a lot of composers over a lot of years. It was just so much fun because Shulamit didn't feel like she understood the soul of the marimba. We were talking about this a few weeks ago. You know, when she had written other solo works for instruments, she felt like she kind of knew how to write for the flute or she knew how to write for the clarinet, you know, she knew kind of how that instrument sounded in all its ranges and how it felt in all those spots and how she could use it well. She didn't have that sense with the marimba, and so I sent her recordings that I thought were really stand out of some of the pieces I really admired for the instrument. I sent her some of the works that are most important for our instrument, Velocities by Joseph Schwantner, Reflections on the Nature of Water by Jacob Druckman, a whole other list of works. And along with those scores and those recordings, she said that she didn't really learn what she wanted to write or how to write for it, but technically how she might kind of put it on the page. And so she would send me kind of, you know, bits and bobs of music, and I would record them for her in my office and just send them back to her so she could have kind of a reference point.

And the first thing she sent me was actually what became the third movement, Speedometry. And there were some things that were technically not possible and then she kind of adjusted them and then said, OK, I think this is the beginning of something, but this is not quite where I want to start. So she shelved that for a second and then she stopped herself and she said, what if I just wrote for a single line melodic instrument the way I would normally want to write for it? What would that sound like on this instrument? And that's how the first movement started. Um, she initially titled it My Marimba because she was trying to think, how do I write for this instrument? And that eventually became Linearality, the first movement. And then because we had that very linear sort of first movement, she wanted to explore what would it be like if we had a very chordal second movement, you know, where the focus of this is maybe harmony instead of these longer lines. And that's where we got the second movement, Verticality.

Then she took back up what she had at the very beginning that she wrote for me, uh, and she titled that Speedometry, and she wanted something — she said that was a very kind of shimmering, uh, virtuosic, but you know, very focused on kind of this dancing quality of the instrument, very fast and sprightly. And then the final movement WrapAround has its own kind of ideas — it uses a bit of a rondo idea that comes back, but then it slowly starts to pull back ideas from all the other movements and we start to hear kind of these ideas come back or wrap around within the final movement. So it's it's a very epic work. It's very rewarding to perform. I'm looking forward to just sharing it more and more. It's um up on YouTube and Apple Music and Spotify now, um, if folks want to check it out.

[00:50:19]
Mel Miller: If you'd like to learn more about the new music festival, Katie Buzard wrote an article on the subject in Clef Notes, which you can read on the Illinois Public Media website at will.illinois.edu/clefnoes. I'll also be linking that article in the web post for this episode. For now, I'll leave you tonight with two movements from Shulamit Ran's Quadrophony for Solo marimba as performed by Josh Graham, Linearity and WrapAround. Thank you so much for listening with me this evening here on Prairie Performances.


Prairie Performances is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm your host, Mel Miller. I hope you'll join me next time.