Zachary Detrick is an eleven-year-old with some really big ideas. His "Fanfare from Symphony No. 7" premiered at Kaufman Center in New York City when he was only four (arranged for trumpet ensemble and chimes by his father). Since then, he taught himself music notation software and began composing prodigiously on the computer. He won the citywide Music Memory Competition in 2009, studies piano with Andrea Hough, and plans to attend the Special Music School, PS 859, in the fall.

For two years, Zachary has also participated in Youth Works, our after-school program at Public School 11 in Manhattan. Through this program, he had the opportunity to work with Metropolis composer fellows Ryan Francis, Cristina Spinei, and Ray Lustig. Now Zachary is collaborating with our newest fellow, Brad Balliett, and they've become quite the pair:

"Zachary and I have been working together for about two months now, and I'm constantly surprised by his imagination and facility. We discovered that we had a lot in common. For one, a love of Stockhausen, which is so rare that I often find our lessons veering off into conversations about Samstag or Tierkreis. There aren't many with whom I can discuss these great pieces!

Brad is part of The Academy (or Ensemble ACJW), a unique fellowship program at Carnegie Hall that works in NYC schools and performs around the city. As head of the programming committee, Brad suggested young Zachary's work as an example of a new generation of composers.

As a result, Ensemble ACJW will present a special live performance on April 26 (7pm) at the Upper West Side Apple Store (Broadway at West 68th Street), part of the store's ongoing artistic partnership with Juilliard. The performance will feature the world premiere of Zachary's "Five Duets for Flute and Bassoon" (with flautist Julietta Curenton and bassoonist Brad Balliett) alongside some stalwarts of the classical world, including Stravinsky, Ligeti, Wolf, and Shoenfeld. RSVP here...

"Five Duets for Flute and Bassoon" gives a nod to Bartok and Stravinsky and tackles some compositional problems posed by Zachary's teacher, Daniel Ott, with some compelling results. For example, in the first piece, the flute plays only "white key notes" and the bassoon only the "black key notes" leading to a surprising sound. Other contrasts - such as staccato (short) and legato (smooth) playing - and clever solutions - including a scale of Zachary's own devising - abound in each duet.

Here's a short excerpt from the fourth duet:


But it doesn't stop there. Elementary students at Zachary's school, PS 11, will be in for a treat on June 8 when Metropolis Ensemble presents the annual end-of-year Youth Works concert that showcases students' work in collaboration with Brad. One of those pieces will be a new work from Zachary inspired by Alice in Wonderland, specifically the Mad Tea-Party scene.

Originally, Zachary was working on a full opera of the famous Lewis Carroll story, but he's put that project on hold to focus on the Metropolis project. Brad and Zachary are meeting regularly to prepare the final piece for the concert: "Each week I visit, he's added a new and delightfully unique piece of the total picture," says Brad. "I, for one, can't wait to hear the final product when we perform it at his school."

As Brad can attest, we are looking forward to more of Zachary's big ideas: "I'm proud to be among the first to present music by our next emerging American composer!"

Labels: bradballiett, composerseries, youthworks, zacharydetrick

This post was written by Timo Andres, one of Metropolis Ensemble's featured composers in Spring 2010, for the upcoming Reverb concerts at (Le) Poisson Rouge.



There's a long tradition of composers finding inspiration in Balinese music, from Poulenc and Britten to Evan Ziporyn and Ingram Marshall. A trip to Bali was also the genesis of Vivian Fung's piano concerto, subtitled Dreamscapes. She traveled there in the summer of 2008 to study traditional music and dance, play in a gamelan orchestra, and indulge her voracious appetite for Asian folk music of all kinds. But don't call her an ethnomusicologist: "I'm less concerned with replicating anything akin to an exact version of these works than with the way I have internalized the shimmering harmonies and interlocking rhythms of their traditions into my own original voice."

I asked Vivian about formulating a voice, which she says is one of the most difficult aspects of a composer's development. Growing up in Edmonton, Alberta and later studying at Juilliard, she was steeped in the canon of Western 20th-century music: Stravinsky, Debussy, Schonberg. It was not until she reached her mid-twenties, at the urging of a friend, that she undertook a comprehensive exploration of Chinese art and music, which also became an important method of self-discovery. Her listening soon widened to the music of other Asian countries. Eventually she found something which she'd felt had been missing from her "musical vernacular" all along: a connection to her ethnic roots.

The origins of her musical material were not a primary concern when Vivian conceived of Dreamscapes; rather, she turned first to her Western models to see how they structured and developed their materials (planning ahead, she says, is key). She ended up with less a traditional piano concerto than a series of vignettes. Each paints a unique sonic portrait, like a travelogue. To this end, the musicians sometimes become foley artists, calling upon a pile of toys and effects: a chorus of bird whistles (purchased from a street vendor in Ho Chi Minh City), a piano "prepared" to imitate the sound of a gamelan orchestra, and, at the end, musical use of a familiar household object which Vivian intends to keep a surprise.

Dreamscapes is scored in bold and brilliant colors, and never settles in one place for too long. Like a tourist's first visit to an unfamiliar city, there's a sense of needing to cover a lot of ground, take in a great many sights, try unrecognizable foods, and somehow have it all take on personal meaning. Vivian writes that "the sounds of Bali haunt my dreams... getting up in the early morning and seeing the morning mist covering the rice paddies [and] hearing a symphony of birds, some of which actually chirp in a gamelan-like rhythm. Occasionally, one also hears frogs and cicadas. Those moments I have remembered and are the inspiration of the opening of the concerto."

Labels: composerseries, reverb, timoandres, vivianfung

This post was written by Timo Andres, one of Metropolis Ensemble's featured composers in Spring 2010, for the upcoming Reverb concerts at (Le) Poisson Rouge.



The title of this concert, Reverb, seems especially meaningful to composer Jakub Ciupinski. "I absolutely love churches for their long reverb. Very often in my music I use a thin, hocket-like texture full of single, short notes that almost never overlap. Harmonic structures can only emerge through reverb or the listener's memory." Jakub favorite musical space is an abandoned salt mine near Cracow, in his native Poland, where "irregular shapes create the most smooth and perfect reverb I've ever heard."

Le Poisson Rouge is also underground, but seems better suited toward one of Jakub's other obsessions: electronics. Many of his recent works are written for acoustic instruments augmented and supported by electronic textures ("like the back row of an orchestra"). His approach to writing this kind of music is architectural, focusing on soundscapes, timescales, and overall continuum rather than the details of a notated score.

Electronica provides more than just a backing track - it also informs content and structure. Jakub's music is built on "loops": short musical phrases that repeat, layer, and evolve - and, like electronic dance music, it often has a very strong groove. This tended to be a source of discord with his composition teachers when he was studying at Juilliard. "For traditionally-oriented composers, having a regular 'beat' seems too casual, [like a] profanation of high art." On the other hand, he appreciates New York's artistic pragmatism, which is refreshing. In Poland, he says, artists are more appreciated for being "original and sometimes weird."

Jakub's art testifies to his easygoing demeanor. He's been straddling musical cultures for several years now, and perhaps realizes it's just as well not quite fitting into any of them. Instead, he strives for "acoustic experiences. I try not to think or analyze." That's not to say he has no time for craft; quite the contrary. "Writing quasi-minimal music... is about finding these little unique jewels with potential so great that even after many repetitions they sound equally fresh... they can resist the destructive power of time."

Labels: composerseries, jakubciupinski, reverb, timoandres

With four completely different voices, the composers in our fall concert, REVERB, have summed up their thoughts on what new music can express. Here's some excerpts from the program notes.

Erin Gee:

The music seeks an experiential non-language, containing the virtuosity of a native speaker.

Vivian Fung:

I am not an ethnomusicologist and am less concerned with replicating anything akin to an exact version of these works than with the way I have internalized the shimmering harmonies and interlocking rhythms of their traditions into my own original voice.

Cristina Spinei:

My interest in integrating percussion with orchestra comes from varying sources, each stemming from dance. I constantly immersed myself in sounds that shared one common principal: rhythm as the driving force of music that inspires and compels movement.

Jakub Ciupinski:

Avant garde composers were trying to find new solutions by rejecting the past. They were really trying to find something new. Whereas our generation is trying to find something new by incorporating elements that already existed. So this is an entirely new philosophy.

And some parting thoughts from Metropolis Ensemble Music Director Andrew Cyr on his curation of this concert of commissions and premieres:

In getting to know these composers and the nuances of their compositional styles in the process of developing these new commissions, I realized over time that they shared something in common that I found to be artistically fascinating and vital: an open and deep curiosity for exploring diverse source material and developing new and highly individual systems of compositional techniques to absorb these modes of representation.

Read more in the program notes...

Labels: andrewcyr, composerseries, cristinaspinei, eringee, jakubciupinski, reverb, vivianfung

To celebrate our upcoming concert, New Music 101: Intro to Electronica, Metropolis Ensemble and composer Jakub Ciupinski are delighted to offer the mp3 of an inspiring electro-acoustic work by Jakub. "The Architect's Brother" premiered in 2006 at the Juilliard School's Peter Jay Sharp Theatre accompanying the choreography of Adam Weinert. You can download it here, absolutely free, for a limited time.

The Architect's Brother as performed by Vassilis Varvaresos (piano), Marko Pavlovic (celesta), Rachel Brandwein (harp), and Eugene Lifschitz (cello).

• Download the mp3...

(right-click to download the mp3s, ctrl-click on a mac)

Labels: composerseries, jakubciupinski, newmusic101

The Groanbox Boys released their new album Gran Bwa at Metropolis Ensemble's concert, GROANBOX on January 28, 2009 at Le Poisson Rouge. The worldwide CD release party for Gran Bwa followed intermission at the concert, with a special performance by The Groanbox Boys. Get the album today on iTunes and CD Baby.

Gran Bwa is named after the Haitian Vodou loa (spirit) of the woods. Creole for great wood (from the French grand bois), Gran Bwa is the great spirit who resides deep in the woods and is associated with the gateway between the spirit world and the living world, the management of time, and medicinal healing. Read more...

Looking for more of The Groanbox Boys? The trio invites you to a special concert at Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn, on January 24 (10:30pm, $10 cover). Check out their official site, MySpace, and YouTube.

Labels: composerseries, groanbox, groanboxboys, michaelwardbergeman

Composer David Bruce shares insights about his new work, Groanbox, featuring Michael Ward-Bergeman on accordion, The Groanbox Boys, and the Metropolis Ensemble:

As a composer whose music has long incorporated folk elements, it has been an incredibly exciting challenge to write a piece for these two groups of outstanding musicians. I titled my piece simply Groanbox, (itself an old American term for the accordion), and wrote a piece which is not at all like a traditional 'concerto', but rather a piece in which the two groups merge as one, along with the two styles of music. I suppose it's a sort of imaginary folk-music I'm writing, played by the largest and most virtuoso village band you've ever seen. Read more...

This past year, David introduced A Bird In Your Ear, a new opera based on an old Russian folk tale originally published in 1903 called "The Language of the Birds," which received its world premiere in March 2008. In this scene below, a Bird with Golden Plumage (soprano Yulia Van Doren) arrives to thank Ivan (tenor Sungeun Lee) for saving her children. She offers to grant him a wish, and so he asks to understand the language of the birds.



You can watch more from this performance of A Bird in Your Ear by Bard College Orchestra and Choir conducted by James Bagwell, and learn more about the work. The opera will also be presented at the NYC Opera VOX Festival on May 1-2, 2009.

Looking for more from David Bruce? Carnegie Hall is featuring his commissioned work Piosenki, which is available as a free download. The work reflects on snapshots of childhood found in the poems of the Polish poet Julian Tuwim, and features a lagerphone similar to the Freedom Boot used by The Groanbox Boys in their upcoming concert with Metropolis Ensemble on January 28, 2009.

Labels: composerseries, davidbruce, groanbox

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan talks about his new piano concerto, the featured work in Metropolis Ensemble's upcoming concert Loop.

Composed concurrently to his Piano Etudes, Ryan Francis's Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra brings together two creative directions that he has been pursuing in his music. One is a post-minimalistic style driven by rhythmic relationships within a simple, diatonic harmonic scheme, exemplified by Remix for violin and piano. Straights of Anian represents the other, post-spectralist style, evoked through coloristic texture and less concerned with metric rhythm. In the Concerto, the solo piano and chamber ensemble engage in an intimate and dynamic dialogue, as in Luciano Berio's Points on the Curve to Find.



Music credits: Luciano Berio, Concerto II (Echoing Curves), Andre Lucchesini piano, Luciano Berio, London Symphony Orchestra; Red Seal; B000003GAZ. Ryan Francis, Remix, Wayne Lee violin, Daniel Spiegel piano. Ryan Francis, Straights of Anian, Pacific Orchestra. Ryan Francis, Digital Sustain for Piano, (MIDI rendering). Special thanks to Ania Dabrowski.

Labels: composerseries, loop, ryanfrancis

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan discusses his new piano etudes, featured in Metropolis Ensemble's upcoming concert Digital Sustain.

Since Frédéric Chopin, the genre of piano etudes transformed from their intention as studies towards improving one's pianism to unfettered exemplars of imagination and virtuosity that pushed piano technique to the limits. In the last century, Conlon Nancarrow removed the performer from the form, composing the first pre-electronic pieces for player piano that are physically impossible for any human to perform. Ryan has used the current version of piano player rolls – MIDI maps – to expand human piano technique in his etudes.



Music credits: Frédéric Chopin, Etude #1 in C, Op. 10, Maurizio Pollini piano; Deutsche Grammophon: B000001G5H. Ryan Francis, "Digitial Sustain" for Piano, (MIDI rendering). Conlon Nancarrow's Etude No. 1; player piano. Ryan Francis, "Harlequin" for Piano, (MIDI rendering). Special thanks to Ania Dabrowski.

Labels: composerseries, digitalsustain, ryanfrancis

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan talks with Metropolis Ensemble's Artistic Director, Andrew Cyr, about his compositional background.

Conceptual inspiration abounds in the music of composer Ryan Francis. Although Maurice Ravel and Gyorgi Ligeti are not two names you normally hear uttered in the same breath together both share an intellectual playfulness and compositional intrepidity that Ryan identifies with.

An example of Ryan's playfulness and engagement with new materials and ideas is his orchestral White Deep Blue, which opens with an exact acoustical rearrangement of the '90s electronic hit Pearl's Girl by Underworld and continues into his own compositional flourish.

The visual arts also translate into Ryan's music on both abstract and more literal levels – one example being the reinterpretation of Joan Miro's canvas Woman Bird and Star into an eponymous musical piece.



Music credits: Maurice Ravel, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé "Soupir", Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Nonesuch: B000005J0T. Gyorgy Ligeti, Violin Concerto, InterContemporain Ensemble, Saschko Gawriloff, violin, Pierre Boulez conductor; Deutsche Grammophon: B000001GLN. Underworld, "Pearl's Girl"; Tvt: B000003RJN. Ryan Francis "White Deep Blue", The Juilliard Orchestra. Ryan Francis "Woman Bird and Star", The Juilliard Orchestra. Special thanks to Ania Dabrowski.

Labels: composerseries, digitalsustain, ryanfrancis

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan offers his thoughts on his new Piano Concerto, the featured work in Metropolis Ensemble's spring concert, Loop.

This concerto feels like an arrival point for me artistically that has been in the works for the past four years. I've been exploring a lot of seemingly (to me, at least) disparate musical concepts, but this concerto is the crucible in which I'm forging them all together. On the one hand, I've written a good deal of music that deals more with textural as opposed to 'metric' rhythms, and I also have a parallel string of pieces that are concerned with electronic influence on acoustic music, which are much more metrically complex, while retaining more harmonic clarity.

My interest in electronics has influenced the concerto on both an aural level and a process level. While the concerto's orchestration is often designed to create 'electronic' tambors, I also decided to forego my traditional paper-and-pencil-exclusively method of composing, in favor of working with MIDI maps.

This new method of working allowed me to explore and develop textures that I probably would have never discovered were I simply working with my hands on a keyboard, and this influenced the soloist's part in particular. I would write with grids, unconcerned with playability, and would then transcribe them into mensural notation and revise and revise until they were completely idiomatic. The result has been that the piano writing is often utterly different than my previous work, which was my goal.

Each of the movements were developed out of piano etudes that I have been writing for the past year, and the form of each movement reflects the same sort of obsessive quality of an etude, although I allowed myself to be a little more expansive as well; this is a concerto, after all!

• The first movement could almost be a chorale, were it not for the sharp syncopated disjunctive melodic contours that cut through the texture.


• The second movement is a sort of musical jacob's ladder; constantly rising musical gestures that are also continuously falling.


• The third movement is more about color than the others, and less rhythmically driving as well, although there is a gentle repeated note pulse that runs through much of the movement.


• The final movement is comprised of two basic layers: a light, distant textural one, and a foreground built on constantly evolving loops of material.

Labels: composerseries, loop, ryanfrancis

Metropolis Ensemble commissioned a new arrangement for chamber orchestra of Erik Satie's Sports et Divertissements from London-based composer David Bruce for our spring concert Loop.

Sports et Divertissements was originally written for piano and narrator in 1914 as a multi-media project of sorts. Satie provided piano music to drawings made by Charles Martin, a French illustrator from the Beaux Arts and Art Deco traditions. First published and performed in the early 1920s, Satie's twenty brilliant thumbnails sketches illuminate Martin's drawings with whimsical verbal and musical images of outdoor sports and amusements.

David Bruce offers his thoughts on creating a chamber orchestra arrangement:

Satie's Sports et Divertissements presents itself in such a deliberately humble, almost self-depricating manner that it's easy to overlook the quality of Satie's inventiveness. Indeed, I think I only really appreciated the true depth and subtlety of Satie's art once I began the process or orchestration.

From the instruments available, I tried to pick an orchestral palette which resonated with the subject matter of the individual pieces, (ranging as it does from circus clowns to and octopus in its cave) and in doing felt a sense of polishing up a tiny gem to reveal an extraordinary richness and strangeness. The tiniest of fragments which might whizz past in the piano piece and which might seem unremarkable, suddenly jumped into life... its true significance seeming stronger than ever.

Most notable were a wealth of connections with Satie's Parisian contemporaries, particularly Debussy and Stravinsky... connections which had only been marginally apparent to me in listening to the piano version. What we now think of as a Stravinskian orchestral sound is particularly evident in the pieces that evoke the circus or the comedia del'arte characters - the combination of 'earthy' circus music sounds with the particular kinds of harmony and repetitive patterns Satie uses bring out the Stravinsky connection especially strongly - and makes one reconsider the extent of the influence Satie exerted on the great Russian composer.

More about Erik Satie...

Labels: composerseries, davidbruce, eriksatie, loop

This is part of our composer series on Avner Dorman.

Inspiration has many names. Avner Dorman's inspiration for his Concerto in A first came from Bach's Harpsichord Concerto No. 4 in A Major (BWV 1055). In 1995 while serving in the Israeli army, he heard the Bach performed on the radio. "I found the bright sound of the violins doubling the piano's top line very exciting, and then and there I improvised the opening tutti."

Avner takes us on a journey through the composition of his concerto: from Bartok and Ravel to jazz, rock, and Israeli horahs.



The second movement of the concerto features a long A-flat major seventh chord, influenced by avant-garde musicians including minimalist Brian Eno, jazz great Keith Jarrett, and Velvet Underground's John Cale.

Some of Avner's more novel devices appear in the third movement. He borrows techniques for the violin and harmonic progressions from The Police and Nina Simone. "I got even more ecstatic about the piece when I realized that using the traditional harmonic vocabulary enables me to effortlessly integrate jazz, pop, and rock elements into the piece."



Music credits: Dorman's Concerto in A performed by the Metropolis Ensemble featuring Eliran Avni on piano, Andrew Cyr conducting. Bach's Concerto in A performed by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra featuring Glenn Gould on piano, Leonard Bernstein conducting.

Labels: avnerdorman, composerseries, onrecord

We're excited to introduce you to renowned Israeli composer Avner Dorman, whose complete chamber orchestra concerti are featured in Metropolis Ensemble's upcoming fall concert, On Record.

Through a series of recordings, Avner discusses the intimate details of each of his concertos, including his inspiration, important motifs, and some of his personal story along the way. We hope these posts will provide you a unique behind-the-scenes look at this bright young composer, and reveal a creative process that is as surprising and engaging as the works themselves!

Labels: avnerdorman, composerseries, onrecord