The Mizzou New Music Ensemble’s first performance of 2017 will include music from a visiting guest composer, new works written by a longtime faculty member and a Mizzou student, and a sneak preview of this summer’s Mizzou International Composers Festival.
The concert is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Monday, February 27 at Whitmore Recital Hall on the University of Missouri campus. General admission is $5 for the public, free for Mizzou faculty, students and staff.
Visiting the Mizzou campus for a guest composer residency that weekend will be Don Freund, professor of composition at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and the father of University of Missouri professor and Mizzou New Music Initiative artistic director Stefan Freund. The Ensemble will perform the elder Freund’s 2013 work “Mixed Blood,” which combines Latin rhythms and a tango tune with sounds and structures of American contemporary art music.
The program also will feature “Their Rest Too is Related to Motion,” a new composition from W. Thomas “Tom” McKenney, professor emeritus and co-artistic director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative. Inspired by a piece of music that his daughter wrote for him while she was in grade school, McKenney adapted and expanded the tune’s basic musical elements into three movements, evoking the motions of ladybugs, whirligigs, and fireflies.
Mizzou’s student composers will be represented by Hans Heruth, a sophomore composition major and Sinquefield Scholar whose new work “To Decipher the Art” is a musical setting of a poem by Lee K. Acton. The piece was written especially for baritone Patrick Graham, who will perform it as a guest with the Ensemble.
Music from the two distinguished guest composers for this summer’s Mizzou International Composers Festival will complete the program.
Georg Friedrich Haas’ composition “aus freier Lust…verbunden” (“Bound … of free will”) is one of a series of works from 1996 in which each of the seven instrumental parts is simultaneously a solo piece, so that it can be played by any combination from solo performer to full ensemble. (The Ensemble will perform it as a quintet, using bass flute, bass clarinet, cello, and two percussionists.) Haas is a native of Austria and a professor of composition at Columbia University who is considered to be one of the major European composers of his generation.
Dan Visconti’s “Fractured Jams” is a “high modernist” work for violin, cello, clarinet, and percussion that was composed in 2007 and features the use of extended techniques. Visconti is a Chicago-based composer and concert programmer who also is known as an advocate for the arts as a form of cultural and civic service.
The seven-member Mizzou New Music Ensemble is made up of University of Missouri graduate students under the direction of Stefan Freund, a cellist, composer, professor of composition, and artistic director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative. The Ensemble’s members for the 2016-17 season are Victoria Hargrove, clarinet; Daniel Keeler, cello; Kelariz Keshavarz, flute; Renan Leme, violin; Rebecca McDaniel, percussion; Gyumi Rha, piano; and Panagiotis Skyftas, saxophone.