Flutist Roberta Michel releases Hush, a collection of new works for solo flute and with electronics by Victoria Cheah, Angélica Negrón, Jen Baker, Mert Moralı, and Jane Rigler that are the result of close collaborations. Michel brings her wide ranging virtuosity to all of the pieces, from acrobatic passagework to deep timbral excavation.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 52:45 | |||
| 01 | Red | Red | Roberta Michel, Jane Rigler, electronics | 5:50 |
| 02 | And for you, castles | And for you, castles | Roberta Michel, Victoria Cheah, electronics | 12:07 |
| 03 | The Great Bridge and a Lion’s Gate | The Great Bridge and a Lion’s Gate | Roberta Michel, Jen Baker, electronics | 7:47 |
| 04 | Quintet | Quintet | Roberta Michel, Mert Moralı, electronics | 17:37 |
| 05 | Hush | Hush | Roberta Michel, Angélica Negrón, electronics | 9:24 |
The five pieces on flutist Roberta Michel’s Hush create a dialogue between the different aesthetic forces at play, each expanding the sonic footprint of the instrument in their own way. Jane Rigler and Jen Baker’s solo works celebrate the challenges of conquering limitations on one’s instrument, in this case, through the intricate integration of an extended vocabulary of sounds into an already virtuosic texture. Victoria Cheah and Angélica Negrón’s pieces use the electronic element to create an environment of charged stillness, an opportunity to absorb the vulnerable intricacies of sound and highlight the flute’s innate capacity to shape micro-inflections of pitch, timbre, and shape. Mert Moralı’s electroacoustic work acts as the bridge between those impulses in a way, using the electronic element to create a new sonic world, but one that is dialogic and teleological over its large scale form. Michel tackles the diverse demands of this repertoire with command and sensitivity, matching her curatorial ingenuity with powerful performances.
Jane Rigler’s Red for piccolo is a tour-de-force of activated trills, virtuosic swirling figures, and vocal extended techniques that create a Coltrane-esque wall of sound. Opening with delicate key clicks, Red accumulates steadily, expanding its register through implied, and eventually, timbral counterpoint. The dramatic finale features the voice accompanying a charged high register trill, almost as if the performer is screaming to be released from the confines of the instrument.
Victoria Cheah’s music often explores the rarefied nuances of slow moving textures, mining their subtleties of pitch and timbre for poignant meaning. In And for you, castles for flute and fixed media, we hear the live performer pushing and pulling up against the pitch material in the playback with microtonal variations, fragile multiphonics, and swelled gestures. Cheah examines the elusive nature of sonic stability, establishing a quasi-drone in the electronic part, but resisting resolution through the flute’s elusive figuration.
Jen Baker’s The Great Bridge and a Lion’s Gate captures a state of transition as well as enhanced power and energy. Opening with a driving figure of repeated notes punctuated by vocal sounds and accented flutter tongue sustains, the work transitions to a secondary lyrical section, marked by haunting multiphonics that frame the melodic line like a halo of sound. The texture diffuses into airy breath sounds and delicate syllabic utterances before a heroic melody enters, harmonized by multiphonics in a striking chorale. Baker recalls the perpetual motion of the opening for a dramatic coda, further integrating extended technique vocabulary into the rhythmic fabric, before the work ends with a sotto voce whisper.
Mert Moralı’s Quintet is an ambitious work for bass flute and four loudspeakers that examines spatial and timbral parameters that emerge from the electroacoustic format. As is the tradition with many electroacoustic works, there is an intentional obscuring of the boundary between live human and pre-recorded sound, in this case, the electronic medium includes some unmodified flute timbres which further cloud the distinction. Subtle pitch bending creates a sense of refracted imagery, like a subtly distorting aspect ratio on a screen. Imitation with variation between the live performer and electronics establishes a dialogue between similar but distinct voices — as the piece progresses Moralı stakes out new timbral territory in the electronics through varied processing, drawing a greater distinction between the flute and the playback. In a striking contrast four minutes before the end of the piece, the electronics briefly coalesce into an rhythmically cohesive ensemble unit that establishes a much clearer accompanimental role to Michel’s improvisational solo line. Moralı swiftly deconstructs this duality with spatialized percolating figures that culminate in unison stabs that cycle around the stereo field of the recording. The work’s denouement returns to the slow, elastic lines of the opening before closing on a series of succinct stop tongue articulations.
Angélica Negrón’s title piece for flute and electronics is inspired by plant photographs by Fred Michel, Roberta’s father. The electronics highlight the glow of the attack and sustain of chimes and tactile percussive sounds, while the flute flows inside and above the resonance of the ringing overtones. Negrón establishes structural pillars through a hierarchy of ensemble arrivals. In the work’s middle section, the texture shifts towards a moderate tempo groove featuring an off-kilter microtonal duet between synthesizer and flute over Morse code and wave-like sounds in the electronics. Negrón adds layers to the texture as the flute floats above it with unstable multiphonics, eventually playing a fragile whistle solo while the chimes reenter. Hush ends with five repeated pitches in the flute, a reinforcement of the core of stillness at the heart of the composition.
– Dan Lippel
Recorded at Oktaven Audio on November 14 & 16, 2023
Recording producer: Ryan Streber
Sound engineer: Ryan Streber
Pre-recorded tracks for Moralı: Justin Robinson
Editing, mix and mastering: Ryan Streber
Cover photo: Fred Michel: 64573.01 leaves
Design, layout & typography: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Brooklyn-based flutist Roberta Michel is dedicated to the music of our time. New York Concert Review has praised her “extreme adventurousness,” writing that she, “...riveted with her performance, inspiring one to want a repeated hearing.” She has commissioned and premiered hundreds of new works and has worked with many notable composers of our day. Roberta is the flutist and Co-Director of Wavefield Ensemble and is a member of PinkNoise.
Roberta has also performed with: Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cadillac Moon Ensemble (founding member), SEM Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Ecce Ensemble, Portland String Quartet, Newspeak, Wet Ink Ensemble, Argento, Iktus, Wordless Music Orchestra, Ensemble LPR, and Cygnus Ensemble among others. Recent venues include: Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Alice Tulley Hall, Merkin Hall, The Kennedy Center, Roulette, Issue Project Room, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She can be heard on New Focus, Chandos, Innova, Tzadik, Bridge, Wide Hive, New Dynamic, and Meta Records. She played on the 2021 GRAMMY-winning album of Dame Ethyl Smyth’s The Prison with Experiential Orchestra.
Originally from Maine, Roberta attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and SUNY-Purchase College and has studied with Robert Dick, Tara O’Connor, Alexa Still, and Jean Rosenblum. She holds a doctorate in music performance from the City University of New York Graduate Center and is a winner of the NFA Graduate Research Competition for her dissertation on the flute music of Salvatore Sciarrino. Roberta currently teaches flute at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College.
Jane Rigler (flute/electronics/composer) creates music that is influenced by nature, movement, languages, and dreaming. A certified Deep Listening® facilitator, she offers inclusive, multi-sensorial listening experiences globally. She thrives at artist residencies like Civitella Ranieri, Montalvo, Ucross, and Harvestworks that promote her collaborative nature. During her US-Japan Friendship Creative Artist Fellowship (2009-2010), she studied Noh theatre and performed over 15 concerts in Japan. She has toured in over ten countries offering workshops and interactive concerts.
Victoria Cheah is a composer whose work concerns boundaries, transitions, sustained effort, and intimacies within social-performance rituals. Her work has been commissioned and/or featured by ensembles and presenters including Talujon, Either/Or, Non- Event, Switch Ensemble, Line Upon Line, The Rhythm Method, Roberta Michel, New Thread Quartet, Han Chen, andPlay, Yarn/ Wire, Wavefield Ensemble, MATA Festival, Guerilla Opera, Ensemble Dal Niente, Vertixe Sonora, Marilyn Nonken, PRISM Quartet, and performed by others. Recordings of their music can be found on Dinzu Artefacts, New Focus Recordings, and XAS Records. Cheah currently serves as Assistant Professor of composition at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory, as well as Director of Production of Talea Ensemble.
From 2011-2015, Cheah served as the founding executive director of Boston new music sinfonietta Sound Icon. She has worked with ensembles and festivals including Composers Conference, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Argento Chamber Ensemble, Composit Festival, and Cantata Profana towards the development and realization of contemporary music events in New York, Boston (USA) and Rieti (IT). Previously, Cheah has taught music, research, and writing related courses as an instructor at Longy School of Music, Brandeis University, and as a teaching fellow at Harvard University. As a composer, she has attended academies including Sommerakademie Schloss Solitude, Darmstadt, Fontainebleau, VIPA, SICPP, The Walden School, and others. Cheah holds a B.A. in music from City University of New York Hunter College (Macaulay Honors College) and a Ph.D. in music composition & theory from Brandeis University.
https://victoriacheah.com/Jen Baker, NYC-based trombonist/composer has pioneered a widely diverse career based in redefining the role of trombone in contemporary music and non-traditional performance settings. Featured on numerous record labels including the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s Oscar-nominated Encounters at the End of the World, she performs locally and internationally as contemporary trombonist and improviser. Her book, Hooked on Multiphonics, fills the gap for trombonists and composers looking to understand this extended technique for her instrument.
Her compositions have been performed nationwide partly through commissions by members of Mivos Quartet, The Fourth Wall, loadbang, Asphalt Orchestra, Wavefield, and with solo and collaborative projects as composer/ performer. She was a featured soloist on Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio in their Quarantine Concert Series. Her Silo Songs blends site-specific field recording (realized with 4+ surround speakers) with live performance soloist. She authored Hooked on Multiphonics: Multiphonics and other Extended Techniques Demystified, the first and only book that comprehensively deals with the technique of singing through the trombone, and has been internationally appreciated in composer and trombonist circles alike!
Hailed for her “formidable sensitivity” (New York Times), she has “performed with brilliant mastery and virtuosity” (San Francisco Classical Voice) at festivals worldwide, as Guest Artist at International Trombone Festival, American Trombone Workshop, Complete Trombonist Workshop, Ostrava Days (Czech Republic), Edgefest, Electro-Acoustic Improvisation Summit, International Society of Improvised Music, and others. Other performance highlights include a world tour with Bananabag and Bodice Beowulf (a thousand years of baggage) and the final performances with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Park Ave Armory. Currently, Jen Baker is fascinated with exploring human consciousness and is developing exciting ways to connect wellness with trombone multiphonics.
http://jenbakersounds.com/Mert Moralı is a Berlin-based composer from Izmir, Turkey, whose current research and artistic focus lies on prosthesis and corporeality in-relation and how this relationship is conditioned by space and particularly its socio-political connotations. He studied composition primarily with Tolga Yayalar at Bilkent University in Ankara and with Eun-Hwa Cho at “Hanns Eisler” Berlin School of Music. He also studied Electroacoustic Music at “Hanns Eisler” Berlin School of Music under the supervision of Wolfgang Heiniger.
He is the recipient of first prize in the duo category at Wilde Lieder - Marx.Music Composing Competition and J.J. Strossmayer Prize at Novalis Festival. He was a composition fellow at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Künstlerhof Schreyahn, and Villa Aurora Los Angeles.
Moralı’s works have been heard at many festivals, such as Bauhaus Festival, Festival Mixtur, Klangwerkstatt Berlin, KONTAKTE Festival, protonwerk, and Ultraschall Berlin, and performed by Ensemble Dal Niente, ensemble proton bern, georg katzer ensemble, hand werk, Unheard of-, das Neue Ensemble, Hezarfen Ensemble, KNM Berlin, modern art ensemble, United Instruments of Lucilin, and many others. He attended workshops led by composers, including Mark Andre, Franck Bedrossian, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, Brian Ferneyhough, Mauro Lanza, Liza Lim, Isabel Mundry, and Marco Stroppa.
Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. Angélica is known for playing with the unexpected intersection of classical and electronic music, unusual instruments, and found sounds.
Recent commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia (a drag opera film in collaboration with Mathew Placek and Sasha Velour), the LA Philharmonic, NY Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Dallas Symphony Orchestra (featuring Lido Pimienta as a soloist), the NY Botanical Garden, Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and her Carnegie Hall debut, commissioned and performed by Sō Percussion. As the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Angélica composed a new work synchronized to the setting sun for EnsembleNewSRQ.
Angélica’s original scores include the HBO docuseries Menudo: Forever Young and You Were My First Boyfriend directed by Cecilia Aldarondo. She regularly performs a solo show and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún. As an educator, Angélica has been a teaching artist with NY Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program (2013-2021) and with Lincoln Center Education (2014-2018).
Angélica lives in Brooklyn, where she’s always looking for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.
Roberta Michel, a co-founder of New York’s Wavefield Ensemble, digs deep into the possibilities of flute on this gripping solo recital. The album opens with Jane Rigler’s “Red” for piccolo flute, a virtuosic display of extended techniques and tense vocal shadowing that begins with barely audible key clicks before leaping into an endlessly morphing series of flutters and swirls marked by upper register stridency. The blend of Michel’s flute and drifting electronics in Victoria Cheah’s “And for you, castles,” toggles between serenity and dissonance, the tension fostered by a mix of microtonal shifts and delicate multiphonic gestures. Jen Baker’s “The Great Bridge and a Lion’s Gate” pivots to a tightly-coiled, fiercely rhythmic series of trills and riffs, careening into upper register cries before drifting downward and opening an extended passage of fraught lyricism, its dissonant lines limned by occasional vocal interjections, whispery breaths, and growly harmonics. Michel’s lines on bass flute create hall-of-mirror distortions and confusions, with the live signal processing of her playing pumped out by loudspeakers in Mert Moralı’s “Quintet,” a kaleidoscopic gem that moves various sound streams around with deft spatialization, even in mere stereo. The electronics on Angélica Negrón’s title piece are more prominent, with a chime-like resonance, but they form a thrilling connection with Michel’s key clacks and sustained lines, conjuring a carnival-like atmosphere, albeit one where we half expect the Ferris wheel to come flying off its base.
— Peter Margasak, 11.27.2024
This collection of New Music pieces for solo flute contains four works commissioned by Brooklyn-based flutist Roberta Michel, which is a small fraction of the hundreds of contemporary works she has commissioned and premiered. The flute, like all wind instruments, vitally needs new works to refresh and expand its repertoire; there are very few standard flute concertos and sonatas, much less solo works, that general listeners get to experience in concert. Michel has close collaborative ties with the composers she commissioned here, and she plays a variety of instruments from the flute family.
We begin with the one work Michel didn’t commission, Red by Jane Rigler, well described in the performer’s words as “a whirlwind of a piccolo piece,” and more specifically by the composer as “a non-stop-circular-tight-rope-balancing-act.” The opening moments are devoted to light clicking or tapping, which I assumed came from Michel tapping on the body of the piccolo, interrupted by riffs of rapid-fire notes. Soon the music evolves into tight, rapid, repetitive patterns that create a virtuoso showpiece. As an extended technique, the soloist is also asked to vocalize, adding an extra layer to Michel’s bravura, one might even say breathtaking, performance.
The first of the commissioned works is Victoria Cheah’s And for you, castles, which at 12 minutes is long for an unaccompanied flute piece. Considerable intricacy is involved through the use of electronic playback. I think this occurs live, reflecting the pitches most recently played by the soloist through added notes and overtones. (If the playback is pre-recorded instead, the effect remains the same.) The solo part often consists of sustained tones or embellishments around an extended note, and the playback harmonically fills in. This is what I’d call a vertical effect, because the main interest comes from the piling up of overtones, almost like spectral music. Certainly the spectral focus on instrumental color dominates as the flute and playback interact, exploring “intimacies in close quarters,” as the composer puts it.
As with spectral music, the listener is asked to adapt to slow motion approaching stasis. Harsh attacks, along with single tones suddenly blasting out, provide tension. Whether And for you, castles is effective depends on patience with long droning passages and little variation in the two closely packed voices. I didn’t respond favorably to the impact of so much abrasive noise.
Jen Baker’s The Great Bridge and a Lion’s Gate makes a cosmic reference in its title. “Lion’s Gate” refers to the conjunction in the sky of the sun and Sirius. “The Great Bridge” is Baker’s invented term for the transitional period our planet is now undergoing. No mention is made of the music, which has nothing to do with the evocative title. Sections unfold according to the extended technique being used. We begin with a frenetic moto perpetuo interspersed with vocalizations that sometimes amount to shrieks, to nerve-wracking effect. This leads to a slow, sustained section featuring overlapping simultaneous notes (multiphonics). There are also taps, breathing through the flute, sighs, and thumps. The piece is basically a demonstration of such techniques without a musical aim that I can discern. I think it would be effective seen in person, since this kind of performance theater is fascinating to observe.
Being there in person would also transform Mert Morali’s Quintet, which is for bass flute and four loudspeakers assigned with pre-recorded electronics. In the composer’s words, “As the piece progressed, the medium became a means to re-imagine the corporeality created by the clash of acoustic and virtual spaces.” (The fact that we don’t get the spatial effect, other than left to right, is a missing element in Morali’s scheme.) The timbre of the bass flute can variously sound melancholic, lonely, eerie, or Oriental. All are evoked here, so the impression is as much about atmospherics as anything else. The pre-recorded electronics tend mostly to be flute notes. Since Morali deliberately confined himself to a handful of patterns, some mellifluous, some grating, I found my interest waning after a while. At over 17 minutes, Quintet challenges the endurance of an unaccompanied flute being echoed by an electronic flute ensemble in mechanical patterns.
The title work, Hush by Angélica Negrón, was inspired by plant photos taken by Michel’s father—the booklet includes a sample. The composer’s intent is about “finding beauty and freedom in stillness and presence.” A great deal depends upon slowly rung chimes (it isn’t specified if these are live or pre-recorded), which begin in tonal harmony but proceed to become clashing and dissonant. Drumming and rapid, nervous tapping expand the texture, with the whole apparatus being so dense and dominant that I often didn’t hear any flute. When it does enter, quasi-melodic fragments and ritualized repletion are the main features. There’s a lot of busyness for a piece titled Hush. Occasionally, taped booms sound tidal and menacing.
My response to these works will have little to do, I imagine, with a general listener’s reaction or a New Music aficionado’s. There’s no doubt that all five works are vastly different and that each composer has successfully probed the possibilities of the flute in a contemporary idiom. Michel is a spectacular flutist, outfitted with a remarkably flexible technique, an adventurous spirit, and unflagging enthusiasm for her art. No one can doubt that New Music for the flute has an invincible ally.
— Huntley Dent, 11.27.2024
New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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