Bobby Ge

Found in Stillness

I began this piece in what was perhaps the quietest period of my life in some time. The years prior had been filled with tumult and a sense of encroaching loss, and in that time, I had begun to crave isolation. Rather suddenly, I found it—I spent the start of 2023 tucked away in a wintry cabin in the woods.

This was a different kind of seclusion than the recent, anxious years of quarantine. Where the uncertainty of that time had made me fill my days with chores and activities, this new kind of stillness made every act feel like a radical disturbance. I noticed how much sound I produced in my day to day, whether I was making my bed, taking a walk, or preparing a meal.

The abrupt drop to nothingness also meant that I had a wealth of time to spend with my thoughts, and over time, every act started to take on a meditative patina. I discovered a ritualistic beauty in the tasks I normally found tedious, giving me ample space to reflect on the events that had led me there.

Found in Stillness is a piece born from that reflection. The trio’s parts alternate between textural, fragmentary meditations and exact, piercing arrivals, much as my thoughts went into and out of focus in the cabin. Initially, the trio largely ignores the electronics, treating them as a simple backdrop. Toward the end, the musicians begin to respond more precisely to the environment conjured up by the track, as they progress toward a thoughtful, gentle conclusion.

This piece was begun while in residence at Copland House, Cortlandt Manor, NY, as a recipient of the Copland House Residency Award.

Zoë Gorman

Submerged Anti-Heroes

Great sagas elicit resonance in the extraordinary. We seek ourselves in tales of triumphing over adversity, rupturing personal limits and deepening the selflessness of our hearts. Imagined amidst the waterfronts of Stockholm and the gardens of Gothenburg, Submerged Anti-Heroes is written for the milliard of nonexceptional anecdotes—when despite effort and strife, no hero rises to victory. The repeatedly downward turning motifs symbolize a tidal process of exertion and failure.

The beginning and close of the piece showcase the contrast between bombastic statements and silence—its power drawn from nothingness. The rich multiphonics in the clarinet line evoke ocean motifs, while the light vibraphone interjections recall the ripples of summer raindrops hitting the water off idyllic Södermalm. A thousand potential protagonists immobilized under the sea. Pitch ambiguity ensorcells a backdrop of purposeless direction, muted aspiration. A disjointed interplay among the instruments progresses, although they occasionally harmonize in crestfallen themes, like shimmers of hope or a sunset disappearing into a vast ocean. A final blast trumpeting achievement, or perhaps, a defiant downfall, is abruptly swallowed.

The lighting evolution layers a palette of deep ocean tones and traces the music’s thematic arc. A ray of sunlight sweeps across the water’s surface only to dissipate in the shimmering waves, and a poignant summer sunset’s ephemeral stain fades into the deep.

Submerged Anti-Heroes is less a celebration of the mundane rather than an ode to understatement, to the millions of almost-stories remaining unsung.

Tom Morrison

Type 2 Fun

In the world of outdoor enthusiasts, adventurers, and thrill-seekers, there exists a concept known as “type 2 fun.” This notion refers to experiences that might not be immediately enjoyable or pleasurable, but in hindsight, they become cherished. Of the three types of fun (Type 1 fun is enjoyable while it’s happening and Type 3 fun is not actually fun at all) I like Type 2 fun best.

Gemma Peacocke

Flight Recorder

I am fascinated by haunting that seeps into a society, and especially by hauntedness that has an industrial or a technological component. A long time ago I had a flatmate who would obsessively watch a TV show that dissected plane crashes. For years afterwards I would think about an episode that featured a reconstruction of a particular plane crash—a passenger jet that had been wrongly weighted. During take-off, the plane pitched its nose up into the sky and fell back to earth upside-down, crashing over the runway from which it had just taken off. The producers had overlaid audio from the cockpit voice recorder and reconstructed the crash using information from the flight data recorder. When writing this piece I was thinking about the near-indestructible black boxes that house these recorders and which capture vast, overlapping streams of information, registering every technical, environmental, and human input that could influence the outcome of a flight with hundreds of people onboard.

With thanks to F-PLUS for workshopping and premiering Flight Recorder, and to Shelley Washington, my friend and Kinds of Kings composer comrade, for inspiring the use of different time signatures simultaneously. What a cool nightmare.

kennedy taylor dixon

all the things from below

there is sometimes peace found in the things that we bury. and there is also sometimes pain and sadness. but, we must embrace all of the things from below, no matter how hard we try to forget them.

Soo Yeon Lyuh

Mirage

Soo Yeon Lyuh, haegeum

My piece aims to articulate elusive elements that linger in the recesses of our minds, subtly affecting our musical cognition. So I titled it Mirage. I set out to craft a playful deception, inviting the audience on an intuitive yet unexpectedly cognitive journey. As the music unfolds, the true essence emerges during the moment when a particular instrument (which I choose not to reveal yet) breaks free into a fully charged improvisation. That is my way of dissolving the mirage and revealing a new revelation to the listeners. Through this approach, I captured the spirit of a jam session, with instruments interacting and framing each other in dynamic ways.

Kennedy Taylor Dixon is a composer, violist, and scholar currently residing in Princeton, New Jersey. Described as a “vibrant musical voice,” Dixon often writes for herself and is also passionate about collaborating with members in her musical community. Recent highlights of her career include recipient of Westminster College’s inaugural Hear and Now Emerging BIPOC Composer Commission (April 2023), Tetractys New Music: Here Be Monsters Commission (May 2023), New Music Gathering performer participant (June 2023), and Bang on a Can Composer Fellow (July 2023). Dixon has worked with numerous artists throughout her career, such as JACK Quartet, Sō Percussion, ~Nois, F-Plus, Boston Children’s Chorus, Parker Ramsey, Michael J. Love, and more. Dixon holds a MA in Music Composition in addition to her dual undergraduate degrees in Viola Performance and Music Composition from Western Michigan University. Dixon is currently pursuing her PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University as a President’s Fellow.

F-PLUS is a violin, clarinet, and percussion trio committed to collaborating with today’s most exciting composers to establish a diverse repertoire for their unique instrumentation. Formed in 2016 at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, the ensemble has performed all over the country, including Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Constellation, the DiMenna Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Ear Taxi Festival, the International Clarinet Association ClarinetFest, and the New Music Gathering. F-PLUS has premiered over 35 new works since its inception, including commissioned works by Chicago Symphony Mead Composer-in-Residence Jessie Montgomery, Grawemeyer-winner George Tsontakis, Emma O’Halloran, Perry Goldstein, Matthew Ricketts, and Charles Peck, among many others. The ensemble has been the recipient of commissioning grants and additional funding from Chamber Music America, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, New Music USA, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Irish Arts Council and the New Zealand Arts Council. F-PLUS is committed to working with the next generation of composers and performers, and has held residencies at the University of Delaware, the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Washington University (St. Louis), University of Texas-Austin, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, UNC- Pembroke, UNC-Wilmington, and Grand Valley State, Central Michigan, Stony Brook, Duke, and Illinois State Universities.

Bobby Ge is a Chinese-American composer and avid collaborator who seeks to create vivid emotional journeys that navigate boundaries between genre and medium. He has created multimedia projects with the Space Telescope Science Institute, painters collective Art10Baltimore, the Scattered Players Theater Company, and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Winner of the 2022 Barlow Prize, Ge has received commissions and performances by groups including the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the U.S. Navy Band, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Harbin Symphony Orchestra, Interlochen Arts Academy, Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra, Guangzhou Symphony Youth Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Youth Orchestra, Music from Copland House, the Pacific Chamber Orchestra, the Bergamot Quartet, and Mind on Fire. He is currently pursuing his PhD at Princeton University as a Naumberg Fellow, and holds degrees from UCBerkeley and the Peabody Conservatory.

Zoë Gorman has composed for ensembles on four continents, including for the National Symphony Orchestra of Ghana and the Stockholm Royal Academy of Music. She served as Resident Composer for the Public Sphere of London and studied composition under Kathryn Alexander and Stephen Gorbos at Yale University, where her senior thesis in physics included musical relativistic doppler shifts. Zoë is currently pursuing a PhD in Security Studies at the Princeton School for Public and International Affairs while practicing composition in her spare time. She aspires to set and defy musical expectations in innovating, yet pleasing ways— through time signature shifts or unexpected tonal modulations—and to break down barriers among art media and cultures.

Soo Yeon Lyuh is a composer, improviser, and master of the haegeum, a two-stringed Korean bowed instrument. Hailing from Daegu, South Korea by way of Princeton, New Jersey, Lyuh draws inspiration from traditional Korean music to perform a meld of improvisatory and experimental sounds. She is currently pursuing her second PhD in composition at Princeton University, after receiving the first doctorate in Korean music at Seoul National University. As a performer, Lyuh possesses flawless technique and a full command of the haegeum’s traditional repertoire. For twelve years, she was a member of South Korea’s National Gugak Center, which traces its roots to the 7th Century Shilla Dynasty and is Korea’s foremost institution for the preservation of traditional music. To weave authentic styles into new musical domains, Lyuh relocated in 2015 to the San Francisco Bay Area and drew inspiration from its dynamic improvised music scene. In 2017, she was invited to collaborate in a series of concerts with the Kronos Quartet, and this work set her on the path of becoming a composer. As a composer, Lyuh asks classically trained performers to think outside the box, drawing out fresh sounds that, once understood, sound organic. Although these sounds are uneasy to visualize with notation, Lyuh can communicate a lot of them and often demonstrates the parts by joining and performing with the ensemble. Ultimately, Lyuh is all about making a bridge between cultures across borders, and breaking down any walls.

Tom Morrison is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. Morrison draws his inspiration from the experience of place. He has written for leading new music groups, including the Aizuri Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, Latitude49, Sō Percussion, Contemporaneous, Yarn/Wire, Albany Symphony’s new music chamber orchestra, Dogs of Desire, and The New Jersey Symphony, among others. Recent projects include new electroacoustic works for Theo Van Dyck and Parker Ramsay and a contribution to Han Chen’s ‘Ligeti Etudes meets 18 Composers’ commissioning project. His work has been released on Eric Huckin’s album, Drifter, and Robert Fleitz’s album, Leaving a Room. Recently, he contributed the title track to Red Dog Ensemble’s debut album, Neon and Oak. He won the 2016 Thailand International Composition Festival Competition and first place in the 2021 Symphonia Caritas Competition for first-generation college students. Morrison is a graduate of the Juilliard School (MM). He is also a graduate of the University of Montana (BM) in Missoula, where he cultivated his love for nature and the environment. He holds an MFA and PhD from Princeton University. His work can be found at tom-morrison.com.

Gemma Peacocke is a New Jersey-based composer from Aotearoa New Zealand. She writes avant-pop music for chamber ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, and she also writes a lot of music with electronics. Part of the Kinds of Kings composer collective, she lives in Princeton with her family and her most intense fan, a smallish standard poodle called Mila.