27TH ANNUAL STONY BROOK PREMIERES! CONCERT
Featuring the Contemporary Chamber Players
Eduardo Leandro, director

Created by composer John Lessard in 1986, the Premieres! series has commissioned works by a wide array of composers from the U.S. and abroad in the past 20 years. This year’s concert features new works by Mark Applebaum, Cindy Cox, Stephen Taylor and Stony Brook’s own Dan Weymouth.

Mark Applebaum (born 1967): Speed Dating (2014)

Cindy Cox (born 1961): Hishuk ish ts’awalk (2014)

Matthew Ricketts (born 1986): Enclosed Position (2014)

Stephen Taylor (born 1965): Writhe (2014)

Daniel Weymouth (born 1953): Brief Moments of Clarity (2014)

Stephen Taylor’s Writhe attempts to ‘sonify’ an extremophile – a tiny organism that can live only in extreme environments, like the hot springs of Yellowstone. “Writhe,” which refers to twists and knots in DNA, translates the genetic structure of a protein – reverse gyrase, found only in extremophiles – into music.”

Mark Applebaum’s Speed Dating is a high-octane octet made up exclusively of duos—instrumental couples who pair off and re-pair in a frenzied, polyamorous orgy of spasmodic rhythms, questionable “key” parties, and vocal chirrups in response to notations appearing on individual players’ wristwatches. Listeners can safely enjoy this hygienic mating spectacle: the love is only aural.

The entwined and enwoven puzzle pieces of Cindy Cox’s Hishuk ish ts’awalk builds a space full of echoes, noises, and silence. Inspired by a wild Canadian temperate rainforest, the ensemble of clarinet, strings, and piano evokes a resonant, forceful, yet fragile musical ecosystem.

Daniel Weymouth: Brief Moments of Clarity
You turn a corner; you catch a glint of sunlight; you read the world’s more perfect sentence, and suddenly—all too briefly—it is all just so clear. By turns explosive, agitated, tender, confused, heartbreakingly sweet, this piece for two pianos and percussion explores those moments when we experience that which lies below this life of ours.

Matthew Ricketts’ Enclosed Position gets caught in a relentlessly gentle maze of claustrophobic triads drawn from 3 uncannily related opera scenes in Ravel (L’enfant et les sortilèges), Puccini (Manon Lescaut), and Massenet (Manon).