Art Inspiring Music: Real / Radical / Psychological featuring New Morse Code

Co-sponsor: Mildred L. Kemper Art Museum

Real / Radical / Psychological: The Collection on Display

A celebration of the Museum's tenth anniversary in the current building, this installation features works drawn from the permanent collection. Since its beginning in 1881, the collection has grown primarily through the acquisition of leading contemporary artworks that represent major international aesthetic positions of the time. The installation is organized chronologically in three sections curated by three of the Museum's curators, each exploring themes of the real, the radical, and the psychological and how responses to these ideas have evolved since the nineteenth century.

About New Morse Code:

New Morse Code is devoted to bold and engaging performances of music worth sharing. Omnivorous, rigorous and inventive, Hannah Collins and Michael Compitello activate the unexpected range and unique sonic world of cello and percussion to catalyze and champion the compelling works of young composers.

To Hannah and Michael, collaboration involves drawing upon mutual influences while generating and refining material together over an extended period of time. Through close work with colleagues such as pianist-composer Paul Kerekes, steel pan virtuoso and composer Andy Akiho, Hawaiian composer and visual artist Tonia Ko, and Pulitzer Prize-winning violinist/vocalist/composer Caroline Shaw, New Morse Code generates a singular and personal repertoire which reflects both their friends’ creative voices and their own perspectives.

Through its outreach initiative New Morse Kids, the duo has inspired young listeners with eye-opening performances and engaging presentations at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Yale’s Morse Summer Music Academy, the ARTSExperience Festival at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven. 

Program: 

Martin Bresnick (b.1946)

Songs of the Mouse People

   I.  Common Squeaking (made apparent by its delicacy)

   II.  That Peace We Yearn For

   III.  Every Disturbance Is an Opportunity

   IV.  A Thousand Pairs of Shoulders Tremble (under a burden actually meant for one)

   V.  Laughter Stops (When We See Josephine)

Christopher Stark (b. 1980)

The Language of Landscapes (2015)

The Language of Landscapes is an exploration of our relationship with nature. The piece’s principal discourse is guided by the friction and/or harmony created by synthetic and natural objects and the sounds and ideals and that accompany their existence. The single-movement work has four scenes that each incorporate found discarded objects, field-collected environmental recordings, and live electronic processing as a way of making commentary on our wastefulness and resourcefulness. We have arrived at an era of human history in which our relationship with nature is critical, and likely calamitous, and this work is ultimately an attempt to illuminate the importance of the geographies of our existence and how they shape our musical spirit.  This commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

Robert Honstein (b. 1980)

New Work* (2016)