Density 2036: Part VI Claire Chase featuring Nathan Davis, Phyllis Chen, Sarah Hennies, Olga Neuwirth, Pamela Z

• Olga Neuwirth (b. 1968): Magic Flu-idity:
• 1 Neuwirth: Magic Flu-idity 14:54
• Pamela Z (b. 1956): Louder Warmer Denser:
• 2 Z: Louder Warmer Denser 09:20
• Phyllis Chen (b. 1988): Roots of Interior:
• 3 Chen: Roots of Interior 12:01
• Sarah Hennies (b. 1979): Reservoir 2:
• 4 Hennies: Reservoir 2 17:08
• Total Runtime 53:23

Info for Density 2036: Part VI

Virtuoso flutist Claire Chase continues her laudable documentation of her multi-year commissioning project, Density 2036, with digital release of the works from 2019. Featuring pathbreaking music for flute, in solo, electro-acoustic, and chamber settings, by Olga Neuwirth, Sarah Hennies, Phyllis Chen, and Pamela Z, Density 2019 represents a landmark addition to the contemporary flute repertoire.

Claire Chase’s twenty four year commissioning project, Density 2036, builds a radical new repertoire for flute in various contexts — solo, with electronics, and as a lead ensemble instrument. The 2019 iteration of the project, released here in digital only format (and in collaboration with the 2020 and 2021 programs on a 3 CD set), focuses on the latter two contexts, featuring a electro-acoustic work, two duos (one of which is a duet with Chase’s own heartbeat), and one with choir.

Olga Neuwirth’s Magic Flu-idity pairs Chase’s flute with the percolating rhythms of a typewriter, played here by Nathan Davis. The work is a reworking of Neuwirth’s flute concerto, Aello—ballet mécanomorphe, written for Chase and Thomas Dausgaard with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. Originally intended to be paired with Bach’s fourth Brandenburg Concerto, the concerto shares the three movement form of a Baroque concerto, and this duo reimagining retains the lightness and grace as well as the typical fast-slow-fast structure. The dialogue between the typewriter and flute soloist mirrors that of the ripieno and concertino, as the accompaniment articulates rhythmic arrivals while the flute swoops in and around the clicks and occasional bell rings of the machine’s carriage return lever. The middle section features sustained material on both instruments, broken up by colorfully embellished figures on flute.

Pamela Z’s Louder Warmer Denser uses an audio interview with Chase as the source material for a collage style electronic part that fragments her voice. Mining disconnected words, laughs, and utterances, the electronics highlight the registral contrasts embedded in Chase’s speaking style, Pamela Z creates an engaging portrait of Chase that serves as the sparring partner for the live flute part. Sometimes the instrumentalist is in rhythmic unison with the electronic part (reminiscent of the increasingly popular YouTube stylized videos where an instrumentalist transcribes a speech and plays along, i.e. Henry Hey’s infamous rendition of a George W. Bush speech), and other times in counterpoint with it. An accumulating wash of long, reverb saturated tones provides a pad for repeated utterances of “36” that close the work, a reference to Chase’s ambitious multi-year project that culminates in 2036.

In Roots of Interior, Phyllis Chen composed a different kind of portrait of Claire Chase, investigating the rhythms of the performer’s own heart during and after a virtuosic performance. Inspired by her own experience carrying her daughter during her pregnancy after hearing two heartbeats in counterpoint with each other, Chen extrapolates beyond Chase’s impressive physicality on her instrument to the simultaneous internal response happening within her body. The result is both a compelling musical work on its own and an invitation to consider the impact of performance on a performer’s inhabited corporeal experience.

Sarah Hennies’ Reservoir 2 for flute and voices explores the boundaries between conscious and unconscious thought. The work opens with waves of inhalation and exhalation, a repeated tone on the flute, and an enveloping harmony in the voices. It has the quality of a collective meditation. Hennies paces the evolution of the texture patiently, adding new entrances and pitch material to encompass an increasingly rich expressive range. At the piece’s climax, we hear an undulating mass of vocal swells on wordless syllables, flutter tongued tones in the flute, and brief grunting outbursts from the choir, as if releasing suppressed tension. The effect is cathartic and expansive, a guided seventeen minute journey that unfolds at the speed of emotion.

Each chapter of Claire Chase’s Density 2036 project has its own unique profile. There are many angles from which to contemplate the works on Density 2019. In a certain light, each piece is a reworking of pre-existing material — Neuwirth’s original concerto, Pamela Z’s reorganization of material from an interview with Chase, Chen’s highlighting of Chase’s heartbeat, and Hennies’ processing of subconscious emotion. Three of the works look inward in creative and individual ways, at the unique features of a personality expressed in speech patterns, at biochemical feedback as a manifestation of lived experience, and at the journey of working through stored emotional memory. It is a credit to Chase and her collaborators that amidst such an ambitious and visible commissioning project, they are able to retain and amplify such personal depth in each piece, leaving behind not just volume of repertoire to future interpreters, but works that carry their own indelible imprint. – Dan Lippel

Claire Chase, flute, bass flute, contrabass flute
Nathan Davis, typewriter (on track 1)
Kirstin Valdez Quade, digital stethoscope (on track 3)
Constellation Chor (on track 4)
Marisa Michelson, director

Claire Chase
a 2012 MacArthur Fellow, is a soloist, collaborative artist, and activist for new music. Over the past decade she has given the world premieres of over 100 new works for flute, many of them tailor-made for her. In 2014 she began Density 2036, a project to commission, premiere and record an entirely new program of pieces for flute every year until 2036, the 100th anniversary of the eponymous and seminal piece by Varese. Also in the 2014-15 season, Chase is music directing and playing as soloist in a series of performances of Salvatore Sciarrino's Il cerchio tagliato dei suoni for 4 flute soloists and 100 flute “migranti”.

Chase has performed throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, including debuts last season in Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, Paris, London, São Paolo and Guangzhou. She has released three solo albums, Aliento (2010), Terrestre (2012) and Density (2013). In 2014, she was selected as an inaugural Fellow of Project&, with which she will several new works exploring the relationship between language, music and social interaction over the next several years.

Chase was First Prize Winner in the 2008 Concert Artists Guild International Competition. She co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in 2001 and serves as the organization’s Artistic Director and CEO in addition to playing over fifty concerts a year as an ensemble member. ICE has premiered more than 600 works since its inception and pioneered a new artist-driven organizational model that earned the company a Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010. Chase was also honored with Crain’s Business “40 under 40” Award in 2013.

In 2013, Chase founded The Pnea Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the flute and its repertoire in the 21st century through commissions, community engagement, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations and advocacy. She lives in Brooklyn.

Susie Ibarra
is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans formats, including performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multi-channel audio installations, recording, and documentary. Many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation: she has worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, such musika katatubo from the North and South Philippine islands; her sound research advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters; and she collaborates with The Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.

She is a recipient of the Foundation For Contemporary Arts Award in Music/ Sound (2022), a National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship (2020); United States Artists Fellowship in Music (2019); the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2018); and a TED Senior Fellowship (2014).

Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Zildjian Drum Artist.

Her album, Talking Gong ( New Focus Recordings 2021), features soloists and ensemble members Claire Chase ( bass, alto , flute and piccolo) and Alex Peh ( piano) , with its title piece commissioned by SUNY New Paltz when Ibarra was Davenport Composer in Residence 2018. The album is inspired by traditional Filipino southern gong music, Maguindanaon kulintang music and by birdsongs of the region. Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change (2020) is a collaboration with glaciologist, geographer, and climate scientist Dr. Michele Koppes, which maps water rhythms from source to sink. Ibarra’s composition is derived from field recordings of five global watersheds, including the Greenland ice sheet and glacier-fed rivers of the Himalayas. Water Rhythms is an acoustic story of human entanglements with a changing climate and landscape. The premiere of Water Rhythms was presented by Fine Acts Foundation and TED at Jack Poole Plaza, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and Innisfree Gardens, Millbrook, NY (2020). It has also been shown at The Countdown Summit, Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); as part of Nothing Makes Itself at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, Korea (2021); and as a multi-channel sound installation at Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY (2021) and the San Francisco Exploratorium (2022).

Ibarra’s piece Fragility Etudes , was a commissioned film by Asia Society Triennial 2021 We Do Not Dream Alone. These compositions are rhythmic studies for solos and ensemble which reflects humanity’s interdependence. Ibarra explores conduction, polyrhythms and concepts from the physics of glass. Fragility Etudes was filmed in residency and premiered at MASSMoCA in live performance 2021. The film is directed by collaborating multimedia artist Yuka C. Honda. September 2022 Ibarra conducted multi-ensemble Fragility Etudes in Zamane Festival Morocco. She was commissioned for a new work for percussion in which she created RITWAL solo percussion Susie Ibarra, for the UNDRUM Festival produced by Architek Percussion and Suoni Per Il Popolo 2021 for video which premiered in June 2021. As a producer, Ibarra collaborates with Splice to create sound packs based in environmental sounds, traditional musical cultures, and her own extended percussion language. Sounds of the Drâa Valley Morocco is a sound pack featuring six traditional ensembles and soloists from South Saharan Morocco (2022). Ibarra has also collaborated with composer and bassist Richard Reed Parry on two sound packs and a new album of compositions focused on breath cycles and heart beats, Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR Records, 2022).

Senem Pirler
is a sound and intermedia artist, and educator based in Troy/Brooklyn, NY. Pirler’s interdisciplinary work crosses over into sound engineering, sound art, performance, video art, movement, and installation.

Born in Turkey, she studied classical piano at Hacettepe State Conservatory and sound engineering & design at Istanbul Technical University (MIAM). She developed her artistry working as a composer and recording engineer before moving to the U.S. in 2010 to study Music Technology on a Fulbright Fellowship. Pirler earned her M.M. in Music Technology the Stephen F. Temmer Tonmeister Honors Track from NYU Steinhardt, and her Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her dissertation’s title was Disruption, Dis/orientation, and Intra-action: Recipes for Creating a Queer Utopia in Audiovisual Space.

Pirler has exhibited and performed her work at international venues such as Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center/EMPAC (NY), Roulette Intermedium (NY), The Kitchen (NYC), Southbank Centre (London), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), LA Phil (CA), Baryshnikov Arts Center (NY), Montalvo Arts Center (CA), Mount Tremper Arts (NY), and Collar Works (NY).

Pirler has been awarded a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in the category of Music/Sound in 2022 and the Malcolm Morse Award to honor the work of Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening in 2018. Her work has been recognized by grants and residencies, including, most recently, Institute for Electronic Arts residency, PACT Zollverein residency, and Signal Culture residency. Dr. Pirler joined the Bennington College faculty in Fall 2018.

Booklet for Density 2036: Part VI