When
Where
Black Cedar performs music from their upcoming debut album at the San Francisco Center for New Music this coming Thursday evening, featuring works by local composers: Garrett Shatzer’s Of Emblems, Durwynne Hsieh’s 2.37 Minutes at the Widget Factory, David Smith’s At A Busy Intersection, Klaus Hinrich Stahmer’s Debussyana, Chinary Ung’s Luminous Spirals, and Nathan Kolosko’s Hungarian Trio.
“Black Cedar has done a wonderful job of making the case that chamber music can involve approaches to instrumentation not usually expected.”
San Francisco, March 2015
“Hats off to them…their connectivity with each other was most apparent…as was their ability to convey their joy to the audience.”
Santa Cruz Sentinel, January 2015
“Life is so delicate,” says Chinary Ung, when describing the casual twists of fate that kept him in the United States in the late 1960’s and prevented him from returning to his native Cambodia and being caught in the crosshairs of the murderous Khmer Rouge. Days before his return flight after completing his first degree, a chance meeting in an elevator led to a graduate scholarship at Columbia University, thus keeping him in the West. “If I did not go (to that office), and I did not take that elevator at exactly the perfect time, I would have been sent back to Cambodia (permanently).” With Pol Pot’s disdain for intellectuals, “I would be gone in no time at all,” says Ung. His three brothers and one sister perished in the genocide. Following a decade away from composing to aide his fellow countrymen, Ung wrote Luminous Spirals in 1997, and he drew upon the idea of a spiral – something that circles back but continues going.
American composer Nathan Kolosko’s Hungarian Trio (2012) gives a musical depiction of traditional Hungarian folk melodies in the slow movements and traditional Hungarian dance steps in the fast movements, using techniques in all three instruments that mimic their Hungarian counterparts: the ütőgardon, or percussive cello, the cobza, a multi-stringed folk instrument of the lute family, and the Hungarian shepherd’s flute.
Many of Durwynne Hsieh’s works have been firmly grounded in tonality and traditional forms. But recently, he has felt more free to draw from disparate influences, and in his latest pieces one is likely to find crunchy atonality alongside lyrical melodies, and minimalistic textures followed by romantic excess. One of the common threads throughout his works is his desire to tell a story through music, even if he himself is unsure what that story is. 2.37 Minutes in the Widget Factory was completed in 2013.
Klaus Hinrich Stahmer was born in Szczecin, Poland in 1945 but soon fled west to Germany with his family upon the approach of the Soviet military during the post-World War II East-West divide. Beyond his life as a composer, Stahmer has been active in German cultural policy, serving as a member of the German Music Council, where he helped repair relations between Germany and Israel and between Poland and Germany. Debussyana (1983) uses snippets of some of Claude Debussy’s most well-known works to create a free-flowing cadenza for three voices.
$10-$15
Tickets at brownpapertickets.com or at the door.
Cash, check, or credit card on-line or at the door.