Brightwork Ensemble: Music from the Ring of Fire

COMPOSER BIOS

Gabriela Lena Frank

Included in the Washington Post's list of the 35 most significant women composers in history, cultural heritage has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank's music. Born in Berkeley, California, to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Frank explores her multicultural heritage most ardently through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Frank is something of a musical anthropologist. She has traveled extensively throughout South America and her pieces often reflect and refract her studies of Latin American folklore, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a Western classical framework that is uniquely her own.

Bill Alves

Bill Alves is a composer, writer, and video artist based in Southern California and engaged at the intersections of musical cultures and technology. He has written extensively for conventional acoustic instruments, non-Western instruments (especially Indonesian gamelan) and electronic media, often integrated with abstract animation. CDs of his audio works include The Terrain of Possibilities and Imbal-Imbalan, Mystic Canyon, and Guitars and Gamelan. His work with computer animation pioneer John Whitney inspired abstract computer animations with music, now released by the Kinetica Video Library as Celestial Dance. He is the co-author with Brett Campbell of the new biography Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick. He is also author of the book Music of the Peoples of the World, now in its third edition from Cengage/Schirmer. Other writings have appeared in Organised Sound, Perspectives of New Music, Computer Music Journal, SEAMUS Journal, 1/1, and elsewhere. In 1993-94 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellow in Indonesia, where he studied the gamelan orchestra music of Java and Bali. He currently directs the The HMC American Gamelan, an ensemble of specially tuned Javanese instruments dedicated to the performance of new, non-traditional music. He often explores new musical tunings in his works and is one of the organizers of MicroFest, the annual Southern California festival of new music in alternate tunings. He is the Miller Professor of Humanities at Harvey Mudd College of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California.

Andy Akiho

ANDY AKIHO is a “trailblazing” (Los Angeles Times) Pulitzer Prize finalist and seven-time GRAMMY®-nominated composer whose bold works unravel intricate and unexpected patterns while surpassing preconceived boundaries of classical music. Called "increasingly in-demand” by The New York Times, Akiho has earned international acclaim for his large-scale works that emphasize the natural theatricality of live performance. He is the only composer to be nominated for a GRAMMY® in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category in 2022, 2023, and 2024.


Hilos by Gabriela Lena Frank

Hilos (Threads, 2010), written for the ALIAS Chamber Ensemble, is scored for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Alluding to the beauty of Peruvian textiles, both in their construction and in their pictorial content of everyday life, the short movements of Hilos are a kind of Peruvian "pictures at an exhibition." Players are mixed and matched in various combinations, and draw on a myriad of sounds evocative of indigenous music. These include fanciful pizzicatos and widely-spaced tremolos suggesting guitar-like instruments, strong attacks and surging releases suggesting zampona panpipes and quena flutes, glissandi and scratch tones suggesting vocal coloristic effects, and so forth. The movements are:

1. Canto del Altiplano (Songs of the Highlands): A bold piano opening of tremolos sets up rhapsodic lines decorated with the strong attacks and releases one would hear in highland wind instruments.

2. Zapatos de Chincha (Shoes of Chincha): This light-footed movement is inspired by Chincha, a southern coastal town known for its afro-peruano music and dance (including a unique brand of tap). The cello part is especially reminiscent of the cajon, a wooden box that percussionists sit on and strike with hands and feet, extracting a remarkable array of sounds and rhythms.

3. Charanguista Viejo (Old Charango Player): The charango, a ukulele-like instrument traditionally constructed with an armadillo shell, is evoked through tight broken chords and odd tremolos in the piano part alongside quick pizzicato notes in the violin. The violin also has a highly emotional melody line decoration with hints of scratch tones to convey the sounds of an old man’s voice as he accompanies himself singing.

4. Danza de los Diablos (Devil Dance): A tribute to the devil dances of the southern Puno regions of Peru, this movement features "stompy" rhythms, quick dissonant grace notes and a general boldness of spirit.

5. Zumballyu (Spinning Top): A musical depiction of a popular children’s toy in Quechua Indian culture.

6. Juegos (Games): A romp inspired by the teasing games that children play.

7. Yaravillosa: A play on the words "maraviollosa" (marvelous) and "yaravi" (an ancient melancholy Inca song), this movement especially draws on glissandi, tremolo, and surges to evoke typical vocal performance practices.

8. Bombines (Bowler Hats): A humorous dance in homage to the ubiquitous bowler hats worn by mountain women. The "karnavalito" rhythm punctuates throughout.

The Fires Around Us by Bill Alves

“Amid the flames of world, I contemplate the dappled darkness of the night.” The images and electronic sounds derive entirely of social media videos of burning Russian oil refineries.

Lost on Chiaroscuro Street by Andy Akiho

Commissioned for Music@Menlo by Trine Sorensen in celebration of Michael Jacobson's 60th birthday. It had its World premiere performance at Music@Menlo in Atherton, California, on May 21, 2017, by Wu Qian, Alexander Sitkovetsky, Mihai Marica, and David Shifrin.