Vicki Ray, piano

The award-winning pianist performs two new large-scale works: Thomas Meadowcroft's All Possible Combinations reconciles immersive modes of listening outside of commodified time, and Nox by Taylor Brook integrates digital media to explore the passage of time through a single night, drawing on unconscious states where logic becomes fuzzy and imagination goes to seemingly impossible places.

Sunday, February 23, 2025, 7 p.m.
Drinkward Recital Hall

Vicki Ray. Photo courtesy of the artist.


All Possible Combinations is dedicated to Vicki Ray, for whom it is written. The piece has two starting points: 1960’s avant-garde music, specifically where content generating form was considered a big deal, and very slow ‘piano jazz’ harmony, where the notes do all the work. In turn, for music theorists the piece consists of major 6 chords with drop 2 voicings modulating in minor thirds via common tone diminished 7th chords, while for casual listeners everything happens when nothing is happening.

Thomas Meadowcroft composes and arranges music for the concert hall, theater and radio. His orchestral music has been performed by various orchestras including SWR Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg. He has also had a close and long working relationship with the experimental music ensembles, Speak Percussion and Yarn/Wire. Recent projects include Love Songs without Subjects for Ditte Braein and the Norwegian ensemble, Asamisimasa; and orchestral arrangements of the music of Herbert Groenemeyer for the Opera-Musical, Horse Eats Hat at the Comic Opera Berlin, Ruhr Triennale and Theater Basel. Australian by birth, Meadowcroft studied composition with George Crumb in the USA before moving to Berlin in 1998 and has undertaken various artist residencies including Villa Aurora, Los Angeles in 2005. His music is released on Mode Records, New York.

Nox was written in 2024/2025 for Vicki Ray for the Piano Spheres Festival 2025 in LA, with the support of a Fromm Foundation commission. Nox is a set of fourteen pieces, conceptualized together as the passage of time through a single night: falling asleep, dreaming, deep sleep, wakefulness, and gradually awakening in the predawn. The music explores this by drawing on Ray’s personal experience of unconscious and semi-conscious states where logic becomes fuzzy and imagination goes to unusual and seemingly-impossible places. With the use of interactive electronic sound and audio-reactive projections, the lighting follows the passage through the night that Nox portrays. The projections are intended as a subtle addition to the music that helps to focus concentration and perception on the music.

The titles of the individual pieces that make up Nox are:

1. Crepusculum (prelude)
2. Lullaby
3. Interlude: Synapse
4. Paramnesia
5. Ballad
6. Interlude: Crystallization 7. Toccata (midnight)
8. Spiral
9. Interlude: Fungus
10. Numbers
11. Eros (after Ligeti)
12. Interlude: Muscles
13. Bes
14. Hypnagogia (predawn)

Each of these pieces has a unique focus and character, often exploring tuning, microtonal harmony, and experimenting with musical tropes. Most of these pieces are precisely notated, but the interludes are semi-notated guides for improvisation. For these interludes, the soloist is prompted to interact with the electronic sound, sometimes asked to only use a single note and other times provided with more complex instructions to improvise in reaction to.

Nox uses a set of piano retuning devices called Maqiano, allowing for the piano to play pitches outside of twelve-tone equal temperament. Ray uses four of these devices for this piece, blending the acoustic piano with retuned piano sounds in the electronics to create a rich harmonic palette. The electronic sounds are made exclusively with Pianoteq, which is a physical modelling synthesizer with a realistic piano sound. Some sections of the piece are set, where the live pianist and virtual pianos are synchronized with a click track, while other sections are interactive with the software listening and responding to what the live pianist plays. The projections were created using touchdesigner, based on the programming of Simon David Rydén.

Taylor Brook writes music for the concert stage; electronic music; music for robotic instruments; generative music software; and music for video, theatre, and dance. His music is often concerned with finely tuned microtonal sonorities as well as unique approaches to the integration of electronic sound and digital media. Brook enjoys collaborating with performers and ensembles on the development of new works, including Mira Benjamin, Jeffrey Gavett, Corey Hamm, Dana Jessen, Andy Kozar, Vicki Ray, Quatuor Bozzini, Del Sol Quartet, JACK quartet, PARTCH ensemble, and many others. In 2018 Brook completed a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in music composition at Columbia University with Fred Lerdahl and was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in music composition. Currently Brook is the technical director of TAK ensemble and lives in Victoria, BC.

Described as “phenomenal and fearless”, Vicki Ray is a pianist, improviser, and composer. She has commissioned and premiered countless new works by today’s leading composers. Ray is a founding member of Piano Spheres and has served as Head of Keyboard Studies at the California Institute of the Arts where she was named the first recipient of the Hal Blaine Chair in Musical Performance. She has appeared on numerous international festivals and was a regular member of the faculty at the Bang On a Can Summer Festival at MASS MoCA. Ray has been featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series as soloist and collaborative artist. Her widely varied performing and recording career covers the gamut of new and old music: from Boulez to Reich, Wadada Leo Smith to Beethoven. Notable recordings include the first Canadian disc of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Blue Rider Ensemble, the premiere recordings of Steve Reich’s You Are (Variations) and the Daniel Variations with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the first recording of John Cage’s Europeras 3 and 4. Her recording of Cage’s The Ten Thousand Things on Microfest Records received a 2013 Grammy nomination. Her recording of Daniel Lentz’s River of 1000 Streams was named by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as one of the top 20 recordings of 2017. Vicki also serves as the chromolodeonist for the Grammy-winning Los Angeles Partch ensemble.



HMC is deeply grateful for the generous support that created The Ken Stevens ’61 Founding Class Concert Series.