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Andile Khumalo: Voices from Ancestors

Voices From the Ancestors traces sonic connections between the dead and the living. Through sound, we connect with our historical beings‘ invisible but perceptible bodies and spirits. In African traditions and beliefs, these historical beings become good or evil spirits that affect the present. This depends on how they behaved while still alive, or, more importantly, how they transitioned to the world of the dead from the world of the living. If that transition was brutal and horrific, as some of the victims of domestic violence in my own country have reported, their spirits live in limbo, wherein they do not find rest. This restlessness is reflected in the brutality and bad omens that then surround the living. Voices From the Ancestors depicts the unsettled perceptual states of the living. Andile Khumalo

 

Biography

Andile Khumalo

Andile Khumalo (*1978 in uMlazi in the environs of southwest Durban, South Africa) is currently a music lecturer at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. His music studies in composition took him to the University of KwaZulu – Natal before he moved to Columbia University in New York, where he studied composition with Tristan Murail, Fabien Levy and George Lewis. As well as to Stuttgart where he studied composition with Marco Stroppa.

 

Stroppa introduced Khumalo to spectralism, a sensitive approach towards constructing sound as the foundation for composition. This was further developed during his studies with Tristan Murail. Sound as the foundation is one of the fundamental aspects of the amaXhosa people of South Africa, where bow instruments provide the fundamentals from which the overtone melodies are developed. This sensitivity to sound is found in the music and their language and is ultimately part of their daily living experiences. For example, a change in intonation could easily change the meaning of a word or sentence without changing how it is written.

 

The change experienced in sound deeply affects the listener’s connection between the lived experiences and the spiritual world. My studies with George Lewis heightened the search for one’s own identity. In deepening one’s own understanding of oneself, as Ngunis and Africans, we believe in a deeper connection with the spiritual world of our ancestors. In my recent work, I have been deeply interested in our sense of existential spirituality through sound.

(Andile Khumalo)

Andile Khumalo
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Sivan Eldar: Anterior study

This study is a dialogue between electric strings – guitar and violin – as they combine into aggregate gestures. Its impulse is a series of arpeggios forged from sampled attacks – plucked, bowed, and hammered. Through subtle adjustments to the guitar’s topography, its timbre spreads out of the arpeggios, and with each impulse, settles closer into its own material. It was created in close collaboration with Nadav.

Biography

Sivan Eldar

Sivan Eldar (*1985 in Tel Aviv) is characterized in her compositions by a unique sensitivity for dramaturgical structures and substance. Qualities such as “luxurious and rapturous,” “vividly imagined,” or even “decidedly of our time” are attributed to her works. Numerous collaborations with authors, directors, dancers and visual artists as well as the leading ensembles and orchestras of the contemporary music landscape testify to her pluralistic artistic approach.

Sivan Eldar
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Alex Mincek: »Strato«

Pendulum XI: “Strato” (for amplified string quartet and electric guitar), is part of an ongoing cycle of pieces inspired by the simple swinging motions of pendulums, along with the more complex forces that allow a pendulum’s movement to continue or dissipate. While the pieces in this series do mimic literal aspects of pendulum behavior, they are more commonly characterized by metaphorical relationships between abstract oppositions in constant, fluctuating oscillation. The latest piece in this series, “Strato“ (“strato” is a reference to both “strata” and “stratocaster”) focusses on stratified layers and of sound and time (formal sections) that are continually transferred and rotated in and out of phase, as if each layer and formal block is in its own orbit, while still meaningfully interacting with all the other layers and sections. Each instrument performs stratified musical structures in a stratified physical manner. For example, the guitarist is prescribed independent, contradictory back-and-forth actions for each hand (what the left hand does causes the left hand to malfunction and vice versa…), often resulting in a dense, noisy murmur. The idea of convergence plays an important role in the formal narrative, like a pendulum coming to rest at a symmetrical point of equilibrium.

(Alex Mincek)

Biography

Alex Mincek

Alex Mincek (*1975, USA) is a composer, performer, and co-director of the New York-based Wet Ink Ensemble. His compositional thinking is primarily concerned with creating musical contexts in which diverse sound worlds seamlessly coexist – from raw to highly refined timbres, from rhythmic vitality to abrupt stasis, and from mechanical-like repetition to sinuous continuity. By connecting, combining and alternating seemingly disparate states, he attempts to create a sense of interconnectivity that reveals underlying qualities of coherence and unity. His music frequently explores novel approaches to microtonal harmony by integrating methods often regarded as incompatible. Mincek’s musical thinking is also concerned with how the cognition of physical shape, movement and color can be used as a model for organizing musical sound and structure in relation to psychoacoustics and musical perception more generally.

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Chikako Morishita: Doll time

Doll Time für Streichquartett entstand im Rahmen meiner One Arm-Serie, die ich als „Theater der Fremdheit“ bezeichne. Der Schwerpunkt der Arbeit liegt auf Bauchredner-Effekten zwischen dem Darsteller und seiner Performance als Mittel, um ein Zusammenspiel von Fiktion und Nicht-Fiktion auf die Bühne zu bringen. Der Wechsel der Darstellungsmodi zwischen einer Art Ich- und einer Ich-Perspektive führt zu einem Zwischenraum, in dem der Darsteller mit sich selbst „kommunizieren“ kann.

(Chikako Morishita)

 

Auftragswerk von Rainy Days Luxembourg und Uraufführung durch das Mivos Quartett im November 2019.

Kammermusik

Biography

Andile Khumalo

Andile Khumalo (*1978 in uMlazi in the environs of southwest Durban, South Africa) is currently a music lecturer at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. His music studies in composition took him to the University of KwaZulu – Natal before he moved to Columbia University in New York, where he studied composition with Tristan Murail, Fabien Levy and George Lewis. As well as to Stuttgart where he studied composition with Marco Stroppa.

 

Stroppa introduced Khumalo to spectralism, a sensitive approach towards constructing sound as the foundation for composition. This was further developed during his studies with Tristan Murail. Sound as the foundation is one of the fundamental aspects of the amaXhosa people of South Africa, where bow instruments provide the fundamentals from which the overtone melodies are developed. This sensitivity to sound is found in the music and their language and is ultimately part of their daily living experiences. For example, a change in intonation could easily change the meaning of a word or sentence without changing how it is written.

 

The change experienced in sound deeply affects the listener’s connection between the lived experiences and the spiritual world. My studies with George Lewis heightened the search for one’s own identity. In deepening one’s own understanding of oneself, as Ngunis and Africans, we believe in a deeper connection with the spiritual world of our ancestors. In my recent work, I have been deeply interested in our sense of existential spirituality through sound.

(Andile Khumalo)

Andile Khumalo
© privat
Biography

Sivan Eldar

Sivan Eldar (*1985 in Tel Aviv) is characterized in her compositions by a unique sensitivity for dramaturgical structures and substance. Qualities such as “luxurious and rapturous,” “vividly imagined,” or even “decidedly of our time” are attributed to her works. Numerous collaborations with authors, directors, dancers and visual artists as well as the leading ensembles and orchestras of the contemporary music landscape testify to her pluralistic artistic approach.

Sivan Eldar
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Biography

Ambrose Akinmusire

Ambrose Akinmusire’s (*1982 in Oakland) 15-year career has paradoxically placed him both at the center and periphery of jazz, most recently emerging in classical and hip-hop circles. He is constantly searching for new paradigms and is a master at weaving inspirations from other genres, art, and life in general into compositions that are as poetic and graceful as they are bold and unflinching. His unorthodox approach to sound and composition make him a regular in critics’ polls and have earned him grants and commissions from the Doris Duke Foundation, the MAP Fund, the Kennedy Center the Berlin Jazz Festival, and Monterey Jazz. Although Akinmusire continues to receive accolades, his reach always transcends himself, his instrument, genre, form, preconceived notions, and anything else that limits him.
Motivated primarily by the spiritual and practical value of art, Akinmusire seeks to eliminate the wall of scholarship that surrounds his music. He strives to create richly textured emotional landscapes that tell community stories, capture time, and change standards. While committed to continuing the tradition of black invention and innovation, he manages to honor tradition without being constrained by it.
Akinmusire is a rigorous practitioner with an uncompromising dedication to creation. “I have learned to accept the consequences of believing in invention and creativity. You will be misunderstood. But my blinders have gotten much longer and much thicker over the years.”

 

Born and raised in Oakland, California, Ambrose Akinmusire (pronounced ah-kin-MOO-sir-ee) was a member of the Berkeley High School Jazz Ensemble when saxophonist Steve Coleman took notice of him. Akinmusire was asked to join Coleman’s Five Elements and went on tour in Europe when he was just 19 years old and studying at the Manhattan School of Music. After returning to the West Coast to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Southern California, Akinmusire attended the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles, where he studied with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Terence Blanchard.

 

Ambrose Akinmusire
© Pierrick Guidou
Biography

Alex Mincek

Alex Mincek (*1975, USA) is a composer, performer, and co-director of the New York-based Wet Ink Ensemble. His compositional thinking is primarily concerned with creating musical contexts in which diverse sound worlds seamlessly coexist – from raw to highly refined timbres, from rhythmic vitality to abrupt stasis, and from mechanical-like repetition to sinuous continuity. By connecting, combining and alternating seemingly disparate states, he attempts to create a sense of interconnectivity that reveals underlying qualities of coherence and unity. His music frequently explores novel approaches to microtonal harmony by integrating methods often regarded as incompatible. Mincek’s musical thinking is also concerned with how the cognition of physical shape, movement and color can be used as a model for organizing musical sound and structure in relation to psychoacoustics and musical perception more generally.

Biography

Mivos Quartet

The New York-based Mivos Quartet, “one of the boldest and wildest new music ensembles in America” (The Chicago Reader), was founded in 2008 and is committed to contemporary music. It has commissioned or premiered numerous new works and is committed to long-term collaborations with composers of diverse musical aesthetic orientations, including Sam Pluta, Mark Barden, Richard Carrick, George Lewis, Eric Wubbels, Kate So-per, Scott Wollschleger, and Patrick Higgins. The quartet awards two composition prizes: the annual “Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize,” designed to support composers at the beginning of their careers, and the “I Creation/Mivos Composition Prize” for composers of Chinese descent. In addition to expanding the string quartet repertoire, the four musicians also develop cross-border projects, for example in multimedia or improvisation, and in collaboration with artists such as slam poet Saul Williams, saxophonists Dan Blake, Ned Rothenberg and Chris Speed, guitarist Timucin Şahin and trumpeter Nate Wooley. The Mivos Quartet has performed at renowned festivals such as the NY Phil Biennial, Wien Modern, Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Düsseldorf Asphalt Festival, HellHOT! New Music Festival in Hong Kong and the Shanghai New Music Week, at Música de Agora na Bahia, at the Aldeburgh Festival and at Lo Spirito della Musica di Venezia. In addition, the Mivos Quartet regularly offers workshops, for example at numerous American universities as well as in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Istanbul. The quartet has released several CDs and DVDs, including Reappearances (2013) and Garden of Diverging Paths (2016) and, with Dan Blake, The Dust Moves (2016).

Mivos Quartet
© Nadine Sherman
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