Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective Program:

 atlcmc makes their debut at this year’s SoundNOW Festival! The group is a newly formed ensemble based in Atlanta . For more info contact Bryan Wysocki. For more information on Artifactual String Unit, check out their Band Camp site.

Les fils du Métal (2018) by Sylvain Griotto

Mixed Media Saxophone Quartet

Michael Chapa, alto and soprano saxophones

Julien Berger, baritone and alto saxophones

Lindsey Welp, soprano and tenor saxophones

Dan Phipps, baritone saxophone

Waiting for Billy Floyd (2011) by Eve Beglarian

Vicki Lu, flute • Allyson McKoon, clarinet  • Taylor Brandon, trombone

Dominic Ryder, vibraphone • Cole Hankins, electric guitar  • Aly Soriano, piano

Sydney Doemel, violin • Will Ruff, viola • Christopher Jeffer, double bass

Jordan Benator, electronics • Bryan Wysocki, conductor

Sleepwalking (2019) by Jordan Benator

Jordan Benator, voice and vocoder • Robert Cushing, piano  • Christopher Jeffer, double bass

Katie Ude, vibraphone • Dominic Ryder, percussion • Bryan Wysocki, conductor

Fool’s Journey (2021) by Jared Tubbs

Members of the Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective

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Artifactual String Unit Program:          

Selected works composed by members of the ensemble announced from the stage.

Chip Epsten, violin

Benjamin Shirley, cello

Gabriel Monticello, bass

Program Notes (atlcmc):

Our program tonight consists of pieces that, like a lot of pieces of contemporary art, deal with the idea of traveling, of implied movement, and the development from one thing to the next. 

The program opens with our friends in the Mixed Media Saxophone Quartet, who come to us from Athens, GA bearing impressive awards: Senior Wind Division at the 2022 49th Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, first prize in the Senior Mixed Instrumental Division at the Coltman Chamber Music Competition, and The American Prize in Collegiate Chamber Music Performance.

The Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective has a close partnership with Mixed Media, and we are excited to have them join us on our program. Their piece tonight, Sylvain Griotto’s Les fils du Métal is a riff on the eponymous album released in the 80’s by the French metal band, Satan Jokers. The traditional instrumentation and sound of a saxophone quartet is modified, with each player picking up different saxophones throughout the piece. The translation from heavy metal to saxophone quartet will be quite clear: the distorted guitars become gruff multiphonics, polyrhythmic kicked drums become slapped tongues, and the genre itself is replaced by literal heavy, metallic instruments. 

Eve Beglarian writes about her piece that it was: “written in response to Eudora Welty’s short story, At the Landing, which takes place in a town called Rodney, Mississippi, that I visited during a trip down the Mississippi River in November 2009.” Beglarian includes the following selection from Welty’s short story in the introduction to her score:

Whenever she thought that Floyd was in the world, that his life lived and had this night and day, it was like discovery once more and again fresh to her, and if it was night and she lay stretched on her bed looking out at the dark, a great radiant energy spread intent upon her whole body and fastened her heart beneath its breath, and she would wonder almost aloud, "Ought I to sleep?" For it was love that might always be coming, and she must watch for it this time and clasp it back while it clasped, and while it held her never let it go.

…

Then the radiance touched at her heart and her brain, moving within her. Maybe some day she could become bright and shining all at once, as though at the very touch of another with herself. But now she was like a house with all its rooms dark from the beginning, and someone would have to go slowly from room to room, slowly and darkly, leaving each one lighted behind, before going to the next. It was not caution or distrust that was in herself, it was only a sense of journey, of something that might happen. She herself did not know what might lie ahead, she had never seen herself. She looked outward with the sense of rightful space and time within her, which must be traversed before she could be known at all. And what she would reveal in the end was not herself, but the way of the traveler.

…

"She's waiting for Billy Floyd," they said.

…

The original smile now crossed Jenny's face, and hung there no matter what was done to her, like a bit of color that kindles in the sky after the light has gone. 

- Eudora Welty in “At the Landing”

This piece was the first piece I programmed for this concert. Beglarian is a composer whose work I have long admired since I had crossed paths with her at a contemporary music program in Vermont. In thinking about this piece, and the journey she took that inspired it, I began thinking about my own journey. It was during this program where I first met her that I became connected with the faculty at Georgia State University, which is, in large part, what brought me to Atlanta. This decision seemingly shaped all others in my life, and is partially what set in motion the paths that led to the creation of this group. In some way, I view this piece as paying tribute to the many paths, sometimes unified but often stratified and unorderly, that we choose to walk in life. 

And if I view this piece in that way, it makes sense to pair it with works by composers whom I’ve met as a result of taking these paths. Jordan Benator’s Sleepwalking is a piece I first heard at a SoundNOW festival a few years prior. It’s a gorgeous piece for voice and ensemble that modifies the sound of Jordan’s voice with a piece of hardware, the vocoder. The sung text of the piece is short, and heard throughout numerous times:

blinds drawn

eyes closed

just recall 

of what you’re composed

- Jordan Benator

The text, and the sound of the piece itself, ask one to remember what they’re made of. Are we the physical body or the digital manipulation we often show the world? With a heavier hand, the piece might come off slightly antagonistically; but in Benator’s voice, literally and compositionally, the piece feels like a warm blanket. Cascading arpeggios of alternating major and minor thirds, lyrical bass lines, 808-inspired percussion, forearm clusters in the piano - all traditionally disjointed sounds come together to pull one from out of their sleep, and reimagine what they’re made of. 

And if we are to imagine what we are made of, where we are going, and how we get there, Jared Tubbs’ work Fool’s Journey is a piece that may help one decide. Inspired by his initial March 2020 pandemic activity of reading tarot cards, the piece is quite literally a musical tarot reading, with the cards pulled informing the graphic score and fixed media track they correspond to. The piece begins with a drawing of the deck. The deck is digitally shuffled by a computer and five cards are pulled for the audience and ensemble to read in real time. This is, in essence, a structured group improvisation, with the orientation, iconography, placement, and mythos behind each card informing how the piece should sound. 

Jared’s work has fascinated me since I first learned of it when we became colleagues in the University of Georgia’s composition program. My favorite of his pieces deal with literary or historical allusions and the idea of interpretation in language, both spoken and musical. This particular piece deals with the impossible task of translating an image into sound. “What information is lost?”, “what is gained?”, and “how do these interpretations differ?” make for an incredibly fun set of questions to improvise on. 

In trying to thematically pull these pieces together, it is the transformation from one thing into another that binds the program: a heavy metal band into a saxophone quartet, a real life journey inspired by a book into a piece, the acoustic voice into a digital voice, image into sound. These transformations represent the creation of something new – something contemporary – that is essential to how we interact with the world today. It is indicative of what we aim to do with the Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective, and it’s why you’re attending the SoundNOW festival and reading this note: to represent these transformations. To create something new.  

— program notes by Bryan Wysocki