Virtuoso cellist Tess Remy-Schumacher will perform my Mist Waves in a version for cello and piano at Waldassen, Germany,
Virtuoso cellist Tess Remy-Schumacher will perform my Mist Waves in a version for cello and piano at Burg Rabenstein, Germany,
Please join us for Tess Remy-Schumacher’s performance of my MIST WAVES in an arrangement I made especially for her. She is joined by the University of Central Oklahoma Chamber Orchestra in this performance.
Please join us for Tess Remy-Schumacher’s performance of my MIST WAVES in an arrangement I made especially for her for cello and piano.
Premier of a new commission by Anne Harley of Scripps College to texts of the first recorded poet in human history, Enheduanna. Enheduanna was the entu (high) priestess of the moon god Nanna (Sīn) in the Sumerian city-state of Ur. My work uses texts taken from the cuneiform ancient Sumerian in creating a new work for two sopranos, violin, bass clarinet, hand percussion and electronics.
Please join us for a performance of the last of my DARK MARIAN ANTIPHONS, Gaude in Dolore, performed by the Cetobriga Chamber Choir (Goncalo Lourenco, director), conducted by Brett Scott.
Please join us for the world premier of the last of my DARK MARIAN ANTIPHONS—Gaude in Dolore—with the Cetobriga Chamber Choir (Gonzalo Lourenco, director), conducted by Brett Scott.
Please join us for Tess Remy-Schumacher’s performance of my MIST WAVES in an arrangement I made especially for her. She is joined by the Oklahoma Community Orchestra in this performance.
Please join me for an exciting concert that will feature an excerpt from my opera BACKWARDS FROM WINTER sung by the wonderful Francesca Federico .
● MadeleineMitchell will release her upcoming album“Violin Conversations” with Naxos on 23 June 2023.
● Described by The Times as ‘one of the UK’s liveliest musical forces (and) foremost violinists’,Mitchell’s highly personal upcoming release shines a light on a fine collection of violin pieces, including eight world premiere recordings, six of which were written specially for her:
○ American-Australian composer Douglas Knehans’ Mist Waves is an expressive work for violin and piano which he describes as relating to a land-based cloud, forming in waves, serving as a metaphor for a type of human consciousness.
○ Martin Butler’s Barcarolles, is a fantasy inspired by folk songs traditionally sung on the water by Venetian gondoliers.
○ Richard Blackford’s Worlds Apart waswritten forMitchell and Nicholas Snowman in 2020, commissioned to support HelpMusicians (UK) during the Covid-19 pandemic. The title refers to the enforced separation of families, lovers and friends during the period of lockdown.
○ American Kevin Malone’s piece for violin and on-hold sounds, Your Call is Important To Us uses phone recordings of call-waiting collected by the composer over three years. The violin part reflecting the increased frustration in music is akin to L'Histoire du Soldat by Stravinsky.
○ ErrollynWallen’s Sojourner Truth, supported by the RVWTrust, takes as its inspiration the spirit of Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) who was born into slavery andwent on to become a prominent American abolitionist and women’s rights activist, using a slave song.
○ Howard Blake’s The Ice Princess and the Snowman. Blake, a close collaborator of Mitchell, noted that when ‘The Snowman’ was made into a ballet it was felt the second act needed this new pas de deux love duet with the Ice Princess.
● “Violin Conversations” is a unique portrait of Mitchell's legacy from working closely with living composers in a variety of styles, and the dialogues between them.
● Mitchell's love of art is reflected in the albumcover, which is a painting by her lateMother, Evelyn Mitchell née Jones (1924–2020).
● In line with the theme of musical conversations (or colloquy), four of the works feature the composers themselves as pianists: Errollyn Wallen, Martin Butler and Howard Blake, as well as Australian composer Wendy Hisocks, who Mitchell also worked closely with on her solo caprice.
● Alongside compositions by some of today’smost renowned living composers, the album also includes works from and tributes to friends and colleagues of the violinist who have passed away.
● The performance of Alan Rawsthorne’s Violin Sonata features pianist Andrew Ball ,with whom Madeleine had an important duo partnership for 20 years in a wide repertoire. The live BBC recording is a tribute to Ball who died in 2022.
● This piece, and Thea Musgrave’s Colloquy (premiered at the same concert in 1960), are two fine classics of mid-20th century violin repertoire to which are added two short unrecorded pieces by Howard Blake and Joseph Horovitz (1926-2022), close associates of Mitchell throughout her career.
Mitchell will perform works from the album in upcoming concerts in the U.K., the USA in October and elsewhere.
Then and Now—A recital of Music of Douglas Knehans
Watching Glass I Hear You (2021) (World Premier)—Now
…de la fumeé, des voix… (1985) (World Premier)—Then
Five Songs to Poems of Sylvia Plath for soprano and ensemble (1983)—Then
Red Silk, Black Water for amplified viola, fixed electronics and video (2016)—Now
No Exit and cimbalomist extraordinaire Chester Englander give the world premier of ECSTATIC WAVES.
As with all of my recent music I find myself returning to the natural world of earth, sky and ocean for inspiration. Especially in these troubled days of radical climate emergency, the world feels even more fragile and perhaps hurting with each passing year as we record ever more extreme environmental change and resultant devastation of human and animal environments and ecosystems.
Ecstatic Waves pays homage to the natural power and beauty of the sea. The first movement, Searise Breaking, is formed in three rather large ‘waves’ each culminating in a quiet and spare ‘exhalation’ stated in the cimbalom.
The second movement Enfoamed Rock takes its departure point from the crashing of waves on rock and the unrelenting energy this can have at certain rugged coastlines around the world. This movement seeks to capture the unrelenting energy and surging, hypnotic force of the sea as it hits and is exploded into mist by rock. It is formed in seven sections which freely restate and mix materials unfolded in the opening measures of the movement.
The third movement Unreturning Tides is a kind of elegy for our earth and the grave difficulties and savagely compromised ecosystems humanity has brought to our natural world. As with all of my recent music, this work also acts as metaphor for the internal life of each of us. Just as our world undergoes radical climate change and even emergency, so too life can bring change and emergencies to our hearts and souls. This last movement therefore is also a kind of statement on our hearts after enduring radical, emergency wrought change.
I am profoundly grateful to know cimbalom artist Chester Englander, with whom I have collaborated before on my second cello concerto Black City. He, and the tremendous musicians of No Exit ensemble have my thanks for this wonderful opportunity to write for them.
No Exit and cimbalomist extraordinaire Chester Englander give the world premier of ECSTATIC WAVES.
As with all of my recent music I find myself returning to the natural world of earth, sky and ocean for inspiration. Especially in these troubled days of radical climate emergency, the world feels even more fragile and perhaps hurting with each passing year as we record ever more extreme environmental change and resultant devastation of human and animal environments and ecosystems.
Ecstatic Waves pays homage to the natural power and beauty of the sea. The first movement, Searise Breaking, is formed in three rather large ‘waves’ each culminating in a quiet and spare ‘exhalation’ stated in the cimbalom.
The second movement Enfoamed Rock takes its departure point from the crashing of waves on rock and the unrelenting energy this can have at certain rugged coastlines around the world. This movement seeks to capture the unrelenting energy and surging, hypnotic force of the sea as it hits and is exploded into mist by rock. It is formed in seven sections which freely restate and mix materials unfolded in the opening measures of the movement.
The third movement Unreturning Tides is a kind of elegy for our earth and the grave difficulties and savagely compromised ecosystems humanity has brought to our natural world. As with all of my recent music, this work also acts as metaphor for the internal life of each of us. Just as our world undergoes radical climate change and even emergency, so too life can bring change and emergencies to our hearts and souls. This last movement therefore is also a kind of statement on our hearts after enduring radical, emergency wrought change.
I am profoundly grateful to know cimbalom artist Chester Englander, with whom I have collaborated before on my second cello concerto Black City. He, and the tremendous musicians of No Exit ensemble have my thanks for this wonderful opportunity to write for them.
No Exit and cimbalomist extraordinaire Chester Englander give the world premier of ECSTATIC WAVES.
As with all of my recent music I find myself returning to the natural world of earth, sky and ocean for inspiration. Especially in these troubled days of radical climate emergency, the world feels even more fragile and perhaps hurting with each passing year as we record ever more extreme environmental change and resultant devastation of human and animal environments and ecosystems.
Ecstatic Waves pays homage to the natural power and beauty of the sea. The first movement, Searise Breaking, is formed in three rather large ‘waves’ each culminating in a quiet and spare ‘exhalation’ stated in the cimbalom.
The second movement Enfoamed Rock takes its departure point from the crashing of waves on rock and the unrelenting energy this can have at certain rugged coastlines around the world. This movement seeks to capture the unrelenting energy and surging, hypnotic force of the sea as it hits and is exploded into mist by rock. It is formed in seven sections which freely restate and mix materials unfolded in the opening measures of the movement.
The third movement Unreturning Tides is a kind of elegy for our earth and the grave difficulties and savagely compromised ecosystems humanity has brought to our natural world. As with all of my recent music, this work also acts as metaphor for the internal life of each of us. Just as our world undergoes radical climate change and even emergency, so too life can bring change and emergencies to our hearts and souls. This last movement therefore is also a kind of statement on our hearts after enduring radical, emergency wrought change.
I am profoundly grateful to know cimbalom artist Chester Englander, with whom I have collaborated before on my second cello concerto Black City. He, and the tremendous musicians of No Exit ensemble have my thanks for this wonderful opportunity to write for them.
No Exit and cimbalomist extraordinaire Chester Englander give the world premier of ECSTATIC WAVES.
As with all of my recent music I find myself returning to the natural world of earth, sky and ocean for inspiration. Especially in these troubled days of radical climate emergency, the world feels even more fragile and perhaps hurting with each passing year as we record ever more extreme environmental change and resultant devastation of human and animal environments and ecosystems.
Ecstatic Waves pays homage to the natural power and beauty of the sea. The first movement, Searise Breaking, is formed in three rather large ‘waves’ each culminating in a quiet and spare ‘exhalation’ stated in the cimbalom.
The second movement Enfoamed Rock takes its departure point from the crashing of waves on rock and the unrelenting energy this can have at certain rugged coastlines around the world. This movement seeks to capture the unrelenting energy and surging, hypnotic force of the sea as it hits and is exploded into mist by rock. It is formed in seven sections which freely restate and mix materials unfolded in the opening measures of the movement.
The third movement Unreturning Tides is a kind of elegy for our earth and the grave difficulties and savagely compromised ecosystems humanity has brought to our natural world. As with all of my recent music, this work also acts as metaphor for the internal life of each of us. Just as our world undergoes radical climate change and even emergency, so too life can bring change and emergencies to our hearts and souls. This last movement therefore is also a kind of statement on our hearts after enduring radical, emergency wrought change.
I am profoundly grateful to know cimbalom artist Chester Englander, with whom I have collaborated before on my second cello concerto Black City. He, and the tremendous musicians of No Exit ensemble have my thanks for this wonderful opportunity to write for them.
NO EXIT gives the New York City premier of MIST WAVES for violin and piano.
Mist Waves is a kind of loose chaconne whose veiled repetition of the initial eight bars forms the basis for the work. Sometimes this initial idea is repeated entirely, sometimes truncated sometimes expanded and all of the time at close interplay with the freely evolving violin line which acts as the expressive core of the work.
Mist Waves is really about land-based cloud and how this forms in waves sometimes thick and predictable and at other times lightening up and revealing more to us. This serves as a metaphor for me of a type of human consciousness and how things are known and unknown to us in mixtures—sometimes equal, frequently unequal—which creates the mystery and magic of life.
The work is dedicated to the wonderful British violinist Madeline Mitchell in commemoration of her 2019 visit to the United States.
NO EXIT gives the plays MIST WAVES for violin and piano the the beautiful LeFrak Concert Hall in Queens, NY.
Mist Waves is a kind of loose chaconne whose veiled repetition of the initial eight bars forms the basis for the work. Sometimes this initial idea is repeated entirely, sometimes truncated sometimes expanded and all of the time at close interplay with the freely evolving violin line which acts as the expressive core of the work.
Mist Waves is really about land-based cloud and how this forms in waves sometimes thick and predictable and at other times lightening up and revealing more to us. This serves as a metaphor for me of a type of human consciousness and how things are known and unknown to us in mixtures—sometimes equal, frequently unequal—which creates the mystery and magic of life.
The work is dedicated to the wonderful British violinist Madeline Mitchell in commemoration of her 2019 visit to the United States.
OFFICIAL LAUNCH of my latest disc CLOUD OSSUARY. Concert information closer to the date.
The brilliant ZODIAC TRIO gives a New York City performance of my work RIVE—originally written for the Verdehr Trio—at the DiMenna Center in New York.
rive literally means a ripping or tearing apart. When the Verdehr Trio visited Tasmania in 2001 they were taken with the severity of such primal ripping and tearing as expressed in the feeding habits of the Tasmanian Devil. We had toyed with the idea of a piece about this and what it distilled to in my mind was a structural approach to musical material which was based on such muscular dismemberment of materials. In my approach to this work the whole of it is formed from a dramatic disaggregation of the materials unfolded in the opening 10 or so measures. All of this material is recycled, recombined, reharmonized, and variously reconfigured such that it morphs from one idea to the next while always relating back to the central initial ideas. This holds true also of the broader formal harmonic structure, which reflects the same harmonic underpinnings of the initial closural arc of the first large phrase group. This work represents somewhat of a departure from previous works of mine in its immediacy of expression and clarity, even its traditionalism in many ways. rive was written over a period of nine days at the Arthur Boyd property Bundanon, now the Bundanon Artists Centre on the Shoalhaven river in New South Wales. It is dedicated with affection to the Verdehr Trio.
Douglas Knehans (b. 1957) is a world-renowned composer. His fresh and energetic style contains a captivating vitality that makes every listener feel alive. If the broader audience has not heard of his music yet, time will certainly tell. Primephonic met him in Brno where his label ABLAZE Records recorded a brand-new album with the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra.
Read the full Interview here
KNEHANS Backwards from Winter • Judith Weusten (sop); Antonis Pratsinakis (electric vc); Douglas Knehans (electronics) • ABLAZE 00054 (61:07 Text and Translation)
An astonishingly visceral Winterreise for the 21st century, Douglas Knehans’s Backwards from Winter is a single woman’s reflection on a love relationship—a space for grief, and her negotiating of that grief. It is scored for solo soprano (“Woman”); there is a part for “Man” as exteriorized in the form of an electric cellist who also sings, and an electronic component. There is also a video, which sadly is absent in this audio release, although its contents are described in the booklet and a YouTube video of the Australian premiere is available.
The superb libretto is by Juanita Rockwell: Each scene is cast in three Tanka verses (a 31-syllable precursor to Haiku; the word “tanka” means “short poem”). The journey begins with “Winter” and moves through the seasons, with the first three seasons followed by a section that remembers it (so, “Winter” is followed by “Remembering Winter” and so on); with the coming of “Spring,” however, the music moves to “Remembering Everything.” The setting is “the landscape of memory and presence.” Tracing a year backwards, from the grief through to the loss itself (“Autumn,” where she lost him in a storm) through to a passionate “Summer” to their budding love in “Spring,” this is a remarkable journey. The emotional effect of the time-reversal is astonishing, as it enables us to hear the joy of first encounter and subsequent love in a totally different manner. The shimmering “Summer” is nevertheless underpinned by a palpable sadness, and when the two voices (soprano and singing cellist) enter together, the effect is stunningly powerful. The opening out into “Spring” is superbly managed through the active electric cello; later, a dark processional around the lines “we stand on the shore, / lilac blossoms ev’rywhere,” with muffled percussion-like sounds (imagine the dead thwacks of Mahler’s 10th Symphony, but on a gong, if you will). It is here the electronica makes its presence known most obviously—swirling lines interacting with the electric cello as the voice swoops hither and thither, sometimes to stratospheric regions. If the repetitive phrases of the electronics and cello refer to Minimalism, it is a highly individualized Minimalism. (One might posit that the repeated slow scales towards the end make reference to Satyagraha, for example, with Knehans grounding the sound through a registrally-emphasized bass note.)
This performance took place in Tasmania in June 2018, shortly after the work’s world premiere in New York’s Thalia Theater on 25/5/2018, during the New York Opera Fest. The recording is stunning, as is the standard of performance from both live musicians; it is hard to credit that this is indeed live from that perspective. Weusten in particular seems to have limitless stamina. One of Knehans’s finest musical statements, this is a stunning release. This is what contemporary opera should be like.
—Colin Clarke
Red Silk, Black Water
In the grim, dark
Palace of souls
They place red silk on the dead
Red of conquered blood
Red of passion
Red of anger
Red of loss
Red of warning and war
Red of love
The red of love
Some things I know in this place to be true
Live centered in your time
Bring those loved
tightly to your bones
And when all is done
and still
and covered in red
Exhale
exhale
exhale
Douglas Knehans
Baltimore virtuoso 2 piano 2 percussion ensemble icarus Quartet perform Knehans Colored Wave
Baltimore virtuoso 2 piano 2 percussion ensemble icarus Quartet perform Knehans Colored Wave
World Premiere recording of Knehans’s Cloud Ossuary (Symphony No. 4) with Judith Weusten, soprano, the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and Mikel Toms, conductor
International Release of recording of BACKWARDS FROM WINTER
Baltimore virtuoso 2 piano 2 percussion ensemble icarus Quartet perform Knehans Colored Wave
Two days of composition lessons, masterclasses, open rehearsals and an evening recital of works including Temple—for solo flute; Rive—for clarinet, violin and piano; and Lumen—for cello and piano.
British violin virtuoso Madeleine Mitchell performs the world premiere of Knehans’s Mist Waves.
Very excited to be presenting a very short introduction to Backwards from Winter at OperaDagen 2019 today! This festival has been tremendously inspirational and I am impressed with the breadth and resourcefulness of so many of the works! Hoping for a nice reception for Backwards from Winter today!
