MARY KOUYOUMDJIAN

Peony

Peony ​is a celebration of life after loss. This piece is in dedication to flutist and dear friend Katie Cox, whose beautiful garden full of peonies in Fairbanks, Alaska celebrates exactly that.​

A Boy and a Makeshift Toy

Inspired by the work of American Pulitzer-nominated war photographer Chris Hondros, who captured images of children in wars around the world, the Children of Conflict series is a collection of sonic portraits based off of Hondros' intimately revealing photography with hopes to continue the storytelling and dialogue of his work prompts. "A Boy and a Makeshift Toy" is a portrait of a young boy playing in an abandoned train station, full of Albanian reugees, waiting to be taken to another camp. During an 11-week bombing campaign in 1999, Serbians displaced more than 800,000 Albanians out of Kosovo.

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Serenade in A is a work for solo piano by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Completed on September 9, 1925, in Vienna and published by Boosey & Hawkes, it resulted from his signing his first gramophone recording contract, for Brunswick, and was written so that each movement could fit on one side of a 78 rpm record. The dedicatee was Stravinsky's wife Yekaterina.

CONRAD WINSLOW

Longliner Trio plays with the semantics of musical line and the shifting roles of a group without a clear leader. There are no solos. For the most part, there is no accompaniment in a traditional sense. The first movement consists solely of single unaccompanied lines jointly performed in fast rhythmic hockets which require the musicians to exchange places (on the beat and off the beat) on a continual basis. It is extremely bare and fragile.
The second movement is built on a set of chords saturated with microtonal voicings in the flute and violin. Presented at first as static objects, the chords are gradually compressed into a swift progression, sending up a cascading tune overhead.
The third movement is a transition, a kind of mechanical echo of the second movement after the chords evaporate. The hushed answer in the fourth movement closes the work with a more lyrical surface. The titles make references to commercial longlining fishing, which my father did for halibut in Alaska in the 1990s.
Joseph Haydn's piano trios fascinate me by their harmonic experimentation and sometimes by their quiet power, but most of all by the doubling of the piano part. Yes, the cello doublings in particular are mostly pro forma, strengthening the piano in chamber music with a clear soloist. But there are also magic moments where the violin and cello step out and show unexpected independence. The reversals of mechanical function and expressive agency keep me hooked.

EVE BEGLARIAN
​
BRIM: the River ProjectInspired by the echoes of Hurricane Katrina and the economic meltdown of 2008, award-winning New York composer Eve Beglarian decided to improvise her own unofficial WPA project, charting a four-month trip down the Mississippi River by kayak and bicycle in 2009.
In the years following the trip, Eve has developed a repertoire of original compositions, adventurous arrangements of traditional songs, and spoken, photographic, and video portraits of people and places along the river.
Each evening’s repertoire of stories, music, and images will be customized for the locations and communities where we are performing. The overall experience for an audience is not unlike a journey on the Mississippi River (and perhaps throughout America) itself: both familiar and strange — friendly, full of warmth and playfulness, but with complexity and darkness threaded just beneath.
Some pieces begin from audio and video recordings made along the river, others are inspired by music and stories Eve heard along the way from the people she met. Eclectic and openhearted, the show traces the spine of the United States to reveal the ties that bind us together.

YAZ LANCASTER

intangible landscapes deals with the growing feelings of ennui and isolation I encounter[ed] living in New York over the past six years, and how perceived landscapes of memory shift, breathe and transform over periods of time. Many people I love no longer live here. I question whether a home is a tangible, real place, or if it exists in the intangibility and quiet intimacy of created and/or remembered landscapes that can only exist ephemerally.