Ward Hall, The Catholic University of America
3976 Harewood Rd NE
Washington, DC

Great Noise Ensemble returns to Catholic University’s 2012 New Voices @ CUA Festival on January 20th and 21st to present brand new works for voice and ensemble.

On Friday night’s concert, GNE presents works by composers from Catholic’s composition program, featuring composers Jay Parotta, Sarah Horick, Brian Rice, and Joseph Taylor as well as premieres of new works commissioned for GNE by composers Sean Doyle and Cornelius Dufallo.

Dufallo joins the group to perform his work Paranoid Symmetry, bringing a marriage of technology and live instruments to depict the disintegration of the human mind. Sean Doyle’s Letters from Zelda sets texts of letters written to F. Scott Fitzgerald by his wife Zelda to lush orchestrations that evoke the jazz age and the dramatic swings of Zelda’s mental instability.

Tickets are available at the door:
Free for CUA students/faculty/staff with ID
$15 General Admission
$10 Seniors (60 and up) and Students with ID
Free admission for students 17 and under when accompanied by a ticketed adult
Festival Pass (good for admission to all concerts):
$50 General Admission
$30 Seniors and Students with ID

Information and Directions To Ward Hall, The Catholic University of America

Hartke Theater, The Catholic University of America
4120 Harewood Road NE
Washington, DC

In 1883 Carlo Collodi published his completed work, Pinocchio, which has gone on to become one of the classics of children’s literature. On December 9th, Great Noise Ensemble presents a retelling of this favorite story, featuring narrator Pamela Witcher and Great Noise Ensemble members Molly Orlando Palmiero, Katherine Kellert, Chris DeChiara and guest percussionist David Wolf in a tour-de-force evening of music composed by Martin Bresnick. This rarely-performed completed version of the piece features not only the original four scenes featured in Bresnick’s Musica Povera but also the rest of the story, culminating in the marionette’s transformation into a real boy, accompanied by a fascinating range of music from a chamber quartet of clarinets, piano, and a percussion setup that has to be seen to be believed.

This concert is free to children 17 and younger with the paid admission of an accompanying adult. (No limit on number of free childrens’ tickets with each admission– you’re welcome! Bring the whole family! Enjoythe concert!) Free tickets may be requested at Will Call. Groups may reserve free childrens’ tickets by contacting the box office at tickets@greatnoiseensemble.com.

Tickets are available through Ovationtix: General $15 / College students & Seniors $10 / CUA Students faculty and staff free with CUA ID

Information and Directions To Hartke Theater, The Catholic University of America

The Mansion At Strathmore
10701 Rockville Pike
Rockville, MD

Great Noise Ensemble is on a mission: to fight for the performance of new works and promote emerging talent in contemporary music. Since its first concert in January 2006, Great Noise Ensemble has become one of the most important players in D.C.’s burgeoning new music scene, winning the Washington Area Music Association’s “WAMMIE” Award. In this concert, GNE explores American music from the turn of the 21st century, including works by Armando Bayolo, David Lang, Carlos Carillo, Angelica Negron, Eve Beglarian and Pierre Jalbert.

Tickets are available for sale via Strathmore’s website: $10 General Admission.

Information and Directions To The Mansion At Strathmore

GNE is starting a great new program– this year at the following concerts, Great Noise Ensemble will be offering FREE ADMISSION to students 17 & younger as long as they’re accompanied by a ticketed adult. All you need to do is show up to the concert to pick up your regular ticket and let the box office know you have young attendees with you, and they’ll get in free!

Free 17 & Younger tickets are available for the following concerts this year:

September 9. 2011: Lullaby, Eulogy, Homage (The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring)
December 9, 2011: Fairy Tale (Ward Hall, Catholic University)
January 20 & 21, 2012: Poems I & II: New Voices Festival (Ward Hall, Catholic University)
April 13, 2012: Philosophy (Ward Hall, Catholic University)

There may be other concerts with this offer, so stay tuned, and see you at the concerts!

In 2005, when I heard from a friend that a random guy she knew was starting a new music group, I was intrigued, but only passively so. After some thought and a shrug of my shoulders, I sent a message to the email she provided and got back an enthusiastic reply from some guy named Armando that I’d never met—come to rehearsals, bring your friends, we’re going to be doing some really cool stuff, the standard things you’d expect to hear from a young enthusiast with a startup group. Was I interested in maybe playing that really gnarly John Adams clarinet concerto, or maybe some Steve Reich?, he asked, naming a couple of pieces that I knew and one I’d never heard before.

If I wasn’t enthusiastic before, all of the sudden my ears perked up.

I should explain that I come from a pretty standard musical background, and growing up in the Deep South in Birmingham, Alabama, most of the “new music” I heard and experience I had came from the school band room. I was a better than average clarinet player in my area, so I ended up doing lots of of honors bands and clinics, including one that would unexpectedly profoundly change my young perceptions of music: I showed up to a local clarinet symposium as a young high school kid to play in the clarinet choir, and found myself looking at one of the stranger pieces of music I’d ever seen at the time—there were all of these repeated eighth notes, sections and sections and pages and pages of them. I could barely keep track of them and wondered what in the world it was supposed to sound like. The guy’s name wasn’t too weird, Steve Reich, and it probably had to be cool if New York was in the title, I thought to myself. (It was, of course, his famous work New York Counterpoint, which the director of the choir had decided to have us perform completely live instead of as it’s usually done, with one live clarinet and prerecorded track.) When the conductor gave that first downbeat, I can honestly tell you that my world shifted entirely into another frame. My stand partner, a veteran local clarinetist, got the grins at my drop-jawed expression as I listened, completely oblivious to the part I was supposed to playing with her—she knew this was a game changer. By the time we’d reached the end of the first section, I knew I had to know more about this guy, this kind of music. By the end of the piece I was totally and forever hooked—anybody that could take a couple of measures of repeated notes and write them to make them groove that way, and that hard, deserved a more intense examination.

In my college years, it was Steve Reich’s name and that experience that drew me to the Contemporary Ensemble led by conductor Gerald Welker at the University of Alabama, who would become a profound influence in my musical life, introducing me to ever broader vistas of “contemporary” works by Olivier Messaien, Harrison Birtwistle, Terry Riley, and of course Reich and many others through those and other ensemble rehearsals. By the time I transferred to a different school (Arizona State University) in my junior year, I knew I liked “new music” at least in theory, even if not all of it grooved quite as well as some of those sections of New York Counterpoint, and I had enough of an open mind to try some of the newest, craziest stuff coming out that was championed by my teacher there (and one of the best in the performance business, Robert Spring, who to this day inspires me to dare to try music that would scare the pants off most traditional performers.)

All of that history basically boils down to this: Steve Reich’s music was the gateway drug that led me to a love of all of the music I now perform with Great Noise Ensemble. And a powerful gateway drug it is too—there are sections of Music for 18 Musicians that quite literally grab me and shake me bodily (section VI and VII particularly): my head bobs, my feet tap, I shimmy in my chair. I’m sure it’s very entertaining to watch, but I can’t help it nor would I if I could. And if that’s what it does to a hard sell you can tell it’s powerful stuff. Because of the interest his music gave me, I’ve learned that there are more kinds of amazing new music out there to play than just the academic, brainiac stuff that used to kind of drive me crazy in college, that there are composers who write music that grabs my attention and speaks to me very deeply using the very vocabularies I had somehow thought classical somehow missed in translation, from the hard rocking sounds of Marc Mellits to the beautiful and zen flow of many of John Luther Adams’s works. If it weren’t for the genius of Steve Reich I might never have had that door in my mind opened.

So, for that, I owe you my thanks in this year of your 75th birthday Mr. Reich—you’ve given me a very precious gift and for that I will always, always be thankful.

Katherine Kellert is Great Noise Ensemble’s clarinetist and Managing Director. You can find out more about her at Great Noise Ensemble’s website and follow her Twitter feed: @katiekellert. You’ll be able to see her perform Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians with Great Noise Ensemble on Friday, September 9th, 2011 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring
10309 New Hampshire Avenue
Silver Spring, MD 20903

Great Noise Ensemble opens its seventh season with a concert featuring a world premiere, a remembrance September 11th, and a birthday wish to composer Steve Reich.

GNE is proud to open this performance with the world premiere of a brand new work written for us by up-and-coming composer Hannah Lash, entitled Hush. We are also proud to present, as a remembrance near the 10th anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, Stephen Hartke’s Beyond Words, composed in the aftermath of the attacks. We also take time to celebrate the upcoming 75th birthday of composer Steve Reich with his epic piece Music for 18 Musicians.

This concert is special occasion for Great Noise Ensemble as well, as this concert marks the official debut of conductor David Vickerman in his new role as GNE’s Assistant Conductor, and will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring.

Tickets are available through OvationTix or at the door: $15 General Admission / $10 Students & Seniors / 17 & under free with a regular adult admission.

Information and Directions To The Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring

GNE: “What inspired you to become a composer?”

Mellits: “I never really thought about anything else. In fact, I think being a composer is not really something you choose, it chooses you. It is not like one day I woke up and thought, “Yea, a composer, that is what I want to be.” Rather, it is just something I have always done, for as long as I can remember. I am constantly creating, there is always music in my head, even right now. The trick is to learn to be able to take the ideas that we are always thinking of and create beautiful sound that works from beginning to end.”

GNE: “What type, style, or genre of music being created right now (be it classical, pop, country, Broadway, whatever) inspires you or interests you the most? In other words, what artists and composers are speaking to you most with their new work?”

Mellits: “I tend to listen to music across multiples styles and genres. So if it is beautiful, well written music, I would like it regardless of the type or style. I rarely listen to ‘style’ and usually focus on craft instead. Right now, I am absorbed with the music of an American composer whom I admire, Bill Ryan, and a Dutch composer I am fascinated with, Douwe Eisenga. Vivaldi I listen to more than anyone else and own multiple performances of his complete works. Lately, I am also back on the first record of Sigur Ros a lot, can’t stop listening to this one. The guitar work of Jimmy Page of Led Zepplin continues to get my attention these days.”

GNE: “What was your inspiration for composing the piece we’re featuring on the CD and what kind of process do/did you go through when composing it or similar pieces?”

Mellits: “I was living in New York City at the time. I got a call from Michael Gordon of Bang On a Can, out of the blue, asking me if I would be interested in writing for the Bang On A Can All-Stars. I remember it very clearly. I started writing this piece that very same day and did not stop until I reached the end. So, I guess you could say that I was inspired my the group itself. I am also fascinated by machinery. I wanted to write music that had the musicians rely on each other much like they were all parts of a giant musical machine. The Guitar line fits into the Cello, which fits into the Piano, and so on. Each player represents a cog, a belt, a gear in the machine. The music is formed by the combination of sounds of the entire group working together. This was a very important piece of music for me. BOAC took a chance on me, and I will always be grateful. This music that I wrote for them was one of the sparks that led to many more and I will always have BOAC to thank for that!”

To learn more about Marc Mellits, visit his website or check out his interview with New Music Detroit on YouTube.

Once again, THANK YOU to all of the donors who helped get our Kickstarter funded. If you haven’t donated yet but would like to, please visit our Kickstarter project page before June 2 and pitch in!

Our third composer profile features another of our favorite artists to work with, Robert Paterson. Our CD will be featuring his piece, Looney Tunes, which is about as fun a piece of music as we’ve ever played.When you get a percussionist/rock drummer as cool as Rob is as a composer you know that his pieces are going to be fun to play, but they’re also very challenging and really make us work– we can’t wait to get cracking on getting this down for the CD. Here’s an excerpt from our premiere of the piece last April, Movement 4: Road Runner:

GNE: “What inspired you to become a composer?”

Paterson: “Growing up in Buffalo, NY, I played drum set in rock bands and percussion in various wind ensembles and youth orchestras. My parents also took me to new music concerts. I even took composition lessons in high school, but it wasn’t until college that I began to take composition seriously. I think ultimately it was the thought of sitting in the back of the percussion section of an orchestra and counting all those rests, or rather, not counting them. As much as I completely admire all of the wonderful percussionists who do this for a living, I was very intrigued by what was happening around me, to the point of distraction. I eventually decided that I would much rather write the music that everyone plays rather than play it.”

GNE: “What type, style, or genre of music being created right now (be it classical, pop, country, Broadway, whatever) inspires you or interests you the most? In other words, what artists and composers are speaking to you most with their new work?”

Paterson: I mostly listen to other classical composers doing what I do. Lately I am inspired by music by Finnish composers such as Kalevi Aho and Magnus Lindberg, but also by living American composers such as Steven Stucky, Christopher Rouse and David Lang (particularly his work the Little Match Girl Passion) and by many of my peers. I have also been listening to indigenous music from around the world, from places like Nigeria, Cuba, India and Japan. I guess it depends what mood I’m in: if I am feeling calm, I’ll listen to choral music, perhaps by composers like Morten Lauridsen, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi or Knut Nystedt. I recently heard a piece by Donald Crockett that I really liked. If I’m feeling more in a pop mood, I might listen to Stereolab, a Buddha Bar album or perhaps music in the electronica vein by musicians like Imogen Heap.”

GNE: “What was your inspiration for composing the piece we’re featuring on the CD and what kind of process do/did you go through when composing it or similar pieces?”

Paterson: “Looney Tunes is inspired by cartoon characters. Like most children during the 70s and 80s, I grew up watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, so I guess this rubbed off on me, especially with regard to sound effects and quick-changing musical styles. My favorites were cartoons featuring Looney Tunes characters like the Road Runner, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety Bird and the Tasmanian Devil, the characters that inspired the movements in this piece. There are a few times I transcribed by ear what I heard in the soundtrack if I needed to quote a snippet of something, because I didn’t have access to the sheet music. I was also intent on using drum set in this piece, which is something I’ve never done in any of my serious works.”

You can find out more about Robert Paterson at his website, and read more of his writing on his blog.

We’re still working on getting the Kickstarter project funded, so head over and pledge if you haven’t already!

Continuing our series profiling the composers on our upcoming CD which we’re funding through Kickstarter (GO DONATE!! We’re getting close to the deadline!) , we’d like to introduce you to one of our favorites, D.J. Sparr if you’re not hip to his music already. His compositions are some of the most groovin’ new works we’ve ever come across, and he’s full of ideas that reshape and re-frame the way we think about music. Here you can hear an informally recorded sample from his piece Carnal Node, which we’ll be recording and featuring on the CD:

GNE: “What inspired you to become a composer?”

Sparr: “When I was three or four years old, there was a show called He-Haw. I would stand in front of the television at my great-grandmother’s house with a broom pretending to play the guitar like Roy Clark and Buck Owens. So, when she gave me a ukulele for my fourth birthday, I must have played it a lot because my parents found me a guitar teacher soon after. Around the same time, I had a piano teacher who assigned me to write a little piece about Soccer…which was my topic of choice. So, it seemed normal to write a new song using all of the new guitar chords I learned each week. My teacher would have me sing them for the music store. The outfit of choice was a western shirt (unbuttoned for good taste), jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat for good measure. This was in the very hip ‘Bo and Luke Duke’ style of the early 80s.”

D.J. Sparr's Mickey Mouse Guitar

“I never had a real ‘flash!’ moment where I saw someone who was a composer and thought, ‘I want to do that too.’ Mostly, as with a lot of the nature of guitar players, writing your own music is just part of playing the instrument.”

“Eventually, this lead to writing music for other instruments which was very exciting- and really just a continuation of the guitar player’s zeal for having fun and being creative with the people around him.”

This will all come full circle in two years when I premiere my second work for the California Symphony, an electric guitar concerto named after my great-grandmother: Violet Bond. The CS is integrating the Young American Composer-in-Residence position with their Music-in-the-Schools program, so there will be a lot to talk about with the students for that year.

GNE: “What type, style, or genre of music being created right now (be it classical, pop, country, Broadway, whatever) inspires you or interests you the most? In other words, what artists and composers are speaking to you most with their new work?”

Sparr: “I try and listen to everything I can find by all composers- even in any style. As a fan of music, I lean more towards what I consider the line of music that came from Stravinsky and impressionism, skipped over the pond, found Copland and a beat, turned into minimalism and post minimalism, and is now being written by people with very little academic hang-ups. I like that kind of stuff. But, as someone ‘n the business,’ there are things to learn from every piece and every style. If a piece doesn’t speak to me as a ‘fan,’ I try to pay attention to the people around me in the audience, gauge their reactions and feel what they are experiencing. This allows me to enjoy or learn something from all music and art. In terms of things that inspire me, this happens with anything from a science theory, a cultural phenomenon, a rock song, a moment from a classic classical piece, or a car chase scene from a movie. Most times, it’s all of those things combined – as in the GNE piece that is being recorded, Carnal Node.”

GNE: “What was your inspiration for composing the piece we’re featuring on the CD and what kind of process do/did you go through when composing it or similar pieces?”

Sparr: “I had a friend who moved back to his parent’s house on a farm after living in a very big metropolitan city while at college. He was one of the first friends I had who tried online dating – like Prodigy and America Online, and he would go on blind dates. He sent me crazy and very lengthy emails about these experiences which were very entertaining. So, I assembled something like one hundred pages of text of these emails and put them into a fictional narrative, mini-drama for soprano and chamber ensemble.”

“The singer fulfills a dual role of narrator and protagonist. So at times, she is performing recitative, and at other times, she sings lyrically in first person, direct quotes from the emails.”

“Here is an example from the text. In this moment the main character is weighing his options for if he never finds love:”

“‘I will live with some old guy, and we will talk about how the kids these days have no respect for their elders, and we will smoke and drink until we are old and fat. Then, when the first one dies, the other will set him into a chair and talk to him like he’s still alive. Then, the Police will come and take the survivor to the sanitarium.’”

“‘Some old guy’ was actually a person’s name in the text – and I was going to set it that way, but I changed it at his request because he was more-than-a-tad offended. And, rightly so… It was a smart request on his part, because ten years after this piece was written, we all know him… as he is in the music writing business too! Anyway, it wouldn’t have worked well leaving his name in because he has found love and is married… which would throw the story off and make for confusion.”

“But, in Carnal Node there seem to be no happy endings:”

“He has false memories of your party-talk and the lock of hair he clipped as you slept on the couch.”

You can hear more of D.J. Sparr’s work on his website or over at iTunes.

If you haven’t donated yet, please do– we have eight days left and a little over $2,000 left to raise– please go over and donate to the project if you haven’t already!!

We thought you might like to know a little more about the composers we’re going to be featuring on our upcoming CD, which we’re trying to fund through Kickstarter. If you haven’t visited out project site yet, please do and please donate to the cause. We’re very, very excited about the project and we can’t wait to get started, but we need your help to get it off the ground!! Donate and help spread the word!

Since charity starts at home, our first profile features composer and GNE Artistic Director and conductor Armando Bayolo, whose off-the-wall sense of humor keeps us laughing and whose passionate commitment to new music is the anchor to GNE’s commitment to finding, performing and championing new music and up-and-coming composers. We’ll be featuring his piece, Chamber Symphony: Illusory Airs on our upcoming CD. If you’d like a taste of what you’ll be hearing (though better recorded– this was a done in a REALLY live hall) check out the third movement of the piece from a concert we did a couple of years ago:

Armando Bayolo: Chamber Symphony: Illusory Airs, Movement III

GNE: “So, first things first: what inspired you to become a composer?”

Bayolo: “Well, at first the voices in my head told me to burn things. I was worried. After all, I had no idea what my extremely strict parents (who were Dickensian factory workers in Victorian London) would do if I set their “house” (a hovel, really…nay, more of a shoebox) aflame. Thankfully, bout the age of 12 I found a way to channel my crippling dementia into the creative outlet of music, and the rest, as they say, is history (or infamy, depending on your point of view).”

“Okay, maybe not. The serious version comes down to two words: Star Wars. Yes, the George Lucas film. Or, more precisely, the John Williams soundtrack to that film. When I was four I saw Star Wars for the first time, the soundtrack to which marked the first time I’d ever heard an orchestra. From that point on I would go around the house making tunes up in my head, and having no idea what I was doing until I started taking piano lessons at age 12 or so. By then I’d heard stories of my mother’s piano playing and the one piece she’d composed, which, sadly, she never wrote down. I decided that, hey, if my mom could do it, I would too, but I would actually write the thing down.”"

“And now, 26 years later, here we are.”

GNE: “What type, style, or genre of music being created right now (be it classical, pop, country, Broadway, whatever) inspires you or interests you the most? In other words, what artists and composers are speaking to you most with their new work?”

Bayolo: “I try to be as varied in my listening as possible. When I first discovered “classical” music I devoured everything I could get my hands on so that by the time I was 18 I had a vast knowledge of the standard repertoire. So in college I devoured a lot of early and recent music. All of that repertoire was incredibly formative and foundational to me. These days, though, I’m particularly interested in the connections between popular music and concert music and how they can inform each other. I continue to be a big Beatles fan (which is like saying you like Beethoven, I suppose) and have been trying, in my music, to apply some of the interesting things they did with their song forms (like having a little coda that doesn’t relate to the rest of the song before it, things like that) to large scale concert music. I’ve also discovered Radiohead in the last six months or so and am a little bit obsessed with them right now. I think what they’re doing is akin to what I’d like to do in concert music but on the other end: trying to apply things from contemporary concert music to the pop language. I’ve also been listening to the New Amsterdam Records crowd, particularly Judd Greenstein, whose music has an infectiously joyous quality that I quite admire and even envy a little bit.”

“And, of course, there’s Andriessen. That guy is to me what Beethoven or Wagner were to composers 100-200 years ago.”

GNE: “What was your inspiration for composing the piece we’re featuring on the CD and what kind of process do/did you go through when composing it or similar pieces?”

Bayolo: “Chamber Symphony, “Illusory Airs,” like most of the rest of my ouvre, involved a complex negotiation with the Dark Lord Mephisto. In essence, my creative life is part of a long-standing bargain my family made with the devil millenia ago that allows us to rule the territories of…”

“…you know what? Forget I said all of that. I’ve said too much already. Let’s just say that the piece was written to give Great Noise Ensemble a significant display piece that it could maintain in its active repertoire. It was written in 2006 while I was teaching at Hamilton College and teaching a course on the history of the symphony, which got me thinking about what the genre is supposed to mean for a contemporary composer and his/her audience. It’s written around a theme that is never completely heard in the piece (hence why it’s an “illusory air”) which, to my mind, represents the connections we all share through technology while still staying separate in the physical world.”

“We’ll go with that. Mephisto would like that.”

For more information about Armando Bayolo’s work and to listen to some examples, please visit his website (www.ArmandoBayolo.com) or his Reverbnation site (www.reverbnation.com/armandobayolo). For more of his writing, visit Sequenza21.com.

As of today, we have thirteen days to get our project funded, and about $4,500 to go. If you’re a fan of GNE or simply want to find out more about our project, please visit our Kickstarter project website.