October 27, 2024 2:00pm
Presented by Inwood Art Works
Caballito Negro + Friends
Birds, Bees & Electric Fish
Caballito Negro: Tessa Brinckman, flutes, Terry Longshore, percussion
with Lisa Cella, flute and Dustin Donahue, percussion
Good Shepherd Auditorium
Inwood, New York City
PROGRAM
Two Seaming | Jane Rigler
Lisa Cella, Tessa Brinckman - flutes
music for the small hours | Emma O’Halloran
Dustin Donahue, Terry Longshore - percussion
No. 13 | Stuart Saunders Smith
Lisa Cella - flute
Dustin Donahue - percussion
Itch | Will Rowe
Tessa Brinckman - alto flute
Terry Longshore - snare drum
INTERMISSION
Birds, Bees, Electric Fish | Juri Seo
Birds
Bees
Electric Fish
Tessa Brinckman - flute/alto flute/found sounds
Lisa Cella - flute/piccolo/ocarina/found sounds
Terry Longshore - percussion
Dustin Donahue - percussion
PLEASE NOTE:
Juri Seo suggests for maximum effect the audience wear blindfolds during the performance, which is up to your discretion. Blindfolds are provided by the ushers. The performers will be moving throughout the performance space, and the entire dynamic spectrum will be evidenced during the piece, from very soft to very loud, including sounds reminiscent of firecrackers.
SPECIAL THANKS TO…
Caballito Negro gratefully acknowledges the following support for Birds, Bees & Electric Fish:
2024 grant from Chamber Music America’s Artistic Projects program, funded through the generosity of The Howard Gilman Foundation
2024 UMEZ grant, administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Inwood Art Works
University Of Maryland Baltimore County Music Department for rehearsal space and percussion in preparing for this concert.
BIOS:
Flute/percussion duo Caballito Negro curates, composes, and commissions interdisciplinary projects that foster empathy and imagination, in true cultural exchange with other artists. Originally based in Oregon (and a bi-coastal duo since 2022), Tessa Brinckman (flutist) and Terry Longshore (percussionist) have been praised for their “wildly personal, intercultural, modern music...that could be performed anywhere” (Oregon Arts Watch), "absolutely gorgeous tone...and understated virtuosity" (Blue Sky Music). Numerous collaborations include “mad-scientist-of-music”, Mark Applebaum, and oud virtuoso Ronnie Malley. Artistic residencies include Ashland Independent Film, New American Music, Britt, and Oregon Shakespeare festivals. They have presented nationwide in venues as diverse as CCRMA (Stanford), Center for New Music (SF), The Delancey (NYC), and Dennos Museum Center (MI). Recent projects include leading a consortium to commission Juri Seo for the world's first double flute/percussion quartet; receiving a Chamber Music America and Manhattan Arts grant; performance tours of Seo's piece in 2024/25; and releasing Bare White Bones.
Interdisciplinary flutist/composer Tessa Brinckman has been praised for her “chameleon-like gifts” and “virtuoso elegance” (Gramophone), and as "an adroit creator of sound worlds” (Fanfare). A New Zealander living in NYC since 2022, she has performed, premiered, commissioned, composed and recorded widely diverse musical genres, from solo to orchestral, across the globe. She builds performances that celebrate synesthesia, dialect, innate meter and collaboration, often on geo-political themes in a surrealist spirit. Tessa co-directs the bi-coastal duo, Caballito Negro, commissioning significant new work for multiple flutes and percussion. Two of her collaborative videos have won 22 film festival awards for music scoring, animation and experimental film. She presents workshops internationally on flute culture and performance, creativity, and artist activism. Tessa's 2024 projects include her critically acclaimed album, Take Wing, Roll Back (New Focus Recordings), several composition commissions, and guest appearances within many new music series, festivals and ensembles around the USA.
Terry Longshore, based in Ashland, Oregon, is a versatile percussionist known for his genre-defying performances blending concert hall artistry, jazz spontaneity, and rock club energy, and whose “understated virtuosity is percussion poetry at its best” (Blue Sky Music). Co-artistic director of Caballito Negro, Knock on Wood Percussion, Left Edge Collective, and Skin & Bones, he is also a member of the Portland Percussion Group and Principal Percussionist of the Rogue Valley Symphony, and has premiered over 100 compositions. Longshore is a Marimba One Vibe Artist and an artist endorser for Black Swamp Percussion, Zildjian Cymbals, Vic Firth Stick & Mallets, Remo Drumheads, Gon Bops Percussion, and Beato Bags. His discography includes recordings on the Albany, Cantaloupe, Innova, Mode, and Tzadik labels. A trained HealthRHYTHMS facilitator, he serves as Professor of Music, Artist in Residence, and Director of Percussion Studies at the Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University.
A champion of contemporary music, internationally renowned flutist Lisa Cella is a founding member of NOISE. This resident ensemble of San Diego New Music has presented at the Acousmania Festival in Bucharest, the Pacific Rim Festival at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, with its own annual festival, soundON. Lisa performs with Jane Rigler and Carrie Rose in the flute collective inHALE, and leads The Low Flutes Project which fosters new works that shatter boundaries in sound and technique. Lisa is a faculty member of the Soundscape Festival of Contemporary Music in Blonay, Switzerland and at Nief-Norf in Knoxville, TN. She has taught at the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico and presented workshops and recitals at the Mid-Atlantic Flute Fair in Reston, VA and at the National Flute Association Convention. She is a Full Professor of Music at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Dustin Donahue is a percussionist dedicated to contemporary chamber music. His performances have been described as "mesmerizing" and "ineffably moving" by the Los Angeles Times, and "exacting" by the San Diego Union-Tribune. He performs for many of North America's top presenters of chamber music, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, the Ojai Music Festival, the Park Avenue Armory, and La Jolla Summerfest. He regularly performs with the International Contemporary Ensemble, WasteLAnd, Monday Evening Concerts, and is a member of the Partch Ensemble, a group specializing in Harry Partch's invented instruments. He has recorded for Decca, Mode, Naxos, New Focus, Populist, and Stradivarius Records. He frequently collaborates with living composers, such as recent projects with Carolyn Chen, Laure Hiendl, Bruno Ruviaro, Steven Takasugi, and Yiheng Yvonne Wu. He is currently Assistant Professor of Percussion at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
PROGRAM NOTES:
The ambiguity of the piece begins with the title. Jane Rigler wrote Two Seaming in 1998 with the Inuit women’s vocal games in mind, where two women face each other so closely that the mouth cavity of one is the resonator for the other. While using a frying pan or other such device to help resonate their vocalizations, each begins to breathe, sing and vocalize gestures into the other’s face. This spectacular game ends when the first person begins to laugh, the other then, becoming the winner of the game. This flute piece was written for two female flutists but has since been performed by anyone. The intention is that neither the audience, and perhaps neither of the interpreters, really know who is playing or singing what, since the timbres and tones match so well between the voices and flutes, the ambiguity deepens. The improvised sections evoke the game: who will play next? Who will have the last word? Who will laugh first? Although, in this game, everyone is a winner! (J.R.)
Irish composer Emma O’Halloran is interested in joy, wonder, hope, and connection, and her music is driven by a desire to capture the magic of what it means to be human. Freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music, Emma has written for folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables, laptop orchestra, symphony orchestra, opera, and theatre, and her work has been described as “intensely beautiful” (Washington Post) and “unencumbered, authentic, and joyful” (I Care If You Listen). music for the small hours was written in 2023, and sweetly combines two woodblocks and six metal pipes (three notes in two octaves) tuned in just intonation, with glockenspiel, which is tuned in equal temperament. The beating between the pipes and glockenspiel caused by the different tuning systems creates a rich tapestry of waves floating over the spritely melodies. (T.L.)
No. 13 by Stuart Saunders Smith was composed in 2023 for Lisa Cella as a gift in honor of Jean Cella, her mother, who had just passed. It is beautiful and thoughtful music, weaving a tapestry of familiar yet new that seems to echo the relationships of mothers and their children. Sometimes in harmony, sometimes not, sometimes in complete unison and sometimes not mirroring the ebb and flow of relationships. (L.C.)
The only thing worse than getting bed bugs is finding out you’re allergic to them. Composer Will Rowe writes that “I’ve never experienced an itch that intense in my life – one that overrides any other sensory input when inflamed, and still screams for your attention when subsided. Itch was composed in 2024 amid acquiring and exterminating these tiny bastards, and served as a cathartic means of enduring those sensations. The flute’s constant unpitched flutter tongue combined with the brushes and thumb rolls on the snare drum illustrate the itchy and burning sensations in various extremes. At times, they swell at regular and accelerating rates: when an itch is this bad, you can feel your own pulse in the bite, and the stress of enduring it plus fighting the need to scratch can send your heart rate through the roof. Of course, the itch must mercifully subside eventually, and all that’s left are the last couple pinpricks before fizzling out entirely. Eerily, the sensory memory of that sensation can be felt on the skin like an image burned into a screen. I hope that hearing this piece is the closest you’ll ever get to experiencing this for yourself.” (W.R.)
Umwelt, the German word for environment, is used in biology to denote the perceptual world as experienced by a specific organism. Juri Seo encountered the term in Ed Yong’s recent book An Immense World, but it has been in use since its introduction in 1909 by the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. While our perception is limited to our own Umwelt, delineated by the limits of human perceptual capacity, we can imagine other animals’ Umwelten by studying their physiology and behaviors. The attempt at this impossible task of exiting the self-centered perception is a deeply human endeavor that may help recontextualize our relationship with other organisms and with the living world.
The composer writes that to begin composing Birds, Bees, Electric Fish, “I began by selecting three organisms I found particularly interesting: birds, bees, and electric fish. How do birds hear their own songs? What goes on in the mind of a bee in a colony? And what does it feel like to be a fish feeling its three-dimensional surrounding via an electrical sensation on its skin? In the first movement, “Birds,” the audience is invited to listen like a bird and become a bird via music. While it is impossible to reside in two Umwelten simultaneously, the continuum between listening as a bird and listening as a human can be suggested in music. Many experimental data show that birds listen faster, capable of differentiating minute variations that escape the human ear. In the article “What Birds Really Listen for in Birdsong (It’s Not What You Think)” in Scientific American, Adam Fishbein introduces experiments involving Indigo Buntings. The buntings sing in paired syllables, which appears to be the most salient feature of their songs to humans. However, recent experiments show that the buntings are mainly interested in fine detail, more so than the paired nature of their songs. To explore this phenomenon, I began by slowing down a song of Indigo Bunting to 1⁄2, 1⁄3, and 1⁄4 of its original speed and transcribing them. They were modified to fit my musical instincts along the way. The various temporal versions of the song unfold in an imaginary sonic forest, ending with the slowest rendering in an attempt to enter the mind of a bird.
While the birds are often considered individually, the bees are often regarded as a collective organism in a hive. Lars Chittka’s A Mind of a Bee introduces some fascinating views not only on how bees come to collective decisions and learn from each other but also on what might go on in a single bee’s mind. Do they feel optimism, pleasure, or pain? The first part of the second movement, “Bees,” is a sonification of hexagons, laid out in a pitch map derived from Euler’s Tonnetz. The ensemble collectively explores the pitch space, unfolding harmonies in a fractal-like process. Perhaps it’s not too far-fetched to think that the mind of a human filling a chromatic space may be similar to the mind of a bee trying to maximize the space within its hive. The second part of the movement is inspired by the bee dance. (The bees are known to wiggle and rotate to communicate with other bees about the location of potential food sources or a new home.) I composed two contrasting melodies—symbolizing two bees dancing—that gradually form a consensus. Once the process is complete, there is a dance party. (It’s sort of a fugue.) I had to speculate that the bees feel something akin to joy in agreement.
The hexagon motif returns at the end while the ensemble scatters for the finale. Sonically representing the electric fish’s perception of the epidermic electroreceptors proved harder to conceive. The 1988 article “Electric Fish Measure Distance in the Dark” by Gerhard von Der Emde et al. in Nature Magazine shares some interesting findings: objects farther away are perceived on the larger surface area of the skin (opposite of our retinal perception), and the gradients of the edges provide the fish with an idea of the objects’ shapes. I decided to adopt a more intuitive approach and paint five sonic scenes surrounding the audience. The diverse sound waves with distinct timbres originating from various locations activate the eardrums, creating an illusion of epidermic perception.
The audience is encouraged to mentally map their surroundings replete with diverse vibrating objects. The translations of senses become more abstract as the piece unfolds; from birds to bees and to electric fish, various senses—auditory, visual, kinetic, and tactile—are alluded to through sounds only. Ironically, my attempt to enter the minds of other beings necessitated a heightened sense of humanity, as I strove to imagine their diverse non-human senses through a lens of familiarity and empathy. It involved hearing birds slower, imbuing them with lyricism; imagining the serene and joyful minds of bees; and experiencing a sense of touch and sight through the act of listening”. (J.S.)