World Premiere of "Considering Light" in Los Angeles

Friday December 5
8pm
The Los Angeles Wholesale Orchestra
Murphy Recital Hall
Loyola Marymount University
1 LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045
$7-10 donation
www.poortommusic.com/index/NEWS
www.wholesaleorchestra.org
(see bottom of this posting for the program note on Considering Light)

Radio Feature
Wednesday, December 3
9pm
Trilogy hosted by Emily Hay
KXLU 88.9 FM
www.kxlu.com
www.emilyhay.com

Los Angeles Wholesale Orchestra gives an evening-long Tribute to late Los Angeles composer Stephen "Lucky" Mosko. The concert will feature works by Mosko and several of his former students. The event will take place at Loyola Marymount College's Murphy Recital Hall and will feature three world premieres introduced by Los Angeles expat Nicholas Chase who returns courtesy of Meet The Composer's MetLife Creative Connections. In addition, Emily Hay will talk with Chase and his colleagues on her KXLU program Trilogy 9pm Wednesday, December 3 on FM 88.9.

The Los Angeles Wholesale Orchestra (LAWO) is a cooperative of professional experimental musicians who are dedicated to performing music by new and emerging composers. LAWO is also devoted to investigating the influences and directions of modern experimental concert music, through performance and dialogue. The group is committed to expanding the audience of this genre of music, utilizing such avenues as pre-concert talks,and educational outreach.

Nicholas Chase returns to L.A. from Europe and the Pacific Northwest, having just completed the successful touring premieres of Ngoma Lungundu (Voice That Thunders) for electronics and interactive video and Songs of the Thirsty Sword - Part I for piano, interactive electronics and video. Dubbed by L.A. Weekly as an 'Eye/Ear Explorer,' and described by the L.A. Times as "flamboyant" and "the Rite of Spring meets Metallica," Chase's solo and chamber works have been performed internationally by the likes of the California EAR Unit, Southwest Chamber Music, New Zealand's 175 East, Long Beach Opera and the Philadelphia Classical Symphony. His electro-acoustic work has been featured at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland and as part of the Weimar-New York festival in Weimar, Germany. Chase is founder of the Musical Art/Sound Laboratory (MAS-Lab) whose trans-disciplinary work has been exhibited in festivals across the US and Europe. Chase's work with the improvising trio NIRUSU III has been acclaimed by the L.A. Weekly as "pushing the edge of audio/visual improv" while his interactive audio/visual composition Transmission was featured last Spring with the Illuminated Corridor's NOVA at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The recently toured Ngoma Lungundu and Songs of the Thirsty Sword - Part I will be available on commercial release early in 2009. (www.nicholaschase.net)

Stephen "Lucky" Mosko was for ten years the music director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and was principal conductor of the Griffin Ensemble of Boston. He also served as music director of the Chicago Contemporary Players. He was guest conductor on numerous occasions with the San Francisco Symphony and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic appeared regularly as conductor at numerous festivals and events world-wide. He was music director of the 1984 Olympic Arts Contemporary Music Festival and the 1987 Los Angeles Festival (John Cage Celebration), and was the conductor of the Fromm Music Week at the Aspen Music Festival. Mosko was the music director of the 1990 Ojai Music Festival. He recorded for New World, Crystal, Mode One, Robey, CMP, GM, Nonesuch, New Albion, Newport Classics, Chandos, OO Discs, and Cambria. Mosko was an expert in the field of Icelandic Folk Music, having received two Senior Fulbright/Hayes Fellowships to Iceland, and was a founding member of the Repercussion Unit. He was Associate Professor of Music at Harvard University for two years, but spent most of his career as a member of the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. Stephen "Lucky" Mosko died at his home in Green Valley, California, on December 5, 2005, of natural causes. His music publishing is handled by Leisure Planet (www.leisureplanetmusic.com).

Los Angeles Wholesale Orchestra
Conducted by Dr. Running Bear Bunch
Trevor Berens
Ellen Burr
Danny Holt
Frances Moore
Mike Robbins
Derek Stein
Jessica Tunick
Sarah Wass

For Morton Feldman - Stephen "Lucky" Mosko
Sirius (World Premiere) - Running Bear Bunch
Labyrinth 2: Kesaputta (World Premiere) - Trevor Berens
Considering Light (World Premiere) - Nicholas Chase

With Nicholas Chase facilitating an open discussion of Lucky Mosko's life and work.

This concert is funded in part through Meet The Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program.
Your donations help us continue to produce our concerts.

Considering Light
(dedicated to Dorothy Stone)

Light is defined in science as an electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength that is visible to the human eye and exhibits properties of both waves and particles. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light). Owing to this 'wave-particle duality,' light remains enigmatic to the sciences. Light's resilient behavior is uncommon to any other waveform; for instance, light can exist in a vacuum. In 2004 it was shown that pulses of light traveling through a refractive material, such as water or glass, will cast off secondary pulses that travel in advance of, and outlive the initial light pulse. These light 'precursors,' as they are known, consist of the various frequencies (i.e. colors) that are manifest in the initial light radiation, and change spontaneously and continuously; while the primary light wave will diminish and eventually disappear over distance, precursors continue traveling indefinitely, altering their frequencies repeatedly. (focus.aps.org/story/v13/st20).

Mid-way through composing Considering Light it occurred to me I ought to call it 'Re-Considering Music.' This is the first non-vocal, completely acoustic, ensemble composition I have written since Crush, which premiered now almost eight years ago. Crush was a first, terrified step into a hugely conceptual realm. It raised many issues, most of which I thought I had conquered through a series of solo-works that were commissioned over the three years following Crush's premiere. Early in 2004, however, while at an artists' retreat in Florida, I realized that I hadn't conquered anything - I had only mastered a musical vernacular that had quickly exhausted itself.

Later that year, I was invited by a friend, a visual artist I had met at that same retreat, to attend a drawing workshop at the ranch of sculptor/painter Jane Rosen in San Gregario, California. Jane and I made a unique (and cherished) connection as we discovered together that composing music (giving form to sounds) and drawing (giving form to shadows) are very much the same process. In fact, the physical action of drawing notes on the page, for me, a former graphic designer, is profoundly connected to the act of drawing. I imagine both notes and visual images in the same way: as multi-dimensional existences, with backs, sides and fronts, exposed by light and defined by shadow. That weekend in San Gregario Jane talked extensively about the three opacities of light - transparent, translucent and opaque. I immediately recognized these measurements of intensity as being directly applicable to layers of musical sounds and can think of a hundred times when Lucky Mosko, my first composition teacher, talked about Mel Powell, his own mentor, and Mel's musical approach to the concept of translucency. He called it density.

I am an avid science and math fanatic and have always incorporated systems and complex mathematic equations into my work. In Considering Light I have utilized the mathematic structure of light to generate rows, pitch groups, rhythms and other serial materials you are hearing. I have isolated the numeric structures of each color of the spectrum and, in the tradition of James Tenney (with whom I also studied), I used math to generate specific scales and systems. In the tradition of Lucky Mosko, I ignored all of my own rules and attempted to create a piece of work that simply 'is.'