MIT professor (Evan Ziporyn), alum
(Christopher Adler) premiere works at Carnegie Hall
 Evan Ziporyn
--by Christine Southworth |
 Christopher Adler
--by
Vika Golovanova |
For Immediate Release:
Sept. 14, 2006
Contact:
Mary Haller
Director of Arts Communication
MIT Office of the Arts
20 Ames St., Rm E15-205
Cambridge, MA 02139
e-mail haller@media.mit.edu
617/253-4006 |
Cambridge, MA...Two MIT-affiliated composers will travel to Carnegie Hall in New York this weekend (September 16-17) for the world premieres of their new works performed by members of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble.
Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music, was one of three "established composers" commissioned by Carnegie Hall to write new works for indigenous Silk Road instruments with varying combinations of strings and percussion.
Christopher Adler (S.B. 1994 music and mathematics) was named one of two “emerging composers” to write for the weekend festival in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, titled, "Tradition and Innovation."
The concerts are a culmination of a two-part workshop (the second of which is currently being held at Tanglewood in Lenox, MA) in which Ziporyn and Adler joined Ma, Silk Road Ensemble members and musicians from Azerbaijan, China, India and Iran to explore musical tradition and innovation through the study of existing and newly commissioned works.
Launched by the internationally acclaimed cellist Ma in 1998, the Silk Road Project seeks to re-create the cultures along the ancient trading route between the China and the Mediterranean.
Like the other composers selected for the Carnegie Hall commissions, Ziporyn and Adler are based in the US but have backgrounds or experience in Silk Road countries.
Ziporyn, who has been involved with Balinese gamelan since taking a Fulbright Fellowship in Indonesia in 1987, is internationally recognized for his works combining Balinese gamelan with western instruments and electronics. He founded the MIT-based Gamelan Galak Tika in 1993 and continues to direct the ensemble, which toured Bali in 2005.
Adler, one of Ziporyn’s first students at MIT, was active in Galak Tika as one of its three original members. Since graduating with joint degrees in math and music, Adler has become an accomplished composer and a foremost performer of new and traditional music for the khaen, a free-reed mouth organ from Laos and Northeast Thailand.
"His talent and passion for music were absolutely evident even then," Ziporyn says about his former student, who's now an associate professor at the University of San Diego. " I now consider him a friend and colleague."
Ziporyn's Silk Road composition, "Sulvasutra," was written specifically for two master musicians, Indian tabla player Sandeep Das and Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and a string quartet. Ziporyn based his work on an ancient Sanskrit treatise giving the mathematical rules for the proper construction of sacred Vedic altars. "I was asked to pick an ancient story and I chose one about math and engineering," says Ziporyn, who learned that "without the proper proportions, the temples cannot be considered sacred and, more to point, won't do the job."
Currently on sabbatical, he will premiere his bass clarinet concerto, "Big Grenadilla," with the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall on October 13.
Adler's composition, "Music for a Royal Palace," pays homage to the Bang Pa-In Palace in Thailand, an opulent 19th century juxtaposition of Thai, Chinese and Western architectural styles.
For more information see Carnegie Hall Events or Carnegie Hall Press Release.
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