Photo by Luke Redmond
Winner of the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellow, Suzanne Farrin explores the interior worlds of instruments and the visceral potentialities of sound in her music. This Portrait highlights another facet of her artistic practice, as an accomplished performer of the early electronic music instrument ondes Martenot. International Contemporary Ensemble delves into a program of her atmospheric work, including the world premiere of Their Hearts are Columns and selections from Dolce la morte, an opera based on the love poetry of Michelangelo.
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SOLOISTS
Alice Teyssier, soprano
Eric Jurenas, countertenor
Josh Modney, violin
Kemp Jernigan, oboe
Nuiko Wadden, harp
Clare Monfredo, cello
Performers
Suzanne Farrin, ondes Martenot
Kemp Jernigan, oboe
Rebekah Heller, bassoon
Nathan Davis, percussion
Kyle Armbrust, viola
Evan Runyon, double bass
Kamna Gupta, conductor
Repertoire
Their Hearts are Columns (2020) world premiere for soprano, harp, ondes Martenot, percussion, and double bass
dolce la morte: unico spirto, come serpe, veggio, l’onde della non vostra, rendete (2016) for countertenor and ensemble
Il Suono (2016) for harp and soprano
corpo di terra (2009) for cello
polvere et ombra (2008) for harp
Time is a Cage (2007) for violin
SUZANNE FARRIN
Suzanne Farrin is a composer who explores the interior worlds of instruments and the visceral potentialities of sound. Her music has been performed by some of the great musicians of today on stages across Europe and North and South America.
Earlier works have concentrated on establishing an intensity and personal language through careful study of solo instruments along with the interpretive personalities that come with them. Those works include pieces for solo strings (corpo di terra, for cello; Time is a Cage for violin and uscirmi di braccia, for viola and piano or bass drum). Though they have now been played by many interpreters, they were expressly written for people close to Suzanne (Julia Lichten, cello; Cal Wiersma, violin and Antoine Tamestit and Markus Hadulla, viola and piano). That intimacy is a productive space for her: it is as if exploring the very personal habits, sounds and physicality of each brings her closer to a more universal expressivity.
This search for transcendence has more recently been applied to vocal music. In dolce la morte, Suzanne felt she was expressing the inherent conflicts, contractions and corporal strife that exists in the great master’s love poetry. The piece is her own, but the “mask” of Michelangelo provided a productive mouthpiece from which she could project her own sound world.
Her music has been featured at venues and festivals including The BBC Proms (with the JACK Quartet), The LA Phil (with Sō Percussion), The Gothenburg Art Biennial, Mostly Mozart, Matrix, Alpenklassik, Music in Würzburg, BAM NextWave, Theaterforum (Germany), Town Hall Seattle, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Symphony Space, Wigmore Hall, Centro de Artes de la Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina) and, in her home city of New York, Carnegie Hall, The Stone, Spectrum, Subculture, Miller Theater, Merkin Hall, Wavehill, Lincoln Center, the Park Avenue Armory, and Joe’s Pub, among many others.
In addition to composing, Suzanne is a performer of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in France in the 1920s as a response to the simultaneous destruction and technological advances of WWI. Her life as an interpreter on the instrument has taken her to venues such as the Abrons Arts Center in NYC, Centro de Artes in Buenos Aires as well as television, where she was was featured in an episode directed by Roman Coppola on the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle. She is featured as a performer in Chicuarotes, directed by Gael García Bernal, which is currently in theaters throughout Mexico and was premiered at Cannes, as well as the Iranian film Sade Ma’bar (Blockage) directed by Mohsen Gharaie, which won best film in the New Currents section of the Busan International Film Festival.
Suzanne is the Frayda B. Lindemann Professor of Music and Chair at Hunter College and The CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches composition. She holds a doctorate in from Yale University. Corpo di Terra (New Focus Recordings) is her debut album and Dolce la morte (Tundra), her second release, came out in November 2018. Her work may also be heard on VAI, Signum Classics and Albany Records labels. She was the 2017 Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize winner in Composition and she is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition.
INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE
With a commitment to cultivating a more curious and engaged society through music, the International Contemporary Ensemble – as a commissioner and performer at the highest level – amplifies creators whose work propels and challenges how music is made and experienced. The Ensemble’s 35 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present.
Described as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), the Ensemble has become a leading force in new music throughout the last 20 years, having premiered over 1,000 works and having been a vehicle for the workshop and performance of thousands of works by student composers across the U.S. The Ensemble’s composer-collaborators—many who were unknown at the time of their first Ensemble collaboration—have fundamentally shaped its creative ethos and have continued to highly visible and influential careers, including MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey; long-time Ensemble collaborator, founding member, and 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun; and the Ensemble’s founder, 2012 MacArthur Fellow, and first-ever flutist to win Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Prize, Claire Chase.
CREDITS
The International Contemporary Ensemble’s performances and commissioning activities during the 2022-23 concert season are made possible by the generous support of many individuals as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., MAP Fund, Mid Atlantic Arts, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, Amphion Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New Music USA’s New Music Organizational Development Fund, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, as well as public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) from the U.S. Small Business Administration. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.