Ellen Taaffe Zwilich | »Femmes4Music«
a Digital Feature
Sun, December 04, 2022 7:00 pm CET
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Gramophone Magazine lists Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in an August 2022 article on the 10 must-hear women composers. The explanation for this is: »A prolific figure, Zwilich’s compositions range from large-scale symphonies to solo works. The works are regarded for their vigour, assertiveness and ability to challenge both the performer and audience.«
Playlist »Femmes4Music« – Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
Kaija Saariaho
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List of works
»Verblendungen«, (1984), 13’23’’
»Graal théâtre«, (1994), 26’29’’
»Six Japanese Gardens«, (1994), 18’53’’
»Sept Papillons«, (2000, 12’52’’
»L'amour de loin«, (2000), 139’15’’
»Vent Nocturne«, (2006), 6’55’’, (Teil 1)
»Vent Nocturne«, (2006), 5’56’’, (Teil 2)
»La Passion de Simone«, (2006/2013), 65’49’’
»Light and matter«, (2014), 16’45’’
Total Duration without »Innosence«: 329:25 min. / 5 h. 48 min. 75 sec.
Interview with Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
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Korvat auki is directed against the conservative Finnish music business of the 1970s, when mainly neo-romantic composers received commissions for large operas. The students around Korvat auki, on the other hand, are interested in works of the avant-garde, which they learn about through their composition teacher Paavo Heininen at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and they organize concerts and workshops in which they present these works and their own works to the public.
Saariaho continues her studies in Freiburg im Breisgau, with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber. Her own view of the avant-garde becomes more critical, she finds many works »musically quite boring«. As if shouting the motto »Open your ears!« to the avant-garde now, she finds fault with the fact that compositions often implement concepts that have »nothing to do with the laws of perception,« and that works are »not really handling any musical issues.«
In 1982 Saariaho goes to Paris, to the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique (IRCAM), the research institute for music and acoustics founded a few years earlier. There she intensively studies the aforementioned laws of perception, which for her are part of the basic tools of composing. At IRCAM there is close exchange with other composers, researchers and developers. Saariaho gains insight into the fields of acoustics and psychoacoustics and gets access to the latest research results. She learns programming languages and studies algorithmic composition and electronic sound synthesis. What she learns here in computer music will also influence the way she composes for instruments without computer.
Her first internationally successful work for orchestra and tape, »Verblendungen«, is written, and Saariaho is already applying her newly acquired knowledge. She sets herself the difficult compositional task of beginning the work with the climax and then steadily reducing the volume and musical energy over a period of 14 minutes. To ensure that the flow of the music is not lost in the process, she plans several simultaneous lines of development. For example, the orchestra begins with pitch-oriented sounds and ends with noiselike sounds (in which no exact pitch can be perceived). The tape moves in the opposite direction: it begins with noise and ends with pitch. In spite of all the theory that goes into the piece, however, the final authority for Saariaho always remains her ear, with which she decides whether a note or sound is well placed or needs to be corrected.
»Femmes4Music« – female composers in focus
As in video art, women are still far from being sufficiently visible in music. Yet sound art in particular, whose boundaries to performance and conceptual art are fluid, has produced many outstanding female artists. With »Femmes4Music«, ZKM presents female composers born between the 1940s and 1960s whose works have achieved great international renown.
Online in Livestream
Sundays on November 20 / 27 and December 4 / 11 starting at 7 pm
After her husband's death in 1979, Zwilich changed her musical-aesthetic way of composing from jagged, atonal harmonies to softer melodies with simpler structures. By 2000, she had produced five major symphonies, as well as dozens of pieces for chamber ensembles, vocal ensembles, choirs, and orchestras. In memory of cartoonist Charles Schulz, creator of the popular »Peanuts« animated series, Zwilich composed »Peanuts Gallery« for piano and orchestra, which premiered in 1997. In 2006 and 2008, the piece, performed by the Florida State University Orchestra, is broadcast on television as part of an half-hour show.
In March 2020, the premiere of »Concerto for Cello and Orchestra« takes place. The performance features soloist Zuill Bailey and the South Florida Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sebrina Maria Alfonso.
Since 1992, Zwilich is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and from 2004 on also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2000, she joined the faculty at Florida State University. Throughout her career, she has received numerous awards and honors, including the NPR and WNYC Gotham Award for contributions to the musical life of New York, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and four Grammy nominations. In 1999, she is honored composer of the year by Musical American magazine, America's oldest classical music magazine. She currently holds the Krafft Distinguished Professorship at Florida State University.
»There are not many composers in the modern world who have the good fortune to write music of substance while appealing directly to a mixed audience. Zwilich offers this happy combination of pure technical excellence and distinct communicative power« - Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians [8th ed.]
Author: Dominique Theise
Composers of the series »Femmes4Music«
Meredith Monk (*1942 in New York City, USA)
Kaija Saariaho (*1952 in Helsinki, Finland † 2. June 2023, Paris, France)
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (*1939 in Miami, Florida, USA)
Jennifer Higdon (*1962 in Brooklyn, New York, USA)
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