As I Write This: Songs & Solos of Aaron Helgeson

Aaron Helgeson

Composer Aaron Helgeson (b. 1982) uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to mix contemporary sounds with historical sources like wax cylinders, medieval psalms, and unfinished manuscripts.

Described as “eerily beautiful” (Cleveland Classical) and “virtuoso display of engaging drama” (New York Times), Helgeson’s music has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund, New Music USA, Barlow Endowment, ASCAP, and American Composers Forum.

In 2016 he received an Ohio Arts Council Award for his Snow Requiem, an “anti-cantata” based on author David Laskin’s book The Children’s Blizzard about the Homestead-era snowstorm of the same name combining original transcriptions of Norwegian-American immigrant folk music with sonifications of weather data using orchestral tone clusters, wordless vocal chorales, and percussive noise.

His choral cycle The Book of Never for Grammy Award winning chorus The Crossing collages ancient hymns from the Novgorod Codex (a medieval book of Kyivan Rus psalm chant overwritten hundreds of times with heretical sermons by an excommunicated Pagan missionary) with contemporary texts by writers in various states of exile.

Other recent projects include Poems of Sheer Nothingness commissioned by soprano Susan Narucki using fragmented realizations of ancient Occitan troubadour poems, Calls of Close and Away for Imani Winds on 19th-century French hunting calls and 20th-century American military signals, and Echoes of Always for Ensemble Dal Niente assembled from scraps of Baroque opera overtures and bits of Helgeson’s own previous music.

Helgeson serves as Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Montclair State University’s Cali School of Music, previously serving as department chair of composition and music theory at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. He also taught as Assistant Professor of Composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, with visiting appointments at the Hartt School of Performing Arts, University of Chicago, New York University, and the University of California Washington Center. He holds degrees in music and theater from the University of California San Diego (Ph.D., M.A.) and Oberlin College (B.Mus., B.A.).

Ryan Townsend Strand

Tenor Ryan Townsend Strand is praised for his “beautiful vocalism” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “expressive poise” (Chicago Classical Review). Known for his storytelling across oratorio, opera, and ensemble repertoire, he has appeared as a soloist in many of Bach’s cantatas and performed widely in both staged and concert works. Recent credits include his Ravinia Festival debut in a featured solo recital entitled Letters To Jackie. Operatic credits include roles with Lyric Opera of Chicago, Haymarket Opera Company, Chicago Opera Theater, and Northwestern Opera Theater, with performances in works by Monteverdi, Handel, Adamo, Gordon, and Glass, among others. He made his professional operatic debut in Haymarket’s Gli equivoci nel sembiante. A versatile ensemble artist, Strand sings regularly with Music of the Baroque, the Chicago Symphony Chorus, Bella Voce, the Grant Park Festival Chorus, and has been seen with the Grammy Award-winning ensemble The Crossing under Donald Nally. He is a founding member and executive director of Constellation Men’s Ensemble, a Chicago- based tenor/bass vocal group dedicated to distinct performances in unique spaces, engaging with the next generation of singers through education, and expanding the repertoire for tenor/bass ensemble music through the commissioning of new works. He lives in Chicago with his husband P.J. and their calico cat Charlie.

Karina Kontorovitch

Karina Kontorovitch was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. At the age of five, she started attending the Music School for Gifted Children, where she continued to study piano with Olga Manukyan until the family immigrated to the US in 1991. Ms. Kontorovitch has taught at the Music Arts School in Highland Park and has been on the faculty of the Merit School of Music in Chicago from 2001-2017. She was on the Voice Faculty as a Coach/Accompanist for the National High School Music Institute at Northwestern University from 2005 until 2010. Since 2001, she’s been serving as a collaborative pianist, vocal coach and Russian diction coach at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, where she collaborates with Voice and Opera Department students across all studios, preparing and accompanying recitals and other performances, co-teaching Russian Repertoire and Oratorio classes. Ms. Kontorovitch is a member of the Chicago Piano Vocal Score Ensemble and Tresillo, whose performances have taken her from Chattanooga to Buenos Aires. She’s very active as a collaborative pianist throughout the Chicago area. She was on the coaching staff of the Castleton Music Festival in Virginia where she worked with the festival’s founder, the late Maestro Lorin Maazel. As a soloist, Ms. Kontorovitch was heard with the Waukegan Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Stephen Blackwelder in a performance of Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K 488.

Modney

Modney is a composer and violinist working at the nexus of composition, improvisation, and interpretation. A “new-music luminary” (The New York Times) hailed as “one of today’s most intrepid experimentalists” (Bandcamp Daily), Modney is a foremost interpreter of adventurous contemporary music, and has cultivated a holistic artistic practice as a composer, solo improviser, bandleader, writer, and collaborator. A highly detailed relationship to sound production on the violin is foundational to Modney’s creative practice, with a particular interest in complex timbres, Just Intonation, and in exploring the perceptual space between improvisation and notation. Modney has released three albums as a composer-performer: Ascending Primes (Pyroclastic Records, 2024), Near To Each (Carrier Records, 2022), and Engage (New Focus Recordings, 2018). Modney has received awards from The Shifting Foundation and Millay Arts. Modney is the violinist and Executive Director of the Wet Ink Ensemble, and a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Donald Berman

A multidimensional pianist, pedagogue, and scholar, Donald Berman has won tremendous acclaim for his “stupendous abilities, both athletic and intellectual” (Boston Sunday Globe) and performances hailed as “stunning, adventurous, and substantive” (New York Times).

With an emphasis on presenting American music of the 20th and 21st centuries, Berman’s inventive recital programs have been featured on the U.S.’s biggest stages for contemporary music — from Carnegie’s Weill and Zankel Halls to Nation- al Sawdust and (Le) Poisson Rouge — as well as major venues across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. An enthusiastic commissioner of new music, he has added more than 200 works to the contemporary canon — many of which he performs alongside classical repertoires to provoke new and fascinating revelations and connections across periods and styles.

Berman’s body of work as a recording artist demonstrates the breadth and depth of his engagement with the music of our time. His albums have included numerous world-premiere recordings as well as illuminating performances of previously unknown works of 20th-century American composers, includ- ing Charles Ives (The Unknown Ives, Vols. I & II), Carl Ruggles (The Uncovered Ruggles), and Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions (Americans in Rome). As concerto soloist and chamber musi- cian, Berman’s discography includes collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (George Perle: Serenades), soprano Susan Narucki (This Island, The Light That Is Felt: Songs of Charles Ives, and the Grammy-nominated The Edge of Silence), and the Borromeo Quartet (The Worlds Revolve). Upcoming albums include a survey of Elena Ruehr songs with baritone Stephen Salters and a new recording of Ives’s Concord Sonata and Impression of the St. Gaudens in Boston Common, to be released on Avie Records during the composer’s sesquicentennial celebrations in 2024.

A former fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Berman currently serves as Chair of Keyboard Studies at Longy School of Music of Bard College and leads Tufts University’s New Music Ensemble. He is also the General Editor of three volumes of Ives’s Shorter Works for Piano — a titanic project representing 30 years of work — and President and Treasurer of the Charles Ives Society, where he is leading an extensive expansion of the Society’s digital archives on charlesives.org.

Berman’s trajectory as a musician and scholar was set in motion by four important teachers: Mildred Victor, George Barth, John Kirkpatrick (who premiered Ives’s Concord Sonata in 1939), and legendary pedagogue Leonard Shure.

Eric Umble

Eric Umble is a Brooklyn-based clarinetist and DJ, praised for “nuanced and coloristic playing” (The Clarinet). They remain active as a performer and advocate for new music, having performed with the New York Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Lucerne Festival Academy and Alumni Orchestras. Eric has performed around the world including appearances in Seoul, Hong Kong, Havana, Mexico City, Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, and Köln, among others. Eric holds

Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Manhattan School of Music. He studied with Stephanie Zelnick, David Krakauer, and Anthony McGill. As a DJ and promoter, Eric is the founder, lead producer, and curator of the FACETIME and QUALITY TIME parties, cultivating uplifting and inclusive nightlife events that help build a thriving electronic music community in New York City. He explores the intersections of multiple musical genres in his sets to create Techno-forward sonic worlds that evoke queerness, modernity, and urban life while striving to articulate our shared contemporary culture in today’s world. He has DJ’ed at BASEMENT, Nowadays, Mansions, Detroit’s Orange Room, and Philadelphia’s VOID, among others.

Sharon Harms

Sharon Harms is a versatile soprano known for her radiant tone and deep commitment to contemporary music. She has become a vital interpreter of new vocal works, collaborating closely with composers and ensembles across the U.S. and abroad. The work featured on this album was written for Sharon and premiered with pianist Katherine Dowling at the 2014 Resonant Bodies Festival in Brooklyn, NY. Her collaboration with Aaron Helgeson reflects a shared artistic language grounded in subtlety, complexity, and emotional honesty. She has performed with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Recherche, Momenta Quartet, Lyris Quartet, the Juilliard Center for Creative Technology, and the Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble, and appeared at Tanglewood, Carnegie Hall, the American Academy in Rome, and the Mozarteum. Her recordings include It Happens Like This by Charles Wuorinen, Jesse Jones’ Ephemera, Gabriela Ortiz’s Aroma Foliado, and Charles Ives' Songs and Solos with pianist Jacob Greenberg. In addition to performing, Sharon is a dedicated mentor and educator, working with programs such as New Music on the Point and the Composer’s Conference at Avaloch Farm. This recording is part of her ongoing exploration of what the voice can say — and how quietly, fiercely, or unexpectedly it might say it.