Ensemble Dal Niente newest release, portrait RE / Flux / Pacific Time, chronicles their immersive collaborations with composers, featuring three works by George Lewis, Carola Bauckholt, and Igor Santos that represent the culmination of long standing working relationships with the critically acclaimed Chicago based ensemble.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 46:34 | ||
| 01 | portrait RE | portrait RE | 16:08 |
| 02 | Flux | Flux | 11:13 |
| 03 | Pacific Time | Pacific Time | 19:13 |
Critically acclaimed Chicago based Ensemble Dal Niente is poised to enter its third decade championing new music, and celebrates that milestone with their newest release of commissioned works, portrait RE/Flux/Pacific Time. A core component of the ensemble’s work has focused on close collaboration with composers over several years; this recording bears the fruit of three of those long standing creative relationships with George Lewis, Carola Bauckholt, and Igor Santos. Each of these pieces inventively uses the resources of the mixed instrumentation contemporary music ensemble to explore aesthetic phenomenon within music and beyond.
The album opens with Igor Santos’ portrait RE for sampler and ensemble, a cinematic work that grapples with the dynamic between escapism versus engagement. Santos references found sounds from daily life in the work’s hypnotic introductory section. Harmonies that echo OS software sound design (start up sounds meant to entice us into a promised world of limitless possibility) live alongside glitchy timbres and repeated motifs in the ensemble, all over the halo of an ambient drone. This dream state is shattered at the six and half minute mark, when we hear six strident, accented chords that introduce a recording of the voice of Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire. Translated to English, he says, “The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.” Several instruments mimic and accompany the contour of Freire’s speech patterns, after which fragmentary motives from this transcription of sorts are embedded and developed in the ensemble. The piece gets stuck like a skipping record, with jagged, repeated loops, the last of which is interrupted by an alarm, an urgent call to wake up from mindless compliance. After recapping the faux hopefulness of the OS start up sound, Santos tempers it with ominous harmonies in the ensemble and an insistent bass drum, before shitting the machine down with a dramatic descending gesture. The piece closes with Freire’s statement over record player static, with the ensemble imitating his spoken cadence in a tutti passage. Santos’ message is clear, we fight escapism and complicity collectively, by shedding delusion and confronting the past, present, and future with honesty and self-awareness.
Read MoreGeorge Lewis’ Flux is a sonic response to visual artist Jeff Donaldson’s painting JamPact JelliTite (for Jamila). A leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s and co-founder of AfriCOBRA, Donaldson was committed to creating an iconography that expressed essential components of the global black experience, whether in Africa or in diaspora. In this way, Lewis’ work promoting the music of Afro-diasporic composers can be seen as a musical equivalent of Donaldson’s work in the visual art world. Flux is a bracing, non-teleological work that explodes with instrumental color and energy. Lewis revels in multi-layered heterogeneous textures, highlighting contrasting timbres and the intensity that arises from their collective individuality. Brash gestures in the winds and brass are egged on by taut tremolos and energetic glissandi in the strings. Lewis uses the percussion section to great advantage, coaxing brilliant textures at key featured moments in the vibraphone, crotales, and rumbling bass drum. One of Lewis’ great strengths is evident here — his ability to capture the spontaneity of improvisation in fully notated music, while orchestrating an amazing level of dense activity in a way that remains transparent. In his aesthetic credo, Donaldson called for “color that is expressively awesome…superreal color.” Lewis’ composition delivers on this call and then some, offering an eleven minute sonic tour-de-force of hyper-expressive exuberance.
Carola Bauckholt’s Pacific Time establishes fields of white noise in the ensemble to evoke sounds of the Pacific Coast. The work opens with a wall of white noise wind sounds, played by a chorus of jaycalls, a pipe-like instrument. After the ensemble gradually enters with individual sustained pitches they coalesce into an oscillating sequence of harmonies, fogs of sound passing back and forth. At the 7:40 mark, the piece becomes suspended by an extended percussion solo played on different sized wooden boxes that produce distinct timbres. A quirky, jagged groove emerges from the percussion solo, with punctuations from bass, piano, electric guitar, and winds creating an ecosystem in sound. As the loops evolve, the orchestration of timbres change and drive a larger scale formal arc forward, led by the shifting colors of each new subsection of instruments. A passage featuring guiro and flute is remarkable in its evocation of the sounds of wildlife in a low lying wetland. Near the work’s end, the jaycalls from the work’s opening return in a churning pattern that careens towards a possible ending, before Bauckholt suddenly dismantles the perpetual motion machine, closing with a series of rhetorical phrases, a kind of final fanfare in noise, a paean to the sounds of the ocean scape.
Ensemble Dal Niente’s commitment to curation and fostering new work with trusted composer partners is matched by their high quality performances, captured in excellent recordings that are expertly mixed to illuminate the details of the scores so faithfully realized by the players. portrait RE/Flux/Pacific Time is a benchmark of what a contemporary music ensemble recording can be; a pristine document of work resulting from close collaboration within a dedicated community of artists.
– Dan Lippel
Engineering:
Aphorism Studios, Dan Nichols (Flux, Pacific Time)
Aaron Holloway Nahum (portrait RE)
Album Mixing:
Dan Nichols (Flux, Pacific Time)
Igor Santos, Murat Çolak (portrait RE)
Album Mastering: Murat Çolak
Additional Technical Support: Darlene Castro, Hunter Brown
Liner Notes: Ben Melsky, Emma Hospelhorn, and Michael Lewanski
Album Cover Artwork: Ben Chlapek
Design & Layout: Natalie Mills Bontumasi
Ensemble Dal Niente performs new and experimental chamber music with dedication, virtuosity, and an exploratory spirit. Dal Niente’s roster of 23 musicians presents an uncommonly broad range of contemporary music, guiding listeners towards music that transforms existing ideas and subverts convention. Audiences coming to Dal Niente shows can expect distinctive productions—from fully staged operas to multimedia spectacles to intimate solo performances—that are curated to pique curiosity and connect art, culture, and people.
Now in its second decade, Ensemble Dal Niente has performed concerts across Europe and the Americas, including appearances at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC; The Foro Internacional de Música Nueva in Mexico City; MusicArte Festival in Panama City; The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Darmstadt Summer Courses in Germany, where it was the first-ever ensemble to win the Kranichstein prize for interpretation in 2012.
The group has recordings available on the New World, New Amsterdam, New Focus, Navona, Parlour Tapes+, and Carrier labels; has held residencies at The University of Chicago, Harvard University, Stanford University, Brown University, Brandeis University, and Northwestern University, among others; and collaborated with a wide range of composers, from Enno Poppe to George Lewis to Erin Gee to Greg Saunier and Deerhoof.
The ensemble's name, Dal Niente ("from nothing" in Italian), is a tribute to Helmut Lachenmann's Dal niente (Interieur III), a work that upended traditional conceptions of instrumental technique; and also a reference to the group’s humble beginnings.
http://dalniente.com/Described as “otherworldly and mysteriously familiar” (Chicago Classical Review), and as “exciting andclear... with a striking boldness” (Luigi Nono Competition Prize), Igor Santos’ music has been performed internationally, by leading musicians such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Dal Niente, Yarn/Wire, Alarm Will Sound, the American Composers Orchestra, and the Florida Orchestra. His work is centered on mimetic relationships between found sounds, acoustic instruments, and recently with video, all of which is dramatized through repetition and the use of microtonal keyboards.
Igor has earned degrees in Music Composition from the University of Chicago, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of South Florida. He has been awarded the Rome Prize (2022), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), and has won additional prizes such as the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition, the Luigi Nono International Chamber Music Competition, the RED NOTE New Music Festival Competition, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, and was also awarded Best Sound Design from Theater Tampa Bay (for his incidental music).
portrait RE is the fourth premiere of Igor’s work by Ensemble Dal Niente, which premiered his suggested affinities for solo piano, chamber orchestra, and electronics at University of Chicago in 2018, anima for harp and percussion in 2019, as well as flautando for flute and violin at Epiphany Center for the Arts in 2024.
Igor is a native of Curitiba, Brazil.
https://igor-santos.com/George E. Lewis has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvisative forms is documented on more than 140 recordings. His work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Talea Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, Ensemble Erik Satie, Eco Ensemble, and others, with commissions from American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Harvestworks, Ensemble Either/Or, Orkestra Futura, Turning Point Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, IRCAM, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and others. Lewis has served as Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Fromm Composer in Residence, American Academy in Rome; Resident Scholar, Center for Disciplinary Innovation, University of Chicago; and CAC Fitt Artist In Residence, Brown University.
Lewis received the 2012 SEAMUS Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis is co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016), and his opera Afterword, commissioned by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in October 2015 and has been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic.
Professor Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A 2015 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis has received a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2015, Lewis received the degree of Doctor of Music (DMus, honoris causa) from the University of Edinburgh. He came to Columbia in 2004, having previously taught at the University of California, San Diego, Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Koninklijke Conservatorium Den Haag, and Simon Fraser University's Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey.
Carola Bauckholt was born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1959. After working at the Theater am Marienplatz (TAM), Krefeld for several years, she studied composition at the Musikhochschule Köln with Mauricio Kagel (1978–1984). She founded the Thürmchen Verlag (music publisher) along with Caspar Johannes Walter in 1985, and six years later they founded the Thürmchen Ensemble. She has received numerous residencies and prizes such as the Bernd Alois Zimmermann Scholarship from the city of Cologne (1986), a residency at the Villa Massimo in Rome (1997), in 1998 she was designated the Artist of the Year by the State of North Rhine Westphalia, and she was selected to represent Germany at the World Music Days in Mexico City 1992, Copenhagen 1996, Seoul 1997 and in Zurich 2004. She was awarded the German Composers Prize from the GEMA in the category of experimental music in 2010. She teaches as guest professor in Santiago di Chile (2010), Ostrava Tschechische Republik (2011 and 2013), Amsterdam (2012 and 2014), Krakau (2012), Zürich (2012), Apeldoorn (2013), Kiev (2013) Oslo (2014 and 2015), Mexico City (2014), Monterrey (2015), London (2015), Moskau and Tschaikovsky City (2016), Valencia, Barcelona and Bludenz (2018) and in Germany.
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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