Composer Steven Ricks releases Mythological Fragments including his extended work for soprano, piano, and electronics, Medusa in Fragments, and his chamber opera Baucis and Philemon. Ricks' use of electronics in his chamber works often provides an element of disorientation; glitchy, disjunct textures keep the music off balance as he explores his subject matter from multiple prismatic angles.
Composer Steven Ricks looks to two tales from Greek literature as a source of inspiration for the two works on Mythological Fragments. Ricks intuitively understands the composer’s role in setting this iconic material, letting the stories speak for themselves but capturing something of the internal reactions they provoke, as felt and extrapolated through his perspective. The result is an album of great contrasts between the gripping Medusa in Fragments and the relatively pacific Baucis and Philemon, presented with a grounded sensibility that pervades both pieces. Ricks keenly understands the work that both tales have already done for him; Medusa brings Dionysian catharsis and Baucis brings Apollonian wonder. He is able to harness these energies and find appropriate musical vehicles to highlight them, and explore their intricacies and implications.
Medusa in Fragments is a striking monodrama for piano, surround-sound electronics, and pre-recorded, video projected soprano (Jennifer Welch-Babidge). The work opens with ominous, alienated electronics, thrusting us into a disturbing sound world before Keith Kirchoff’s solo piano enters dramatically with powerful chords and trilled figures. The keyboard figuration is imitated by glitchy, halting fragments in the electronics, reinforcing and then doubling down on Ricks’ modular approach to motivic manipulation. The ferocious tenor of this introductory section diffuses into an ascending electronics gesture before the piano brings in the soprano entrance with glistening rolled chords after the 2:54 mark (ushering in the section titled I. “Concerning Athena”). The vocal part lays out Medusa’s case for herself with a spoken text, echoed with unsettling delays in the electronics. “Am I to blame for another’s desire,” she asks, as the intensity of the passage grows. The soprano’s first sung lines enter at 4:45, (II. “To Perseus (Concerning Andromeda)”), joining a haunting chorus of echoing virtual doppelgängers while the piano is mixed with microtonally inflected keyboard samples in the electronics. Ricks skillfully mines the high register of the keyboard for its unique timbral properties, using repeated pitches to mimic the cadence of the spoken voice parts and create a context for brittle processed sounds. As the piece unfolds, Ricks’ use of electronics begins to transform the voice timbre more dramatically, modulating its color and obscuring it with more immersive delays. Concurrently, the vocal writing itself opens up, culminating in powerful high register passages such as the peak at the 11:30 mark. A subsequent passage adds a pre-recorded male voice as a sparring partner for Medusa’s ruminations, as an accumulating fever propels the psychological drama of the piece forward. Ricks’ fragmentary impression of the Medusa myth focuses not on a linear retelling of the tale, but instead on a portrait of internal turmoil that the story embodies unrelentingly from beginning to end. By placing the soprano inside a virtual hall-of-mirrors electronic environment instead of scoring it for live singer, Ricks further enhances the work’s sense of disconnection and isolation.
Ricks employs some similar techniques in Baucis and Philemon as in Medusa in Fragments, despite the works overall gentler tone and the use of a larger onstage ensemble. In the “Introduction: The Gods Came as Peasants,” a female narrator sets the scene, echoed subtly by electronic delays that occasionally alter the speed of the recitation. The electronics undulate behind the spoken voice in a blooming halo, before the cello intones a meditative alternation between an open string and harmonics accompanied by samples of bird songs and the lapping of water. “A Home for Birds” opens with a wordless vocalise duet between soprano and baritone over watery harp arpeggios, and the ensemble joins to accompany the text entrance with colorful word painting. Baucis and Philemon includes four Interludes featuring instruments with electronics — the first is for piccolo with bird sound samples, a joyful dialogue of complementary sonic imitation. “I Once Complained” is a solo aria for Philemon’s character (baritone Shea Owens), supported by pointed ensemble unison attacks, interstitial cello utterances, oscillations in the marimba, bell-like percussion, and rich harp chords. “Interlude 2: Rainfall, Runoff, River” is similarly environmental to #1, this time opening with harp before inviting flute, cello, and percussion in for a percolating, modular texture that suggests the activity of creatures over a recording of water sounds. “The Arrow of Time” returns to the vocal duo format, with a moto perpetuo toggling figure in the harp anchoring the energized texture before it is briefly passed to the marimba, flute, and cello. “Interlude 3: Cloud (to) Figure (to) Ground” features solo cello, again within a bed of bird calls, along with sounds of a thunderstorm. For Baucis’ (soprano Madison Leonard) solo, “There is More to You and Me,” a rising soprano line is shadowed and commented upon by the flute and supported by delicate harp harmonics and trills. The final Interlude, “Change in the Air,” is improvisatory and brings the thunderstorm to the fore, as cymbal swells and extended techniques in the ensemble mimic the power of a deluge. A splash of harmonic color opens “Marcescence,” with shimmering crotale attacks and brilliant piccolo lines brightening the ensemble texture. “The Hidden Lives of Trees” is austere, featuring scraped and hit metal percussion, reveling in their resonance before erratic non-pitched electronic sounds enter brusquely, breaking the introspective character. The narrator returns for the final movement, “Afterlife,” closing the piece with a texture reminiscent of the opening movement; a calming monologue is heard over bird song, gentle electronics word-paint phrases of the text, and luminous cello harmonics swell in and out of earshot. The final words heard, “made way for something new,” encapsulate the magic and mystery of these timeless myths — tales from antiquity that always renew themselves in contemporary times, refreshing the mind in preparation for new horizons.
- Dan Lippel
More info:
Medusa in Fragments recorded July 27, 2011
de Jong Concert Hall, BYU, by Jon Holloman
Edited and mixed by Steven Ricks
Baucis and Philemon recorded October 26-27, 2023
The Box, BYU, by Sam Herrera
Edited, mixed, and mastered by Erdem Helvacioglu
Recordings produced by Keith Kirchoff
All recordings mastered by Troy Sales
CD Design by Brent Barson & flame art by David Habben
Libretti by Stephen Tuttle
Steven Ricks (b. 1969) is described in BBC Music Magazine as a composer “unafraid to tackle big themes.” He creates work that is bold, innovative, ambitious, and diverse, and that often includes strong narrative and theatrical influences. His music is performed and recorded by several leading art- ists and ensembles, including counter)induction (NY), New York New Music Ensemble, Canyonlands New Music Ensemble (SLC), Talujon Percussion (NY), Hexnut (Amsterdam, NE), Links Ensemble (Paris, FR), Manhattan String Quartet, Earplay (SF), NOVA Chamber Music Series (SLC), Empyrean Ensem- ble (SF), NY Metropolitan Opera soprano Jennifer Welch-Babidge, pianist Keith Kirchoff, guitarist Dan Lippel, flutist Carlton Vickers, and violinist Curtis Macomber.
Ricks has received commissions and awards from the Fromm Music Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, SCI, and Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, among others, and his music has been featured at multiple national and international conferences, festivals, and symposia, including ICMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, ISIM, KISS (Kyma International Sound Symposium), Third Practice, Festival of New American Music, and TRANSIT (Leuven, BE). Recordings of his music appear on multiple labels, including New Focus Recordings, Bridge Records, Albany Records, pfMENTUM, Vox Novus, and Comprovise Records. Ricks received degrees in music composition from Brigham Young University (BM), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (MM), the University of Utah (PhD), and a Certificate in Advanced Musical Studies (CAMS) from King's College London. He is a professor in the BYU School of Music where he teaches music theory and composition and is the Music Composition and Theory Division Coordinator (2016 to the present). He is former Editor of the Newsletter for the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (2012–19), and was director of the BYU Electronic Music Studio for 20 years (2001–2021).
http://www.stevericks.comDescribed as a “virtuosic tour de force” whose playing is “energetic, precise, (and) sensitive,” pianist and composer Keith Kirchoff has performed throughout North America, Europe, and the Pacific Southwest. A strong advocate for living composers, Kirchoff is committed to fostering new audiences for contemporary music and giving a voice to emerging composers, and to that end has commissioned dozens of compositions and premiered hundreds of new works. He is the co-founder and President of SPLICE Music: one of the United States’ largest programs dedicated to the performance, creation, and development of music for performers and electronics. Kirchoff is active as both a soloist and chamber musician, and is a member of both Hinge Quartet and SPLICE Ensemble. Kirchoff has won awards from the Steinway Society, MetLife Meet the Composer, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, and was named the 2011 Distinguished Scholar by the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association. He has recorded on the New World, Kairos, New Focus, Tantara, Ravello, Thinking outLOUD, Zerx, and SEAMUS labels.
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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