Claire Mutchnik

The New Music New Haven concert taking place Thursday will include compositions by faculty and students in a program featuring music inspired by a range of experiences.

The concert series solely features music composed by students and faculty at the Yale School of Music and takes place three times per semester. This particular concert will present a variety of instruments — ranging from strings to piano — and will include solo pieces, duo pieces and small groups. Notably, “Music for a Dance” by Lila Meretzky MUS ’22 will involve a theatrical element with a dance piece performed by David Geffen School of Drama professor Emily Coates, who also choreographed the dance. 

“[The program is] very alive and fresh, and all my composer peers are extremely musical, talented, thoughtful and original people,” Matiss Cudars MUS ’23, whose work will be performed at the concert, said. “Hearing their music is always like a spring water to drink. It’s just so refreshing, fulfilling and super inspiring.”

Typically, works performed in “New Music New Haven” concerts are played by around five to 15 musicians. According to faculty composer Christopher Theofanidis, pieces in this concert will have only one or two players participating per piece, which is unusual but creates a more “intimate” feel.

The program includes pieces composed by Theofanidis and School of Music students — Udi Perlman MUS ’26, Jack Freer MUS ’22, Cudars and Meretzky. Given University COVID-19 guidelines, in-person audiences will be limited to current School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music students, faculty and staff, but the concert will be streamed online at the School of Music’s website.

Cudars’ solo piano piece “Drive” was a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, Cudars got more involved with composing solo pieces, given that larger music groups were unable to gather due to pandemic restrictions. The title of the piece, “Drive,” was inspired both by Cudars’ idea of one’s inner drive as well as the feeling of driving around in a vehicle, which ended up making the piece “sparkly” and “ritualistic.” While Cudars’s instrument is the guitar, his piece will be played by pianist Rachel Breen MUS ’22.

Perlman’s piece “Material as a Metaphor/Plus = Minus” was also shaped by the pandemic. He wrote the piece over a year ago during a collaboration between the vocal and composition departments at the School of Music called “New Haven Songbook.” This initiative sought to develop pandemic pieces which require few musicians or can be sung solo. The pieces were based on themes related to New Haven — some composers writing about pizza, some about elm trees.

But given COVID-19 restrictions, it was not possible to rehearse these pieces. Thursday’s concert will be the first time Perlman’s piece is played in front of an audience, and also the first time Perlman hears his piece performed.

Perlman’s piece was inspired by two artists that lived in New Haven — Josef and Anni Albers. Josef Albers was a famous abstract artist and influential art professor at Yale whose paintings featured squares and rectangles. Perlman took a poem written by Josef and a part of a speech Anni gave towards the end of her life and employed a musical form widely used during the Medieval times called “polytextual motet,” where different singers sing simultaneously in different languages, rhythms and keys. Two School of Music students — soprano Molly Mcguire MUS ’23 and tenor Matthew Newhouse MUS ’23 will sing Perlman’s piece. 

“The text represents different kinds of creative personalities,” Perlman explained. “It’s not really a dialogue from their marriage or anything. It’s just two artists singing simultaneously about two different things, and hopefully it somehow works together.”

The concert will feature three pieces composed by Theofanidis — “Birichino,” “January Echo” and “Wake Up, Called the Voice.” Theofanidis explained that “Birichino” is an Italian word for “troublemaker,” and he wrote the piece about his daughter, whose youth was characterized by playful jokes. Theofanidis wrote the piece for “The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition” back in 2012, which takes place every four years and features music composed by young talents. 

“January Echo,” is a solo guitar piece written for Theofanidis’s late professor Jacob Druckmann. Theofanidis explained that Druckmann passed away in 1996, and he wanted to write six to seven minutes of a memorial “elegy” on guitar. The piece will be played by Barbara Matthews MUS ’23. Finally, “Wake Up, Called the Voice” is based on a Bach chorale and will be played by School of Music Dean Robert Blocker, for whom Theofanidis wrote the piece about five years ago.

According to Freer, “New Music, New Haven” is “very useful” for composers. Compiling the music of several composers is a “fun” and “delightful” experience as well as a good opportunity for composition students to put together a portfolio. Freer said it was an “invaluable” and “amazing” experience for students to have their music performed. 

Freer is a classical composer who uses notation, chords and melodies that sound familiar to his audiences. However, many composers on Thursday’s program write music that are both modernist and experimental. According to Freer, New Music New Haven allows an audience to hear pieces that sound totally different from one another, and even in that “eclectic” environment, the composers can still support each other’s work.

“I noticed that a lot of the students have created very special music in this period,” Theofanidis said. “I’ve been teaching for more than 25 years, and there’s something special that’s happening to the music: a sense of patience, a sense of time, a sense of appreciation of sound in the moment. All of these things create very unique music that is particular to this moment that we’re in. I feel it myself, but I think it’s also palpable in the results of the new music that’s being composed.”

Morse Recital Hall is located at 470 College St.