furnish it with love (2024)
Commissioner: Thornton Composers Ensemble
Written: September 2024
Duration: ca. 2’
Instrumentation: cello trio
Performance History
November 15, 2024: Ella Kaale, Evan Williams, Namratha Kasalanati [vcl] — Ramo Recital Hall, Los Angeles, CA — (World Premiere) — Thornton Composers Ensemble presents “Pictures at an Exhibition: The Art of Our Time”
About this concert:
In 1874, Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky visited a gallery in St. Petersburg. As he walked from painting to painting, he translated pigments and brushstrokes into musical motives and sonorities. The resulting work is a ten-movement piano suite that is familiar to many of us– Pictures at an Exhibition. This recital, Pictures at an Exhibition: The Art of Our Time, has taken a modern approach to Mussorgsky’s process. In May, we took nine composers, including ourselves, to visit the Broad Collection in Downtown Los Angeles and gathered inspiration for our pieces. The museum’s mission statement summarizes our exact goals in creating this project:
The Broad makes its collection of contemporary art from the 1950s to the present accessible to the widest possible audience by presenting exhibitions and operating a lending program to art museums and galleries worldwide. By actively building a dynamic collection that features in-depth representations of influential contemporary artists and by advancing education and engagement through exhibitions and diverse public programming, the museum enriches, provokes, inspires, and fosters appreciation of art of our time.
Thornton Composers Ensemble (TCE) is a student-run collective of composer-performers dedicated to curating live concerts and increasing engagement with new music at USC, founded in 2022 by Ella Kaale and Charlie Richardson. We have hosted several concerts, giving over a dozen composers the space and resources to present their work. Pictures at an Exhibition: The Art of Our Time serves as our Young Artist Project, a capstone course taken in the senior year by all Classical Division students at Thornton.
Program Notes
I chose Red Block (2010) by Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui. From a distance, Red Block appears to be a glimmering, metallic red tapestry secured to the gallery wall. It drapes like cloth and looks like you could wrap yourself up in it. As the viewer moves closer, however, they realize that the tapestry is not soft at all— it’s comprised of hundreds of meticulously “stitched” together found aluminum and copper wire.
When asked about his use of found aluminum (bottle caps, soda cans), El Anatsui stated the following:
“The most important thing for me is the transformation. The fact that these media, each identifying a brand of drink, are no longer going back to serve the same role but are elements that could generate some reflection, some thinking, or just some wonder. This is possible because they are removed from their accustomed, functional context into a new one, and they bring along their histories and identities.”
This philosophy towards found material manifests in my version of Red Block in multiple ways, the most obvious being my use of tinfoil. The foil mutes provide a constant harsh buzz which I attempt to mellow out with natural harmonics and open strings. Additionally, the original work interacts with popular culture and capitalism in a very elegant way, using the logo of a drink brand to create an entirely new pattern and connotation when viewed from a distance. Thus, all the material in my Red Block is fragmented jingles from a popular soda company with red packaging...
Ultimately, I want to ask a few questions. How can we make use of our excess? Can we morph the hard-edged and sharp into something warm and comforting? How do we accept that aspects of our lives and fates are irreversible, and embrace the world in which we are forced to exist?