Ryan Francis: Etudes for Piano

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan discusses his new piano etudes, featured in Metropolis Ensemble's upcoming concert Digital Sustain.

Since Frédéric Chopin, the genre of piano etudes transformed from their intention as studies towards improving one's pianism to unfettered exemplars of imagination and virtuosity that pushed piano technique to the limits. In the last century, Conlon Nancarrow removed the performer from the form, composing the first pre-electronic pieces for player piano that are physically impossible for any human to perform. Ryan has used the current version of piano player rolls – MIDI maps – to expand human piano technique in his etudes.



Music credits: Frédéric Chopin, Etude #1 in C, Op. 10, Maurizio Pollini piano; Deutsche Grammophon: B000001G5H. Ryan Francis, "Digitial Sustain" for Piano, (MIDI rendering). Conlon Nancarrow's Etude No. 1; player piano. Ryan Francis, "Harlequin" for Piano, (MIDI rendering). Special thanks to Ania Dabrowski.

Ryan Francis: On Composing

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan talks with Metropolis Ensemble's Artistic Director, Andrew Cyr, about his compositional background.

Conceptual inspiration abounds in the music of composer Ryan Francis. Although Maurice Ravel and Gyorgi Ligeti are not two names you normally hear uttered in the same breath together both share an intellectual playfulness and compositional intrepidity that Ryan identifies with.

An example of Ryan's playfulness and engagement with new materials and ideas is his orchestral White Deep Blue, which opens with an exact acoustical rearrangement of the '90s electronic hit Pearl's Girl by Underworld and continues into his own compositional flourish.

The visual arts also translate into Ryan's music on both abstract and more literal levels – one example being the reinterpretation of Joan Miro's canvas Woman Bird and Star into an eponymous musical piece.



Music credits: Maurice Ravel, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé "Soupir", Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Nonesuch: B000005J0T. Gyorgy Ligeti, Violin Concerto, InterContemporain Ensemble, Saschko Gawriloff, violin, Pierre Boulez conductor; Deutsche Grammophon: B000001GLN. Underworld, "Pearl's Girl"; Tvt: B000003RJN. Ryan Francis "White Deep Blue", The Juilliard Orchestra. Ryan Francis "Woman Bird and Star", The Juilliard Orchestra. Special thanks to Ania Dabrowski.

Upcoming Concerts

Metropolis Ensemble and Artistic Director/Conductor Andrew Cyr are delighted to announce two new concerts for 2008:

LOOP
Thursday, April 10, 2008 (8pm)
The Times Center (620 8th Avenue at 41st Street)
Tickets: $20 online / $25 at the door
Buy tickets now...

The World Premiere performance of Piano Concerto by Wet Ink Composer Resident Ryan Francis featuring pianist Anna Polonsky. Also on the program, three 20th Century masterpieces: Ravel's Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Salonen's Five Images from Sappho with soprano Kiera Duffy, and Satie's Sports et Divertissements, arranged by David Bruce. Wine reception during intermission.

Digital Sustain: Six Etudes for Piano by Ryan Francis
Saturday, March 8, 2008 (2pm)
Chelsea Art Museum (556 W 22nd Street)
Tickets: $20 online / at the door
Buy tickets now...

The World Premiere performance of ETUDES for Piano by Ryan Francis featuring pianists Vicky Chow, Michael Shinn, and Daniel Spiegel. Presented in tandem with etudes from Ligeti, Bolcom, Chopin, and Liszt. This special concert is a preview of Ryan Francis' spring concert premiere, Piano Concerto.

Ryan Francis: Piano Concerto

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan offers his thoughts on his new Piano Concerto, the featured work in Metropolis Ensemble's spring concert, Loop.

This concerto feels like an arrival point for me artistically that has been in the works for the past four years. I've been exploring a lot of seemingly (to me, at least) disparate musical concepts, but this concerto is the crucible in which I'm forging them all together. On the one hand, I've written a good deal of music that deals more with textural as opposed to 'metric' rhythms, and I also have a parallel string of pieces that are concerned with electronic influence on acoustic music, which are much more metrically complex, while retaining more harmonic clarity.

My interest in electronics has influenced the concerto on both an aural level and a process level. While the concerto's orchestration is often designed to create 'electronic' tambors, I also decided to forego my traditional paper-and-pencil-exclusively method of composing, in favor of working with MIDI maps.

This new method of working allowed me to explore and develop textures that I probably would have never discovered were I simply working with my hands on a keyboard, and this influenced the soloist's part in particular. I would write with grids, unconcerned with playability, and would then transcribe them into mensural notation and revise and revise until they were completely idiomatic. The result has been that the piano writing is often utterly different than my previous work, which was my goal.

Each of the movements were developed out of piano etudes that I have been writing for the past year, and the form of each movement reflects the same sort of obsessive quality of an etude, although I allowed myself to be a little more expansive as well; this is a concerto, after all!

• The first movement could almost be a chorale, were it not for the sharp syncopated disjunctive melodic contours that cut through the texture.


• The second movement is a sort of musical jacob's ladder; constantly rising musical gestures that are also continuously falling.


• The third movement is more about color than the others, and less rhythmically driving as well, although there is a gentle repeated note pulse that runs through much of the movement.


• The final movement is comprised of two basic layers: a light, distant textural one, and a foreground built on constantly evolving loops of material.

Kids Bringing Music to Life

To say that Cristina Spinei's experience teaching for Metropolis Ensemble's Youth Works has been successful would be an understatement. Now halfway through this year's program at Public School 11 in Manhattan, Cristina wrote a report to capture some of the amazing progress her students are making.

Teaching at P.S. 11 for one semester has been exciting, challenging, and extremely rewarding. My students are imaginative and open to learning about music that they have had little exposure to. On the first day of class, I asked everyone to name a few composers. The responses I got were "Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Jennifer Lopez, 50 Cent, and Mozart." There was a lot of concern among the students that the music we were learning about would be written by "old dead guys" and would sound "old-fashioned." After the first month of lessons, the students were able to identify the music of Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Wynton Marsalis.

From Brazilian percussion to Disney's Fantasia, Cristina has found some inventive and exciting ways to bring music and those "old dead guys" to life! At the end of the school year, Metropolis Ensemble will present a concert showcasing the students' work with Cristina. Read the full report (PDF)...

Sports et Divertissements

Metropolis Ensemble commissioned a new arrangement for chamber orchestra of Erik Satie's Sports et Divertissements from London-based composer David Bruce for our spring concert Loop.

Sports et Divertissements was originally written for piano and narrator in 1914 as a multi-media project of sorts. Satie provided piano music to drawings made by Charles Martin, a French illustrator from the Beaux Arts and Art Deco traditions. First published and performed in the early 1920s, Satie's twenty brilliant thumbnails sketches illuminate Martin's drawings with whimsical verbal and musical images of outdoor sports and amusements.

David Bruce offers his thoughts on creating a chamber orchestra arrangement:

Satie's Sports et Divertissements presents itself in such a deliberately humble, almost self-depricating manner that it's easy to overlook the quality of Satie's inventiveness. Indeed, I think I only really appreciated the true depth and subtlety of Satie's art once I began the process or orchestration.

From the instruments available, I tried to pick an orchestral palette which resonated with the subject matter of the individual pieces, (ranging as it does from circus clowns to and octopus in its cave) and in doing felt a sense of polishing up a tiny gem to reveal an extraordinary richness and strangeness. The tiniest of fragments which might whizz past in the piano piece and which might seem unremarkable, suddenly jumped into life... its true significance seeming stronger than ever.

Most notable were a wealth of connections with Satie's Parisian contemporaries, particularly Debussy and Stravinsky... connections which had only been marginally apparent to me in listening to the piano version. What we now think of as a Stravinskian orchestral sound is particularly evident in the pieces that evoke the circus or the comedia del'arte characters - the combination of 'earthy' circus music sounds with the particular kinds of harmony and repetitive patterns Satie uses bring out the Stravinsky connection especially strongly - and makes one reconsider the extent of the influence Satie exerted on the great Russian composer.

More about Erik Satie...

Ryan Francis Wins American Composers Forum Commission

Metropolis Ensemble's Wet Ink Composer Resident, Ryan Francis, won a competitive commission from the American Composers Forum with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation for his Piano Concerto. The world premiere will be presented by the Metropolis Ensemble's spring concert, Loop, on April 10, 2008 with pianist Anna Polonsky and conductor Andrew Cyr. Here's the official announcement:

The American Composers Forum announces the results of the 2007 Jerome Composers Commissioning Program (JCCP). JCCP, now in its 28th year and one of only a few national commissioning programs, supports the production of new musical works by emerging composers. It seeks to boost a composer's career by offering composers an early commission and more experienced composers a chance to stretch their current boundaries. Composers apply with an ensemble or presenter and request support to underwrite the commissioning fee. Awards this year ranged from $3,000-8,000. A total of 17 projects were funded from a pool of $90,000.

Jerome Foundation was created by artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill in 1964, and makes grants to support emerging artists across the performing and visual arts, particularly those based in Minnesota and New York.

American Composers Forum is an organization committed to supporting composers and developing new markets for their music. Through grants, commissions, and performance programs, the Forum provides resources for over 1,700 composers around the world.

Congratulations to Ryan for this exciting achievement!