For haegum, flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, trombone, percussion and piano.
Written for ensemble mise-en and Soo Yeon Lyuh, premiered at the Cell in New York City on December 6, 2017.
The piece that taught me how difficult it is to compose with a one year-old and full teaching schedule.
See if you can guess the musical inspiration behind the piece.
2016 has been a life changing year for me so far! At the beginning of the year, I had several world premiere performances – Music Box for guitar and piano, Palus for vocal trio, and Forest Songs: HD Songs. In April, my first child was born, and the adorable little guy has been keeping me very busy ever since! I’m finally getting around to posting some information about my latest pieces as well as audio and video of the performances.
Music Box for guitar and piano premiered on February 16 at Southeastern Louisiana University. The piece was written for a subset of Hypercube, Jay Sorce, guitar and Andrea Lodge, piano. The idea behind Music Box stemmed from a residency at Banff back in January, 2014. The Banff center owns the entire set of Stockhausen Tierkries music boxes!
While there, I was allowed to play with the entire collection of Stockhausen’s Tierkreis music boxes. I loved all the mechanical sounds these little boxes made – particularly the whirring of the gears, the noise of the winding mechanism and the gradually distorting, sinking, slowing sound of the music boxes as they gradually wound down. In this piece, the piano and guitar are used like gargantuan broken down, spastic music boxes, sometimes spitting out noise, sometimes warping chordal and spectral materials and occasionally spitting out fragments of the Virgo, Sagittarius and Taurus music boxes.
Here is a recording of the world premiere performance:
By the way, thanks to my husband, Philip Schuessler, I now have a Sagittarius box of my very own.
2015 has already been an extremely productive year. I have composed two new pieces with premieres scheduled in April and May!
The Inhibitors, written for pianist Mabel Kwan, is a study in frustration and irregularity. When a pattern or melody begins to emerge, it is thwarted and immediately stamped out. This piece will premiere on April 1st at Southeastern Louisiana University and April 3rd on the Versipel New Music concert at Cafe Istanbul.
I also recently completed a vocal trio for Accordant Commons called Palus. This piece captures the essence of being in the cypress swamps of Louisiana, truly one of the most beautiful and magical ecosystems on the planet. This work is scheduled to be premiered in May on Microfest, an annual celebration of microtonal music in Los Angeles.
I have just finished editing the score for Forest Songs Book I: HD Songs. This book includes the songs Huntress and Pursuit and is part of an ongoing project. Over the next few years I plan to add more songs to the collection. Ultimately, the songs in this work will be able to be performed as a long cycle, or mixed and matched in shorter collections.
Through these songs, a variety of subthemes and sentiments are approached – from environmentalism, to mythology and memory, to feelings of loss, loneliness and hopelessness, to expressions of beauty, the supernatural, the sublime; and to the inhabitants of the forest themselves – the trees, plants, creatures and otherworldly denizens. As a life-long hiker and camper, the forest holds special meaning to me – there is really no place I would rather be than lost in a forest.
Here is a preview of Huntress and Pursuit. Please contact me if you are interested in seeing the rest.
For the past few months I have been working feverishly on a huge “composition” project. Undoubtedly, it has been a time-sucking black hole, but one that has generated much excitement and many possibilities for the future. Learning how to construct and problem-solve for this project has been pretty absorbing – sometimes in a good “I’m fascinated” way and other times in an obsessive “how is this ever going to work” way. This huge project is still a work in progress, and always will be. It’s like a huge shape-shifting monster, with its own microbial colony always changing the game beneath the surface. The project I am referring to is Versipel New Music, an organization built from the ground up by Philip and I. We had been contemplating creating an organization like this for several years, and have poured over the questions and problems that doing something like this would entail. At the heart of the problem, we had moved to a place where contemporary classical music hardly seemed to exist. The rare offerings that did exist seemed rare, small and ancillary, never really reaching beyond the token presentation of a new work. We started to brainstorm on ways that we could push new music more into the forefront of the New Orleans concert music scene. We created Versipel to be a multi-tiered organization. We structured it to tackle the challenges we perceived in presenting new classical music in our area. We created a visiting artist series which will bring in top-level new music specialists from all over the place to perform works that they personally believe strongly in. In collaboration with several universities in the area, these performers will frequently interact with students through workshops, masterclasses and occasionally, perform with them. Secondly, the heart of Versipel New Music is The Versipel Collective – a collective of local musicians who will present several types of concerts, thereby nurturing our local performance scene (see our 2014-2015 schedule!). The Versipel Collective also has composer members who are the workhorses of our organization, organizing shows, applying for grants, schlepping gear, and sometimes performing on our shows. Our organization also serves to help promote their music. Most importantly, this collective serves the purpose of building a community of musicians who can share knowledge, ideas and grow over time. So what was the final straw in taking the plunge to start this group? Honestly, it was feeling that I have no control over any aspect of my life. Maybe this isn’t P.C. to bring up in a “business” site, but for me, all of this is very personal. I have many altruistic reasons for starting Versipel as well – I really want to raise the profile of new music in the New Orleans area. A concert music scene that has an organization dedicated to presenting new music will make the entire music scene in New Orleans more robust. It will also make for a healthier environment for the many composers in the area. I want Versipel will help bridge the gaps between different audiences and styles in the multifaceted New Orleans music and art scene. So, please check out our page. If you’re local, come to our shows. We also have a call for scores up, that anyone (regardless of age or nationality) can submit to. Last but not least, we are a new organization. In order to get our organization started, we have launched an Indiegogo campaign! Please check it out and support this exciting endeavor! Watch our fundraising video:
Earlier this week, I was ecstatic to hear two fantastic performances of my first song cycle performed by the Astralis Duo. These performances revived a work that I haven’t heard in almost thirteen years, and the songs have never sounded better. Soprano Stephanie Aston has an amazingly versatile voice with much color and sings these tricky songs with so much control and precision. Katalin Lucaks played the piano superbly, bringing out many hidden ideas in the piano part. The presentation itself was really well-done, and was accompanied by interactive video projections by New Orleans composer/video artist Peter Leonard.
“Four Songs” is a piece I wrote in 2000 when I was a student at UT Austin. I set four poems by Donald Justice; Landscape with Little Figures, Song, Bus Stop and Presences. I hope to post a recording and/or video soon!
I started off 2014 with a short residency at the Banff Centre in Canada! I had a fantastic time playing in the snow, making new friends, going on wintry hikes and listening to some fantastic music performed by other residents. I did some composing too, in my little composer’s hut, #7, the Mendelssohn cabin. While small, it had all the essentials needed to work on a new exclusively acoustic piece, a set of songs with the provisional title, “Forest Songs.” For years, I have had a strong desire to get back into writing vocal music. My first and only journey intro writing for voice was about fourteen years ago, when I wrote “Four Songs” for soprano and piano on texts by Donald Justice. In a strange coincidence, it looks like these songs will be revived for several new performances in Louisiana this Spring (details to come).
A couple of years ago, I made several sketches for new songs with a forest/nature theme and spent considerable time looking for texts. However, due to other projects, this new set of songs was pushed into the background until this month. I’m still looking for texts to go with my various sketches, but I have started two songs that use texts by Hilda Doolittle, “Huntress” and “Pursuit.” I am writing these songs for soprano and small chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano). Ultimately, I hope to write five or six songs in this set and potentially, a couple of instrumental interludes.
So, I’ve been sitting on this piece for quite some time. About three years to be exact, working on it here and there amidst many other projects. I recomposed this piece four times which I don’t think of as a bad thing at all. The first three compositions just weren’t all they could be, they didn’t reach certain states of being/feeling that I am interested in creating in my music. Now the piece says and does more of what I originally intended it to do and more. It’s a piece that I am exited about, a piece I would love to hear and love to play.
Here is the program note, which describes Icons reasons for existence…
As a guitarist, I grew up listening to and playing classic rock and heavy metal during its peak years, the 1980s and 90s. The guitar icons I looked up to included Jimmy Page, Dave Mustaine, Marty Friedman, Tony Iommi, Dimebag Darrell, Randy Rhodes, and Zakk Wilde among others. These guitarists all had a great sound and a powerful mode of expression – wild solos and riffs immersed in a crunch of amplified noise, reverb and distortion. For this piece, rather than incorporating or emulating the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic material typical of this style, I took a couple of iconic guitar sounds and distilled them down to their very essence. The pluck (picked – clean and distorted), the trill, and the bow (à la Jimmy Page) formed the primary seed materials for the entire composition. Other elements of the piece extracted from rock gestalt include distortion, noise fills, and feedback. There are several underlying processes used to alter these basic materials over time, which in turn govern the overall structure of the piece.
Icons is for flute, clarinet, violin, bass and electric guitar.
You can download a pdf preview of the notes and first five pages here: Icons-preview
You can download a full pdf of the score here: Icons-fullscore
This summer I have been involved with my first studio recording project. My piece “Embers” for saxophone and piano has been recorded and will be part of an album of new & adventurous music for saxophone, piano, and electronics. The star of this CD is saxophonist Richard Schwartz, who commissioned and premiered “Embers” to begin with. I am super excited as this will be the first time a piece of mine has been professionally recorded and set for release on a commercial CD. The album also includes works by Philip Schuessler (who plays piano on Embers), Stephen Suber and Ray Pizzi. We recorded the album in June & July in the recording studio at Louisiana State University with a great recording engineer, Bill Kelley. It has been an interesting process and now we are in the final stages of getting this project completed!
Even though this has been a minimal, bare bones recording project involving only a few performers, the costs still add up. We have launched a Kickstarter project to help generate funds to bring the project to completion. You can check out our Kickstarter video below and then head on over to our Kickstarter page for more information.
Project page: http://kck.st/1d7IPD5
Hey all,
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any updates. Here is what has been going on!
The Anemone Fragments for cello and electronics recently received its second performance at Music on the Mountain, Birmingham Alabama. The piece was once again performed by Craig Hultgren, cello accompanied by *yours truly* on electronics. Craig performed a whole concert of new/recent music for cello with and without electronics. The concert also contained a follow-up presentation of Craig’s Vox Novus project, 15 Minutes of Fame. Here is a recording of the performance.
In other news, saxophonist Richard Schwartz is recording a new album of newish pieces for solo saxophone, with or without piano and/or electronic accompaniment. My piece Embers, is set to be the title track of his album, which will be released on Centaur Records later this year.
I’ve also been working away on finishing two pieces, Icons for clarinet, violin, bass, electric guitar, and percussion and Crickets and Gongs for orchestra.
Kari Besharse 