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Composer fuses light, sound in Carnegie premiere

February 16, 2011 By Susannah Brooks

Photo: Schwendinger

Composer Laura Schwendinger (right) collaborates with her lighting designer cousin, Leni Schwendinger. In March at Carnegie Hall, the pair will debut a major new work combining light and sound. Photo courtesy Laura Schwendinger

Now in its 33rd season, the New York-based American Composers Orchestra is the only orchestra in the world dedicated solely to the creation, performance, preservation and promulgation of music by American composers. Using instruments such as a junked automobile and the “sonic canvas” of a concert hall itself, the ensemble wants to re-imagine the scope of a modern orchestra.

Next month, the ensemble will fuse light and sound in a major new work by a UW–Madison composer.

“Shadings,” by Laura Schwendinger, professor of composition in the School of Music, will receive its world premiere on a program titled “Orchestra Underground: Playing it Unsafe.” The event takes place on March 4 in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall.

Launched in 2007, Playing it UNsafe is the first professional laboratory in the United States dedicated to the research and development of new orchestral works. Deconstructing the symphonic experience can involve something as subtle as physical shifts in an orchestra’s arrangement, or as radical as considering the aforementioned auto parts for their sonic qualities.

“The orchestra as an institution has made its mark in the world and this country. For the orchestra to continue to build on its history, we need to re-invent it,” says Robert Beaser, artistic director of the ACO. “We decided to give the composer of the 21st century an opportunity to say, ‘Look. We’re going to give you this orchestra, and this orchestra can mean whatever it is in your head. Why don’t you pitch some ideas to us? Why don’t you dream?’”

The five commissioned composers — selected from a competitive national pool — tested the limits of the orchestra through readings, discussions, open rehearsals and lab sessions.

“The orchestra has rehearsed my work twice in a workshop situation,” says Schwendinger. “I could respond immediately with suggestions and try new approaches at the moment of first hearing. This rarely happens.”

“Shadings” combines the sounds used by Schwendinger herself and the lighting art of her cousin and collaborator, Leni Schwendinger. Drawing on Leni Schwendinger’s photography, the shimmery orchestral sounds and the pearlescent tones of projected images fuse to produce a score with two distinct personas.

Described as a “lighting urbanist” for her work in architectural and public spaces, Leni Schwendinger has created projects such as a massive installation at the front of the Seattle Opera House and a piece exploring the relationship between the flow of traffic and the changing tides below a bridge in Glasgow, Scotland.

“Light flows like music,” says Leni Schwendinger, who began her career lighting for rock musicians. “It has a crescendo and a decrescendo.”

In 1993, Leni Schwendinger traveled to Japan to research ephemeral architecture and karesansui (dry landscapes, often referred to as Zen gardens). The serenity of sand, moss and patterned gravel contrasts with the darker intensity of nearby industrial building sites. The short life of her medium — black-and-white Polaroid transparency film — enhances the fragile atmosphere of ritual gardens and ever-changing earthen construction sites.

The cousins composed their individual contributions separately. Using a laptop and a rainbow of colored pencils, they came together across a table to create a roadmap incorporating cues for music and lighting.

“We’ve had several very long, hard working sessions where we talked about the language of each discipline and common ground,” says Laura Schwendinger. “We worked with her images and my score and found the connections and how they would respond to one another.”

Laura Schwendinger’s orchestral soundscape attempts to amplify the sense of wonder found in her cousin’s images. The duality of light and shadows, and the shapes shared by the visual worlds of both gardens and industrial scenes, reflect the mysterious visual relationships of geometry and space.

“[Leni’s] use of color and drama spoke to my own use of drama,” says Laura Schwendinger. “To work with her and find out how much artistic vision we have in common is wonderful.”

The first composer to win the prestigious American Academy in Berlin Prize fellowship, Laura Schwendinger has also received awards from the Rockefeller, Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations, the Yaddo and MacDowell Colonies, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2009 with a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship given to “mid-career composers of exceptional gifts.”

During her year as a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008, she created a new work for Sole Nero, the percussion and piano duo of fellow School of Music faculty members Anthony Di Sanza and Jessica Johnson, as well as a solo piano work for the Van Cliburn Piano Competition’s Composer’s Invitational, premiered in Madison by piano professor Christopher Taylor. A recent recording of three concertos was funded by a $10,000 grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music 2010 Recording Program.

At UW�Madison, Schwendinger is also the artistic director of the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, which will hold spring concerts at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 9, and at 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 10, in Mills Hall.