Bloom for Symphonic Brass Ensemble and Percussion (2024)
Suggested excerpts: 1) 4:44 to 8:04 (pg.11, m.120)
Commissioned by Tanglewood Music Center, performed by TMC Brass and Percussion Fellows; world premiere on June 30, 2024 at Seiji Ozawa Hall.
Annie Nikunen, composer
ABRIDGED PROGRAM NOTE:
A piece about life cycles and cycles of bloom, from each individual being to a bed of beings growing as one body. The opposite of a fanfare, a piece that features the waves and lushness of a sea of brass. Extended program note in score.
The Sound of Space Between Us III for orchestra (2023/24)
Suggested excerpts: 1) 8:47 to 13:24 (starts pg.16, letter H), 2) 4:25 to 6:55 (starts pg. 9, m.100)
Commissioned and performed by The Phoenix Symphony; world premiere on April 26, 2024 at Phoenix Symphony Hall.
Annie Nikunen, composer
PROGRAM NOTE:
Reaching is the reverb of movement...one of my favorite gestures to embody in composition and choreography, as well as physicalize through breath in playing flute. Like sounds expand into space over time and live on, reaches extend far beyond the body, elasticizing the moment for everyone in its range...or in its cage.
As a composer as well as flutist, dancer and choreographer, I’m always exploring how to connect music and dance in a way beyond mere coexistence, where they physically meld – musicians becoming choreographic agents, dancers embodying sonic activity, and this overarching conversation between musicians, dancers, audience. Here, I wanted to explore musicalizing distance, the sound of silent space framed and catalyzed by two people once connected and now separated, through broken partnership or death. I’m interested in how that emotional space - whether physically measurable or boundless, as in any kind of emotional apartness - can be renewed life through sound. I aimed to make the orchestra an ever-moving body, choreographing sounds that embody physical phenomena, gestures and emotions. These could be bodily movement - i.e. the swelling motif, pushing, pulling, embracing, touching and reaching - or psychological movement resurrected from and interlaced with memories, i.e. longing, thinking, dwelling, revisiting.
This piece is the third and final installment of The Sound of Space Between Us trilogy, all based around a 4-chord phrase that is re-contextualized, mutated and expanded. The three installments are all sonically reminiscent of one another, but evolve in instrumentation, structure, narrative and movement. They expand around the solo violin role, or present voice, like someone’s core amidst a changing body, mind and circumstances around them. I wrote the first installment in 2021 for multi-tracked violin, where the violinist’s live playing is surrounded by recorded tracks of their voices from different points in time. I wrote the second installment for violin soloist and string trio (string quartet) in 2023, serving as the thematic focal point for a program of music and dance I curated featuring BlackBox Ensemble - of which I am the flutist - at The Clark Art Institute and Roulette (see third work sample below). This final installment for orchestra consists of various embedded duos representing those two aforementioned people: the solo violin and full orchestra, the solo flute and solo violin, the “poofs” of densely orchestrated textures suddenly cutting to more minimal, sparse textures, etc. So not only are there many layers of dialogue, but there are also many forms these two voices take in communicating with each other.
While there are some similar threads of material in Parts II and III, they develop and take shape in different ways.
The Sound of Space Between Us II for solo violinist and string trio (string quartet) (2023)
Suggested excerpts: 1) 14:56 to end (starts pg. 25, m.297), 2) 12:31 to 14:05 (starts pg.22, m.245)
NY premiere performed by BlackBox Ensemble featuring guest violin soloist Clara Kim as part of BlackBox Festival on January 18, 2024 at Roulette Intermedium. World premiere at The Clark Art Institute on October 1, 2023.
Annie Nikunen, composer / director / dancer / choreographer
Peter Cheng, dancer
Tyler Neidermayer, electronic postlude*
*after the piece ends, Tyler took its live recording and stretched it out to create a swirling soundscape lingering in the air
ABRIDGED PROGRAM NOTE:
This is Part II of The Sound of Space Between Us trilogy. As a composer, flutist, dancer and choreographer, it’s not often that I get to wear all those hats at the same time, so this was a culmination, along with curating a program around it originally set at The Clark Art Institute, where it premiered in October 2023. I wanted to connect sound and movement through The Clark's unique landscape, from its grandioseness to its subtle details. The program is a meeting point between societal and interpersonal; our public place in the ecosystem and our private paths with(in) it. The program also traverses a spectrum of methods of interpreting music and dance, from notated scores to sonic maps to choreographic exercises.
This recording is the second iteration of the program at Roulette in January 2024 as part of BlackBox Festival, where I reconfigured the choreography and overall production on a much smaller scale. Whether somewhere as vast as The Clark or somewhere as intimate as Roulette, amidst me and Peter Cheng dancing together in the space, the violin soloist physically embodies the sound of space between us.
holding onto blur for solo flute and electronics (2022)
Improvised/unscored (below is a description as to how I created it)
Suggested excerpts: 1) 0:00 to 6:05 (Part I), 2) 7:20 to 9:50 (Part II excerpt), 3) 12:40 to 16:45 (Part III excerpt)
Annie Nikunen, composer / flutist / dancer / choreographer / video effects editor
Kevin Chiu, cinematagrapher
PROGRAM NOTE/DESCRIPTION:
As someone typically motivated by concept and narrative in my writing, I wanted to challenge myself to create something based on a more simple and abstract idea. I played a structured improvisation based on ascending scales within a collection of pitches, cycling between climbing and getting knocked down to the bottom again. I used reverb and delay to interact with myself, playing and leaving behind lingering ghostly trails of my flute playing. I have experimented a lot with this overlay technique in both sound and film.
Kevin and I shot this short film off the cuff while on location for The Sound of Space Between Us at The Clark, in an Airbnb in Williamstown, MA. The nature of Kevin’s cinematography in its intimate, out-of-focus lens resonated so much with the blurry soundscape I was envisioning. I’ve always love blurred film and photography that capture those fleeting moments, the in-betweens of actions. Over the course of about 16 minutes of dense flute textures, the film repeats in three parts: first in its original form, second in reverse, and third canonized, overlaying a staggered entrance of the beginning of the film. In the last bit of the third repetition of the film, the flute mass fades into a deafening silence, amplifying the gravity of the gradual movements.
all mass is interaction for flute, clarinet, string quartet (2023)
Suggested excerpts: 1) 6:00 to 8:08, measures 126-166; 2) 1:40 to 3:04, measures 36-69; 3) 4:30 to 5:32, measures 97-117
Performed by Tanglewood New Fromm Players; premiered August 6, 2023 at Tanglewood Music Center.
Annie Nikunen, composer
“You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa...All mass is interaction.” -Richard Feynman
The dancer/choreographer part of me was attracted to the physicality of this idea and musicalizing it, that the fundamental nature of mass arises from interactions between particles, rather than from any inherent substance. I wanted to put an aural microscope on the active relationships between these particles that are so imperceptibly minute in the realm of physics, and fuel those relationships with friction, love, chaos, calm. I aimed to make a collage-like ecosystem of sounds building on different relationships between the players, which become stronger and more dependent as the piece progresses. The duality of past and present is threaded within that as well, playing with the idea of “particle memory”. I was inspired by an article discussing how particles can have spatial memory, remembering their past so that they never travel the same path twice, which produces beautiful, complex patterns.