Jason Eckhardt is a composer that has taught at many music schools across America including Northwestern, Columbia, and Rutgers University among others. He is currently a professor at City University of New York. His education was primarily at Berklee College and his most notable teachers include Jonathan Kramer, Milton Babbitt, and Brian Ferneyhough. He has received many awards and commissions including the illustrious Guggenheim Fellowship. His music is often atonal or microtonal, and is highly complex with large scale processes.
Flux, written in 1995 is a piece written for bass flute and cello. In his program notes Eckhardt explains that the music in this piece never finds its rest and is always in transformation. The conversational aspects of this piece in the way that the flute and the cello interact is brilliant. While sometimes it seems that they are in totally different worlds, unaware of each other entirely, the moments where they do come together, or communicate in direct response to the other are almost surprising and make the audience listen for those moments of sweetness.
Flux
Cuts is a piece written in 1996 for solo piano. From his website, Eckhardt provides the program notes for the piece. There, he explains that the piece has a “singular focus”. The first minute gives the audience the basic elements of the piece, then “the remaining music is realized through their temporal, directional, and parametrical redistribution.”(www.jasoneckhardt.com) While truly a wild and daring piece, the technical aspects alone keep the audience glued to the performers every move.
Cuts
Although, I don’t have the full-length premiered piece, The Silenced is a piece that was dedicated to Claire Chase for her project Density 2036. The video below links to excerpts of the piece with Claire herself as the performer. While you can’t listen to the full piece, I wanted to take a moment to appreciate the themes and advanced techniques that Eckhardt uses in this piece. In his program notes he explains that “The Silenced is a meditation on those who are muted, by force or by political, economic, or social circumstances, yet still struggle to be heard. While composing the work, I was concerned with the ideas of trauma and self expression during and after an emotionally damaging experience. This is manifested musically by gagged, stifled sounds that are perpetually in transition towards a clearer articulation that is never fully reached. Significantly, it is the flute, not the voice, that comes closest to realizing a kind of expressive "purity," free of the noise and interference that typify so much of multilayered sound strata in the piece.” As artists of sound I think it is immensely important that we really see the people around us and that we give those who cannot stand up for themselves a voice through our art.
The Silenced
While sometimes difficult to understand merely through listening, Eckhardt’s music reaches beyond the immediate satisfaction of having something easy to digest and challenges the audience both to listen both conceptually and thematically. To follow Eckhardt’s career, visit his Website or subscribe to his YouTube channel.
To anyone who may need it :
I do not own any of the music or videos in this blog post or in any of the other posts that you may find in this blog.
Comments