Work samples
-
BYE BYE LOVE for orchestra
Commissioned and premiered by Ilan Volkov & the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for the TECTONICS Festival in Glasgow, Glasgow City Halls, 30 April 2023.
“These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands”
Julia Kristeva, 1980
About Ian
I am a composer who writes clear, warm, immersive music that focuses on performer agency. Through simple notation or text instructions, players explore parts of their instrument in a way that showcases their mastery of tone and pacing. My work is played regularly in the US and Europe, and in Baltimore I have curated and performed in 2-3 concerts per year of new, often unheard experimental music, as well as lectures on experimental art and politics. I studied with Chaya Czernowin… more
mahrem bir eser
This piece is commissioned by and made in collaboration with Mariel Roberts, cellist. It is dedicated to her, with admiration for her tireless and indiscriminate dedication to performance and musicianship, and her amazing instincts with this music.
BUOY
Using material from Laurence Crane's organ piece "The Swim," this piece grapples with a poetics of domesticity, refuge, and being moored against a current.
Premiered as an ensemble piece by Musica Nova at the Tzlil Meudcan festival in Tel Aviv in July 2015, the solo version premiered at the Red Room in Baltimore in April 2016. This recording was made at Spectrum, NYC in October 2016.
for *current* resonance
This piece is commissioned by, written for, and dedicated to the Current Resonance project, made up of Mallory Bernstein and Shawn Savageau. Their project and its name inspired me, and the title of the piece obviously refers to the dedication. I also found this title apropos of the music in the piece, which is why “current” is highlighted; for me, an arresting music turns one's own 'mind's ear' back toward oneself and experience again and again with each passing sound and moment. The “resonance” of music is, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, the act of listening through toward an ever-echoing and expanding self.
Premiered by Mallory Bernstein and Shawn Savegeau at Space Gallery, Denver in June 2013.
Lullaby, for Megan Ihnen
Quaff, for Martin Iddon
UNTITLED PROJECT, with Bonnie Jones
aspirapolvere, sega, spettro, tenere, possedere
A meditation on background hums and the comfort they afford. The title translates to "vacuum cleaner, saw, ghost, hold, hold."
Premiered in May 2013 at Harvard University by L'Arsenale.
-
No video provider was found to handle the given URL. See the documentation for more information.aspirapolvere, sega, spettro, tenere, possedere[vacuum cleaner, saw, ghost, hold, hold] Performed by Ilario Morciano, Luca Piovesan, and Lorenzo Tomio.
please
For harmonica and piccolo. Premiered in October 2016 by myself and the great flutist Richard Craig.
MAINTENANCE, for Victoria Cheah
Victoria and I have a plan for the piece in which she will play synth, midi controllers, a megaphone, and a to-be-determined acoustic instrument that she does not “play,” set in different places around the stage. The goals are: for Victoria to have a performance in which she can be both reflective and proactive about the roles both she and I play, and for the audience to feel comfortable in the space of the music, but also captivated by Victoria’s navigation of score and self. The music will be repetitive, stark, and yet melodic. There will be gradients of lighting that allow her to perform parts of the piece in a kind of “private,” vs. heavily lit, as well as in different postures (crouching for the acoustic instrument, standing forward with megaphone, for example). The contrasts highlight the actual gaze from the audience, while instructions that give her more compositional freedom in the “private” moments will highlight the contrasts in composer-performer hierarchy.
Because I recognized early on that there was no decent way for me to write a piece of female embodiment, I focused on writing a piece that allows the performer, whoever it is, to explore their own embodiment deeply. The score will in part take the form of a letter, which is partially inspired by Peter Dimock's novel George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time, in which an old classmate of the Bush administration official who wrote a memo legalizing torture writes to that official, asking that they engage in a series of self-explorative exercises to try and understand how history has brought them to this point. I am developing a series of exercises (in a sense in lieu of practicing and rehearsal) that will correspond to moments in the score that are to be generated by the performer specific to her own embodiment, experience, and meditation.
swathe
This piece uses notation that is dependent on the performer's breath capacity and pacing choices, but is not indeterminate. The result is a kind of music that simultaneously shores itself up on a performer's expertise, and invites that same performer to explore the instrument as though it were new.
Swathe and protract. Swathe to create refuge, protract to demarcate. Swathe to create a restrictive safe haven; breathe to push against it and to protract the sovereignty of your space as much as you can.
This piece is commissioned by and made in collaboration with Heather Roche, clarinetist. It is dedicated to her, with admiration for the unique combination of rigor, outreach, organizing, musicality, and sensitivity she brings to new music. It was written between August and December of 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland.