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Lois V VierkMatthew Gold - marimba
Sachiko Kato - piano
Jody Redhage - cello
Guy Klucevsek - accordion
Words Fail Me, first movement (2005) for cello and piano
I wrote the melody for the first movement sometime soon after September 11, 2001. I usually don’t write melodies. My family and I watched horrid events of that day live out our apartment window, as thousands of people were murdered before our eyes when the World Trade Center was shot down. It is an image I will never ever forget of smoke and dust drenching lower Manhattan in a horrible white cloud of debris that used to be a building vibrant with the energy of many living, breathing people. After spending some weeks in a kind of daze I eventually picked up musical sketches I had been working on before. The materials in those sketches seemed so irrelevant that I threw them away. Then I wrote simple music. There is room for some improvisation. It is slow and sad.
Demon Star (1996) for cello and marimba
The demon star is Algol in the constellation Perseus. Algol (literally “the demon’s head”) was observed for over a century to periodically get bright, then suddenly dim, but no one knew why. It wasn’t until 1782 that the astronomer John Goodricke offered the explanation that Algol is really a pair of stars orbiting around a common center. Approximately every 69 hours the dimmer star passes in front of the brighter star, partially blocking its light, to someone watching on earth. He had made the first identification of an “eclipsing binary” star. This is the imagery that inspired my piece Demon Star. This work sometimes brings one or the other of the instruments to the foreground, eclipsing the other, as it were, contrasting their sounds. At other times it blends and intertwines the instruments to form new timbres.
Manhattan Cascade (1985) for 4 accordions
This 20-minute piece is a slowly unfolding work which, like much of my music from the 1980’s, was influenced by the Japanese Gagaku court music that I was studying and performing, and by music of long-tone minimalist composers like Phill Niblock. My pieces from this period are for ensembles of like-instruments--8 cellos, 18 trombones, 8 violins, 8 ryuteki flutes, etc., and this work for 4 accordions. In my pieces for multiples of the same instrument, two or more of the instruments act together, forming a “sound shape”. The beginning of this work consists of relatively simple sound shapes of accordion trills and tremolos. More musical materials are introduced. Gradually these sounds develop into complex and dynamic scales, repeated chords and clusters, accents and dynamic patterns. The piece utilizes principles which I call exponential structure, in which rates of change of musical materials are constantly increasing by an exponential factor. Little by little, Manhattan Cascade is transformed from a gentle flow of sound to its cascading conclusion, crashing like a giant waterfall. This piece was commissioned by Guy Klucevsek, who plays the live accordion part and all 3 pre-recorded parts in this performance.
(All works Frog Peak, ASCAP.)
Lois V Vierk, from Lansing, Illinois, in suburban Chicago, was born in 1951. She studied composition at California Institute of the Arts with Mel Powell, Leonard Stein, and Morton Subotnick. For ten years she studied Gagaku (Japanese Court Music) with Suenobu Togi in Los Angeles and for two years she studied in Tokyo with Sukeyasu Shiba of the emperor’s Gagaku Orchestra. Ms. Vierk has spent most of her career in New York City. She was presented recently in a “portrait” concert at German Radio Cologne. Among the many performers and presenters who have commissioned her are pianists Ursula Oppens, Frederic Rzewski, Margaret Leng Tan, Aki Takahashi; accordionist Guy Klucevsek; the Kronos Quartet, Lincoln Center Festival, Bang on a Can Festival, Ensemble Modern, Music from Japan. Co-creations with tap-dance choreographer Anita Feldman have been performed at major dance and music venues. In 2008 the feature length film “Everywhere At Once” by Holly Fisher and Peter Lindbergh, featuring Vierk’s music, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, NYC. Her music is available on CD on Tzadik Records, XI Records, oodiscs, Sony Classical, Starkland Records.
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