The Evolution of the Arm, having materialized from Buffalo's vibrant experimental music scene five years ago, takes its interdimensional, genre- transcending chamber music on the road in March 2023.
An unconventional quartet drawing on collective experience in classical, jazz, noise, theater music, and beyond, The Evolution of the Arm combines the subtle precision of notated concert music performance with the wild spontaneity of free improvisation, superimposing or moving seamlessly between these extremes in their original compositions. The instrumentation of oboe, piano, violin, and cello allows unique timbral amalgamations, while their heterodox approach to counterpoint and form manifest as a kind of doppelgänger of classical music—built from the flotsam and jetsam of Baroque intricacy and Romantic lyricism.
The band's Cleveland concert will feature music from their debut album Sounds Like, on which the band blurs the boundaries between the tactile and the non-corporeal. From the gestural, quasi-metal opening riff of “Starting Positions” to “Double Memory’s" transcendent final chorale, the album charts trajectories through diaphanous string harmonics, crunchy piano clusters, and vertiginous oboe multiphonics. Album centerpiece Jackrabbit's Palace is split across four movements, each featuring a different quartet member as an improvising soloist (pianist Michael McNeill, oboist Megan Kyle, cellist Katie Weissman, and violinist Evan Courtin respectively). Entr'actes break up this form with dreamily pensive string duo Fluffernutter, and the jerky starts-and-stops of pawns, a setting of the eponymous poem by Marina Blitshteyn.
The band’s 2023 tour will coincide with the release of Telepathic Music Vol. 2, their second EP of remotely-recorded, telepathically-connected improvisations. Of the first EP, saxophonist/composer Maria Faust writes “The band has a rich and recognizable sound, and as I would say, 'they play like one person with multiple personalities.' […The EP] perfectly describes not only the pandemic period but the general state of mind of a person living in modern times.”
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Described by the New York Times as “eloquently plangent, making a powerful impact,” Khari Joyner has a following both nationally and abroad as a versatile concert cellist, chamber musician, and ambassador for the arts. He has made numerous guest appearances with orchestras and ensembles across the world, including two recent performances of both Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto in A Minor and Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which received rave reviews. In addition, he has given many cello masterclasses and lectures at notable institutions, including the University of Georgia, Duke University, Bowling Green State University, Oberlin Conservatory, and the International Cello Institute among others. Furthermore, he has recently joined the faculty as Assistant Professor of Cello at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory. In 2017 Joyner received a career grant from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund, which nominates and endows a select number of gifted artists with generous funding to further their careers. Joyner has also performed for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the latter for which he gave a private performance in the Oval Office. A passionate advocate for the music of the 21st century, Joyner has collaborated and given performances of works by major composers such as Tyshawn Sorey, Lowell Liebermann, Keith Fitch, Carman Moore, Kaija Saariaho, and Jessie Cox among several others. An active chamber musician and one of the founding members of the Altezza Piano Trio, Joyner has given performances as a guest at the Ritz Chamber Players, Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival, Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival, Fontainbleau Music Festival, and recently as a guest with PinkNoise contemporary ensemble performing Gerard Grisey’s monumental Vortex Temporum. A graduate of Juilliard’s prestigious Doctor of Musical Arts program, he has had other teaching affiliations with Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Mannes Prep. Joyner also pursued a mathematics concentration in an exchange program with Columbia University, while studying in Juilliard’s Accelerated BM/MM program. Joyner actively collaborates across genres with many choreographers, actors, and jazz musicians—his most recent collaboration includes a featured world premiere with the Atlanta Ballet, for his solo cello work Intransigence.
On this program, Khari Joyner brings some Uncommon Sounds in three very different works for cello, by himself, Lucian Berio, and Julius Eastman. The first work, Berio’s monumental Sequenza XIV for solo cello is the final work of a set of solo compositions spanning almost fifty years that the composer started in the mid-late 1950’s. Each sequenza features a variety of extended techniques, and instruments range from saxophone, guitar, voice, violin, cello, to even the accordion. The Sequenza XIV was dedicated to Sri Lankan cellist Rohan de Saram, and features characteristic Sri Lankan Kandyan drumming rhythms imitated on the cello. But throughout becomes a highly textured, ornate web of consonance, dissonance, and otherworldly sounds. The work is followed by Joyner’s own spectral composition Évanescent Éclairs. In this work, Joyner employs the usage of scordatura and the harmonic series to create a vastly non-cellistic sound out of the instrument. Composed between 2017-2018, before the pandemic, Joyner largely took inspiration from the sounds of nature, the harmonic series, mathematics, and synthetic sounds. The goal of the work was to essentially take a “concrete, visible instrument and turn it into something cosmic and unreal or imaginary.” Within the work, there is not necessarily thematic, melodic material but rather motivic nods that slowly unfold over the course of the whole work. But largely, the notes, B natural, E natural, A natural, and G-sharp permeate the entire composition. Usage of artificial harmonics, multiphonics, and natural harmonics can be heard almost all throughout. But, amongst the cosmic element of the piece is something that Joyner finds naturally and aesthetically beautiful as it reflects the sounds of nature.
The final work on this set is the rather arrestingly haunting Buddha, by the late African-American composer Julius Eastman. In this work, one is transfixed by the sounds that emanate from a consort of instruments, for which Eastman specifically scored for “any combination of.” The work is very much inspired from Eastman’s interest and study of Eastern philosophy, religion, and art. With a very improvisatory feel, there is nothing but a richness of color that constantly emanates from the ensemble. While sometimes very clear pitches or lines are heard, other times only visions or ideas are implied. Joyner is honored to be joined by his own students this evening from the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music.
-Khari R. Joyner
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