Above: composer Steven Swartz
~ Author: Lili Tobias
Thursday April 24th, 2025 – It was unexpectedly difficult to get to the location of the New Music for Percussion, Piano, and Strings concert, performed at NYU. After waiting in the lobby for half an hour and being ushered towards the elevators with no other directions, the other audience members and I finally arrived at Room 620 shortly before the music began. Composer Steven Swartz, who had an exciting premiere on the program, described the feat as “breaching the walls of the castle.” But fortunately, all the music on last night’s program was entirely worth the struggle of getting there!
The program began with two pieces for piano trio, each made up of a handful of very short movements. These were Miu Sato’s Threads of Belonging and Takashi Yoshimatsu’s Atom Hearts Club Suite No. 1. Despite the brevity of the music, both composers packed an incredibly diverse array of sounds into each piece, from lush, pianistic arpeggios that filled out the space around the violin and cello’s melodies to energetic syncopated rhythms in odd meters. The three performers, Angel Guanga (violin), Noelia Carrasco (cello), and Malka Bobrove (piano) are all currently undergraduate students at NYU, but their sound as an ensemble was nothing short of professional, playing with an incredible level of confidence and precision.
I was also impressed with pianist Miles Avery’s performance of …couple égyptienne en route vers l’inconnu… by György Kurtàg. The music featured pointillistic collections of notes, connected together through the overtones left behind by the sustain pedal. Avery played every single note with such intention that each sound that emanated from the piano seemed to have an entirely different character from the last.
Above: pianist Marilyn Nonken and percussionist Jonathan Haas do a soundcheck before the world premiere of Steven Swartz’s When the horizon has a mind of its own.
I was absolutely mesmerized by the fragments of sound that emerged just to trail off again, reminding me of light refracted through glass. Swartz’s inspiration for this piece came from a light source as well—he observed the intricacies and ever-changing motion of the sunset and aimed to capture the elusiveness of those moments in this piece. I certainly felt that ephemeral nature: The music felt aimless in an entirely good way, the sort of aimlessness you might have when you’re walking through nature on a summer afternoon without being in a hurry to get anywhere in particular. I also felt an all-encompassing sense of serenity in the moments of silence between the notes, especially in the silences after the deep rumble of the bass drum or passages in the very lowest register of the piano. This piece of music is certainly one of those pieces that I want to listen to over and over again!
The program ended with two pieces by Jacob Druckman, Reflections on the Nature of Water (Shiqi Zhong, marimba) and Animus II (Bowen Zheng, mezzo-soprano, Natalie North, percussion, Zhaoxuan Song, percussion). Animus II was certainly the most eclectic music of the night: The colorful lighting, unintelligible singing, and bubbly electronic noises turned the room into an extraterrestrial landscape. As I was heading out, I caught a glimpse of one of the percussion scores, which was one of those half traditional notation, half graphic scores that bridges the gap between a useful tool and visual art. I also spoke with percussionist Natalie North, who told me that they had been working on this piece for the whole semester and had never performed from a score like that before. It certainly looked like they knew what they were doing though!
Swartz mentioned in the program notes the playful nature of a sunset, and his music was equally playful. In fact, all the pieces on this program were exceptionally playful, each in their own unique ways, which made for such a joyful evening. I hope that When the horizon has a mind of its own has the opportunity to be performed many more times going forward!
~ Lili Tobias
Oberon's Glade 