Nicole Lizée: Zeiss After Dark - (US Première Performance)

Camellia Symphony Orchestra
Christian Baldini, music director & conductor
McClatchy Auditorium (Sacramento, California)
September 21, 2019

Zeiss After Dark (US Première Performance)
Commissioned in 2016 for the 150th anniversary of the Confederation of Canada by Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Zeiss After Dark is Lizée’s sonic homage to cinematography. Drawing on her longstanding fascination with film of the 1960s and 1970s, she was interested in musically capturing the difficulty inherent in relying solely on candles to light a particular scene, such as in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 Barry Lyndon. To combat the challenges inherent in this kind of practice, Kubrick employed a special kind of lens – a Zeiss lens – to facilitate this low-light situation and maintain the intimate effect of the candlelight.

About this short work, which is called a “fanfare” and is scored for winds and percussion only (no strings), Lizée has said:

Reading about [the “candlelight scene” in [Stanley Kubrick's] Barry Lyndon] and […] what the cinematographer had to go though was really fascinating […] So essentially, I wanted lens music, I wanted cinematography music. That’s what I was creating: something to acoustically simulate […] the flicker, the low light, the heat, the shadows; what the Zeiss lens would sound like. In writing this piece, I imagined a sonic equivalent: a musical work that brings sound into focus through techniques that emulate the conditions involved in ultra-low light – glow, flicker, bokeh – reimagined for orchestra.

Nicole Lizée (b. Gravelbourg, Canada 1973)
Lizée, who received a Master of Music degree from McGill University in 2001, has written compositions ranging from works for orchestra and solo turntablist (featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting) to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichord (a sort of electronic autoharp), stylophone (a small, stylus-operated synthesizer), the Simon™ electronic game, vintage board games, and karaoke tapes. Her commissions include works for the Kronos Quartet, the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Proms, the San Francisco Symphony, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can, the CBC, and Radio-Canada. Her music has been performed worldwide in renowned venues including Carnegie Hall and Royal Albert Hall. This Will Not Be Televised, Lizée’s seminal piece for chamber ensemble and turntables, placed in the 2008 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers’ Top 10 Works. Her work for piano and notated “glitch,” Hitchcock Études, was featured at the 2014 World Music Days in Wrocław, Poland.

Lizée has been called “a brilliant musical scientist” who draws on an eclectic mix of influences, including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Alexander McQueen, thrash metal, early video game culture, and 1960s psychedelia and modernism. She is fascinated by the “glitches” made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them, and integrates them into live performance.

https://www.nicolelizee.com/

http://www.camelliasymphony.org/

https://www.christianbaldini.info/

Видео Nicole Lizée: Zeiss After Dark - (US Première Performance) канала Christian Baldini - conductor & composer