My First Commission

After graduating from Stanford in 1984, I was fortunate to get two big breaks from Earle Brown. I met Earle for the first time at the 1985 BMI Student Composer Awards, where to my surprise he was on the jury that year. I was 24 and had studied his works for many years. If it had not been for Earle, I would not have been invited there.

The piece that got his attention was Pentateuch, a grand divisi orchestral work in quarter-tones, including three choral groups and soprano solo with strong hints of György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis. Pentateuch was used to fulfill the requirements for my masters thesis. Because of its unwieldy and impractical size (back then, only blueprint shops could make copies of oversize paper and reductions were prohibitively expensive) Earle was the only judge who took the time to open it up and give it a look. ‘I had to fight for your score,’ he told me. ‘No one else wanted to look at it.’ Earle did not mind ‘rolling up his sleeves,’ so to speak. It was serendipity that he was a judge that year. My life changed!

Excerpt from Pentateuch (1983-84)

Shortly after meeting Earle, I received my first commission. Earle presided over the Fromm Music Foundation and asked me to write a piece for sinfonietta (one each winds and brass, percussion, piano and string quintet). The piece, called Trailing Vortices, was based on a musical interpretation of photographs of trailing vortices and other flow phenomena in Milton Van Dyke’s An Album of Fluid Motion. I discovered the book while browsing at the Stanford Bookstore. Milton Van Dyke was a Stanford professor in fluid mechanics and even signed the book for me! I spent the good part of 1986 composing the piece. In a sense, Trailing Vortices is a tone poem, however instead of program music with a story line, photographic images of flow phenomena are musically depicted.

Trailing vortices from a rectangular wing (An Album of Fluid Motion, Milton Van Dyke, 1982).

Trailing Vortices was premiered at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 1987. A few months later, it was performed at the Gaudeamus Festival by the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra with Ernest Bour, conducting. Here is the recording of the live performance at the VARA radio headquarters in Hilversum.

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My First Quartet

Once upon a time in the west… in the Orwellian year of 1984… I composed a string quartet and called it “Streams.” It was my first.

I was 24 and composed it shortly after completing my graduate fellowship at Stanford. During the day, I would care for my newborn son and evenings play jazz piano nightly at the Stanford Park Hotel near our apartment in Menlo Park, California.

Around that time, I shared my new creation with an old friend, Amy Brandfonbrener. She and I were childhood friends going back to the 7th grade and now she was in the Harrington String Quartet based in Amarillo Texas. During our 7th grade classroom spelling bees, she was my arch rival, where I mostly came in 2nd place to her 1st.

To my delight, her quartet picked up “Streams” and gave several stunning performances including a date in New York at the 92nd Street Y. The performance, on a Wednesday evening, October 12, 1988, was followed a few days later with a review in the Sunday New York Times. Here is a blurb:

“… a vivid impression of the turbulent, watery imagery … a swirling, rich-textured microtonal work.” – Allan Kozinn

Like a dream, it’s hard to believe I wrote five more quartets since, each one a different stylistic milestone on this bumpy and uneven road.

In gratitude to these amazing musicians,

THE HARRINGTON STRING QUARTET
Dawn Harms, violin
James Lyon, violin
Amy Brandfonbrener, viola
Brian Manker, cello

_____________________

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream

OCTET Ensemble: Scatter My Ashes

Valeria Di Matteo created this album trailer for OCTET Ensemble‘s album Scatter My Ashes

Bandcamp

Streaming everywhere

MUSICIANS:
Music by William Susman
Poems by Sue Susman

Members of Octet:
Vocals: Mellissa Hughes
Saxophone: Demetrius Spaneas
Trumpet: Mike Gurfield
Trombone: Alan Ferber
Drums: Greg Zuber
Piano: Elaine Kwon
Electric Piano: William Susman
Double Bass: Eleonore Oppenheim

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Produced by William Susman
Sound engineer and mixing: John Kilgore
Recorded and mixed at Kilgore Sound, New York City
Mastering engineer: Alan Silverman Mastered at Arf! Mastering, New York City
Additional sound engineer: Josiah Gluck
Additional mixing by Stephen Hart, assisted by Ana Sophia Dunham at The Site, San Rafael, California
Cover design by Daniel Sofer / Hermosawave
Photography by Ken Goodman
Cover image by Ben Swift

For Bookings:
Peter Robles
music@klassicalfirst.org
http://www.klassicalfirst.org

A Quiet Madness

I am grateful to the many artists who worked on this release. So much goes into the making of an album from musicians, recording and mastering engineers to liner notes, photography, and album design. To say, “I could not have done it alone,” is an understatement. This project was a joyous collaboration and I cannot express my appreciation enough for the honor to work alongside these many great talents.

Released January 20, 2021.

PRESS RELEASE by Tyran Grillo

“When you think you have a clear idea of a composer’s purpose, suddenly you realize that something is hiding behind it, and behind it, again and again. I will keep playing William Susman’s music for a long time.”

–Francesco Di Fiore, 2012

Violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, pianist Francesco Di Fiore, bayan accordionist Stas Venglevski, and flutist Patricia Zuber have been knitting restorative sonic garments from the compositional yarn of William Susman for over a decade. Their rapport is deeper and more apparent than ever on A Quiet Madness, an appropriately titled new masterwork for our current zeitgeist. 

A Quiet Madness immerses the listener in a photorealistic sound world of understated beauty. At once calming and thought-provoking, it allows the ear and mind to make their own connections without feeling overwhelmed by thematic constraints. Susman’s precise harmonic and rhythmic languages invite us into a subdued, enchanting expression of madness that roams all over the map, akin to the mind wandering during a rainy day—or, perhaps clairvoyantly, akin to the strange passage of time spent in self-isolation during the collective trauma of COVID-19.

A Quiet Madness unfolds across six pieces that were composed between 2006 and 2013. Susman has curated these selections into a unified trajectory. Setting the stage is Aria. Excerpted from Susman’s opera-in-progress, Fordlandia, it features the composer at the piano and Pollick on violin. Its interlacing melodies give way to three Quiet Rhythms for solo piano, into which are shuffled a study in contrast: Susman’s 2011 Seven Scenes for Four Flutes, recorded and multi-tracked by Zuber, and 2006’s Zydeco Madness, played here by Venglevski, who also performed the piece’s premiere.

Although Susman describes the solo piano sections on this album as “quasi-interludes,” each of the Quiet Rhythms is in itself an intricate and autonomous examination in sound. These pieces are performed by Di Fiore, who is himself a composer working in a post-modern, post-minimalist language akin to Susman’s. Meanwhile, Seven Scenes for Four Flutes evokes a sequence of abstract yet vividly colorful scenes that interject a shining liveliness between the darker, more subdued energy of the Quiet Rhythms. Even greater contrast can be heard in Zydeco Madness, which Susman composed in 2006 as a response to the tragic events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Hence, the relative peace of the concluding Quiet Rhythms No. 7. Despite being recorded before the pandemic, A Quiet Madness opens itself like a gift for a broken world, a place where insanity and solace indeed coexist in strange harmony, and where music is the only imaginable escape.

***

William Susman has created a distinctively expressive voice in contemporary classical music, with a catalog that spans orchestral, chamber, and vocal music, as well as numerous film scores. AllMusic calls him an exemplar of “the next developments in the sphere [of] minimalism,” and Gramophone has praised his music as “texturally shimmering and harmonically ravishing.” Susman’s training as a pianist in both jazz and classical traditions was influential in his evolution as a composer, and his music is notable for its integration of global influences.

Karen Bentley Pollick is one of America’s leading contemporary musicians, performing a wide range of solo repertoire and styles on violin, viola, piano, and Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. She currently serves as concertmaster of Valse Café Orchestra in Seattle, and Principal Second Violin and Festival Artist with the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra in Boulder.

Francesco Di Fiore, pianist and composer, was born in Palermo. He launched his professional career in 1986, performing hundreds of concerts worldwide. In 1993 he won the “XV Internationales Kammermusik Festival Austria Waldviertel” in Horn, Austria. His album Pianosequenza features piano music in film, including Susman’s score to When Medicine Got It Wrong.

Patricia Zuber has performed with many major orchestras in the New York area including the American Symphony Orchestra, New York City Opera, New York City Ballet, American Composers Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, and the Westchester Philharmonic. She appears regularly with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at Lincoln Center. She performs in Duo Zuber with her husband, percussionist Greg Zuber.

Stas Venglevski is a native of the Republic of Moldova, part of the former Soviet Union. A two-time first prize winner of the Bayan Competition in the Republic of Moldova, Stas is a graduate of the Russian Academy of Music in Moscow, where he received his Master’s in Music under the tutelage of famed Russian bayanist Friedrich Lips.

From Poetry to Music

In the early 90s, pianist Joan Nagano had recently formed a group here in the San Francisco Bay Area called The Belmont Ensemble.  The instrumentation was voice, clarinet, french horn and piano. They were all supeerb musicians drawn from the SF opera orchestra. They asked me to write them a piece. I asked my sister Sue to send me some of her recent poems. I selected three for this song cycle that I felt spoke to each other and could tell a story. The result was Moving in to an Empty Space (1992).

When I set her poetry to music, I was also drawn to her shorter poems. They paint a picture using  words that are bubbling with motion and sound. In many ways, setting her poems to music was cathartic. Her words almost composed the music for me.

In the first poem called Hot Time, the line, “At night people scurry and run together in packs,” and, “as the music blasts into flashing strobe-lights, the walls begin to swell and breathe,” are filled with sonic gestures. The way I treat the vocal line with these words is a centuries old technique called word or tone painting. The melody and dynamics here reflect the literal meaning of the words.

The title of the second poem in the song cycle, Begging the night for change, is filled with movement and also is a stunning metaphor.

And, in the third poem, Moving in to an Empty Space, the closing existential lines, “There is no message, no sound just the silent reflection of my own face shining in the night to remind me that I have always been here,” are pregnant with music.

When I formed OCTET ensemble around 2010, I wanted to create an instrumentation that drew on my background playing in jazz ensembles. This band takes its sound from the big band music I played as a teenager: trumpet, sax, trombone, rhythm section plus vocals. When looking for repertoire, it was natural to arrange Moving in to an Empty Space for OCTET. In 2018, my sister’s poems were published in a collection called The Forest Within.

The second of three songs, Begging the Night for Change, in its original instrumentation of voice, clarinet, horn and piano.

Begging the Night for Change arranged for OCTET Ensemble.

Piano and Poetry

French pianist Vanessa Wagner and singer/songwriter Arthur H appeared together to celebrate Piano Day 2020. The concert was filmed on March 9, 2020 at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

They performed a number of piano pieces and poems including my Quiet Rhythms no. 9 with an extract from Yves Bonnefoy’s Le haut du monde 

Watch the entire Piano Day ARTE Concert with Vanessa Wagner and Arthur H

Philipp Glass – Glassworks, ouverture
Hans Otte – Das Buch der Klange, Part X
Bryce Dessner – Ornament 3
William Susman – Quiet Rhythms, Prologue and Action No. 9
Philipp Glass – Etude No. 9
Philipp Glass – Etudes No. 5

Poèmes :
Jacques Prévert – Sables mouvants. Chansons. Sanguine
Henri Michaud – Poteaux d’angles (extrait court)
Gaston Miron – La marche à l’amour (extrait)
Yves Bonnefoy (extrait)
Arthur H – Anatalius sans remord ni regret
Arthur Rimbaud – L’éternité

 

Fanfare’s 2nd Album Review of Collision Point – “Crystalline Music”

SUSMAN Camille¹. Clouds and Flames ². Motions of Return³. The Starry Dynamo⁴  —  ¹Piccolo Accademia degli Specchi (^3,4Alessandra Amoreno, fl; ⁴Claudia Di Pietro, alto sax; ^2,4Giuliano Cavaliere, vn; ^2,4Rina You, vc; ²Assunta Cavallari, ^3,4Fabio Silvestro, pns)  —  BELARCA 007 (47:01)

 

Back in Fanfare 38:2, I wrote about a disc of William Susman’s music entitled Scatter My Ashes. Like the current disc, similarly on the Belarca label, playing time was short, but a sense of fun and enjoyment of life was long. Susman’s minimalist tendencies are fully on display again in this release, itself entitled Collision Point.

Scored for flute, alto sax, violin, cello and piano four-hands, Camille (2010) is based on the Afro-Cuban clave rhythm, with 3+2 layered against 2+3 in the first movement, “Vitality”. Susman suggests the aural equivalent is that of Escher’s woodcut Illustrations, where the eye can choose to concentrate on wither white fish or brown fish; here, it is the ear that opts which division of the measure to concentrate on. Booklet annotator David Sanson puts it well when he refers to Susman’s music as a “labyrinth of rhythms, a perpetually moving trompe-l’oeil,” a statement that seems to fit particularly well with Camille. The contrasting second panel “Tranquility,” is like a slowly turning kaleidoscope, before the pulsating finale, “Triumph,” emerges. The work was written for the current ensemble and is performed with the sense of rhythmic cleanliness and exactitude minimalist music requires.

The 2010 piece Clouds and Flames finds the scoring reduced to piano trio. Seven short movements are inspired by events in Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin and also by the tightrope walk of Philippe Petit between the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974. The central theme of Clouds and Flames is remembrance and loss, nowhere more evident than in the fourth movement, “The Alphabet of Dying”. The title of the next movement, “Collision Point,” a restrained movement built on slow-moving piano against pizzicato strings, also forms the title of the disc as a whole. The scoring for piano trio gives the piece a brilliant sort of clarity completely different from the ensemble used or Camille; again, the performance is beyond criticism.

The two remaining pieces date back into the 1990s. Based on cyclical melodies and chord progressions, Motions of Return for flute and piano (1994) takes its title from Francis Bacon’s 1627 The New Atlantis and is, like Camille, based on the idea of illusion. The agile flute part is superbly rendered by Alessandra Amoreno; Fabio Silvestro is the most fluent-fingered of pianists. Together, they negotiate the tricky asynchronous passages with great confidence.

The disc is bookended by ensemble pieces, that for The Starry Dynamo (1994) only one pianist short of that used for Camille; the original clarinet part has been replaced here by the alto sax of Claudia Di Pietro to fit in with the line-up of Piccolo Accademia degli Specchi. And, as in Camille, it is an Afro-Cuban rhythm that forms the basis, this time especially the montuño, a repeated syncopated figure.  It is a poem by Allan Ginsburg, HOWL, that forms the inspiration for The Starry Dynamo, including the line, “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”. This is a work that, in one continuous movement of nearly 15 minutes, goes further than any on this disc to offer a sense of immersion into Susman’s world.

Performances are superb throughout, while the recording is perfectly judged, enabling the crystalline aspect of Susman’s music to shine through. Recommended.

Colin Clarke

Five stars: Performances are superb, while the recording enables Susman’s crystalline music to shine.

Fanfare Magazine, March-April 2020 Issue

LISTEN HERE: Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon Music, Spotify and other streaming platforms

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Collision Point Reviewed in Fanfare

 

 

SUSMAN Camille. Clouds and Flames. Motions of Return. The Starry Dynamo ● Piccola Academia degli Specchi ● BELARCA 007 (47:01)

On the face of it this album of chamber works by the accomplished Chicago-born composer/pianist William Susman is very accessible, delivering ingenious variations on Minimalism’s familiar techniques from a confident and fertile musical imagination. But bit of exploration into Susmnn’s biography reveals an intriguing story, a capsule history, in fact, of where modern American music has traveled over the past decades.

Born in 1960, Susman studied both classical and jazz piano. He is probably the only performer who learned from both a student of Artur Schnabel’s (Pauline Lindsey) and a pianist with Louis Armstrong (Steve Behr). He founded his own jazz ensemble when he was 13 and later performed with big bands and Afro-Cuban groups. That’s merely the beginning of a complex web of influences that led him to gravitate toward Xenakis and Ligeti in the Eighties. At 25 he enjoyed a major breakthrough by becoming the youngest composer to be awarded a commission from Harvard’s prestigious Fromm Foundation. There were graduate studies in computer-generated music at Stanford and an invitation from Pierre Boulez to engage with IRCAM in Paris.

For a composer rooted in the European avant garde, using arcane methods based, for example, on Fibonacci sequences to generate rhythmic repetitions, his eventual encounter with American Minimalism came as an “aesthetic shock” and a kind of spiritual awakening. In a booklet note Susman relates that “The way Riley, Reich, and Glass incorporated the things they liked—Indian or African influences, for example into their music led me to think about the things I knew and admired.”

As listeners we are so accustomed to following our personal tastes that it might be hard to relate to a young composer tightly identified with mid-century Modernism (and receiving commissions and praise for adhering to that idiom), but Susman’s awakening moment was a kind of liberation. In a much publicized shift, another arch Modernist, the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, had a similar conversion to Minimalism as a composer.

In none of these cases does the shift represent a move from complexity to simplicity. No one could be more theoretical than Glass or more steeped in the Modernist styles he rejected. The hidden texture inside today’s Minimalism consists of personal and private influences being brought to bear. For Susman, his style today is inspired by Afro- Cuban montuño, medieval hocket and isorhythm from the École de Notre-Dame de Paris, and jazz.

I’ve gone into these facets out of fascination but also to illustrate how these four chamber works came about—you couldn’t guess it by ear alone. The instrumentation varies from a duo for flute and piano (Motions of Return) to a standard piano trio with violin and cello (Clouds and Flames), with a sextet, Camille, and quintet, The Starry Dynamo, that call upon the largest complement of the Rome-based ensemble, Piccola Academia degli Specchi (Little Academy of Mirrors), which is flute, alto saxophone, violin, cello, and two pianists (they play four-hand in Camille). While listening to Camille, which opens the program, I thought that Susman should consider writing film scores, because he uses Minimalism to express a range of feelings that can be unusually tender or bold. My impression was justified, as I discovered later, because Susman has composed a number of award-wining film scores.

Needless to say, Minimalism has evolved into more than one thing, and for me, Susman’s version is appealing because it isn’t mechanical and the harmonic shifts don’t occur with glacial slowness. This is quick-witted music guided as much by emotional change as rhythmic and harmonic modulations. The flute and piano duo, Motions of Return, is necessarily fairly monochromatic, so here the focus is on rhythmic changes that might well be mathematically based. The quintet and sextet, since they use piano and alto sax, are more colorful and jazzy, I’d say, although Susman is capable of considerable surprise and unpredictability.

In all, I recommend this release to fans of Minimalism and more broadly to general listeners interested in an intriguing American voice. The performances are energetic and committed, the recorded sound excellent.

Huntley Dent

Four stars: An enjoyable and original version of today’s Minimalism

Fanfare Magazine, March-April 2020 Issue

LISTEN HERE: Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon Music, Spotify and other streaming platforms

 

Checkout This New Album Trailer

Video artist Valeria Di Matteo created a stunning album trailer for Collision Point . Valeria also designed all the album artwork.

Enjoy more of Valeria’s work here!

Belarca Records presents Collision Point, a new album by American composer William Susman and Rome-based ensemble Piccola Accademia degli Specchi celebrating a 10-year collaboration.

Collision Point features music inspired by love, loss, redemption, and the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Colum McCann and Francis Bacon.

Streaming everywhere October 11, 2019.

The Forest Within

My sister Sue Susman recently published a new collection of poetry called The Forest Within. This stunning work spans several decades. Her poetry touches on the sublime as well as everyday occurrences with language that is direct and natural. There are many wonderful testimonials to Sue’s poetry, and this one especially rings true:

“These poems are the voice of courage, so much more courageous because it dares to be tender. An honesty that finds simplicity in its many layers, a silence that sings, filling the sky.” – Louise Cloutier, Women’s PowerVoice.

The connection to Sue’s poetry goes back many years. Some of the poems in this book I set to music, first in the song cycle Moving In To An Empty Space and then, with Scatter My Ashes.

The collection opens with a poem from the song cycle and eponymous album title Scatter My Ashes.

Even in the Dark

The forest breathes in and out
as I sleep and curl
like a cat snuggled into a bigger sleeping body.
Even in the dark,
I wake
and see light from above,
the moon burning into black earth.
Stars,
glittering chips of glass,
scatter in a strange design.
I keep my eyes open until morning.

A review of The Forest Within aptly called Waking Up From the Dark Night of the Soul  is at The Mindful Bard

Listen to more of Sue’s poetry set to song on the album Scatter My Ashes at Amazon, iTunes, Spotify et al: