Graduate, faculty composers present at 21st Century Orchestra festival

Over the weekend, the Brown Arts Institute hosted “The 21st Century Orchestra,” a three-day contemporary music festival highlighting innovative orchestral music.

When BAI first invited departments at Brown to propose projects for its IGNITE Series, Professor of Music Butch Rovan proposed hosting the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, a professional orchestra founded in 1996. Rovan hoped to highlight the new Lindemann Performing Arts Center and showcase technological innovations within the orchestra. 

Associate Professors of Music Eric Nathan, Anthony Cheung and Wang Lu joined Rovan to curate the event.

The festival looks “at how the orchestra can innovate but also create change in the years to come,” Nathan said. 

Graduate students Nick Bentz and Inga Chinilina had their new pieces performed at an open reading and recording held at the Lindemann on Thursday night. According to Nathan, the event allowed the audience to witness “how an orchestra, for the very first time, opens a new score and reads it.” During the event, each featured composer worked with the orchestra to make their respective pieces come to life.

Bentz’s piece, titled “a collision of horizons,” was originally abstract and conceptual. But as he continued composing, he drew on his own experiences with his partner at the time and shaped the piece into an autobiographical work. 

The first 90 seconds of the piece took six months to compose, while the subsequent eight-and-a-half minutes took only two additional months, Bentz explained. He initially finished the piece in the spring of 2022, but revised it over the past summer in preparation for the festival.

Chinilina’s piece, “Pagan Peal,” is the culmination of years of research into how composers present complex and emotionally charged sounds. After collecting recordings of large bells across the United States, Chinilina ran a series of surveys asking people to describe what they heard in the recordings. 

Chinilina likened hearing her piece for the first time at the open reading to a literary translation or a book-to-movie adaptation. 

“I had the sound, I captured it, I wrote it down. Now musicians give it back to me,” she said.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project also performed new works by the festival’s co-organizers on Friday night. This included a work by Rovan which utilized a TOSHI interface — a small, electronic device worn on the wrist of the conductor that tracks their hand movements and creates digital sounds during the performance. 

“In Between II,” a piece by Nathan, was also performed. The piece was inspired by the sound of wind rustling the leaves of trees, he explained. While the piece is performed, the conductor sweeps their arm over the ensemble and points at players, signaling them to play a rustling sound.

The live recordings of the faculty works will eventually be compiled into an album to be released at a later date.