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ONLINE EVENT – Quintetto Profano, A Piano Quintet for Quarantined Musicians

Composition

Venue: Fred Fox School of Music, Crowder Hall

“Quintetto Profano,” A Piano Quintet for Quarantined Musicians
Thursday, April 30, 2020 at 11:00 a.m. (AZ/Pacific)
Livestream: https://www.facebook.com/UAZMusic/live

Jaeook Lee, violin
Melisa Karic, violin
Raiden Thaler, viola
Diana Yusupov, cello
Kevin Seal, piano

 

Tom Peterson’s new composition Quintetto Profano, a piano quintet for quarantined musicians, was composed specifically for the possibilities and limitations of videoconferencing software at a time of social distancing and isolation. Its livestream world premiere takes place as part of the final meeting of the course MUS 130B (Introduction to Music Literature), taught by music history professor Dr. Matthew Mugmon. Throughout the semester, students in the course have explored musical compositions, traditions, institutions, and individuals, in part through research in physical archives and digital collections.

This world premiere event for Peterson’s Quintetto Profano brings together music composition, performance, and scholarship to offer students and the public the opportunity to explore the meaning of art in a time of crisis. Students in the course are contributing to a new archival collection that will relate to this world premiere, allowing them to document this event and its context for future generations of musicians, audiences, and scholars.

11:00 a.m. AZ/Pacific – Introductory remarks by Dr. Mugmon

11:10 a.m. – Livestream Rehearsal of Quintetto Profano, composed by Tom Peterson and to be performed

by Fred Fox School of Music graduate students, including members of the

UArizona Graduate String Quartet.

11:30 a.m. – Livestream World Premiere of Quintetto Profano:

             I. Solos

             II. No such thing as now

            III. Elegy

            IV. Duets

This project has been made possible with the generous support of the UArizona Center for University Education Scholarship (CUES)

 

Notes from the composer

In early March, this piece was to be a normal piano quintet. Then everything — much more than this piece, much more than music — changed.

 

Music brings people together; literally, to a concert, and figuratively, in empathy and experience. Music is fundamentally communal and helps to form and shape communal experiences. How then are we to make music in these unprecedented times when we can’t be together?

 

I treated the question as a compositional puzzle: how to compose a piece for piano quintet (the personnel who were already scheduled for the premiere) within the very specific limitations of our time? In the past weeks, many “virtual” performances have been stitched together by layering recordings made to a click track; that did not interest me for this project. Though they may be inspirational technological feats, there is nothing interactive or communal about the process. Performers record their part alone. An editor assembles it alone.

 

Technology’s miracle of videoconferencing is limited in the ways that it can process audio. These limitations are sure to be solved in the years to come, but I wanted a piece for right now, and a piece that, within reason, did not rely on programming expertise or expensive audio equipment. The quintet can be performed by five players with a computer and common, entry-level audio equipment.

 

The result is a fragmented quintet — a deconstructed meal when we can’t be in a restaurant — that, by accepting and embracing the limitations of current technology, aims to offer one proposal for how we might continue to make music together.

 

My thanks to Dr. Matthew Mugmon for the initial opportunity to create a piece, and for encouraging me to continue to move forward when everything changed.
-Tom Peterson

 

 

Composer Biography

 

Tom Peterson is a composer and conductor based in Phoenix, and the winner of the 2019 Stephen Paulus Emerging Composer Competition. The winning piece, “Being Many, Seeming One”, was premiered by the Grammy-nominated choir True Concord, and will be published by E. C. Schirmer later this year. His music has been performed by a wide range of ensembles both local (Arizona Choir; Paradise Winds; Tetra String Quartet), national (the Grammy-nominated Trinity Wall Street Choir; Oregon Bach Festival; Fisher Piano Competition), and abroad (Festival Choir, London; Sounds New Festival, Canterbury; Cortona New Music Festival, Italy). A collaborator with Canyon Records as both composer and conductor, his debut commercial recording with Platinum recording artist R. Carlos Nakai will be released later this year.

Tom is the assistant conductor of the Grammy-winning Phoenix Chorale, and music director at Christ Church of the Ascension in Paradise Valley. He previously served two years as artistic director of the Master Chorale of Flagstaff and the Green Valley Community Chorus. He holds a bachelor’s degree in theory & composition from Arizona State University, a master’s degree in composition and conducting from the Royal College of Music in London, and is completing a doctoral degree in choral conducting at the University of Arizona.

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