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Nico Muhly (b. 1981)
Doublespeak (2012) ~ 10'
Born in Vermont, in 1999 Nico Muhly moved to New York to study English at Columbia and composition at Juilliard. It was in 2003, during his Masters, that he met Philip Glass, initially working as an archivist.
Doublespeak can be understood as an encapsulation of these two features of Muhly’s biography. Defined as deliberately euphemistic, ambiguous, or obscure language, the title reflects Muhly’s longstanding fascination for words and communication. More literally, Muhly’s music is deeply influenced by the minimalism pioneered by composers like Glass and Steve Reich. The piece therefore often revels in the textures created by very close repetition, with instruments shadowing each other. On a more personal note, the piece was written for the specialist new-music ensemble eighth blackbird to celebrate Glass’s 75th birthday. Indeed, it is dedicated to the older composer, and features a brief quotation from his iconic Music in Twelve Parts, a mammoth three-hour cycle.
The principal foundation of Doublespeak consists of four long passages dominated by unrelenting soliloquies in, respectively, the violin, cello, piano, and cello. These are interspersed with calmer, more contemplative ensemble passages. Emotionally, the piece revels in the ambiguity prompted by its title: is the opening exuberant or feverish? Are the chorales tranquil, or mournful? Here, the upbeat optimism of early minimalism has been replaced by something more bittersweet.
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Joshua Ballance
Kai Kubota-Enright (b. 2000)
spatial communication of dripstone (2025) ~ 12'
Raised between Japan and Vancouver, Kai Kubota-Enright started composing only relatively recently, when she moved to Montréal to study at McGill in 2018. Success came quite quickly: in 2022 she won the ROSL Composition Award, resulting in a London Sinfonietta premiere at the Purcell Room, and in 2025 spatial communication of dripstone won McGill’s Graham Sommer Competition where it was premiered by Ensemble Paramirabo.
Kubota-Enright’s work is often associated with a very particular sonic experience, and thus with a specific time and place. This is often focussed on the sounds of nature, whether the calls of cicadas or the noises of underground rivers. In this case, in 2023 she visited Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four islands. While there, she travelled to the Mikuro and Shinmei caves on the eastern coast, most famous for being the place where the monk KÅ«kai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, reached enlightenment. On entering the caves, Kubota-Enright recalls that there was “this endless dripping of water from all different directions, and listening to it carefully you hear not just the dripping but the way the sound of the dripping reflects and augments through the different reverberations within the cave.”
The piece takes this quite literally: the piano and vibraphone, with what Kubota-Enright describes as their more “watery feel”, act as the droplets. Meanwhile, the other instruments then augment and reflect these sounds around the space. The music is elusive: often delighting in the smudging of timbres achieved by extended ways of playing and very soft dynamics.
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Joshua Ballance
Michael Finnissy (b. 1946)
Banumbirr (1982) ~ 9'
Banumbirr (morning star) is a creator-spirit in the Yolngu culture of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia which is associated with the planet Venus. In 1982–83 the British composer Michael Finnissy, a composer of so-called New Complexity music, was living in Australia. While there he wrote a substantial group of pieces of which Banumbirr is one, alongside Teangi (‘Flowering Earth’), Warara (‘Red Ochre’), Aijal (‘Sky’), and Marrngu (‘Mythical Possum’).
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Finnissy’s time in Australia was an intensely productive period, even by his prolific standards, and these works emerged from a deep engagement with Australian Aboriginal culture and artistic practice. Alongside his teaching and performance work, Finnissy immersed himself in Aboriginal music, visual art, and literature — experiences that left a lasting imprint on his compositional output. After returning to the UK, Finnissy continued to reflect on this formative period, creating works such as Red Earth, written for the 1988 Proms, that look back on his Australian years from a distance.
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Banumbirr runs continuously without any major structural breaks, with the different sections evolving more than contrasting. Like much of Finnissy’s music, register plays an important role; particularly in the virtuosic opening section, all five instruments play very close to each other, creating a hyperactive overall texture. As the piece goes on, new registral areas are gradually explored, particularly as the flute and violin ascend into the stratosphere while the piano roars in the depths. Finnissy has commented that he is “more interested in line than anything else” and this is certainly demonstrated in Banumbirr, where the different instruments rarely coincide rhythmically and even when they play together—as the piece goes on Finnissy establishes duo pairings between the various instruments—they tend to be in conversation rather than speaking with a single voice.
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David Palmer & Joshua Ballance
Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980)
Still Life With Avalanche (2008) ~ 9'
Born in Pennsylvania, Missy Mazzoli went on to study at Yale and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. She is a composer and keyboardist, and part of a generation of American composers greatly influenced by the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
Like Doublespeak, Still Life With Avalanche was commissioned by eighth blackbird. Mazzoli has explained that she set out to write it while in residence at Blue Mountain Center in upstate New York. The music is characteristically melodic and, after a gradual introduction characterised by the unusual sound of harmonicas, explodes into a joyous tutti celebration.
Midway through the composition process, Mazzoli learned of the sudden death of her cousin. This tragedy reveals itself in the breakdown the music undergoes, after which nothing is the same. A darker central section gives way to an energetic recapitulation, and yet the shadows remain, the vivacious opening melody now haunted by death. As such, she writes that the piece is “about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa”, and is dedicated to “the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose.”
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Joshua Ballance
Isabella Gellis (b. 1997)
And Other Things (2022) ~ 10'
Isabella Gellis is a British-Canadian composer whose music delights in ‘tactility, play, and manipulation of perception’. Having started out as a pianist and violinist, she went on to study composition at the Royal Academy of Music. In 2023 she spent a year on the Panufnik Scheme, resulting in the LSO performing her music, and this year the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal premiered a new work of hers.
And Other Things began with its second movement, written in 2018 for the Dartington Festival. When the Tritium Trio later asked whether there were indeed “other things” still to come, Gellis responded by composing the outer movements, shaping the work into a three-movement whole. The title also references Charles Ives’ Soliloquy or a Study in 7ths and Other Things; the first and third movements of Gellis’ piece explore the idea of widening intervals, inspired by a single bar in Ives’ song, whilst the central movement focusing on harmony, repetition, and a sense of ritual.
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David Palmer
Steve Reich (b. 1936)
Double Sextet (2007) ~ 24'
i. Fast
ii. Slow
iii. Fast
Steve Reich is one of the first generation of the American Minimalist composers. Along with figures like Philip Glass and La Monte Young, he reacted against the modernist style of composers like Luciano Berio (with whom he studied), Pierre Boulez, and John Cage, to embrace tonality and pulse. Indeed, the fundamental insight of these composers was to take up repetition as a crucial aesthetic principle, in direct response to the European Avant-Garde which rejected repetition at all costs. Reich’s early music takes a hardcore approach to this, often setting up a single process in a piece which then plays it out. As his practice has developed, he has moved away from this fundamentalist approach into a more complex and composed-out style, whilst still retaining those major elements of the earlier aesthetic.
Double Sextet was written in 2007 and quickly garnered attention as one of Reich’s most important pieces, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. As is common with Reich’s music, he attaches no illustrative or programmatic meaning to the music but is instead fascinated by the contrapuntal interplay of the various parts. It is written for two identical sextets, as the title suggests; in performance this is achieved either with twelve players or six musicians playing against a recording of themselves. The two ensembles interlock extensively with each other, a classic technique of Reich’s. The repetition of nearly identical material was a crucial approach in his early phase-shifting music, which often featured one musician playing against a recording of themself. Double Sextet is therefore a natural expansion of this idea, which Reich describes as providing more ‘timbral variety’. This approach creates extensive resultant patterns, particularly from the pianos and vibraphones which often drive the music forward in a fast, rhythmic manner.
The work is in three movements which run without a break and form a symmetrical arch form, another favourite strategy of Reich’s. The opening fast movement alternates between energetic sections driven by the keyboards over which the other players sing out long melodies or join the percussion in their lively rhythms, and more static, bell-like passages. The middle movement, meanwhile, is darker. Structured in four ‘verses’, each demarcated by a change of harmony, the two ensembles weave haunting melodies between themselves. With the return of the fast tempo, Reich retakes the material of the first movement, before the piece concludes with a vigorous, dazzling, coda.
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Joshua Ballance