listen to complete piece

composer	Christopher Adler (b. 1972)
performers	Christopher Adler, khaen Eric Pritchard, violin Jonathan Bagg, viola
affiliation	ASCAP
label	Tzadik 8004http://www.tzadik.com
duration	07:27

about the music

Christopher Adler:

"This is my first piece to combine the khaen, a bamboo free-reed mouth organ from Laos and northeast Thailand, with Western instruments. Instead of contrasting Western and Lao musics against one another, I have combined the three instruments into one larger meta-instrument that plays only one kind of music at a time. The word lai refers to the melodic modes on which traditional solo improvisations are based. This piece is a suite of three different approaches to the combination of khaen music and Western music. In the first section the khaen plays in a traditional mode (lai noi) while the strings expand its range and polyphonic capability; the second section departs from traditional music altogether with all instruments forming a tapestry of longer tones; and the third section is an idiomatic khaen melody (in lai yai) played in close canon by all three instruments."

about the composer		back to top

Christopher Adler's (b. 1972) work emerges from an exchange between composition, improvisation, mathematics, and the traditional music of Thailand and Laos. He is internationally recognized as a composer and performer of new and traditional music for khaen, a free-reed mouth organ from Laos and northeast Thailand. Adler's music is influenced by experimental and minimalist music of the United States, including the early works of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, later works of Morton Feldman and John Cage, and the ambient works of Alvin Lucier. He has also been influenced by the recent interactions of popular and classical genres by such composers as Louis Andriessen, Michael Gordon, and Evan Ziporyn.

Adler was born in Mountain View, California, and grew up in California and Washington, DC. He studied composition and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and composition at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His teachers included Scott Lindroth, Stephen Jaffe, Sidney Corbett, Evan Ziporyn, and for studies of Thai music, Panya Roongruang. Adler currently teaches composition, sound art, theory, computer music, and world music at the University of San Diego; he has also taught at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, and was a visiting professor at Mahasarakham University in Thailand.

Adler's music has been performed across the US by ensembles including NOISE, pulsoptional, red fish blue fish, Seattle Creative Orchestra, Silk Road Ensemble, and many solo artists. A CD of Adler's music, Epilogue for a Dark Day, is available on the Tzadik label, and his retrospective analysis of ten years of cross-cultural composition was recently published in Arcana II: Musicians on Music (Hips Road). Adler has performed his own khaen compositions and traditional repertoire at the Bang on a Can Marathon, Carnegie Hall, Cultural Center of Chicago, Music at the Anthology, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and many universities across the US and Thailand. He promotes the instrument through the commissioning of new works, recently premiering a work by Sidney Marquez Boquiren and recording a work by David Loeb for the Vienna Modern Masters label.

Adler is pianist and composer-in-residence with the San Diego New Music resident ensemble NOISE, and recently co-founded the soundON Festival of Modern Music, four days of performances and workshops in June 2007 centered around the work of emerging composers. He performs improvised music on piano in a duo with woodwind player Alan Lechusza and trio with drummer Vikas Srivastava. In addition, he collaborates on khaen with Marcelo Radulovich, Charles Curtis, and Scott Walton as the improvising acoustic ensemble Gunther's Grass. Adler has conducted large improvising ensemble projects by Alan Lechusza and Nathan Hubbard, and performed with a wide range of improvising musicians. Recordings of these projects are available on the Accretions, Artship, Nine Winds, and pfMENTUM labels.

related websites
http://www.christopheradler.com

about the performers		back to top

Eric Pritchard and Jonathan Bagg are members of the Ciompi Quartet, which for three decades has performed in major cities across the United States, and in Europe, Israel, South America, Australia, and China. The quartet has a strong commitment to new music from the US, having commissioned and premiered works by Michael Daugherty, Stephen Jaffe, Scott Lindroth, Donald Wheelock, and Zhou Long, among others. Named after its founder, the Italian violinist Giorgio Ciompi, the quartet has been in residence since 1965 at Duke University in North Carolina, where its members are also professors in the Department of Music. Recordings of the quartet can be found on the Albany, Arabesque, CRI, Gasparo, and Sheffield labels.

related websites
http://www.ciompi.org