WNMF 4: CC Duo: Hyperfocused

Partnering with the Winnipeg Classical Guitar Society, WNMF heads for the second time to the beautiful Marcel Desautels Concert Hall to present award-winning Canadian ensemble CC Duo.

In recent years, guitarists Adam Cicchillitti and Steve Cowan have undertaken numerous projects that have explored new sounds and possibilities in the classical guitar. Together and individually, they have commissioned works from Canadian and international composers like Kelly-Marie Murphy, ICEBERG New Music, and WSO’s own Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis, together developing a corpus that blends an appreciation for tradition and a fascination with innovation.

Enjoy an evening of music that ranges from delicate sonorities and intimate expressions to grandiose and bombastic interjections, tied together by electronic soundscapes that will fill the University of Manitoba’s resonant new concert hall.

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PROGRAM NOTES

Jacob Mühlrad & Olga Neuwirth – Alarm of the Soul

Mühlrad and Neuwirth co-created this short electronic piece to capture the ambiguous feeling of a sound that contains both danger and warmth, severity and comfort.

Alex Burtzos – The Turing Test

The Turing Test was composed for a guitar/electronics concert as part of the 21st Century Guitar Conference in Ottawa, ON, Canada. It is a playful, tongue-in-cheek exploration of the relationship between man and machine. At the center of the piece — heard in various guises in both the guitars and electronics — is a quotation of a familiar melody, which will be familiar to most listeners from the world of film.

Commissioned by the 21st Century Guitar Conference. Premiered by Steve Cowan and Adam Cicchillitti at Dominion-Chalmers United Church, Ottawa, ON (August 2019)

Max Grafe – Berceuse

Berceuse is a brief study for two guitars and electronics, exploring the harmonic and timbral interactions between the guitars, one of which is tuned microtonally, and the sine tones produced by the electronics. At various times throughout the piece, the electronics act in response to the guitars, in contrapuntal dialogue with them, and ultimately as a supplement to their resonance and timbre. Berceuse was composed in 2019 for the Cowan-Cicchillitti Duo.

Jason Noble – Shadow Prism

A natural harmonic isolates a single partial from the complex spectrum of an open string of the guitar, splitting the harmonic off and allowing its individual colour to be appreciated. In that way, it is like a prism. But this colour is isolated by blocking all of the other partials out. In that way it is like a shadow.

—Jason Noble

Commissioned in 2015 by Steve Cowan, Shadow Prism is an intoxicating aleatoric work which builds a unique sound world using exclusively harmonics and open strings on the guitar. Through the use of scordatura in the form of Stravinsky’s ‘Petrushka Chord’ (a superimposition of two major triads a tritone apart), this time as E♭ major over A major, the piece creates haunting clusters of harmonics which are given to the performer in prisms which can then be semi-improvised. Each prism contains a set of harmonics on different strings, which can be played in specific sequences dictated by arrows. The performer may stay in each aleatoric region as long as they wish. The effect of these progressions of prisms is that the piece expands outwards, until it gives way to cascading sequences of shifting tempi and dynamics. Though order can be observed in these sequences, they shift unpredictably, making for a branching and asymmetrical landscape.

Derek Cooper – Insomnia Rain

As I began conceiving a piece for two guitars and electronics, I was suffering from a bout of nights where I had immense trouble sleeping. During many of those evenings, I would hear rain falling outside. While rain can often be a relaxing way to fall asleep, this time it became a sound that I was consciously lost in, exploring the timbres and articulations of every drop that I could audibly find. This became the impetus for Insomnia Rain, a piece in which the music becomes both hypnotic and yet distracting all at the same time.

—Derek Cooper

Gordon Fitzell – Slight & Sleight

These are a pair of fixed audio electroacoustic works based on passages from Fitzell’s 2024 work Sleight of Hand for string quartet and 8-channel audio. Created for the 2026 Winnipeg New Music Festival.

Andrew Staniland – Choro: The Joyful Lament for Villa-Lobos

When Lawrence Cherney commissioned me to write a new work, he gave two conditions: 1) it would be for two guitars, and 2) it would have some audible relationship to a Latin genre, thereby fitting will into the Encuentros theme. To meet these requirements, I set off to write a work inspired by the Choro genre that channeled my deep affinity for the music of Villa Lobos. Interestingly, the literal translation of Choro is “cry” or “lament”, seemingly contrary to the upbeat and cheerful musical character of the genre. It is characterized by virtuosity, improvisation, subtle modulations, syncopation, and counterpoint. As homage to Villa Lobos, I sampled a favorite riff from his work Choros #1, transforming it into a new motif in a characteristic syncopated choro rhythm. While it is difficult to say if this work is a real choro, it certainly channels many choro characteristics: It is joyful in character, highly virtuosic, and in a common choro form of AABBACCA. It is my humble, joyful homage to the great music of Villa Lobos. This work was commissioned by Stanley and Rosalind Witkin, in honour of Mr. Martin Offman.

—Andrew Staniland

Amy Brandon – Intermountainous

Intermountainous illustrates, through sound, the various techniques used to communicate over long distances (ie. between mountains or intermountainous) such as temple bells, letters delivered laboriously by hand, wireless and satellite communications.

Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis & Adam Pietrykowski – Focus (Van Tilberg Remix)
I. Radial Glare
II. Inward Gaze

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

—Alexander Graham Bell

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”

—Aristotle

My artistic persona is deeply informed by two musical lineages that are historically distinct: classical music and progressive metal.

I first began developing my compositional voice as a metal songwriter. Later in life, switching lanes to the world of (“classical”) concert music, there was a pervasive sense in my new milieu that one must hide or subsume such “popular” influences in order to be taken seriously. Naturally, then, my artistic output over a dozen years of composing concert music has largely been concerned with both fusing and highlighting these two lineages explicitly and unabashedly.

Focus is an ode to my love of both metal and classical musics – passions I share with my friends Steve Cowan and Adam Cicchillitti, the two guitarists to whom it is dedicated.

The piece is set in two movements. The first, Radial Glare, leans heavily on the metal end of the spectrum, deploying both classical and electric guitar idioms in an unrelentingly virtuosic, ferociously extroverted stream of sound and tight ensemble work. The second, Inward Gaze, shifts over to the classical domain, exploring the more delicate and coloristic qualities of the nylon-string guitar, while building on a thematic foundation drawn from one of the most beautiful works in Western music history: the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

Focus was commissioned by the Cowan-Cicchillitti Duo with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The Van Tilburg Remix was created for the 21st Century Guitar conference in Ottawa, Canada.

—HS | www.hstafylakis.com

The sun burns bright only because of its own self-destruction. It is a sea of fire in a vast nothingness, violently burning its own essence. Harry’s piece captures this disarray and directs this fervor into a focused beam. Still, the tension of such a process is not alleviated. The fire is still unwieldy, the filament still burns hot, and the noise is present in our light whether we notice it or not.

When dealing with music like Focus, I prefer not to remix in overtly destructive ways. The piece is already there for me to decorate and pull from. Think of this remix as a photograph of a familiar subject, but captured on different wavelengths. My interpretation adds nothing that wasn’t already there, it merely makes that spectra visible.

—Van Tilburg