Of Being - more about the album
Of Being is on the list of Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: June 2020 by Peter Margasak
Midwest Record - “Wild trips to out there are here a plenty here.”
I Care If You Listen - “Ning presents complex new works impeccably and expressively on an album that gives some hope in the complex year of 2020, an outstanding example of art being both beautiful and politic.”
anearful - “Ning's playing throughout is as lethally elegant as the album's design, making this one of the finest piano albums of the year so far.”
The Road to Sound - “Of Being excels most in its flawless execution of three new works that each delve into the unanswerable questions of existence.”
album cover design by Mark Reigelman II
The Music:
Rates of Extinction (2016) by Wang Lu
Every day, industrial expansion and the modernization of societies push the limit of earth’s natural capacity to accommodate and sustain us. Many animal species quietly suffer and become extinct due to the harsh conditions imposed by human advancement. This piano work starts from the idea of using gradually decreasing and decelerating polyrhythmic layers and simple tempo/pulse motives to represent the heart rates of different animals that went extinct around 2015. The piece then takes a different direction in a more improvisational style. Rates of Extinction not only expresses the sorrowful, almost lament-like irreversible winding down process of precious life, but also celebrates an imagined eternal freedom through the blossoming of pianistic virtuosity.
Moebius-Ring (2003) by Misato Mochizuki
"Moebius-Ring" is the mathematical paradox of the ribbon folded back on itself: we pass successively from the front to the back of the ring while remaining on the same side of the ribbon. Moebius-Ring for solo piano is a sequence of variations based on repetitive pulsations. In each cycle, the piano tries to escape these pulsations, but invariably they return, as in an experience of "déjà vu" or a prophetic dream. The tempo relaxes or tightens each time.
Of Being (2018) by Emily Praetorius
Of Being navigates a space between suspended time and flowing time. The material in each movement is fairly minimal and exposed so as to frame sounds and gestures into discrete moments. This temporal framing creates a hyper-focus on aspects such as the decay of a lingering note, the fragility of a brittle sound, or the angularity of an open interval, in an attempt to continually focus the listener's attention on the fleeting moment of the present—a moment of suspended time, just before your memory influences the present and you begin to anticipate the future. The focus on the immediate present diminishes, however, as repetitions occur, patterns develop, and the discrete moments are strung together. Past memory and present experience combine, working simultaneously to create an expectation of the future—a state of mind characterized by the consciousness of the flowing of time.
The title comes from Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being,” a concept described in her essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” as sudden moments, or “blows,” of experience uncover “a token of some real thing behind appearances.” Such moments reveal “a pattern,” or interconnectedness of all things, that lies beneath the surface of what Woolf calls “the cotton wool of daily life.”
The People:
Composer and pianist Wang Lu writes music that reflects a very natural identification with influences from traditional Chinese music, urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, and freely improvised traditions, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities. She is currently the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University, after receiving her doctoral degree in composition at Columbia University and graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Wang Lu received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition (Spring 2019 residency), commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.
Born in 1969 in Tokyo, Misato Mochizuki is amongst those composers who are equally active in Europe, North America and in Japan. After receiving a Masters degree in composition at the National University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo, she was awarded first prize for composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris in 1995, and then integrated the "Composition and Computer Music" program at IRCAM (1996-1997). Between 2011 and 2013 Misato Mochizuki was composer-in-residence at the Festival international de musique de Besançon and did lots of workshops and conferences as well as jury of the renowned young conductors' competition, for which she wrote a symphonic piece (Musubi II) for finalists. Since 2007 she has been professor of artistic disciplines at the Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, and has been invited to give composition courses in Darmstadt, in Royaumont, in Takefu, at the Amsterdam Conservatory, Columbia University.
Emily Praetorius is from Ojai, CA. She studied clarinet performance and music composition at University of Redlands and composition at Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University. Her previous teachers include Anthony Suter, Susan Botti, Georg Friedrich Haas and George Lewis. She is currently based in New York City.
