Composer and cellist Laura Cetilia shares thoughts about her piece, counterglow, which will be performed by the MusicWorks Collective in a world premiere event this Sunday at Bell Street Chapel.
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As you may or may not know, I served as the first Cello Fellow at Community MusicWorks from 2006-2008 and later as a Resident Musician from 2010-2018. I have since been in grad school at Wesleyan (2018-2020) and now Cornell (since 2020) to study music composition.
Fortunately, this year I was able to rekindle my relationship with Community MusicWorks when my daughter became a CMW student studying viola with Jesse Holstein, and I was commissioned to write a new work, counterglow, which will have its world premiere this Sunday at Bell Street Chapel. It has been such a pleasure to write music for close friends — I am grateful for their understanding of me as a person/artist and for their gracious acceptance of what this new piece asks of them.
Over the last twenty years I have developed my own technique of listening to and playing the cello — when the bow is placed very lightly on the string, overtones and a fuzzy layer of soft noise are allowed to speak. I enjoy creating opportunities for these disregarded sounds to be the focus of my compositions. In counterglow, I ask the musicians to go outside their comfort zone and embody this technique within their own playing.
To me, the resultant sparkling yet gossamer timbre beautifully conveys some of the larger ideas around counterglow. Printed throughout the score is a quote from visual artist Yayoi Kusama, “Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment. I become part of the eternal and we obliterate ourselves with love.”
My specialized bowing technique brings out Kusama’s appreciation of the granular with both finite and infinite points occurring within a wash of sound. Similarly, fundamental pitches, such as the open strings of the violin family, are comprised of a multitude of overtones, or partials, that give that note its defining character. I ask the quartet to use their open strings often, and to strive for those overtones to shine through.
In counterglow, I also make use of the smallest interval in Western music theory, the minor second. At times this interval is suspended by one or two players while another instrumentalist slowly glissandos (slides) from the lower note to the next. What results is a sort of shimmering harmony where “dissonance” is treated as a timbre and negates traditional resolution. This technique explores the hidden but rich worlds situated within a sustained semitone, or the notes in between the notes (otherwise known as microtonality, a common musical practice in non-Western cultures).
The title counterglow is taken from an astronomical phenomenon when a bright spot appears in the night sky, caused by sunlight being scattered by interplanetary dust. This is proof that despite the dismal state of the world’s current affairs, we are still surrounded by and are ourselves part of immense and random occurrences of spectacular beauty. I hope the performance of this quartet is a shining moment within this instant of time and space before us.
— Laura Cetilia, cellist and composer
Join us in experiencing the world premiere of Laura’s piece, counterglow!
MusicWorks Collective in Concert
Sunday, January 14 at 3 pm
Bell Street Chapel, Providence
Admission is free but seating is limited
Make your reservation here
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Read more about Laura here and on her website: https://laura.cetilia.org
As a daughter of mixed heritage, Mexican-American cellist, Laura Cetilia is at home with in betweenness, straddling multiple worlds as cellist / composer / educator / artist while working within acoustic / electronic / traditional / experimental sound practices. Her compositions have been described as “unorthodox loveliness” (Boston Globe) and hailed as “alternately penetrating and atmospheric” (Sequenza 21). Her works have been performed by TAK Ensemble, loadbang, Mivos Quartet, Splinter Reeds, Dog Star Orchestra, a.pe.ri.od.ic, LCollective, and others. The Grove Dictionary of American Music describes her electroacoustic duo Mem1 (established in 2003 with Mark Cetilia, electronics/ modular synth) as a “complex cybernetic entity” that “understands its music as a feedback loop between the past and present.” And in the performer / composer collective Ordinary Affects she has collaborated with, commissioned and premiered works by composers such as Alvin Lucier, Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, Jürg Frey, Eva-Maria Houben, and Magnus Granberg. Laura is currently pursuing her DMA in Music Composition at Cornell University and is also a proud mother of one.