Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025  •  7:30 p.m.

Timashev Recital Hall
Columbus, OH

Unheard-of Ensemble

Ford Fourqurean, clarinets
Sofiya Levchenko, violin
Iva Casian-Lakos, cello
Daniel Anastasio, piano
 

Program

Fire Ecologies (2020–2022)

Christopher Stark (b. 1980)

Scene One: Terra incognita
Scene Two: Jeux d'eau
Scene Three: Louange à l'éternité de Mère Nature 
Scene Four: Infernal dance
Scene Five: Dypt inne i barskogen
Scene Six: Marche funèbre

— Student composers and works will be announced from the stage —

Notes

Christopher Stark’s six-part Fire Ecologies is a musical homage to the global environment as it faces a perilous future. Written for and performed by New York-based Unheard-of Ensemble, the piece received its premiere in a unique setting, performed on a dock in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Presenting Fire Ecologies in outdoor settings, and particularly in locations like the Gowanus that have critical needs with respect to cleanup of toxic materials and pollution, underscores the work’s intent to draw attention to the fragility of our natural landscapes and promote preservation efforts.

Stark was first inspired to write the work after traveling the American West in the summer of 2020 and observing several wildfires ravaging the landscape of California, Montana, Oregon and Colorado. The influence of nature had been a key component of Stark’s work previously, but the trip catalyzed his sense of urgency to bring climate related topics to the fore in his work. Included in the electronic sounds that accompany Unheard-of’s performance are field recordings from the California wildfires and other locations on his travels. Stark’s expansive score is matched to the vast subject matter; the large scale structural movement of the work happens on a stretched time scale, as the trajectory of climate transformation unfolds in slow motion in human terms, albeit alarmingly fast in light of geological and biological trajectories.

The opening movement, or “scene," Terra incognita, opens with waves of white noise that fill the stereo field with immersive sound. The ensemble emerges with halos of harmony, as individual voices swell in and out of the texture in their respective registers. Subtle pitch bends lend the texture an otherworldly character. As the movement evolves, activated elements such as trills and oscillations animate the sonic mix. The enveloping white noise returns to close the movement, eventually darting around the stereo field punctuated by electronic glitches just before the track’s end.

Jeux d’eau places Unheard-of in a more conventional ensemble role as Stark looks back to Maurice Ravel. The piano plays moto perpetuo arpeggiated figures in dialogue with a pointillistic electronic part. A long sustained melody is supported by swift toggling figures in the clarinet and hairpin gestures in the cello and violin. A forceful groove of repeated unison attacks emerges, with polyrhythms intertwined into the rhythmic fabric before the orchestration gradually thins out to delicate electronics in a free coda that elides into Scene 3.

Louange à l'éternité de Mère Nature hearkens to the ethereal slow movements of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, reveling in temporal expansion and poignant melodic lines in the cello over pacific, long harmonic pads. At spaced-out intervals, the ensemble adds enlivening figuration as a supportive element, and the scene closes with a windswept field recording.

Infernal dance opens with an ominous ticking clock before the ensemble enters with brusque, jagged unison figures. The electronics enter with a syncopated ostinato as the instruments weave an elastic line of brisk fills and pointed motives that reinforce the groove. The driving rhythm breaks for a series of disembodied gong sounds and mournful sighs in the strings before the insistent pulse from the opening returns with increasingly virtuosic, mechanistic variations.

At the opening of Dypt inne i barskogen, we hear the luminescent chorus of crickets before the clarinet enters with a clarion call echoing through the soundscape. The strings play modulated sustains with slight microtonal pitch bends as in Scene 1, painting a constantly shifting, refracted image. Grieg’s Peer Gynt is the source of inspiration for this wooded forest scene.

Marche funèbre closes the work, a nod to Chopin, opening with the clarinet outlining an harmonic progression and the strings contributing a simple, folkloric melody. A slowed-down field-recorded sound of a buzz of a high-tension powerline in the Sierra Nevada churns away in the background with a fluttering effect that comes closer and closer to the fore. When the piano joins, it integrates the melody into swooping arpeggio figuration. Scene 6 closes the work with an extended passage of the same powerline, one of the culprits for some of the wildfires in California, closing the piece with a haunting admonition about the inexorable march of technology and progress at the expense of the environment.

— Note by Dan Lippel

CHRISTOPHER STARK (b. 1980, St. Ignatius, MT) is a composer of contemporary classical music deeply rooted in the American West. Having spent his formative years in rural western Montana, his music is always seeking to capture the expansive energy of this quintessential American landscape. Stark, whose music The New York Times has called "fetching and colorful," has been awarded prizes from the American Academy in Rome, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, and the Barlow Endowment. Named a 2017 "Rising Star" by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, his music has been performed by such ensembles as Alarm Will Sound, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, BIT20 Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Momenta Quartet, Unheard-of//Ensemble, No Exit New Music Ensemble, and New Morse Code. In 2012, he was a resident composer at Civitella Ranieri, a fifteenth-century castle in Umbria, Italy; and in June 2016 he was awarded a residency at Copland House. Recent highlights included performances at the 2016 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the 2016 NY Philharmonic Biennial. In 2018, he was in residence in Bergen, Norway where he worked with musicians from the Bergen Philharmonic; and in 2020, he was in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy as the Aaron Copland Fellow in Music. His score for the feature-length film, Novitiate, premiered at Sundance in January 2017 and was theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics. His debut CD, Seasonal Music, was released in 2019 on Bridge Records.

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