For most graduate students, a doctoral thesis has a straightforward, if daunting, form—a few hundred thousand words set down in a Microsoft Word document.
But for Thom Limbert, the parameters were a bit different—the composition student also had to create an original piece of music.
The result is a 30-minute exploratory work that blends complex instrumentation and digitally processed sounds, a thematic investigation into the experience of time entitled “Timepiece.” The work will debut this Sunday in Baldwin Auditorium as part of the Music Department’s Encounters With the Music of Our Time concert series.
“[Encounters] is a forum to present the compelling voices of today’s music,” said Stephen Jaffe, Mary and James H. Semans Professor of Music Composition and one of the directors of the series. “At the same time, it shows the breadth of music-making that’s happening right here at Duke.”
For evidence of that breadth, one need look no further than the other composers and performers who will join Limbert in concert. In a veritable tour of music department offerings, the performance also feature works by Chia-yu Hsu, a 2009 Ph.D recipient in music composition, and her fellow composition graduate John Mayrose, now a postdoctoral fellow of music composition at the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music. They will be joined by performances from Jane Hawkins, professor of the practice of music, the musical ensemble pulsoptional and the Ciompi quartet, Duke’s string quartet in residence.
Hsu explained that her piece “Among Gardens,” unlike Limbert’s piece, which meditates on a concept, was composed to evoke an image—that of the Duke Gardens throughout the course of a day.
“Sometimes the sounds I use are the real sounds of the Gardens—the birds and the insects,” she said. “And sometimes the place is inspiration but the sounds come from my imagination.”
The piece, originally commissioned in 2006, was debuted by pianist Natalie Zhu in the Philadelphia Chamber Society series. Since then “Gardens” has attracted national acclaim.
For Hsu, such praise is nothing new. With an education that spans from conservatories to the Ivy League, her compositions have won international awards and been performed in a dizzying array of venues, from Carnegie Hall to the Moscow Open Harp Festival.
But Sunday she will play to a more intimate crowd, and she said she is excited for the opportunity to interact directly with the audience hearing her piece. “That’s the privilege of having a living composer,” she said. “I can talk to my audience and so they will know what’s going on in the music.”
And what is going on in her second piece, “Journey to the West,” could use a bit of explanation. The piece, commissioned for the Ciompi Quartet, is an allegorical retelling of a Chinese story by the same name, which recounts the journey of an adventurous monk named Xuan Zang and his disciple, a monkey king. The Ciompi Quartet will play the first movement of the piece Sunday, with the full work debuting in May.
Limbert’s “Timepiece,” on the other hand, will be performed by pulsoptional, a self-described “band of composers”—nearly all of them Duke music department graduates—who develop and play eclectic, genre-bending modern music. Limbert himself is a member of the group, which he said meshes well with his own musical style.
“I like to incorporate elements of rock and pop in my quote unquote classical music,” he said.
Mayrose, also a member of pulsoptional, will round out the concert with an excerpt from a solo guitar work entitled “Common Practice,” inspired by finger-style banjo techniques.
To Jaffe, the works of Mayrose, Limbert and Hsu represent a phenomenal pool of compositional talent in the Duke student body, one he said he is excited to see displayed for the public this weekend.
“I am very proud of what’s going on creatively at Duke right now,” he said. “It’s a fecund period for music here.”
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