Hello Wheaton!
Last night we had dinner with Wheaton College composers Shawn Okpebholo and Xavier Beteta. They invited us to Fire+Wine and it was delish.
This is only one of so many reasons we’re having an amazing time here :)
You 🫵 are another! Thanks for being here this evening 🙏
❤️, 8BB
Ari Sussman: to no end (2023)
Joan Tower: Into the Night (2023)
Wenbin Lyu: Duck and Roll (2025)
Molly Joyce: Light & Dark (2018)
Nico Muhly: Doublespeak (2012)
Shawn E. Okpebholo: Fractured Water (2019)
Ned McGowan: The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures (2016)
to no end was commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting for the Blackbird Creative Lab
Into the Night was commissioned for Eighth Blackbird by Harry Santen in honor of the birthday of his wife, Ann.
Duck & Roll was commissioned by Elemental Music and Eighth Blackbird.
Fractured Water was commissioned by The Fifth House Ensemble (5HE) for their Rivers Empyrean Concert Series.
The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures was commissioned for Eighth Blackbird by De Doelen Rotterdam.
Ari Sussman: to no end (2023)
Ari wrote to no end during his time spent with us at our Blackbird Creative Lab (look it up!). Eighth Blackbird was hosting The Lab at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin (look it up!). Imagine: An iconic center for the study of astrophysics, the largest refracting telescope in the world housed in a 10 story dome, and a building best described as Hogwarts Castle… all rolled into one. This is a setting for boundlessly unpredictable creativity and to no end is how Ari responded when prompted by the observatory itself. We got to premiere this composition in that observatory dome, with that telescope soaring above us, and our realization of Ari’s imagination lofted weightlessly into the unknown, and it was utterly magical.
Ari writes: While I am by no means religious, I do consider myself a proud cultural and spiritual
Jewish American. Naturally, I often gravitate toward and find fascination and solace in traditional Jewish music and chant. to no end paraphrases the cantillation chants of two excerpted verses of the Book of Genesis regarding the stars and celestial beings (the original Hebrew is translated below). While both verses are similar in tone, meaning, sentiment, and nature, the perpetual and unremitting chant-like melodies serve as the foundation for this work; it is constantly evolving by building, compressing, deconstructing, decompressing, “melting,” and mutating.
“Then God brought him (Abraham) outside and said: ‘Look up to the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to number them.’ (Genesis 15:5)
Then God said...”
“’I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars of the sky, and I will give your descendants all of these lands. And through your descendants, all peoples and nations will be blessed.’” (Genesis 26:4)
Translation by Ari Sussman, via Bible Gateway
Joan Tower: Into the Night (2023)
Joan writes: “The title Into the Night was taken from the last movement of my cello concerto A New Day, which was dedicated to my husband who passed away in November of 2022. The decline and loss of a partner of fifty years creates a major and complex challenge of emotions that involve sadness, love, anxiety and too many other emotions to describe in words. I guess this piece has helped me go through a journey of those feelings through a musical expression - my beloved and supportive friend - which I am so blessed to have in my life. I want to thank Eighth Blackbird for playing my piece so very beautifully.”
This is no small thing, to take a work born from such a deeply emotive place - to take responsibility for it - and aspire to be the ambassador of an expression so personal. Eighth Blackbird and Joan began their relationship at a music festival in 1996, where Joan was a faculty member and Eighth Blackbird was a group of undergraduate students trying to figure out what this whole chamber ensemble thing is about. Joan knows Eighth Blackbird. She knows for whom she was composing, and we feel that connection in these parts formed from love. She believed in us then, and she believes in us now, and it means the world to us.
Wenbin Lyu: Duck & Roll (2025)
In the spring of 2025, Eighth Blackbird partnered with Elemental Music (Santa Monica, CA) to commission some composers. Elemental Music is a lovely youth music program and this partnership provided Eighth Blackbird with us an opportunity to participate in youth music education guided by an organization of extraordinary mentors for young artists. Six works were commissioned and the mandate to the composers was not to write music for a youth chamber music program. The mandate was to write chamber music playable by young artists. To write chamber music that would be programmed by any chamber ensemble, but is playable by younger artists.
Duck & Roll is one of the six pieces and Wenbin was a perfect composer for this project. The ensemble Wenbin was assigned to write for had chosen to bestow themselves with the appellation “The Fire Breathing Rubber Duckies”. Wenbin applied his sense of humor to the task and gave the work an appropriate grounding, or as Wenbin says, he added “some duckie flavor”.
Molly Joyce: Light and Dark (2018)
We’ve known Molly for a while, transfixed by the trajectory of her career, an arc spanning depth and authenticity. An accident in her youth resulted in a left hand impairment which has since become the genesis of deeply reflective creativity, and an area of practice centered on disability advocacy.
Ambient and ephemeral, dichotomies such as left and right, and ability and disability, dissipate veiled in a slow animation, floating and suspended. She doesn’t presume that left and right need to reach some presumptuous equilibrium. Instead, imbalance become her canvas.
Nico Muhly: Doublespeak (2012)
We’re lucky to have so many adventures and one of those took us to Cincinnati for Bryce Dessner’s MusicNow festival. On this particular occasion, it was Philip Glass’s 75th birthday, and so Bryce had this idea to commission Nico to write music for Philip’s birthday that we would perform. Nico was a copyist for Philip as a precocious teenager (he’s still precocious). We’ve all performed together in different configurations, and recorded together (see: Eighth Blackbird, Grammy-winning Filament ;) and this is all just to say that this composition comes from a place of lots of friends having lots of fun together. Because Nico has such a personal compositional connection with Philip Glass, he reverently nods to him from within Doublespeak.
Nico writes: I wanted to point back to the 70's, when classical music perfected obsessive repetition. The piece begins by applying an additive process to a small cell on the solo violin. This is the defining gesture of the piece, and is subject to much variation. Occasionally, the busy textures give way to drones under which we begin to hear chords from Philip's insanely beautiful Music in Twelve Parts (1971-1974). The piece unfolds in similar episodes: fast music offset by slow, melancholic memories of the music of the late 1960's and 1970's (aren't those the intervals from Violin Phase? Was that a cell from In C?). Towards the end of the piece, the language of Philip’s Music in Twelve Parts becomes more dominant, and gradually overtakes all the busy material and the piece ends in a stylized dream-state.
Shawn Okpebholo: Fractured Water
FRACTURED /ˈfrakCHərd/ adjective: split or broken and unable to function or exist.
WATER /ˈwôdər / noun: Water; noun: a colorless, transparent, odorless liquid that forms the seas, lakes, rivers, and rain and is the basis of the fluids of living organisms.
“At a time when the environment is more threatened than ever with pollution and our life-giving waterways at risk, 5HE traces the life cycle of water from its metaphorical descent from the heavens as rain, to its long journey in streams and rivers informed by conservation experts and ecologists.” - Fifth House Ensemble,
About Fractured Water, Shawn writes:
“In Fractured Water, I attempt to bring awareness to pressing concerns about water pollution, conservation, and perseveration with a particular focus on the Chicago River. Living in the Chicagoland, this river has personal significance, not only for its beauty but also as a sustaining life-source for people and animals in this region. Perhaps the most famous aspect of the Chicago River is that in 1887, through innovative human-engineering, the flow of the river was reversed to deal with an environmental and sanitary crisis due to pollution and waste.
I have found that discussions on the topic of the environment and water pollution center on three distinct narratives: sincere concern (shedding light on a genuine life-altering issue); argument (working out how to solve these issues, often highjacked by diametrically opposed political debates); and hope. My interpretation of and engagement with these three narratives is the source of my musical expression. Because of the reversing of the Chicago River’s flow, throughout this piece, there are instances, some subtle, of musical retrograde. Despite the risks posed to vital waterways throughout the world, Fractured Water has elements of hope, as I reference in the spiritual, Down in the River to Pray.
Eighth Blackbird programmed this work a couple of years ago and have been planning to bring it back in our repertoire for a while. Since Shawn is a professor here at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music, and since Eighth Blackbird is here… well, what more perfect time could there be to return to this work that so evocatively realizes the elemental characteristics of its inspiration, both turbulent and tranquil.
Shawn is also just a lovely guy. How could we not?
Ned McGowan: The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures (2016)
It’s kinda hard to describe Ned. Composer, teacher, flutist, improviser and curator. But really an artist in a broadly encompassing conceptual scope. He’s known for rhythmic virtuosity and vitality. You’re as likely to find him in Bangalore as Rotterdam creating self-contained musical worlds through a process of cross-genre translation.
The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures is Ned’s aural imagining of Bosch’s super-weird “The Garden of Earthly Delights” interpolated through the metal band Meshuggah, south Indian Carnatic rhythms, Steve Reich, Colin Nancarrow, Frank Zappa, John Zorn, and George Crumb.
*Nerd-Alert: Ned says,
The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures has a recurring rhythmical spine composed of a series of groups with the lengths 7 7 5 5 5 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3. These groups are repeated, built upon and altered throughout, an influential rhythmic landscape on top of which much of the music travels. But wait, there’s more: The length of the groupings adds up to 60, which is neatly divisible by 3, 4, and 5 (plus a few other numbers), another source for composition material.