solm (2016)
I spent part of the summer of 2016 in Japan, where I hardly speak the language and can understand only the most fundamental words for functional communication. The effect of being there is that words cease to be language and become sound, subtle differentiated but absent of expression. Meaning is lost, while the sound acquires form, gesture, and texture.
solm aims for such an experience in music, dealing in the familiar, repetitious, submerged and veiled. The performers navigate the landscape of the score among self-similar aural signals, carving a path through the surface of the sound.
- Mischa Salkind-Pearl
Mischa Salkind-Pearl is a Boston based composer of instrumental and vocal music. His music is informed by questions of humans' relationships to nature; through the musical qualities which grow from this relationship, feelings of mystery, anticipation, and the unexpected are common threads in Mischa's music. The Boston Globe wrote of his opera Troubled Water, premiered in September 2015 by Guerilla Opera, that “the invoked virtues, literary and musical, so fascinatingly and congruently avoid the conventionally operatic." Boston Classical Review listed Troubled Water as the Best Premiere of 2015. His works have been performed throughout the United States, Japan, Germany, and Italy, and have been featured at music festivals and concert series in Boston, New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, Fairbanks, Tokyo, Freiburg, Pavia, and elsewhere. He has received commissions and performances from numerous ensembles and soloists, including Boston’s Guerilla Opera, Dinosaur Annex, and Ludovico Ensemble, the Boston Conservatory Sinfonietta, Alea III, Chamber Cartel, Callithumpian Consort, Sinopia Quartet, the DMC percussion-clarinet duo, Ensemble SurPlus, Diagenesis Duo, Transient Canvas, Finland's Uusinta Ensemble, Juventas New Music, and UMBC’s faculty ensemble, RUCKUS; percussionists Trevor Saint and Masako Kunimoto; saxophonist Philipp Stäudlin; guitarist Gregory König; cellist Jennifer Bewerse; pianists Elaine Rombola, Miki Arimura, and Kate Campbell; as well as conductors Russell Ger, Eric Hewitt, Jeffrey Means, and Yohei Sato. He holds a BA in Music from Skidmore College, a Certificate in American contemporary music from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and an MM in Composition from the Boston Conservatory. His primary teachers have included Linda Dusman, Marti Epstein, and Dalit Warshaw, with additional studies under Anthony Holland and Carlo Alessandro Landini. Mischa is co-founder and artistic director of the Boston area Equilibrium Concert Series. He currently teaches at the Boston Conservatory as a member of the Composition, History, and English as a Second Language departments. He is composer-in-residence for the Ludovico Ensemble.