Tectonics 2023 Artist Profile
Ian Power
Ian Power is a composer in Baltimore, USA. Power’s music is inscrutable, warm, insistent, and performer-driven, and has been played by ensembles and soloists around the world.
He has two portrait albums: Diligence on Edition Wandelweiser Records, and Maintenance Hums on Carrier Records, available at ianpowerOMG.bandcamp.com. Dusted magazine described him as “a force guiding the rapid-fire development of instrumental syntax and its expressive components.” His upcoming CD, Ave Maria: Variations on a Theme by Giacinto Scelsi for piano, will be out in 2023.
Power is Director of Arts Production & Management at the University of Baltimore, where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018. His writing on new music is published in TEMPO, and he has lectured at the American Musicological Society and American Studies Association.
Power studied primarily with Chaya Czernowin, and he has degrees from Harvard University, UC San Diego, and Ithaca College.
BYE BYE LOVE
“These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands”
Julia Kristeva, 1980
Love of life, or of others, is an abject experience. The abject response to human body fluids is viscerally similar, bringing an uncomfortable awareness of the body, and mortality. But the way one is thrown into that awareness is of a piece with the sudden euphoria of desire. The orchestra here steps into a fleshy presence: in large and small groups, the musicians play virtuosic passages, coordinate achingly slow volume changes, and cleave to conductor Ilan Volkov in blistering metric modulation, all while flailing against a strangely banal tonal language that tests their stamina but showcases their tone. There is a loving, rapturous clarity in their insistence, which brings simultaneous attraction and revulsion to how much or little one sees of oneself in it. The obvious effort involved brings the musicians and listeners together, and they share an unease about what is meaningful and what might be waste. This is what love, and the musical experience, withstands.
