News
BYE BYE LOVE (2023) for symphony orchestra is now available to stream in excerpt. Please inquire for information about the score and full audio and video recordings. Premiered by Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony at TECTONICS 2023 in Glasgow.
Events
30 October - 12 November, 2024
In residency at Virginia Center for Creative Arts
18 December 2024, BROOKLYN
8pm
Scholes St. Studio
Solo Guitar w/ DM R
375 Lorimer St, Brooklyn, NY 11206
$15
13 January 2025, BALTIMORE
7:30pm
2640 Space
Solo Guitar w/ Chloe Clarke Smith, Ida Dierker, Aaron Oldenburg
2640 St. Paul St., Baltimore, MD 21218
$15 suggested
14 January 2025, ROCKVILLE, MD
2pm
Ring House
1801 E Jefferson St, Rockville, MD 20852
Iris Music Project Premiere
28 March 2025, LOS ANGELES
Terasaki Budokan Courtyard
Steven Leyva Book Release Event
Work
A Soul? A Desire?
A 50-minute set of theatrical pieces co-composed with Clint McCallum. We explore religious death, social death, hermeneutic death, political death, and life after death. The centerpiece and inspiration is a medley of pieces by [THE], the San Diego-based performance duo of Ed Harkins and Phil Larson, who were active from the 1970s - 2010s.
This set was premiered at Le Mondo, Baltimore, 30 May 2024, and performed at the Dogstar Festival, Automata, Los Angeles, 22 June 2024.
It Allowed Them to Produce a Single Sound, by Ian Power, excerpts
[THE] medley, complete
BYE BYE LOVE
For orchestra. Commissioned and premiered by the TECTONICS Festival, Ilan Volkov, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Glasgow City Halls, 30 April 2023.
I work to make music that is clear, warm, and entirely foreground, that keeps performers and listeners present in their bodies and in their craft. In BYE BYE LOVE, I am also trying to capture the abject, a maximal feeling that overwhelms our presence in and relationship to our own bodies. This feeling can be one of love, and also one of disgust, and the musicians push themselves to the limits both of stamina and of patience in search of that flailing feeling. I find a loving, rapturous clarity in their insistence, and in this music that attempts in vain to never settle, to always search.
Stream an excerpt below. For further information on score and recording, please contact the composer.
Brace Each Other Dive
for the Bergamot Quartet.
A text-based string quartet that, neither sightreadable nor memorizable, pulls the quartet together in an exhilarating feat of listening, rhythm, and coordination.
"Every direction is earnest, complete, and hopefully explicit. A good faith performance can take many forms: adherence to the letter of the directions, assumption of the spirit of them, alteration, disregarding (hopefully just) a few of them, or anywhere in between.
I hope it feels like an exercise as much as a piece, played with the same unworried but dedicated attitude. I always got a bit of a thrill sitting down and playing haphazardly through the Hanon piano etudes, an elemental thrill more connected to playing than to executing or interpreting."
Premiered by the Bergamot String Quartet, ICE Rehearsal Space, NYC, 28 October 2020.
BUOY (after Laurence Crane)
for electric organ and several electronic kitchen appliances.
It is inspired by Laurence Crane's The Swim for electric organ. BUOY uses chords from The Swim as source material.
The title makes reference to Crane's title: BUOY floats, moored against its surroundings, wavering, dithering, but immersed, tethered.
Premiered at Tzlil Meducan, Tel Aviv, July 2015, and at Red Room, Baltimore, April 2016. Since performed in the US, New Zealand, Denmark, and Japan.
Ave Maria: Variations on a Theme by Giacinto Scelsi
An album-length piano piece.
From composer Ian Power and Bay Area-pianist Anne Rainwater. Power unwinds the original melody of Scelsi’s 1972 hymn, over and over, into an obsessive meditation for performer and listener alike. What begins as lush chords and hammering bells is interrupted by a bizarre ritual where the pianist must perform an impossible task and be held musically accountable for their mistakes. Ave Maria’s relentless repetitions and uncannily tonal harmonies probe, exalt, and challenge religious concepts of devotion and interiority.
Premiered by Stephen Lewis at UC San Diego, 19 May 2009. Since performed throughout the United States.
WHAT IS LOVE BUT THE PAIN OF WAITING?
For toy trumpet.
"Bekleme acısıyla, aşkı birbirinden ayıran şey nedir?"
-Orhan Pamuk, Kar
Premiered at Rhizome DC, 1 July 2022.
mahrem bir eser | a private work
for Mariel Roberts, cello
mahrem bir eser is Turkish for “a private work.” The cellist plays through a set of instructions intended to produce enjoyment of the small differences in sound production that a person in a close relationship with an instrument can appreciate, and appreciate their ability to affect that sound. At certain moments the player enters into a private space, away from the audience, where the dynamics of noticing and of affecting and of enjoying are quite different. This piece, like every solo piece, is about attention to detail, aloneness, and love.
Premiered by Mariel Roberts at the Red Room, Baltimore, February 2018.