Eco Ensemble
David Milnes, director

Edmund Campion
Fan sings… (2025)
The sound installation Fan sings… imagines a moment from the 19th or early 20th centuries when music performance could challenge cultural norms through new mediums and materials. Are we witnessing a resurgence of such a time today? On stage, the electric fan—blowing air and singing—is both a hybrid intelligence and an inert mechanism. Does not every fan long to be heard? To be understood? To express, through music, its power to move air?

Fan sings… is part of a larger installation series by Edmund Campion that explores the musical possibilities of identical industrial fans. The series evolves from solo to duets and trios to a full “squad” of nine fans in large-scale public installations. The sounds produced by the fans—their electric motors and spinning blades—are captured by a computer, analyzed, and transmitted back into the performance through the fans’ metal bases and integrated small speakers.
—Edmund Campion

• • •
Edmund Campion (b. 1957) is Professor of Music Composition and Co-Director at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley. A recognized composer, performer, and collaborating artist for more than 30 years, he continues to produce highly personal music that often mixes emerging technologies with acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. In 2024, Professor Campion was a guest composer at the Festival Electrocution in Brest, France, where David Milnes and the Ensemble Sillages premiered Le Sillage (WAKE) for six instruments and live electronics. Improvising cellist Danielle DeGruttola was a collaborator and the featured guest performer for the world premiere and is also featured in this evening’s concert. Visit www.edmundcampion.com to hear and learn more about his music.

Sivan Eldar
L’eau la colonne le fer (2023)
L’eau la colonne le fer was commissioned by IRCAM-Centre Pompidou as a sonic journey alongside the newly restored Stravinsky Fountain, itself a commission by Centre Pompidou and Pierre Boulez to artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely in 1983. The piece was created in collaboration with poet Laura Vazquez and premiered as a sound installation at Festival Manifeste in July 2023.
—Sivan Eldar
• • •
The music of composer Sivan Eldar (b. 1985) has been described as “resolutely of our time” (Opera Forum), “striking in its singularity” (ResMusica), “luxurious and rapturous” (SF Classical Voice), “vividly imagined” (The Boston Globe), and “with a unique sensitivity to dramaturgy” (Diapason). Recent projects include Like Flesh (Lille, Montpellier, Lorraine, and Antwerp operas); After Arethusa and The stone the tree the well (Venice Biennale, Louvre Auditorium, La Seine Musicale); Una Mujer Derramada (Théâtre du Châtelet); Heave (Pompidou Center, November Music, Time:Spans) and Solicitations (Luxembourg Philharmonie, Ultraschall Berlin, Wien Modern). Recent recognitions include the 2021 Fedora Opera Prize, 2022–23 Prix de Rome, 2023 New Talent Award (SACD), 2024 Opera American Discovery Prize, and residencies at the MacDowell, Civitella Ranieri, Camargo, Royaumont, and Fulbright foundations, Cité Internationale des Arts, Villa Albertine, and Snape Maltings. She has served as Composer in Residence at Montpellier National Opera (2019–22) and is currently in residence at IRCAM. Eldar holds advanced degrees from UC Berkeley (MA/PhD) and IRCAM (Cursus). Her music is published by Durand–Universal Music Classical.

Didem Coskunseven
Dawn Chorus (2023)
Dawn Chorus* is a composition for two percussionists (on vibraphone and marimba) and spatialized electronics. In Dawn Chorus, Didem Coskunseven once again blends her personal passion for modal jazz and modality in general with contemporary electronics, highlighting the simple joy of listening—a concept also associated with duende.

Duende is the spirit of deep emotion; it arises from within as a visceral response to art, giving you chills, making you smile, or evoking tears through an artistically powerful performance. This concept, later developed into an aesthetic by Federico García Lorca, captures the profound emotional response that art can elicit.

Through Dawn Chorus, Didem aims to create a fully immersive experience within the performance space.
—Didem Coskunseven

*The title refers to the time when birds sing at the start of a new day.

• • •
Didem Coskunseven (b. 1985) is a composer, musician, and sound designer currently based in Paris. Her works range from compositions for contemporary classical ensembles to song arrangements in which she combines her musical taste rooted in modal jazz with electronics. Additionally, she creates sound designs and composes music for various projects with choreographers, video artists, and performing artists.

Coskunseven studied music, visual arts, and philosophy in Istanbul and holds a PhD in music composition from UC Berkeley.

Maija Hynninen
…sicut aurora procedit (2015)

O frondens virga,
in tua nobilitate stans,
sicut aurora procedit.

O blossoming branch,
you send forth your noble beauty,
in the same way the dawn arises.

—translation by
Christopher S. Morrissey

…sicut aurora procedit for solo violin (2015) proceeds from the twilight of the dawn to the sun rising above the horizon. The version for violin and electronics travels this journey backwards, as if in a memory. O frondens virga, an antiphon by Hildegard von Bingen, is intertwined with the violin part in the beginning of the work. This antiphone, placed in a distant cathedral-like space, is a reflection of the brightness of the day. As the first rays of light of the rising sun hit the outer layers of the atmosphere, the air starts to glow. Movement glow radiates in translucent harmonies, as the sound particles spin like a whirlwind. The memory of the twilight of the dawn ends the work in the atmosphere of the blue hour. The dawn is rising, but the sun is still waiting beneath the horizon.
—Maija Hynninen
• • •
Maija Hynninen (b. 1977) works in concert music, electronic instrument design, and multidisciplinary performances. The essence of her music builds on the unique moments when the parameters of this world are slightly altered to allow a glimpse of another reality to be present. It can be a moment where the timbre of purely acoustical writing gives surprising results or when electronics project sound into another domain, another space and reality.

Hynninen’s music has been commissioned by, among others, Radio France, YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Company), Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, Mirka Malmi, and Jan Lehtola. Hynninen holds a PhD in music composition from UC Berkeley. She is mainly working as a freelance composer as well as a part-time teacher at the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Jimmy López
Warped Symmetry (2011)
The title refers to the asymmetrical composition of the phrases and the ways in which they complement one another. In a piece for solo instrument like this one, the linear (melodic) aspect rises to prominence, so the way in which antecedents and consequents balances each other has an enormous impact on the development of the piece. Sometimes I structure the phrases symmetrically, but at times, I cut them short or extend them in order to create contrast. This constant fluctuation between the anticipated and the unpredictable creates a sense of instability that keeps the piece in motion. It is a fast-paced work with very few moments of rest; it therefore calls for endurance and virtuosity on part of the performer. Finally, polyphony is suggested in many passages throughout the piece. This device, which Baroque composers were so fond of, proved to be an exciting tool that allowed me to create the illusion of listening to more than a single layer.

Warped Symmetry is dedicated to my dear friend Sami Junnonen.
—Jimmy López
• • •
Jimmy López’s (b. 1978) works have been performed by leading orchestras around the world, including all “Big Five’ American orchestras, and in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall (BBC Proms), Concertgebouw, Sydney Opera House, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Kennedy Center, Vienna’s Musikverein, Konzerthaus Berlin, the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games, the Lima 2019 Pan American Games, and the Aspen, Tanglewood, and Grant Park music festivals.

López was Composer-in-Residence at the Houston Symphony from 2017–2020, and during the 2024–25 season, he is Mead Composer-Curator with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His Symphony No. 5: Fantastica, written for and dedicated to conductor Christian Reif, will be premiered by an international co-commissioning consortium that includes the symphony orchestras of Cincinnati and Detroit, Gävle (Sweden), and Konstanz (Germany).

A native of Lima, Peru, he studied at the city’s National Conservatory of Music prior to graduating from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with a master of music degree. López completed his PhD in music at UC Berkeley. He is published by Filarmonika and Birdsong.

Oren Boneh
Her Majesty the Fool (2020)
Her Majesty the Fool is a work for microtonal accordion and electronics, written for accordionist Fanny Vicens. As a composer, I am inspired by the contrasts between musical characters belonging to opposite worlds, and the search for common ground between them. During my collaboration with Fanny and her specially tuned accordion, I was amazed by the immersive, quasi-vintage sound that emerges from the combination between stops that are tuned up a quarter-tone and normally tuned stops. After the vintage and brutally industrial textures at the start of the piece, a kind of musical machine emerges, flawed but determined to play human music despite those flaws. Placed side by side, these contrasting characters take on greater meaning, marked in particular by absurdity and animated irreverence.

Special thanks to Thierry de Mey, Grégoire Lorieux, and the pedagogical team at IRCAM for their generous technical and artistic support during the creation of this piece.
—Oren Boneh
• • •
Composer Oren Boneh (b. 1990) writes music characterized by its energy and dynamism. As described by Le Monde, his works are distinguished by a “constant tension between two opposing poles—one civilized and the other savage.” The music plays with listener’s expectations of the characters’ behaviors in order to create unpredictability and friction.

Boneh’s music has been commissioned and performed internationally by some of the most renowned ensembles in Europe and North America, including Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Proton Bern, and Alarm Will Sound. Boneh completed his PhD in composition at UC Berkeley. Upcoming projects include a new large-scale work for Ensemble Intercontemporain and electronics to be premiered in 2025.

Mason Bates
Digital Loom (2015)
The power of the organ lies in its ability to create a space. Indeed the organist—like his modern-day club counterpart, the DJ—is simultaneously perceived as background accompaniment to various activities, and as the invisible hand controlling the choreography within its belly. Sometimes as I sat in the choir loft of my church school in Virginia, letting my mind wander during communion or a procession, I imagined the organ as an enormous yet almost invisible creature, whose miles of piping are entangled within and around the church’s structure like a central nervous system. Congregational recitations of the Apostle’s Creed, the ringing of bells on the roof, even our own singing—all of this must sound so hollow and distant from deep in the bowels of the organ. The mysterious ambience of a dusky church, with faint organ harmonies wafting up from the stone floor, inspired a pairing with the abstract beats of ambient electronica, and in this space Digital Loom begins.

This static world moves like continental drift, creating a powerful expectation that is soon disrupted by the quickening rate of change. The evolution, via the contagious beats of drum and bass to a bright fanfare, begins a more dynamic section, which ultimately boils over into an explosion of stratospheric sonorities. Only gradually do they fall lower, and in this surreal world we return to the opening sonority, where cross-fading chords recall the opening continental drift and environmental electronic sounds indicate that we are free of the tyranny of beats. All seems at peace, but the appearance of a colossus of a bass line, “walked” by the organist’s feet, takes us into a fiendish reincarnation of the fanfare theme, and on this note we end.
—Mason Bates
• • •
Composer of the Grammy-winning opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Mason Bates (b. 1977) is imaginatively transforming the way classical music is created and experienced as a composer, DJ, and curator. With electro-acoustic works such as Mothership and the animated film Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra (available on AppleTV), Bates has become a visible advocate for the modern orchestra and imaginatively integrates it into contemporary culture.

Bates’ current focus is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for the Metropolitan Opera. Based on the bestselling novel by Michael Chabon, the opera tells the story of two Jewish cousins in 1940s New York who go into the cartoon business, hoping to make enough money to save their family from Prague amidst the Nazi occupation. Other projects include a triple concerto for Time for Three and Nomad Concerto for violinist Gil Shaham.

A diverse artist exploring the ways classical music integrates into contemporary culture, Bates serves on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He earned his PhD in composition at UC Berkeley under Edmund Campion.

Keeril Makan
Mercury Songbirds (2008)
Mercury Songbirds was inspired by a 2006 article that reported increased levels of mercury in wild songbirds in the Hudson Valley:

“While mercury has often been found in lakes and streams and in fish, Dr. [David C.] Evers’ work documents the unexpected presence of the chemical in birds that do not live on water and never eat fish…
“Dr. Evers’ work suggests that when mercury falls on land, it is absorbed by soil and by fallen leaves that are consumed by worms and insects. Songbirds then feed on the bugs, absorbing the mercury.”

—Anthony DePalma,
New York Times, July 25, 2006

My work is from the point of view of the songbirds. Their environment is slowly being poisoned, but they are not aware of this. There is a continual hum emanating from the piano, which though acoustic is produced by electronic means. It seems like a natural sound coming from the piano, but in its unchanging duration, defies our expectations of how the piano works and also goes unnoticed because of its ubiquity, much as the continual contamination of our environment happens without our awareness or understanding.
—Keeril Makan
• • •
Described by the New Yorker as “empowered by modern technology but haunted by a spirit of immemorial darkness,” American composer Keeril Makan (b. 1972) is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Luciano Berio Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. His work has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, American Composers Orchestra, |Pacifica Quartet, and Carnegie Hall, among others. His music was featured at a Miller Theatre Composer Portraits concert. Makan’s CDs In Sound (Tzadik), Target (Starkland), Afterglow (Mode), Letting Time Circle Through Us (New World), and Dream Lightly (BMOP Sound) include performances by the Kronos Quartet, Either/Or, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.

Persona, Makan’s opera commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and National Sawdust, is an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s classic film, with a libretto by Jay Scheib. The New York Times praised Persona: “Music comes first in any opera, and Mr. Makan’s 85-minute score… compellingly drives the drama…. Mr. Makan sets the text with striking sensitivity to when a moment demands conversational naturalness or supple lyricism,” and the Los Angeles Times described the music as “brilliant.” In addition to the premiere at National Sawdust, Persona has been performed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and by the Los Angeles Opera.

Makan was raised in New Jersey by parents of South African Indian and Russian Jewish descent. He makes his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor at MIT.

Edmund Campion
Le Sillage (WAKE) (2024)
Commissioned by the brilliant players of the Ensemble Sillages and written alongside my partner, improvising cellist Danielle DeGruttola to include a live electronic synthesis part, Le Sillage is collaborative in all ways. In the piece, I try to create the experience of both frozen time and time in motion. The experience is not specific, and tells no story, but is rather immersive and akin to an alternate reality, or a brief visit into the thinking patterns of another’s mind. I imagine a walking person who suddenly stops, immobile, to watch silently the patterns of a flock of birds for a very long time. The piece is in three large sections, each about five minutes long. The opening section is playful; the middle section descends and is darker; and the final section is bleak and obscure. The electronics are synthesized in real-time based on the pitch analysis of the improvising cellist and were created with the support of Carmine Cella, Jon Kulpa, and Jeremy Wagner at CNMAT.
—Edmund Campion