Performer: Tiffany Ng
UC Berkeley Carillon
When my doctoral advisor, Jorge Liderman, passed away in 2008, I was in residence at Montalvo Art Center. Over the next week, I produced a large number of musical sketches, some of which ended up in my piece Lamento for baritone saxophone which I premiered at that residency. When Tiffany Ng asked me for a carillon piece, it was the perfect opportunity to dig into that same library of material and write a piece for Jorge that would persist on the UC Berkeley campus.
Lamento Segundo is necessarily quite different from the first piece. Carillon is a challenging instrument; the timbre of each bell is individually rich, and has a large effect on the character of any musical gesture. My basic musical material engages the contrast between fluid, expressive music and mechanical, procedural music, a contrast I found to be dramatized by the physical reality of the carillon. Along with a certain terseness, this drama is something I appreciate in Jorge’s music. Although I haven’t attempted to directly mimic his style, he and I had similar interests in this respect.
