Composer Emily Doolittle is a native of Nova Scotia who recently relocated to Glasgow. Amplifying her presence on these shores is the UK premiere of her work green/blue by the English Symphony Orchestra (ESO) and Music Director Kenneth Woods on 7 February at Hereford’s Shirehall, and the release of all spring, a recording of her chamber works performed by the Seattle Chamber Players on the Composers Concordance Records label.

Emily Doolittle’s green/blue is playful, energetic and full of colourful compositional techniques, as the work’s title would suggest. It was commissioned by the Oregon East Symphony in 2003 when Kenneth Woods was that orchestra’s Music Director. green/blue bears a close relationship to an earlier work, green notes, which Doolittle wrote for the Toronto-based Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra in 2001. She explains:

"In green notes I took a simple, diatonic idea, which was not too foreign to the sound world of baroque music, and little by little transformed it into something which sounded unmistakably modern and strange in the context of the baroque-like music which generated it. In green notes, this emergent modernistic passage serves as the climax of the piece, and immediately precedes a return to the neo-baroque music of the opening. In green/blue, however, this new material serves as the main body of the piece, and develops according to its own patterns, rather than those of the baroque-like music from which it originated. While the baroque-like material remains, its role is now secondary."

Woods is a steadfast champion of Doolittle’s music. In October 2014 he conducted the ESO in the UK premiere of falling still at LSO St. Luke’s in London. Scored for violin and string orchestra, falling still was described by Classical Source as “a very beautiful work … drawing the attentive listener in such a way as to invite – if not demand – quiet contemplation and sympathy.” Like much of Doolittle’s music, falling still was inspired by the sounds of nature, specifically the calls of a European blackbird in counterpoint with the gentle background of early morning rain.

An arrangement of falling still for oboe and strings appears alongside four other chamber works by Doolittle on the album all spring, which abounds with references to the natural world. Four Pieces About Water, for winds, strings and piano, depicts different patterns and sounds of water in various forms – Running, Salt, Frozen and Rain. The album’s title work, for soprano, strings, winds and percussion, sets five poems by Rae Crossman, each portraying the sounds and symbolism of a different type of bird. col, which refers to a pass or depression in a mountain range, is scored for violin and marimba and was inspired by a hike in the Adirondacks in Upstate New York. Why the parrot repeats human words, for clarinet, viola, percussion and narrator, is based on a Thai folktale. all spring is released by Composers Concordance, a New York City-based organisation that has presented new music, including hundreds of premieres, both in concert and on recordings for over 30 years. The musicians are members of the dynamic Seattle Chamber Players, an ensemble considered at the vanguard of the North American contemporary music world.

Of all spring, Scena Musicale noted, “Doolittle’s musical language is harmonious and often firmly rooted in a more or less traditional tone. That said, its originality is revealed primarily in its delicate instrumental colours and the flexibility of her melodic inspiration ... An ideal disc for those who want to discover a composer of music that is clear, colourful and very accessible.”

Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Reviews said, “This is music worth waiting for, a set of works that all have a disarming charm, an organic, almost rustic sort of modern feel 
…
 All five works have the personal Doolittle stamp upon them. The music often has a whimsical quality, well paced, organically modern tonal, spun out with a cohesively inventive narrative sequentiality. Each work has a distinct identity 
…
 If you were to try and pin the ancestry of this music to the influence of forebears you might as I did think of the chamber neo-classic phase of Igor Stravinsky, but that mostly in the pacing, not the tones themselves. Nonetheless Emily Doolittle stands on her own ground, rather delightfully so. Recommended listening.”

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For further information, image or interview requests please contact Melanne Mueller, MusicCo International, 020 8698 6933, melanne@musiccointernational.com

For further details about Emily Doolittle, please visit http://emilydoolittle.com

PERFORMANCE INFORMATION

Sunday, 7 February 2016 – 3:00 pm
Emily Doolittle green/blue *
Also on the programme:
Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E Minor (Alexander Sitkovetsky, violin)
Beethoven Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”
* UK premiere

Kenneth Woods
English Symphony Orchestra

Shirehall
St. Peter’s Square
Hereford HR1 2HX
For further information please visit http://eso.co.uk/?page_id=2750

RECORDING INFORMATION
all spring: chamber music of Emily Doolittle

Four Pieces About Water
1. Running Water (2:53)
2. Salt Water (3:24)
3. Frozen Water (2:31)
4. Rain Water (2:30)
5. falling still (5:40)

all spring
6. five o’clock (2:55)
7. all spring (4:05)
8. have you (1:36)
9. ruffed grouse (2:21)
10. just when (3:48)

11. col (5:56)

12. Why the parrot repeats human words (18:23)

Seattle Chamber Players and friends:
Maria Mannisto voice / Paul Taub flute / Brent Hages oboe / Laura DeLuca clarinet / Seth Krimsky bassoon / Mark Robbins horn / Sara Mayo trombone / Matthew Kocmieroski marimba / Oksana Ezhokina piano / Mikhail Shmidt violin / Mara Gearman viola / Rajan Krishnaswami and David Sabee cellos / Joe Kaufman bass / Julia Tai conductor

Recorded 2013 and 2014, at the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle, Washington, USA
Recording, engineering and mixing: Doug Haire
Mastering: John D. S. Adams, Stonehouse Sound, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada

Composers Concordance Records comcon 0025

NOTES FOR EDITORS
Composer Emily Doolittle was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and educated at Dalhousie, Indiana University, Princeton, and the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, where she studied with Louis Andriessen with the support a Fulbright fellowship. From 2008-2015 she lived in Seattle, where she was an Associate Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts. She currently lives in Glasgow, UK.

Doolittle enjoys writing for both traditional and less standard instrumentation, and has been commissioned by such ensembles and soloists as Symphony Nova Scotia, the Vancouver Island Symphony, Orchestre Métropolitain (Montreal), the New York Youth Symphony, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Toronto), Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal, the Motion Ensemble (New Brunswick), the Paragon Ensemble (Glasgow), soprano Suzie LeBlanc, viola da gambist Karin Preslmayer, and alphornist Mike Cumberland. Upcoming projects include a chamber opera called Jan Tait and the Bear, which will be performed in Shetland by the ffancytunes ensemble in April, 2016, and a concerto for Canadian bassoonist Nadina Mackie Jackson.

An on-going interest for Doolittle is the relationship between music and sounds from the natural world, particularly bird and other animal songs. She has explored this in a number of compositions, as well as in her doctoral dissertation at Princeton and in interdisciplinary birdsong research with biologists and ornithologists. In 2011 she was composer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, where she collaborated with ornithologist Henrik Brumm in researching the song of the musician wren and presented a concert of her birdsong-related works, performed by members of the Bavarian State Opera.

Other recurrent interests include folklore, musical story-telling, and making music for and with children. These interests are combined in her piece Songs of Seals, based on Scottish folklore and written in collaboration with Gaelic poet Rody Gorman, for the Voice Factory Youth Choir and the Paragon Ensemble (Glasgow), which was premiered in the fall of 2011 in Glasgow and Skye.

Doolittle has received a number of awards for her music, including the 2012 Theodore Front Prize for A Short, Slow Life (commissioned by Suzie Leblanc and Symphony Nova Scotia), two ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, and the Bearn’s Prize. Her work has been supported by grants and commissions from the Artist Trust (Seattle), the Eric Stokes Fund, The Culture and Animals Foundation, ASCAP, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Nova Scotia Arts Council, FIRST Music, the Montreal Arts Council, and the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec, and with artist residencies at MacDowell, Ucross, Blue Mountain Center, Banff, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow.