“ Interestingly, the work that tried to please the least was the most compelling. Hayes Biggs’ piece Ave Formosissima harkens back to the dance-mad, melismatic and slightly raucous music of the Middle Ages. But the score, with its zig-zagging lines and pungent dissonances, is genuinely contemporary.”
—New York Times
“ A Consuming Fire, a short, zesty trio by Hayes Biggs, led off the evening. The piece is framed by some engagingly angular rhythmic writing, with a lyrical nougat at the center.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“ [The] most convincing and coherent performance [was] Hayes Biggs’ homage to his composer/pianist colleague Eric Moe, E.M. am Flügel, a short piece with romantic gestures and echoes of Berg and Stravinsky.”
—Aufbau
“ The Mass for All Saints would be an exciting challenge for those choirs skilled in precise intonation and rhythmic agility. Biggs writes with knowledge of and respect for the expressive capabilities of the human voice.”
—Choral Journal
“ Hayes Biggs’s wedding motet Tota Pulchra Es, here being sung for the first time, impressed by its quiet solemnity and neat working of its expressive opening motif: not empty fanfares but a reminder of the seriousness and privacy of love.”
—New York Times
“ Mass for All Saints by composer Hayes Biggs releases shadows transformed into tendrils of light by the arabesque of the vocal line. Contrapuntal procedures are used to their utmost expressive effect. [It] is a work of a melodist of talent in the manner of Puccini, or better yet, Respighi.”
—La Liberté
“ The Biggs song, Northeast Reservation Lines, is a real party piece... the sneakiness of the changes, the liveliness of the music and the verve of the performance worked handily... a potential recital hit in the vein of Bernstein’s I Hate Music cycle.”
—The Village Voice
“ All the works tried a return to tonality typical of the decade; the most successful made the return oblique and ambiguous. Hayes Biggs’ O Sacrum Convivium took off from the motet of Tallis, yet it handsomely reconfigured early modes in a modernistic scheme of free tonality.”
—New York Times
“ Hayes Biggs’ To Becalme His Fever... is a vivid evocation of anxiety, fits and repose. The language embraces pointillistic colors, romantic lines and prickly episodes when the demons hover. Biggs claims a forceful and subtle dramatic hand, along with a keen command of instrumental resources.”
—The Plain Dealer
Dear Friends, Family, Colleagues, and Students, Long time, no post. I’m attempting to rectify that now. On Wednesday, February 5, 2025, at 7:30 pm in Greenfield Hall at Manhattan School of Music, my new trio, In Recovery Mode (2025), for violin, clarinet, and piano. The performers will be Curtis Macomber, violin, Paolo Marchettini, clarinet, and Christopher Oldfather, piano. Here’s the basic information: Music and Art by MSM Faculty Members Hayes Biggs,Delano Copprue, David MacDonald (DMA ’97), Paolo Marchettini (DMA ’14), Kerstin Roolfs, and Chris Vassiliades (BM ’81, MM ’83) Free, no tickets required Greenfield Hall 130 Claremont Avenue New York, New York 10027 There also will be a livestream; see the link below: https://www.msmnyc.edu/livestream/msm-faculty-composers-concert-2025-02-05/ The “recovery” of my title is that of old melodies and other thematic material of mine that languished for years in search of a piece or pieces in which they could find a proper home. In 1987 I composed a short lullaby in celebration of the birth of a family member’s new baby. That tune actually did find its way into a piece for instrumental septet, When you are reminded by the instruments (1997), but I decided to recycle it yet again in this work. In the new piece, that tune, played in artificial harmonics by the violin, doubled at times in the right hand of the piano, begins the proceedings, and recurs in a few later passages. Soon after, the clarinet enters with a fragment I came up with some years ago, thinking I would use it in an unaccompanied solo for that instrument. It starts with a d minor triad, has a bit of a Bachian vibe (a small nod to the subject of The Art of the Fugue), and it returns in various guises and textures throughout the work. The clarinet eventually has its own short solo to end the first section, and this leads into the next recovered melody, one that I wrote sometime around 1975, when I would have been a Freshman at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). This one also is in the clarinet, accompanied by the piano, and is of a decidedly lyrical and Romantic cast, in the clarinet-friendly key of B-flat major; it will be heard again near the end of the piece, with violin counterpoint added. The tune is followed immediately by extremely contrasting material, initially marked ruvido (rough or coarse), violento, brutale, alternating with lighter, more dance-like music, featuring another thematic retrieval: a short, fast, arpeggiated ostinato pattern that constantly changes meter (7/16, 6/16, 9/16, etc.), also composed sometime in my late teens, I think perhaps between my senior year in high school and my first year as an undergraduate, though I’m not sure of the exact date. (I can’t seem to put my hands on the original versions of any of these musical ideas, so I am recovering them entirely from my memory.) The fast music yields to a varied return of some of the introductory music to lead back to the B-flat tune, followed by a short duet for clarinet and violin (eventually returning to the initial artificial harmonics) based on the lullaby tune that began the piece. In Recovery Mode is in many ways an homage to my first teacher, Don Freund, whose extraordinary, truly staggering Triomusic (1980) — a much larger scale work for the same combination of instruments — is one that I continually return to both as a teacher and as a listener. I remember studying with him while he was writing it, and I continue to learn from it, particularly from its bold stylistic juxtapositions, as I do with so many of his compositions. My piece even has a few very, very tiny “stealth quotes” from Don’s. In any case, if you are able to make it to the concert, I hope you will find it enjoyable as well as intriguing.
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