Aquatic Ecology - music inspired by the natural world
Featuring Gabriella Smith’s 40-minute work for yMusic and underwater field recordings —
soon to be released on Nonesuch Records
SAMPLE PROGRAM (Subject to change)
Tessellations 5’ — Gabriella Smith
Ecstatic Science 9’ — Missy Mazzoli
Zebras / Cloud / Flood 10’ — yMUSIC
Clearing, Dawn, Dance 9’ - Judd Greenstein
Optional Intermission
Aquatic Ecology 40’ — Gabriella Smith
Year of the Dog / Year of the Dragon 8’ — Sufjan Stevens (arr. Moose)
Aquatic Ecology - Program Notes
Most people think of the ocean as a silent place, but in reality it is incredibly noisy and vibrant. These underwater ecosystems are alien to most—and yet most of our planet is covered in water. The ocean is our planet’s largest carbon sink, which makes it “the greatest ally against climate change” (according to the United Nations). Its health is vital for a livable future. In order to conserve aquatic ecosystems, it is important to feel a connection to them. One of my goals with this piece is to make the underwater ecosystems feel less foreign and more tangible to listeners, and to provide them with a connection to the ocean in a way they probably haven’t experienced before—through sound.
In this piece, field recordings (made with hydrophones) sometimes appear in their raw, unaltered state — particularly when yMusic is not playing— and at other times are processed in musical ways to become part of the ensemble. They appear in this order:
A coral reef off the island of Huahine, French Polynesia - shrimp crackling, the sound of parrotfish eating algae off coral, grunting (recorded by Gabriella Smith)
Many species of fish including croakers and herring - grunting and clicking sounds (from many places and sources)
Ice melting - squeaking, bubbling, sounding kind of like birds (recorded by Francesco Fabris in Iceland)
Plainfin Midshipmen, humming and growling (recorded by Gabriella Smith on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, and by researchers in the Sisneros Lab at the University of Washington)
Rain falling onto a creek, Green Island, Oregon (recorded by Gabriella Smith)
Cetaceans, including dolphins and whales (courtesy of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute)
Tessellations - Program Notes
When yMusic’s cellist Gabriel Cabezas introduced the band to his onetime college roommate, the composer Gabriella Smith over a decade ago, we had no idea it would be the beginning of one of our most fruitful and inspiring collaborations. Tessellations is the first piece Gabriella wrote for us, and it’s visceral bop of an opener. We love how she teases out unexpected textures from the group and has us blending in new ways, eventually ceding rhythmic ideas to quasi-baroque figurations and harmony.
Ecstatic Science
Ecstatic Science was commissioned by New York-based sextet yMusic and premiered at Carnegie Hall, New York, in December 2016. There’s a lot of math at play; chord progressions are drawn-out, multiplied, condensed, and layered. Melodies are flipped upside-down and fractured into the smallest possible element. The horizontal becomes vertical and the vertical stretches systematically into a twisting melody. The “science” behind the notes provides a frame for a persistent, bubbling energy, a scaffold for the ecstatic gestures that eventually consume everything else.
— Missy Mazzoli
Zebras / Cloud /Flood
yMusic started to collaboratively compose our own music in 2019. While it’s not unexpected for a band to write new material in this manner, classical ensembles usually stick to interpreting pre-written scores. The impetus to write came after spending a significant amount of time on concert tours with artists Ben Folds and Paul Simon performing “off the page” — memorizing, re-writing, and sometimes creating arrangements on-the-fly.
During these tours, we started working out little ideas together backstage, right before concerts, or in an idle moment of rehearsal. Eventually, it was Paul Simon who took us aside and encouraged us to dedicate time to writing music together. We immediately realized this group was meant to work this way! As six finely-tuned and opinionated musicians, we had literally been training for this our whole lives.
Clearing, Dawn, Dance
Clearing, Dawn, Dance was written specifically for the six virtuoso musicians of ymusic who commissioned this work for their debut album, Beautiful Mechanical. It’s a piece that tries to take advantage of their unique skills and personalities; they are a chamber group that can behave as a tight, seamless ensemble, but they also embrace and even flaunt their individual personalities within the group. That’s a rare combination and it was a pleasure to write this piece for them, and to have them truly make it their own.
—Judd Greenstein
Year of the Dog / Year of the Dragon
These arrangements, adapted from Sufjan Stevens’ 2001 album Enjoy Your Rabbit, were some of the first pieces yMusic experimented with when we formed the band in 2008. We have always loved the way they move with propulsive abandon, and over the years we have musically embroidered them in so many places with improvisations and reworkings that the pieces have really come to feel like our own.
ABOUT yMusic
yMusic is a genre-leading American chamber ensemble. Now in its 19th season, the group is renowned for its innovative and collaborative spirit. Since their inception, yMusic has had a unique mission: to work on both sides of the classical/popular music divide, without sacrificing rigor, virtuosity, charisma or style. They were recently praised by NPR Music as “deeply, profoundly skilled. They’ve formed a language all their own.”
Named for "Generation Y”, yMusic and their cohort of composer-collaborators, who include Andrew Norman, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Marcos Balter and Caroline Shaw, have come to represent the vanguard of American Contemporary Music. Simultaneously, yMusic has been tapped to lend their orchestral sound and instantly-recognizable style to recordings and concert projects by a dizzying array of popular artists from ANOHNI to John Legend to Paul Simon.
In 2023, the ensemble released their first album of self-composed work titled, YMUSIC. Written collaboratively by all six musicians, YMUSIC represents a creative breakthrough for the ensemble. “They’ve transcended all the conventions that they were trained in” (NPR Music), presenting "one of the most exciting and confident chamber music releases of the year” (Strings Magazine). yMusic also launched an ongoing collaboration, Stories x yMusic, a series of filmed performances and streaming singles featuring prominent artists performing with the ensemble an intimate acoustic setting such as Bruno Major, Amy Allen and Rufus Wainwright.
For their inaugural commission as a composition collective, yMusic was enlisted by the Park Avenue Armory to compose an original score for renowned choreographer Kyle Abraham’s production Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful. This momentous collaboration was hailed by the New Yorker as “a deeply personal portrait” that "works organically, seeping into us through skin and eyes and ears. And it is a beauty." The production, in which yMusic performed the score live, featured Abraham alongside a company of seventeen dancers. The world premiere run of ten performances took place in the Armory's expansive Drill Hall in December 2024.
In addition to their most recent album, yMusic has released four full-length albums of commissioned music, 2020’s Ecstatic Science, 2017’s First, 2014’s Balance Problems, and 2011’s Beautiful Mechanical, Time Out New York’s “#1 Classical Record of the Year.” They can be found performing around the world in a variety of contexts and have performed venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and Madison Square Garden.
— Gabriella Smith
ABOUT Gabriella Smith
Bay Area native Gabriella Smith is a composer whose work invites listeners to find joy in climate action. Her music comes from a love of play, exploring new instrumental sounds, and creating musical arcs that transport audiences into sonic landscapes inspired by the natural world. An “outright sensation” (LA Times), her music "exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy” (NY Times). Lost Coast, a concerto for cello and orchestra, written for her longtime collaborator Gabriel Cabezas, received its world premiere in May 2023 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. This work joins her organ concerto, Breathing Forests, written for James McVinnie also premiered by the LA Phil, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Other current projects include Keep Going, a large-scale work for Kronos Quartet, commissioned in celebration of their 50th anniversary season, and Aquatic Ecology, an album-length work for yMusic featuring underwater field recordings. In December 2023, her work Tumblebird Contrails was performed on the Nobel Prize Concert by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Gabriella grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area playing and writing music, hiking, backpacking, and volunteering on a songbird research project.