As part of our mission to expand the limited repertoire for violin and cello, the Elliston Duo is collaborating with local composer Mark Volker on a newly commissioned work. The piece will be premiered on January 5th, 2012 at the Steinway Recital Hall in Nashville. Mark Volker is the head of the composition department at Belmont University, and we are very excited to share this new piece with you!
Elliston Duo
The Elliston Duo takes its name from Nashville’s own Elliston Place, just west of downtown near Vanderbilt University. Like violinist Patricia Rudisill and cellist Nicholas Gold, it’s a hip neighborhood with a youthful vibe, and is home to the group’s rehearsal space.
Rudisill and Gold began performing together shortly after both relocated to Nashville in early 2010. They quickly discovered an affinity in artistic and career goals and have gained an impressive reputation as a powerful and dynamic performing ensemble. Emotional and intimate, fresh and exciting, every performance packs a punch audiences don’t forget.
The Elliston Duo has been featured twice on the programs of WPLN (Nashville Public Radio). They were featured artists for the Nexus Chamber Masterworks Series, as well as at Austin Peay State University, Western Kentucky University, University of Miami, and West End United Methodist Church.
Rudisill and Gold both enjoy mentoring the next generation of artists—from the youngest Suzuki Method students to master classes at the college level. Both maintain private studios for students in the Middle Tennessee area.
Dedicated to the advancement of the violin and cello duo canon, the Elliston Duo is commissioning new works and also adapts old classics for their repertoire, which spans the most serious classical works for duo to country, Latin, and contemporary favorites. Regardless of style, the duo never fails to present music making of the highest caliber. www.ellistonduo.com
Mark Volker
Recently named 2011 Composer of the Year by the Tennessee Music Teachers Association, Mark Volker is the Coordinator of Composition and Assistant Professor of Music at the Belmont University School of Music, where he teaches applied composition and music theory. Known for his colorful harmonic language and orchestration, in addition to his facility with both electronic and traditional instrumentations, Mark’s music has been performed and recorded all over the world, and he has received awards from ASCAP, Meet the Composer, SCI, and ERMmedia. From his operas for the Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players and the Young Opera Company of New England, to his steady stream of chamber music commissions and colorful orchestral works, to his experimental works for live instruments with interactive electronics, Mark’s output extremely vibrant and varied. You can hear his music the recently released Centaur Records CD, Elemental Forces, as well as on volume 3 of ERMmedia’s Masterworks of the New Era series. His acclaimed ballet based on The Diary of Anne Frank is currently being performed by members of the Nashville Ballet in schools around Middle Tennessee and he will have a work for wind ensemble premiered in the spring, with subsequent performances by the various wind ensembles that make up the commissioning consortium.
Mark is also an active guitarist, specializing in the performance of new music for classical and electric guitar in chamber settings. He has premiered numerous chamber and solo works and performs regularly with the Luna Nova Ensemble.
A native of Buffalo, NY, Mark holds degrees from the Ithaca College School of Music (BM), the Cincnnati College-Conservatory of Music (MM), and the University of Chicago (PhD). Prior to his appointment at Belmont,Mark taught for several years at Colgate University in upstate New York.
He lives in Franklin, TN with his wife Alyssa and two children, Molly and Jacob. Find more at markvolker.com.
Two Mysteries for String Duo
When my friend Nick Gold presented me with the opportunity to write a piece for him and Patti Rudisill to perform, I was very enthusiastic, as I have come to know Nick as a fantastic cellist (and subsequently Patti as an equally fine violinist), and I have never written for the precise instrumentation of violin/cello duo. I am generally very fond of these instruments and their unique capabilities. For some time, I had also been looking for the opportunity to revisit in a chamber music setting some of the musical ideas I had explored in my organ suite, In the Presence of Mystery. I am very happy with that piece as it is, but I had been thinking that some of its musical and expressive ideas could be very effective in a more intimate instrumental setting. I felt that a piece for the Elliston Duo was the perfect opportunity.
The “mystery” of that piece’s title is a reference to the intense and meditative spiritual searching that I wished to illustrate musically, as well as to the very mysterious power of music itself, which of course is explored to some degree every time music is created. In particular, I wanted to explore the power of harmony to transform simple melodic ideas into varying and complex emotions.
While I retained the basic musical themes and general forms from the earlier work in Two Mysteries of String Duo, I enjoyed reworking the development of those themes to suit the idiosyncrasies of the violin and cello. Many of the harmonies and specific patterns are different as well, both to better suit the strengths of the violin and cello, and in response to alternatives musical ideas that emerged during the compositional process. I feel that each time I make a compositional decision, there are one or more other valid alternatives that I usually do not get the opportunity to explore. In this case, I was able to do just that. The result is a piece that is at once brand new and a re-imagining of previous work. Each of the two movements is set in a broad, three-part form. This gives them the sense of expansive meditations on their “mysteries,” the first focused and intense, the second somber and yearning.
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