For Bass Voice and Pierrot Ensemble

Premiere: November 2017 

at Peabody Conservatory

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Length: 15 Minutes

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Premiere Ensemble:

Robert Ellsworth Feng, bass

Lily Josefsberg, flute

Andrew Im, clarinet

Shannon Fitzhenry, violin

Kahler Suzuki, cello

Aaron Thacker, piano

Alan Buzbaum, conductor

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Mikylvxka Hllupo (2017) monodrama for bass voice and Pierrot Ensemble with music by Nicholas Bentz and text by Robert Ellsworth Feng. 

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"The text follows an unnamed speaker’s hallucinatory journey through its crests and troughs, reaching ecstatic highs and ultimately a sublimely horrifying descent into the dark plains of the human un-conscience as they come face to face with an incomprehensible terror.

 

The piece travels along this mental odyssey as the speaker unravels their consciousness and is exposed to rapturously illuminating beings, but then is led to a cataclysmic realm of unheralded dismay and unadulterated monstrosities . . . 

 

Mixing [inspirations from H.P. Lovecraft’s various works and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House] with Robert’s original text yields what I hope is a piece steeped in a sense of contrasting euphoria and horror, meaning and non-meaning, and the sublime." - Nicholas Bentz

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To contact the composer, please visit  http://www.nicholasbentz.net

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