S03E04: "Beowulf" by Hannah Lash
Ensemble pianist Tae Kim sits down with composer Hannah Lash to talk about her opera "Beowulf." They talk libretto, instrumentation, piano reduction and more!
Tae Kim: Hello Guerillas. This is episode four, season three of Guerilla Opera Podcast. My name is Tae Kim, ensemble pianist, and I’ll be your host for this episode. This episode will focus on the Opera ‘Beowulf’ for the upcoming watch party on July 23rd, and we’re here with the composer, Hannah Lash. Let’s begin. Thank you for joining us today. The question I have is, what was the inspiration for this modern adaptation of -- an essentially-- an old English epic poem?
Hannah Lash: Well, I wanted actually to write something entirely new, and just use the name of Beowulf in a few touch points that refer to the epic poem, so it really isn’t in any way the adaptation as it is a reference actually, we’re using it as a reference at times for the piece, so the idea was that I wanted to signal, by using a title for Beowulf, was that it was about a hero.
To me, the idea of a hero is actually a very complicated type of concept. He isn’t just somebody who swoops in superman style, and saves the day. And we never really find out too much, usually in these kinds of heroic tales, about that person’s psychology, and it also seems to me as though there are… as we all know.. A lot of different kinds of heroes, and oftentimes, the most accessible ones are the ones that give us the most intimate glance into what that’s like psychologically. Not necessarily that a hero like my Beowulf, who’s a doctor, would necessarily be wearing his heart on his sleeve. But yet, it’s a little bit easier to glimpse clear humanity in somebody like that as opposed to, you know, the hero in the epic poem, or again sort of a superhero figure.
Although interestingly enough, you can observe that a lot of superheroes also sort of have this dark side to them, which I think is something that’s really kind of poignant and not a coincidence by any means. I think a lot of writers, authors, cartoonists have kind of grasped the idea that that’s a very complicated role to play, so oftentimes the hidden identity of these superheroes is actually something really mixed and complex, and sometimes a bit twisted.
So I wanted to approach this from a very real life and very intimate point of view, and I wanted to also address the idea of both the long term and the short term psychological ramifications of this person’s role, with other humanity, with other society, and the people that he’s interacting with, the environments that he’s been in, and the stress that he’s lived through.
So he’s a veteran of war, he was a doctor in the Iraq war presumably, although that’s never really made clear in the opera, what war it was, and in some sense it doesn’t matter, although I think it is important that we think of this as a current story, and don’t think of it as taking place in the past. And this- he’s referred to as Beowulf, he’s addressed as Beowulf, and for me that’s kind of something that was a little bit of an abstract thing; I don’t necessarily expect anybody to take seriously that a modern day doctor’s name would literally be Beowulf, so there’s a little bit of narrative distance there, sort of authorial distance, which I think allows for a bit of abstraction in the piece in general.
So for example it allows the lullaby that’s shared between Beowulf and his mother to be really set apart in some point out of time, to a certain extent, so it’s this glimpse into the inside lives, and the inside relationship of this mother and son, that we never would actually have in real--so it’s not in any sense meant to be completely realistic, or naturalistic, but yet we kind of slip in and out of something quite plausible, and something more abstract, like the name of the character being Beowulf for example, or the lullaby that they share.
As I was saying there’s a few sort of touchpoints to the original epic poem that I was interested in preserving, or--evoking, I guess would be a better way of putting it, although, the role that the original characters play is very very different from the role that my analogous characters play.
For example, the idea of the monster is very abstract, you could think of the monster as being the PTSD that Beowulf suffers from. Grendel is that, you could think of Grendel as being embodied, to a certain extent, in all of the characters, you know, they each have Grendel inside of them, and the point at which in the epic poem Beowulf rips Grendel’s arm out is reflected a little bit in Beowulf’s mother ripping the IV out of her arm as she’s leaving the nursing home facility. So it is anything but the killing of a monster in that regard, it is I think very much the effort to save herself, the effort to rid herself of a situation that seems very very scary; so in that sense, in that moment, she takes the role of Beowulf a little bit to rid her of this thing that’s very scary, but out of her own arm.
And also I think, you know, structurally in the opera, that happens in the first half, as opposed to in the epic poem when that really happens towards the end of the poem, right before Beowulf is sort of victorious. Beyond that, really there is very little relationship to the epic poem. Again, just the idea of evocation, which I think is kind of interesting, particularly in opera, which operates so much on archetype; because opera tends to be something that is large, despite the fact that this is a very small chamber opera with just three characters, the stories tend to be large, the stories tend to be very clear cut, not a whole lot of detail, because you know they’re conveyed by music, and the nuance is really in the music. So all of those things combined I think brought me to the decision to use those archetypes, but loosely, evocatively.
Tae Kim: Well, I was going to ask, how did the anonymous authorship affect your libretto writing for the opera, but something tells me that you had a lot more liberty with it, going away from the epic poem in some ways, and making it a little bit more modern in that sense. Can you actually tell me a little bit about the libretto writing?
Hannah Lash: Sure, so, libretto writing is actually something that I’ve been interested in for a long time; the first libretto that I wrote was, I want to say, two librettos before ‘Beowulf’. And it’s a fascinating learning process really, writing libretti. You could study past librettos and see what works, and all of that, but what’s really interesting about trying to study old librettos, or even current ones--I find the librettos that George Benjamin works with to be really one of the best current libretto-- but anyway the interesting thing about that is you have to realize that it’s the relationship between the libretto and the music that makes the piece work, and that’s a magical and in some ways unknowable alchemy.
But what I do find, and now I’m somewhere on my fifth or seventh libretto I think, writing these things is that it’s very important to have a clear idea of whether you’re painting in watercolor, or whether you are sketching with a Sharpie marker; meaning is the whole thing going to be kind of abstract, and use that sense of the abstract very much to the pieces advantage, and purposefully leave some things up to interpretation, or is the story going to be so clear that it’s almost as if as I said you’re sort of drawing these figures in Sharpie marker. And the interesting thing is you can combine these things, but you have to do it very strategically, and knowing that the music can play with that and the watercolor bits of libretto will need to be very very fleshed out musically. It tends to be the Sharpie marker bits that will move quicker musically, and the more abstract bits that you can expand a bit more.
I found this to be the case with ‘Beowulf’ for sure. It took--you know--I always find that when I write a libretto, it will take many many passes through, and usually what will happen is that the initial draft will be overwritten, which I think is actually very common for writers. And then the process of whittling back to find what’s the bones of it is really really important.
Writing a libretto is so different from when you’re writing a play. When you’re writing a play you look for a complete theatrical experience, and despite the fact there’s a great deal of directorial license to be taken after the writing of the play, nevertheless you’re looking for something that stands, you know, you’re looking for something that is very nuanced on it’s own and can include a lot of twists and turns and things that are not necessarily as concise as what we’re looking for with a libretto.
I suppose the analogy would be creating a fully fleshed out sculpture as opposed to a scaffolding. So with a libretto what we’re looking for is something that is, you know, even if it does include sort of water-colored bits, and I’ve mixed my metaphors now in terms of painting and building, nevertheless, you’re looking for a lot of space.You’re looking for something that will allow the user to drive the bus essentially. So the process again of editing back is a fascinating one, and even if you want your libretto to be poetic, it has to be poetic in the most fair terms possible.
For me the reason for that is it’s the music’s job to be poetic, and having poetry upon poetry is very obscure, difficult to grab hold of, and sometimes distancing for the audience--and distancing for the story too, you know you want a world that you can enter that’s entirely absorbing and entirely self contained and complete. It seems as though in order for that to happen there has to be a real symbiotic relationship between the libretto and the music. A libretto is functional, no matter how abstract, it’s functional. Some are really virtuosic, and some are more just engines that you use.
Tae Kim: In some ways having that control over music and libretto achieves that ideal symbiotic relationship between the two. Speaking on the music, I was looking at the score and it calls for clarinet, saxophone, violin, and percussion, not to mention, as you said, only three singers. Even by Guerilla Opera standards that’s pretty small. What kind of challenges did you face writing an opera for an even smaller chamber orchestra?
Hannah Lash: It was challenging. One of the things that I find as my greatest strength as a composer is orchestion, and bending colors and playing with the various types of gradations that you can get with different types of instrumentation. I worried a little bit about that at the outset. I worried whether I wouldn’t have quite the pallet that I would like to work with, but I found that there are a great deal of ways to glean a great deal from that tiny ensemble, and to find colors that I find really beautiful within that small instrumentation. The players of course are just really first rate which helps a lot.
One of the things which I found to be an interesting thing to do was to evoke, at times, a medieval type of music, which again evokes the epic poem to a certain extent, or points to it at least. So one of the ways in which I did that was in one section of the piece, and I think if I’m remembering rightly it might happen in a couple of sections of the piece, there’s this kind of additive frequency type of thing, so that they end up being essentially microtonal tunings in certain places of the piece. This is similar to, but it had to be a stripped down version, of a technique that Claude Vivier used in Lonely Child, referred to, funnily, as ‘Les Couleurs’. So I used something similar to that, it’s in some sense a similar concept to ring modulation, but of course much simpler. This gave me an interesting thing to play with, because what it ends up doing, basically, is giving you a sound that feels loosely evocative of old instruments, so that was something kind of fun to play with.
Another--for me anyway--great aspect of this was having a vibraphone available, because that does give a sustain, and does give a halo to the sound, which otherwise is not there with the other instruments. You know, it’s funny, I’m a harpist, and I find that lifelong relationship with that instrument does indeed sort of, influence the sound world that I gravitate to orchestrationally, and it was pointed out to me by a very close friend that oftentimes within my music there’s some funny ghost of the harp. So to a certain extent this idea of a halo around the sound is something that’s very attractive to me.
The other part of it that I found to be attractive was not so much about my own harp sensibilities, but more about that the piece itself demanded something of a halo. There is, as I was mentioning before, a lot of abstract elements to the telling of this story so the idea of blurring, and creating a little bit of a… dust around the picture is very very important to me.
The other thing that I found really appealing was that basically these instruments are treated like soloists, and they sort of have to be; I mean there is of course a combination, between integrated ensemble playing and the treatment of them as soloists, but I like the idea, when you have the violin singing by itself, it’s not a section it’s one, and likewise with the others too but I think that for me very much corresponded with the idea that each of these three characters is lonely in a sense. They’re isolated from each other, despite the fact that they’re very much on top of one another, particularly Beowulf and his mother.
Tae Kim: Wow. I think I’m going to get a little selfish here just because I don’t think--well the thing is--as an ensemble pianist, getting a piano vocal score was so welcoming, because it never happens, so thank you by the way.
Hannah Lash: *laughs* Yes of course.
Tae Kim: I remember the first time I got it, I was like *inhales* Yes!
Hannah Lash: Sure, sure, sure!
Tae Kim: But I do think that it is rather a neglected part of an opera production in some ways, obviously I’m biased here, but there is such art in transcribing so many voices into a singular instrument. Do you mind sharing this process of transcribing an opera, per se?
Hannah Lash: Yeah, I mean actually in this instance I did not make my own piano reduction, you know, my copyist did, and as I understand it, it was a fairly straightforward process.
Tae Kim: Right right right.
Hannah Lash: Basically all of those notes could go in, there’s nothing that couldn’t be on a keyboard. Now, this is a little bit different than reducing an orchestral piece for the piano, I think that is definitely something that I would want to put a personal stand on. And I think that tends to be, as far as I see it, a very suggestive process, more than a literal one. So, the idea being that you want to get the sense of this thing and make it work for the piano, so that the pianist speaks as clearly as the orchestra speaks, which is gonna be different. It’s a little bit like the reverse, you know, in an orchestra to piano piece, it’s going to be anything but literal.
I had an experience recently where I orchestrated two of Charles Ives’ songs for the American Composers Orchestra. It was a very fun project, and what I found to be fascinating was the way in which the piano resonates, oftentimes has to do with where you release, and how the pedal is beared, and you don’t necessarily bear down upon the sound in order to resonate, it’s a much more sort of--you know it’s again a bit like a harp in that sense; the more relaxed you are plucking those strings and the more you come away from it, the better the resonance is gonna be. So if you have kind of an attack, a repeated attack at the same chord--let’s say something like that--then I find that sometimes the best way to translate it into the orchestra, and there’s a lot of different ways of going about this, it’s quite contextual but this is one example, would be that you put some sustaining instruments on that sustained chord, but then you provide the sense of the attack with the ringing percussion. So that’s something that would be an example of a very non literal way of orchestrating.
Likewise, if you have a sound that’s sustained for a very long time in the orchestra and you need to reduce it down for the piano, then you need to be equally creative in that sense too, whether it’s a figuration, or whether it is kind of a metaphorical translation of that sustained chord.
Tae Kim: I do hope, you know, more composers write piano vocal score, that would be nice. That’d be really nice. *laughs*
Hannah Lash: Yeah, I sort of feel that it’s necessary for this kind of thing, I mean certainly for the opera that I wrote, certainly with, ‘Desire.’ The rehearsal pianist is indispensable, such an important part of the rehearsal process. As with this one too, although I wasn’t as privy to the rehearsal process with ‘Beowulf’ as I was with ‘Desire’, but I just cannot imagine how this would possibly work without that.
Tae Kim: I don’t know either, to be honest with you. You know trying to read clarinet here, saxophone here, and then viola, I’m just like okay, I mean what. *laughs*
Hannah Lash: *laughing* It’s really hard, it’s really hard, just particularly transposing scores takes five times as long.
Tae Kim: Yeah, oh my God, that’s the cake, that’s the cake. Anyway, I do believe the intimacy of the score translated into the production as well, as one will notice right off the bat how close everyone was, to the point of being a little bit claustrophobic. Could you elaborate on this design?
Hannah Lash: Yeah, that was something that was really important to me right off the bat, and I was really lucky to have such an incredible designer, somebody who really really got that.
What I had asked for, which was delivered in fact, was a set that looked--and an audience arrangement that made it look like a surgical theater. So that we’d watch this whole thing as almost a--you know, it’s scary, it’s a scary sort of experience, and we watch the dissection of a character, and yeah, in some ways the total disassembly of this person’s mind. So that was something that I really kind of specified from the very beginning, and conceived of from the very beginning, that the set should feel like a surgical theater, it should feel claustrophobic, and one of the things that I wanted to play with was also the aspect that we should be very privy to what it feels like to have PTSD, we should be very privy to what it feels like to be stuck. So the closeness of that, and the sense of almost overheating because of the closeness of that was very important.
And the players, you know, they were behind a screen, a sort of slightly transparent screen, which was a beautiful thing to do, and at one point that screen lifted, so that the interlude could be very clear, and also so that you could see them. And at one point too, the instrumentalists had to come and be the surgical assistants as well, so that was something that was really important to the sense of breaking the implacable wall that oftentimes happens between the pit and the stage.
I liked that aspect a great deal, I liked the idea that there was always this cave as it were, that the doors can open and people can come out and leave the pit. It really isn’t a pit at all, it’s just something behind a curtain. And it’s interesting, you know there had to be some very creative staging around the idea of motion. Motion through time, especially when time passes between the exit of the nursing home to the entry of Beowulf’s house.
The opera itself isn’t operating in real time at that moment, we have to assume there’s a passage of possibly some days or something like that between the exit from the nursing home to the home, so what ended up happening, which was very beautiful, was just a, you know sort of a promenade of those two characters around. I can’t remember if it was the entire stage or nearly the entire stage, but they just very simply walked around and you got the sense I think pretty early that that was a break. There was no music during that period of time, you know nobody could ever break character, because they were always visible. The nurse made an exit and an entry, and the mother, she wasn’t visible in the first little bit which is Beowulf alone, but at the same time there’s no way of kind of putting a spotlight on somebody and hiding somebody else, be on stage but dimmed. So there was never any way that these wonderful singers were off the hook, and they really sort of sustained that incredibly beautifully.
Tae Kim: Even as an audience member, even just sitting there you’re always kind of looking down and examining everything. Well actually not even examining because I mean the word examine has the connotation where you just kind of want to do that kind of action but the problem is, you are forced to just kind of look at what’s down there. That discomfort was--oof…
Hannah Lash: Yeah, it was palpable. Yeah, I felt it too, and I remember sitting, I think for one of the performances I sat basically in the front row, and for another one I was a little bit more up, and I sat in various places depending on the performance, and it was a very different experience depending on where you were, but you’re basically on top of the piece
Tae Kim: Right, right. Minimalist set design, poignant lighting, claustrophobic experience for audience members and performers, especially when juxtaposed by an unforgettable lullaby, created this haunting image of a hero suffering from seemingly incurable psychological trauma. Why was this the most important aspect of ‘Beowulf’?
Hannah Lash: Again, I think that the idea of a hero is something that’s so complicated, and oftentimes we overlook the burden on that person who has to take the role of a hero, again returning to the idea of a superhero’s dark side that’s usually very much under wraps, and that’s a very binary view of that person, so they’re either in their hero persona or they’re in their person persona. And I don’t think that’s possible, you know, I think that whatever suffering that person goes through will creep in through all aspects of their life eventually.
Another thing that was really tragic about that character is that he sort of couldn’t seek help. He was in this role of always giving help, and so something in him didn’t allow him to reach out for help. I do see that as one of the ways that someone in that role can really suffer, because you come to see yourself as a giver, and you give, and you give, and something will snap. We certainly don’t see that in the epic poem, we see Beowulf as this kind of implacable, incredible thing that sort of shiningly saves the day.
The other thing that I should mention, which just popped into my head but I think is important, is that unlike the type of saviour, let’s say almost a Christ figure, that takes on the sins of the people that this person is saving, this is not the case for Beowulf; he’s dealing with his own brokenness, and it is his own brokenness that destroys him. This is a psychology that collapses, this is unsolved memories, unsolved trauma, and it collapses him.
Tae Kim: A tragic Hero, whose biggest battle happens to be within his own broken mind. I do feel that the opera captures that human frailty marvellously. So looking back, what were some of the most enjoyable moments and challenges with ‘Beowulf’?
Hannah Lash: Well I think this was a process as a composer that was very interesting. For opera oftentimes it goes through a long workshop period, and that’s something that Guerilla doesn’t do, you know they don’t really workshop a piece. So that’s a really interesting thing for a composer because oftentimes for a dramatic piece, particularly if you don’t have a dramaturg working with you along the way, that premiere is in some sense going to be a first pass.
Though I feel very proud of what happened, and I feel very proud of what the piece is, I still think there’s work to be done there, I think there’s stuff to be mined, particularly with the mother’s role. I think her character feels very clear to me, but I also feel as though her desire to die needs to be more clearly etched. I think given the chance for another pass through I would probably make that very explicit, I would probably make her beg, for her son, the doctor, to help her have a physician assisted suicide, and the tension between them would be that he would not agree, and then in the final scene when he’s actually in a flashback it would have made it that much more poignant.
This was in some ways sort of implicit in my own mind but I think that sometimes what happens in a first pass is the things that you feel as a writer are very clear just actually need to be clarified.
In terms of the real positives though, that came out of it, it’s a little bit like handing something that feels super super personal and very much inside your head, and watching it come to life. And one of the amazing, actually shocking parts of not necessarily being involved in the early parts of that rehearsal process was that I watched a complete piece more or less pretty much flower in front of my eyes. It was unbelievably touching to see these artist’s interpretation of what this would be. Everybody was unbelievably respectful of my vision, but also brought so much to the table. I found that being able to step in at that finished stage was both terrifying and thrilling, and unbelievably touching. I watched the first rehearsal that I saw remotely. I tuned in to Skype, I want to say it was, and I was in tears. They ran the piece from start to finish, which is rarely the case, I would say never been the case for me, certainly with an opera. It’s always been watching it grow, from a baby, to a toddler, to a child, to finally an adult, so you watch it learn to walk, in a sense, but this was already a very formed being once I saw it, so that was unbelievably touching to me, and the story felt so intimate and felt so personal so watching it external to myself was absolutely breathtaking.
I think the other moment that really really was amazing to me was what was done with that lullaby, and how the two characters were on either side of the stage, and sort of up the stairs partly. What happened in that moment was I think you saw how intimate that relationship is, and yet how complicated, you know. You see in some ways how the mother has held on too long and too hard to her son, and how the son wants to respond exactly how she wants him to respond, and yet that creates tension between them, and I think in that moment, especially because the space is so small, you see all balled up together all this love and all this tension.
Tae Kim: Right, aw man. If you think about it that’s probably the farthest physical distance they’ll ever be, in that, when they’re singing that duet, but because of the intimacy it feels as if the stage just got bigger.
Hannah Lash: Yeah, that’s what’s interesting. I also think that the out-of-time-ness that they were able to achieve with that moment sort of takes you away in a sense. So it does feel that it opens up at that moment.
Tae Kim: Anything to add about your experience working with the Guerilla Opera that you want people to know before the watch party?
Hannah Lash: Well only just how appreciative I am of Guerilla, and how appreciative I am of these incredible individuals, these artists who brought so much to the table.
The other thing that really must be mentioned is their incredible dedication to the art form, and to make it something so urgent. I mean I think that it’s so fitting and so wonderful given that they’re called the Guerilla Opera. It’s a beautiful thing. I mean they really do take the form by storm, and make it into something really really revolutionary. So I don’t think they can be praised highly enough really.
Tae Kim: Cool. Any upcoming opera in the making?
Hannah Lash: Yeah, I actually am working on this very strange, very different piece, and maybe this is sort of the evolution of my libretto writing in a sense.
I was very interested in a libretto that was rhymed, and in scansion that’s unbelievably strict. So I’m working on this very darkly humorous piece right now called ‘The Applicants’, which is about the idea that death is not something that you will naturally experience at the end of your life, it in fact is run by bureaucracy, and in order to die you have to have the right amount of money, and the right amount of connections, and if you have that, you can get a permit to die, and if you get the permit to die then you actually have to take an exam, then if you pass the exam then the idea is, this is what’s rumoured, then you sort of open a door and you’re set free from your life, you know, you die and supposedly there’s some wonderful afterlife waiting for you. And if you don’t pass the exam, you get exiled, so you have sort of--you’re doomed to eternal life in a very remote place.
So it centers around one guy who’s the applicant, the titular applicant. He has his finances all in order, he’s got his connections, he’s born into money, so he’s given a lot of privilege and in fact one of the privileges that he has as a result of his sort of birthright is that he can take this exam three times, so if he fails the first two times he still has a third shot at it. So he goes through the accountant who gets his stuff in order, he goes through a bunch of financiers who get his stuff in order, and finally he gets the permit and takes the exam. So he ends up failing for the first and the second go, and finally he passes the third try, and the committee sends him out of the room to deliberate, and they deliberate and decide that he passes. They bring him back into the room and the head of the room has a bottle of champagne to celebrate the passage of this applicant, and he pops the cork, or she pops the cork off this bottle of champagne and it hits the applicant in the head and it kills him. So he’s lying there prone, dead in the exam room, and the committee congratulates themselves, and they say, well, he’ll make a fine addition to the committee. So as it turns out death is not some exit through a door into some lovely eternal afterlife, it’s just that you enter a higher level of bureaucracy.
Tae Kim: When is this happening? This sounds amazing by the way.
Hannah Lash: Thank you, so, I’m working on the libretto right now, I have an amazing dramaturg, Corey Elison, that I’m working with to sort of shape this piece and figure out where the blocking works and how all of that goes, and you know, the process of drama. Initially the plan was that it was going to be immediately for live performance but then of course the pandemic happened so I thought, well, I’ll animate it, you know, this’ll be an opera for animation. So what’s gonna happen is I will go through this unbelievably laborious process of creating literally thousands, hundreds upon thousands of slides, and then I’ll be using this program called Dragonfly to figure out the animation and make it all go. So it’ll come out in that format first, and then when it’s possible to have people together in a large situation, then it’ll be realized but the idea is that there will be the voices that are eventually intended to play the characters singing the roles in the animated version, but it’ll be to a piano reduction. But the idea eventually, even in the live version is to have a very small band. The sense of it, sort of the general atmosphere will be that of almost a ragged, travelling theater group that puts on this show in various weird little places.
Tae Kim: *laughing* Well please let us know when this happens.
Hannah Lash: Oh I will, I’ll keep you posted.
Tae Kim: Great, well, thank you so much for joining us, and I hope to see you at the watch party.
Hannah Lash: Thank you so much for having me, it was a pleasure to talk to you, and thank you for the vital role you played in the coming to life of this piece. I really will look forward to the watch party.
Hailed as a "highly skilled improviser" by the New York Times and "prickly and explosive" by the Montreal Gazette, Tae Kim has gained widespread recognition as a classical pianist and improvisational artist. His innovative "Walk on the wild side" by Lou Reed concert at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Salle d'Institut in Orléans, France, featured not only his classical improvisation on the very song by Lou Reed but traditional repertoire ranging from Robert Schumann to rarely heard Olivier Greif. His unique talent for classical improvisation earned him "Prix d'interprétation André Chevillion–Yvonne Bonnaud" for the premiere of his work, "Translate (2016)" at the 12e Concours international de piano d'Orléans, as well as "Prix–Mention Spéciale Edison Denisov". Part of the Piano at South Station, Tae regularly played on Thursdays in the middle of a train station amidst the confused if not pleased onlookers and travelers. He has soloed with many ensembles, including Cambridge Philharmonic, Yurodivy Chamber Orchestra, Hemenway Strings, and Boston Conservatory Orchestra. The Boston Globe praised his "sparkling performance" of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto with the BCO as a "glimpse of radiant talent". Avid collaborator, Tae has partnered with "America's most wired composer" Tod Machover in such productions as Central Square Theatre's 2012 play "Remembering H.M.", part of the 2013 Edinburgh Festival's "Repertoire Remix" and as one of the presenters in "Reconstructing Beethoven's Improvisations" at MIT.
Hailed by the New York Times as “striking and resourceful…handsomely brooding,” Hannah Lash’s music has been performed at the Times Center in Manhattan, the Chicago Art Institute, Tanglewood Music Center, Harvard University, The Chelsea Art Museum, and on the American Opera Project’s stage in New York City. Commissions include The Fromm Foundation, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, American Composers Orchestra, The Naumburg Foundation, The Orpheus Duo, The Howard Hanson Foundation’s Commissioning Fund, Case Western Reserve’s University Circle Wind Ensemble, MAYA, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Arditti Quartet, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and the Aspen Music Festival and School, among many others.
Lash has received numerous honors and prizes, including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fromm Foundation Commission, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Naumburg Prize in Composition, the Barnard Rogers Prize in Composition, the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize in Composition, and numerous academic awards. Her orchestral work Furthermore was selected by the American Composers Orchestra for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings. Her chamber opera, Blood Rose, was presented by New York City Opera’s VOX in the spring of 2011.
New York Times music critic Steve Smith praised Lash’s work for the JACK Quartet, Frayed: “Ms. Lash’s compact sequence of pale brush strokes, ghostly keening and punchy outbursts was striking and resourceful; you hoped to hear it again…” Esteemed music critic Bruce Hodges lauded Lash’s piece Stalk for solo harp as being “appealing…florid, and introspective.”
In addition to performances of her music in the USA, Lash’s music is well known internationally. In April of 2008, her string quartet Four Still was performed in Kyev in the Ukraine’s largest international new music festival, “Musical Premieres of the Season,” curated by Carson Cooman. In the summer of 2010, her piece Unclose was premiered by members of Eighth Blackbird at the MusicX festival in Blonay, Switzerland.
Recent premieres include Three Shades Without Angles, for flute, viola and harp, by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Pulse-space, for string quartet, by the Flux Quartet, as well as several new orchestral works: Eating Flowers, for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Nymphs, for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, and This Ease, for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In October 2015, the American Composers Orchestra premiered Lash’s Concerto for Harp and Chamber Orchestra, conducted by George Manahan and with Lash as soloist. Other recent premieres include God Music Bug Music in January 2011 with the Minnesota Orchestra, the monodrama Stoned Prince by New York based ensemble Load Bang in April 2013, Subtilior Lamento with the Da Capo Chamber Players at Carnegie Hall in 2012, and Glockenliebe, for three glockenspiels, with Talujon Percussion in December 2012. Her 2011 orchestral work, Hush, was featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Brooklyn Festival in April of 2013. Upcoming premieres include a new chamber opera, Beowulf, commissioned by Guerilla Opera, and a new work for Loadbang, commissioned by Columbia University’s Miller Theatre.
Lash obtained her Ph.D in Composition from Harvard University in 2010. She has held teaching positions at Harvard University (Teaching Fellow), at Alfred University (Guest Professor of Composition), and currently serves on the composition faculty at Yale University School of Music.