Prof. Ian Power Releases Second Album of 2020
September 17, 2020
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Ian Power, assistant professor in the University of Baltimore's Klein Family School of Communications Design, director of the undergraduate program in Integrated Arts in the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences, and a noted composer of challenging but inviting music for ensemble and solo performance, has released his second album of 2020. Maintenance Hums, released by the Carrier Records label of Chicago, features three compositions for solo, duo, and trio.
"The pieces create warm, suspensive atmospheres derived from the drones that surround us in our daily life, providing brief comfort in their insistence," the label says.
The album, recorded in Berlin, Treviso, and Baltimore, includes performances by members of Ensemble Nikel, L'Arsenale, and Prof. Power. The tracks bring in a wide range of instrumentation, including percussion played inside a piano; accordion, alto saxophone, electric guitar, organ, and a sampling of household appliances—blender, mattress inflator, fan, vacuum, food processor—in a piece that builds "slowly from dense, low organ chords, buttressed by whirring, harmonic appliance combinations. The appliances gradually take control of the narrative."
"It sounds all so simple but there is something complex and fascinating about all of this," says a reviewer on Vital Weekly.
The album art for Maintenance Hums was designed by Integrated Design alumna Carrie Epps-Carey, M.A. '20.
Power's debut album, Diligence, was released on Germany's Edition Wandelweiser label in July.
Prof. Power, whose music has been noted for its "resolute ooze and elemental graininess" by The New York Times, earned his Ph.D. in Composition (music) from Harvard University in 2015. He also holds an M.A. in Composition from the University of California, San Diego and a B.M. in Composition from Ithaca College. Since 2017, he has served as UB's director of Integrated Arts. Prior to that, he taught courses at the University beginning in 2013. He also has taught at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University in both musicology and music theory. Prof. Power served as a visiting lecturer in music at Harvard University in 2016 and as an adjunct in musical composition at UMBC in 2014. In 2018, Power won the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award.
As a composer and performer, Ian Power has achieved global reach, with solo and ensemble concerts in the U.S., the UK, Germany, Denmark, and Israel. He performs both his own work and that of others on piano, electric organ, and other instruments. In Baltimore, he has performed at the Red Room, UB's Wright Theater, EMP Collective, the Copycat Building, Cork Factory, An die Musik!, MICA, the War Memorial, Baltimore Theater Project, and several house and underground venues. His writing on rhetoric in new music and reviews of recordings and performances are published in TEMPO. He has delivered lectures at the American Musicological Society, the American Studies Association, and at universities in the U.S., the UK, and Turkey.
Learn more about Prof. Ian Power and the Integrated Arts program at UB.
Listen to Maintenance Hums.
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