Michael Standard - Ice Climbers
Michael Standard - Ice Climbers
The University of North Georgia's (UNG) 5th Annual Research on Contemporary Composition (ROCC) Conference, 30-31 October 2021, allowed young composers and scholars to present new works, papers, and research to both in-person and virtual audiences.
Michael Standard is a composer and percussionist based in Tampa, FL. He is currently on faculty at the University of Tampa where he teaches Contemporary Technology and directs the UT Interactive Arts Ensemble. His 2020 work, Ice Climbers, was premiered at the Tampa Homegrown New Music Concert Series at the Tampa Museum of Art by violinist Michelle Kim-Painter and cellist Eduard Teregulov (listen and watch the recording here). We were lucky enough to listen to the original performers who both came up from Florida for the conference.
This short duet for violin and cello is an enjoyable work which does exactly as it promises. Standard describes the work as a musical demonstration of a transition from individual performers into a single voice. He uses the metaphor of rope-braiding musical gestures together, which is heard clearly in the opening of the work. The delight in the piece comes not from the actual music, but in the timbral interest caused by the swift transferring of attention back and forth between the two musicians.
Kim-Painter and Teregulov clearly have impeccable chemistry as chamber musicians, which brings out the best in Standard's music. The two players are quite adept at applying musicality to contemporary classical music, and find ways to bring out the hidden romanticism throughout the work. At just before the climax of the piece, Kim-Painter makes the decadent half-step gesture sound as though it was pulled directly from the middle of a Strauss opera. Standard then concludes the piece with a beautiful mostly monophonic hymn-like melody in the two instruments. This moment of exposed beauty after minutes of tension and extended techniques comes across as a huge sigh of relief to both the audience and performers, until the sound dies away into nothingness.
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