Dark Matters Tiffany Ng

• Stephen Rush (b. 1958): 3 Etudes:
• 1 Rush: 3 Etudes: No. 1, Paced, Almost Hurried 02:20
• 2 Rush: 3 Etudes: No. 2, Slowly, Almost Lost 02:41
• 3 Rush: 3 Etudes: No. 3, With Drive 05:07
• Stephen Rush:
• 4 Rush: Dark Matters 04:49
• 6 Treatments:
• 5 Rush: 6 Treatments: No. 1, First Treatment 03:52
• 6 Rush: 6 Treatments: No. 2, Tilted Waltz 02:40
• 7 Rush: 6 Treatments: No. 3, Cloud Bowls 04:27
• 8 Rush: 6 Treatments: No. 4, River Teeth 03:05
• 9 Rush: 6 Treatments: No. 5, Homage to Ives 04:30
• 10 Rush: 6 Treatments: No. 6, Bolts 03:33
• Sonata for Carillon:
• 11 Rush: Sonata for Carillon: I. Momentum 05:00
• 12 Rush: Sonata for Carillon: II. Flux 04:05
• 13 Rush: Sonata for Carillon: III. Variations on "Holy Manna" 03:51
• Stephen Rush:
• 14 Rush: September Fanfares 06:22
• Total Runtime 56:22

Info for Dark Matters

Trailblazing a path for the carillon in the 21st Century, Tiffany Ng commands towers of bells that ring across great distances. On Dark Matters, Ng masterfully helms the carillon works of composer Stephen Rush. These works and Ng’s playing possess a kind of magical cacophony that is in equal parts powerful, intimate, and entrancing.

Since Stephen Rush’s debut carillon work Three Etudes reshaped the soundscape of carillon composition in 1987, he has steadily fashioned new campanological sounds in partnership with trailblazing carillonists like Margo Halsted and Neil Thornock. When Halsted premiered Six Treatments for Carillon in 2002, they launched a tradition of carillon with live electronics at the University of Michigan that flourishes to this day. In 2013, Dark Matters invited Rush to attend to time, space, and chance on a vast scale. Through the visceral experience of music, movement, and space, this piece leads into the unknown, questioning the origin of life, coincidence and inevitability, macro and micro, the stars and the elements, the instant and the eternal.

As an oeuvre, Rush’s carillon music is singular in style, compelling in its driving rhythmic effects, and pushes the technical boundaries of the instrument while remaining idiomatically true to it. Ng recorded this album in collaboration with Rush, Jason Corey, Roger Arnett, Jessica Glynn, and Matias Vilaplana.

A “virtuoso” (HKSNA) in command of a range of expression from “eerie sonance” (Diapason) to “jumpy athleticism” (Chicago Classical Review), Tiffany K. Ng, Ph.D., is assistant professor of music and university carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An energetic advocate of diversity in contemporary music, she has premiered or revived over sixty pieces by emerging and established composers from Augusta Read Thomas to Yvette Janine Jackson, pioneered models for interactive “crowdsourced” carillon performances and environmental-data-driven sound installations with Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, Ed Campion, Ken Goldberg, John Granzow, and Laura Steenberge, and through her composer collaborations significantly increased the American repertoire for carillon and electronics. She has performed solo concerts across Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America.

Tiffany Ng, carillon
September Fanfares ensemble:
Keenan Bakowski, trumpet
Zoe Cutler, trombone
Dominic Hayes, horn
Michael Stern, trumpet
Jacob Taitel, tuba
Tanner Tanyeri, percussion
Stephen Rush, conductor

Tiffany Ng
is an assistant professor of carillon and university carillonist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An energetic advocate of diversity in contemporary music, she has premiered or revived over sixty pieces by emerging and established composers from Augusta Read Thomas to Yvette Janine Jackson, pioneered models for interactive “crowdsourced” carillon performances and environmental-data-driven sound installations with Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe, Ed Campion, Ken Goldberg, John Granzow, and Laura Steenberge, and through her composer collaborations significantly increased the American repertoire for carillon and electronics. Her concert career has taken her to festivals in fifteen countries in Europe, Australia, Asia, and North America, including the 2018 University of Chicago Rockefeller Carillon New Music Festival, 2018 Canberra Carillon Festival, 2017 University of Michigan Bicentennial, 2015 UC Berkeley Campanile Centennial, 2014 Stanford CCRMA anniversary festival, the 23rd International Carillon Festival at Bok Tower Gardens, Florida, the 2014 International Carillon Festival Barcelona, and the 2008 Post-Congress Festival of the World Carillon Federation. She has taught master classes at Yale University, the Eastman School of Music, Wellesley College, the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Mayo Clinic. At U-M, she is a faculty affiliate of the Digital Studies Institute and the Center for World Performance Studies.

Ng’s previous positions include visiting professor of music history at St. Olaf College, associate carillonist at the University of California, Berkeley, and instructor of carillon at the University of Rochester. Her musicology dissertation, “The Heritage of the Future: Historical Keyboards, Technology, and Modernism,” explores the carillon and organ in terms of music technology, the Early Music movement, and the Cold War in America and the Netherlands, drawing on media studies, urban planning, legal history, and the history of military electronics to reevaluate the Organ Reform Movement and the postwar use of carillons as diplomatic and urban planning technologies.

Ng holds a licentiate diploma magna cum laude from the Royal Carillon School “Jef Denyn” where she studied with Geert D’hollander; a PhD from UC Berkeley where she studied with Richard Taruskin (musicology and new media); a master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music where she studied with William Porter (organ); and a bachelor’s degree from Yale University (English and music). She is former assistant director of the Women in Music Festival and the Contemporary Organ Music Festival in Rochester, New York; author of the multimedia catalog of the Municipal Carillon Museum of Mechelen, Belgium; and former curator of a special exhibit of bells at the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments.

Ng’s awards include the U-M Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, the Shirley Verrett Award for service to women of color in the arts, the Ronald Barnes Memorial Scholarship for Carillon Studies, the E. Power Biggs Fellowship of the Organ Historical Society, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center Fellowship, the Westfield Center for Early Keyboard Studies paper award, and the Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship.

Booklet for Dark Matters