[reviews & mentions]

Highlights for me include inti figgis-vizueta’s the motion between three worlds, a rhythmic piece reflecting the composer’s Andean and Irish roots, Vijay Iyer’s reflective Equal night which includes an occasional nod to Bach’s iconic cello suites, the dramatic  by Roberto Sierra and Lisa Bielawa’s otherworldly Missa Primavera...

​- the Whole Note
For figgis-vizueta, the creation of active creative space for living, breathing communities of composers might be even more important than repairing a long-broken history.

“We have a really rich community practicing right now,” says the composer originally from Washington and now based in New York. “And a space like this is actually how some of that moves forward — outside of closed rooms and whisper networks.”

Representation and inclusion should be as much about amending the past as taking practical steps to shore up the future.

“The majority of my inbox is young people,” figgis-vizueta says. “They’re like, ‘Hey, I saw you do this thing, that’s so cool, I never thought this was possible.’ When you see different legacies and different lineages appearing and affirming themselves in spaces like this, that’s how people can start to see themselves there.”

​- The Washington Post
No one can keep up with the pace of contemporary composers and their works, but inti figgis-vizueta is someone you don't want to miss. A New York-based composer, inti is an innovator in the style of John Cage. Open work has three sections – knotted object//Trellis in bloom//lightening ache. A generous artist, she allowed us an on-camera peak at the graphic score. While it may look simpler than standard notation, it takes a talented group of musicians to make sense of a non-traditional score and bring it to life. Catchfire's performance was magical.
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- North Carolina Classical Voice
Originally from Washington and now based in New York City, figgis-vizueta, 27, knocked my comfiest socks off during the quarantine with “Music for Transitions,” a raw, scraping yet soaring solo piece commissioned and premiered by cellist Andrew Yee. Since then, I’ve been hooked: The Julius Eastman-inspired “Openwork, Knotted Object”; the haunting “No Words” for clarinet and electronics; the “reaching sap-slow toward sky” thriller of “Placemaking” — her music feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn. Coming in 2021 are commissions for the JACK quartet and North Carolina-based ensemble earspace.

​- the Washington Post
Form the Fabric, an ensemble work by composer inti figgis-vizueta, can be played with any number of musicians on any type of instrument. The score provides lots of gestures, with some indications of harmony, leaving the interpretation up to the performing musicians. No two performances of Form the Fabric are alike, forming a new “fabric” with each performance. According to figgis-vizueta, the phrase “Form the Fabric” derives from archaeologist Ramiro Mato’s description of the cosmological understandings of the Incan & Andean peoples. Mato describes the Inca Road as “threads interwoven to form the fabric of the physical and spiritual world,” and figgis-vizueta conjures an auditory representation of the connectivity between the physical and non-physical.

One unexpected debut also took place: clarinetist Sophie Huet’s pet cat softly mewled throughout the piece. However, technical glitches punctured the magic of the performance, interrupting several truly magnificent swells that lost impact when the sound cut out. Despite the technical issues, the reverberations of each instrumentalist’s interpretation sang off each other in an ethereal glow.
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[Editor’s note: Ninth Planet has since released a glitch-free recording of Form the Fabric, which can be viewed on their YouTube channel] - I Care If You Listen
Alone Together is a marvel for a time of crisis. Ms. Koh gathered 20 established composers to donate short new works for solo violin and recommend 20 emerging composers to be commissioned as well. The roster is more inclusive than anything in mainstream classical music.
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After the Bach, which was intensely felt but unpretentious, 18 pieces of Alone Together bled into one another as Ms. Koh played through them without pause. Some moments did stand out: the alternately smooth and serrated melodies of Inti Figgis-Vizueta’s “Quiet City”; the bouncing wonder of Angélica Negrón’s “Cooper and Emma”; the modest comfort of Cassie Wieland’s “Shiner.”
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- The New York Times
inti figgis-vizueta presented the world premiere of three short pieces. Openwork, knotted object introduces quietly focused interlocking rhythmic patterns that weave in and out of each other as they breathe together. The enveloping world evokes a sense of translucence, which slowly rotates until all facets of the space are visible. Conducting the module-based piece, Lidiya Yankovskya allowed the instrumentalists to dictate when things moved forward, sometimes slowly rotating her hands but remaining largely in the background.
The second short piece, Trellis in bloom, evokes the contrast between wood structure and floral growth; the last, lightning ache,described as a “collage of gestures, sounds, and transformations,” continued in this modular fashion, yet without any pause between the three, it became hard to decipher where we were. As indicated in their interview with Nico Muhly, inti fashions musical scores that seem to be works of art themselves. I couldn’t help but wonder what the immersive experience would have been like, had the scores been projected for us to view in real time as the pieces unfolded.

​- The National Sawdust Log
Form [the] Fabric by New York-based composer inti figgis-vizueta is an exploration of collective improvisation where the musicians are provided with flexible lead-sheets. The composer herself conducted this performance which opened with beautiful sustained tones that swelled into a tumultuous ball of loud noise. The piece passed through several more textures, all quite different, but the impressive thing was the smoothness with which these transitions were conducted.

- The Journal of Music
Says 2019 [Hildegard Competition] winner inti figgis-vizueta, “When people acknowledge and engage with every part of complex identities, artists can create authentic work.” For figgis-vizueta, the competition win allowed them to “commit a large amount of time to the development and expansion of my practice of overlapping notional and structural schema. Beyond money, however, the most valuable part of this competition was mentorship from people [specifically, Gavin Rayna Russom and Du Yun] who shared more of my lived experiences than any other teachers I’d found in traditional spaces.”​

​- 21CM
[older mentions, click for link]

In Review - Starshine & Clay by Brin Solomon

A Trans Composers Playlist by Alex Temple