Hot Springs Music Club to host presentation of ‘Shimmer’

The Hot Springs Music Club will present composer/pianist D. Riley Nicholson’s latest musical production, “Shimmer,” at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Grand Avenue United Methodist Church.

Tickets for the event can be purchased at the door for $5 for students or $10 for adults.

“Shimmer” was premiered by Nicholson at the Center for New Music in January alongside projected visuals created specifically for the event by artist Robby Gilson.

“Shimmer” is a 50-minute, five-movement work for piano and electronics. Just as a shimmering image is rendered from wavering perspectives, “Shimmer” reflects multiple viewpoints of a musical idea, a shaking tremolo of fitful aural light. Nicholson worked closely with sound artist Zach Miley to sculpt and create an interface suitable for live electro-acoustic performance.

To shimmer is to flicker and allow the complexity of a beautiful light to evolve; to open up the possibility of something viewed from multiple perspectives simultaneously. There’s some beautiful distortion or distance between where an object is and where its image is. “Shimmer” reflects these ideas as repetitive tremors of oscillating, mesmerizing, musical glare. From a different angle, Nicholson explores “Shimmer” as a highly personal verb. We are remembered by how we reflected the light around us. We don’t create our light, but we do choose to spread and magnify it in a myriad of directions, choosing what to reflect, to absorb, to emit, and to deflect.

Nicholson and Miley crafted a platform for live performance to mix the acoustic piano with pre-recorded playback, textural ambient samples, and live manipulation effects. Gilson utilizes three sets of visual projections, reflecting the musical manipulation processes in the work. These projections act as a backdrop to the onstage performance and add visual ambience to the sides of the hall.

Until March 30 Nicholson will tour “Shimmer” across the U.S., pairing the work with other pianists and electro-acoustic musicians. Tour venues include MISE_EN-PLACE in New York City, An Die Musik in Baltimore, Grand Avenue United Methodist Church in Hot Springs and Narloch Piano Studio in Chicago.

Nicholson has composed for a wide range of ensembles and performance venues including music for contemporary ballet, theater, orchestral music, wind band, chamber music, vocal music, and electronic music. Riley feels comfortable writing for electric guitar one day and string orchestra the next; his music can be described as metaphorically rich, innovative, and modern, but never inaccessible or overly esoteric, a news release said.

Fascinated and committed to working with artists outside of music as well as within, collaborations include original music for Hot Air Music Festival, Post:Ballet, Switchboard Music, Ballet Memphis’s Cecily Khuner, Three Penny Theater, Cello Street Quartet, Amaranth Quartet, SFCM New Music ensemble, Balmoral Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Roar, San Francisco Conservatory of Music Percussion Ensemble, University of Memphis Percussion Ensemble and many other talented artists and organizations.

Riley has a M.M. in Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, a B.M. in percussion performance, a B.A. in psychology from the University of Memphis, and graduated from Lake Hamilton High School in 2009. He is the son of Vivian and Charles Nicholson of Pearcy.