ACO will hold its 27th Annual Underwood New Music Readings for emerging composers on Thursday and Friday, June 21 and 22, 2018. Six composers have been selected by open call to participate including Carlos Bandera, Lily Chen, Scott Lee, Ryan Lindveit, Tomas Peire Serrate, and Liliya Ugay. Each composer will hear ACO perform their work live for the first time, receive personalized mentorship, and an archival recording. Two composers will receive a commission for a work to be performed by ACO in an upcoming season: one will be selected by the panel of mentor composers and one will be selected as the Audience Favorite through an audience survey.
The Readings are open to the public for a nominal admission price. The first day of Readings, a working rehearsal, will be presented on Thursday, June 21at 10:30am; the second day of Readings will take place on Friday,June 22 at 7:30pm, during which all selected pieces will be polished and performed in their entirety, led by ACO’s Music Director George Manahan. ACO’s Artistic Director Derek Bermel directs the readings. Composers looking to build their entrepreneurial skills are invited to attend the Career Development Seminar on Friday, June 22 from 10:00am – 3:00pm.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
About Carlos Bandera
Carlos Bandera is a composer who is fascinated by musical architecture and by the music of the past. His recent music explores these fascinations, often by placing a musical quotation, be it a phrase, scale, or sonority, within dense microtonal textures.
Carlos’s music has been performed in the Faroe Islands, Scotland, Uzbekistan, China, and several spaces in the US, including Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall. In 2016, he organized and participated in a workshop between Peabody composers and the Uzbekistan-based contemporary music ensemble, Omnibus Ensemble. In the summer of 2015, Carlos attended the Fresh Inc Music Festival, where he worked with the Fifth-House Ensemble and studied composition with Dan Visconti. He also attended the 2015 Wintergreen Summer Music Academy. There he studied with Daron Hagen and Gylda Lyons and had his Florestan premiered by members of the Wintergreen Festival Orchestra.
In 2015 Carlos earned his Bachelor of Music degree in Music Theory and Composition from the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, where he studied with Elizabeth Brown, Dean Drummond, and Marcos Balter. Carlos recently received his Master of Music degree in Composition from The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he participated in masterclasses with Christopher Rouse and Georg Friedrich Haas and studied privately with Kevin Puts. Photo courtesy Carlos Bandera.
Work to be Read: Lux in Tenebris Upon first hearing the music of Anton Bruckner, I felt deeply connected to the composer and his work. His Eighth Symphony in particular, with its immense harmonic landscapes, devastating silences, and profound “darkness-to-light” narrative, continues to be one of my greatest influences – no doubt, in more ways than I am even aware of. Lux in Tenebris explores these elements of the Eighth Symphony by allowing Brucknerian light to pierce through a dense micropolyphonic fabric.
The work is constructed in three large sections: the first features the main theme of the first movement of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, the second focuses on harmonies that are built from the pitches of that theme, and the third section features a fragmented quotation of the last iteration of the theme (found in the coda of that same movement), which Bruckner described as “how it is when one is on his deathbed, and opposite hangs a clock, which, while his life comes to an end, beats on ever steadily: tick, tock, tick, tock.”
While Lux in Tenebris features quotations from only the first movement of the Eighth, it also features the C-major sonority from the coda of the Finale, which represents light in Bruckner’s darkness-to-light narrative. The title Lux in Tenebris is an allusion to this narrative and comes from “et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt” (John 1:5), meaning “and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”
Carlos’ Sound: Lux in Tenebris (Peabody Symphony Orchestra, Jisoo Kim conductor)
About Lily Chen
Lily Chen (b. 1985), born in Taiwan, is a composer exploring timbral materials with subtle theatrical potentials in both acoustic and electronic music, which shape evocative atmospheres that point towards poetic commentary on her observations on literary, emotional, or social aspects of the contemporary condition. In December 2017, she received her Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied with Ken Ueno, Franck Bedrossian, Edmund Campion, and Cindy Cox. She also holds M.M. (2009) and B.F.A. (2007) from Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan, under the instruction of Chung-Kun Hung. Since 2005, Lily has received several prizes, including the George Ladd Prix de Paris for one research year in Paris, 1st Prize of Asian Composers League Young Composers Award, 2nd Prize of National Taiwan Orchestra Symphony Competition, winner of !BAMM! Student Composers Competition, 1st and 2nd Prizes of Nicola de Lorenzo Prize in Music Composition. Her music has also been performed at several international festivals in United States and Asia, including June in Buffalo, Mise-en Festival, International Computer Music Conference, SEAMUS, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and Asian Composers League Conference and Festival. Lily has also collaborated with several ensembles and orchestras, such as St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Eco Ensemble, Ensemble Signal, Mivos Quartet, Splinter Reeds, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Ensemble Mise-en, Ensemble Exceptet, Ensemble Cairn, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, and Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra. For more information, please visit – http://chenlily.com Photo by Lily Chen.
Work to be Read: A Leaf Falls After A Leaf Falls After is inspired by my recent memories of living in Europe. In the fall of 2015, I received the Ladd Prize funded by UC Berkeley and had the great opportunity to live in Paris for ten months. This was my first time in Paris as well as in Europe; I experienced intimate incidents of fragile beauty that touched me, but also shocking and terrifying ones during my residence there. I was impressed by the most clear and colorful fall I’d ever seen when autumn leaves fell to the ground, sizzling as if drizzling; I was terrified by the terrorist attack but also touched by the toughness of the Parisians that winter; on a visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, I was fascinated to hear twelve bells constantly ringing, intertwining together as a huge chaotic but illusory whirl; I was stunned when visiting the installation ‘Fallen Leaves’ at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, watching thousands of open mouthed steel metal faces on the ground create, when walked on, harshly grating sounds like the victims’ screams.
Inspired by mixed emotions and diverse sounds, this piece traces the journey of a leaf: a solitary leaf falling with loneliness as described in an e. e. cumming’s poem; a light leaf falling with other leaves in autumn; a heavy metal leaf fallen on the ground. However, no matter what vibrations it has undergone during its falling and fallen time, the leaf will eventually be reincarnated into a rising butterfly, flapping its wings to cause a tornado in spring until the next falling comes. Based on such images, I created a constantly flowing process of different kinds of vibrations along with air sounds to represent falling leaves, fallen leaves, and flaps of rising butterflies’ wings. Besides this, metallic sounds/noises either with pure resonances or with intense pressure make up another important element, which is associated with my memories of the ringing bells and the metal “fallen leaves.”
Lily’s Sound: Fusing Refusing Diffusing (Eco ensemble, conducted by David Milnes)
About Scott Lee
Composer Scott Lee writes concert music infused with the visceral sounds of popular music. Lee has worked with leading orchestras such as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Winston-Salem Symphony members, Symphony In C, and the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, chamber groups such as the Jack Quartet, yMusic, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Deviant Septet, chatterbird, and ShoutHouse, as well as multi-platinum pop artist Ben Folds. He has received commissions from the Aspen Music Festival, the Baltimore Classical Guitar Society, loadbang, the Raleigh Civic Symphony, and the American Craft Council.
Notable honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, winner of the Symphony In C Young Composer’s Composition, the grand prize in the PARMA Student Composer Competition, and the Gustav Klemm Award in Composition from the Peabody Institute. Lee has also received fellowships to attend the Tanglewood and Aspen Music Festivals.
As a James B. Duke Fellow, Lee recently earned a PhD in Composition at Duke University, mentored by Scott Lindroth and Steve Jaffe. He earned the Master of Music degree at the Peabody institute, where he was the recipient of the Philip D. Glass Endowed Scholarship in Composition and studied with Michael Hersch. He received his Bachelor of Music degree from the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, where he studied with Michael Rose, Michael Slayton, Stan Link, and Michael Kurek. Photo courtesy Scott Lee.
Work to be Read: Anadyr The name Anadyr refers both to a remote port town in Northeastern Russia and to the secret 1962 operation (“Operation Anadyr“) in which Soviets deployed missiles and supporting forces to Cuba, prompting the Cuban missile crisis. The mission involved a complex campaign of deception, and was shrouded in secrecy. The name “Anadyr” itself was chosen in order to suggest anything but a movement of Soviet troops and missiles to the Caribbean. Only five senior officers knew of the actual deployment location, and kept their plans handwritten; the loading of men and material onto the ships occurred under cover of darkness; false structures were built on the ships, placed alongside agricultural equipment, to hide their defenses. Disinformation was fed to associates of President Kennedy and to the Communist Party of Cuba while accurate information was given to the Cuban émigré community in Miami, Florida, since the Soviets knew that American intelligence services perceived them as unreliable. This work aims to evoke the deception and subterfuge that characterized this period in international dealings with Russia.
Scott’s Sound: Vicious Circles (Symphony in C, with Stillian Kirov conducting)
About Ryan Lindveit
An American composer of chamber, orchestral, vocal, choral, and electronic music, Ryan’s works have been performed across the United States and abroad by Alarm Will Sound, “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, Orkest de Ereprijs, the USC Thornton Symphony, numerous university wind ensembles, the Donald Sinta Quartet, FearNoMusic, and the City of Tomorrow, among others. His music has received recognition from BMI, ASCAP, SCI, the American Modern Ensemble, the National Band Association, Tribeca New Music, and the Texas Music Educators Association. Ryan grew up in Texas and is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where he was selected as Salutatorian for the class of 2016 and named the Thornton School of Music’s Outstanding Graduate. He is currently a master’s student at the Yale School of Music. His past teachers include Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Andrew Norman, Ted Hearne, Frank Ticheli, and Donald Crockett. Recent and upcoming projects include Mysterious Butterflies for chamber ensemble and eight voices, a wind ensemble version of Like an Altar with 9,000 Robot Attendants commissioned by a consortium of 30 university wind ensembles organized by conductor H. Robert Reynolds, a commission for the Big 12 Band Directors Association, and pieces for chamber ensemble and orchestra to be premiered at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 2018. Photo by Marije van den Berg.
Work to be Read: Like an Altar with 9,000 Robot Attendants Like an Altar with 9,000 Robot Attendants was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950). The futuristic story describes a computer-controlled house, in which robots perform a myriad of tasks such as cooking breakfast, cleaning house, and telling time. In Bradbury’s future, all humans have been destroyed by a nuclear bomb, and this house is the only building that still stands amidst the rubble. Nonetheless, the house’s robots remain dedicated to their duties, even in the absence of the house’s human occupants. As the author puts it, “…inside, the house was like an altar with nine thousand robot attendants, big and small, servicing, attending, singing in choirs, even though the gods had gone away and the ritual was meaningless.” Despite this tragedy, Bradbury’s futurist prose remains characteristically exuberant in describing these household robots—a tension which calls to mind the satirical ebullience of Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove. My piece lives in the same brazenly ecstatic spirit as Bradbury’s story and Kubrick’s film. Sometimes the only response to misfortune is a wild, full-teeth smile.
Ryan’s Sound: spiked(Alarm Will Sound)
About Tomàs Peire Serrate
Tomàs Peire Serrate was born in Barcelona. He studied piano at the Sant Cugat del Vallès conservatory, where he grew up, and History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. After few years performing and teaching he decided to focus on composition, first studying at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (Barcelona) with Salvador Brotons, and in 2009 at the Sibelius Academy of Helsinki (Finland) with Tapio Tuomela and Risto Väisänen. In 2011 he moved to New York with the La Caixa Fellowship to pursue a Master´s in Scoring for Film and Multimedia at the New York University, where he graduated in 2013 obtaining the Elmer Bernstein Award. That year he moved to Los Angeles to explore the film music industry and participate as a composer in different projects including writing the music for the films The Anushree Experiements and Prism, and orchestrating and arranging music for If I Stay, Minions or Love and Friendship.
In the fall of 2015, Tomàs initiated his PhD studies at UCLA, where he is having the privilege to study with Bruce Broughton, Richard Danielpour, Ian Krouse, Mark Carlson, Peter Golub and David S. Lefkowitz. His research at UCLA is about music, space and media, with particular interest in new technologies and virtual reality. His concert works have been performed in Europe, US and Asia, and is currently working on a short opera-monologue that will be premiered at the Off-Liceu series in Barcelona next June 2018. Photo courtesy Tomàs Peire Serrate.
Work to be Read: Rauxa Rauxa is a sudden determination, like the impulse I had to write this piece, or an outburst, which actually is how this work begins. It is a Catalan word that has been used in pair with another one, Seny, meaning balance and sensibleness, to describe or refer to the Catalan people and their character. This duality, like in other cultures and traditions, is essential, indivisible, and necessary to understand each part separately, which is what I tried to explore here.
I worked on sketches and sections of Rauxa in different moments and places, always away from my home country, Catalonia, and I kept coming back to it looking to improve it as well as to learn more about myself and about music.
Tomàs’ Sound: Toccata (for piano, premiered by José Menor)
About Liliya Ugay
Described as “particularly evocative,” “fluid and theatrical… the music [that] makes its case with immediacy” (The Arts Fuse) as well as both “assertive and steely,” and “lovely, subtle writing” (Wall Street Journal) the music by the award-winning composer and pianist Liliya Ugay has been performed in many countries around the globe. Recipient of a 2016 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2017 Horatio Parker Memorial prize from the Yale School of Music, Ugay has collaborated with the Nashville Symphony, Albany Symphony, New England Philharmonic, Yale Philharmonia, Raleigh Civic Symphony, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Molinari Quartet, Antico Moderno, Omnibus ensemble, and Paul Neubauer among others. Her music has been featured at the Aspen, American Composers, New York Electroacoustic Music, June in Buffalo, and Darmstadt New Music festivals, as well as the 52nd Venice Biennale. During 2017-2018 Ugay will be working on a new opera as a Resident Composer at the American Lyric Theater. Originally from Uzbekistan, Liliya is currently a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate at the Yale School of Music studying with Aaron Kernis and David Lang. Besides new music, Liliya is passionate about the music of the repressed composers from the Soviet era. She regularly presents a series of the lecture-recitals on this topic with guidance of Boris Berman. Photo by Dilya Khaliulina.
Work to be Read: Rhapsody in Color I chose the title Rhapsody in Color to evoke two musical associations: Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The piece bears a structure similar to Hungarian Rhapsodies with two main sections – slower one (lassan) and fast one (friska). Each section bears strong elements of improvisation: in particular, such aspects as a simple harmonic progression in variations and ostinato.
The idea of Rhapsody in Color is similar to the process of reproduction of old sepia photographs or films into color with individual, unrealistic to the time of the original, touch. Rather a simple, and, in a sense, traditional, motive and harmonic progression are taken through the contemporary lens by coloring it out with the sporadic and often unpredictable formal and orchestral realization. Similarly, in the second half of the piece, the idea of the ostinato dance is approached from modern perspective, transforming it into what sounds more like an electronic dance loop track with constantly adding/changing shades and timbral colors.
Liliya’s Sound: Sospiri (conductor is Peter Askim, and the orchestra is The Next Festival of Emerging Artists)
HITOMI OBA: September Coming (2016, World Premiere) ETHAN IVERSON: Concerto to Scale for piano and orchestra (2018, World Premiere, ACO Commission) STEVE LEHMAN: Ten Threshold Studies (2018, World Premiere, ACO Commission) T.J. ANDERSON: Bahia Bahia (1990, New York Premiere) CLARICE ASSAD: Dreamscapes for violin and chamber orchestra (2009, New York Premiere)
ACO’s April concert at Carnegie Hall, Dreamscapes, is a global celebration of musical dreams, fusing jazz, world, and classical music. It features the world premieres of The Bad Plus founding member Ethan Iverson’s first orchestral work, Concerto to Scale with the composer as the piano soloist, and Steve Lehman’s Ten Threshold Studies, both commissioned by ACO; and the New York premieres of Clarice Assad’s Dreamscapes featuring violinist Elena Urioste, TJ Anderson’s Bahia Bahia, and Hitomi Oba’s September Coming, which was first read at the Buffalo Philharmonic EarShot Readings led by ACO after Oba’s participation in ACO’s 2015 Jazz Composers Orchestra Initiative.
Ethan Iverson is best known as a founding member and pianist of The Bad Plus, a game-changing collective with bassist Reid Anderson and drummer David King. The New York Times describes the group as, “better than anyone at melding the sensibilities of post-60’s jazz and indie rock.” With The Bad Plus, Iverson has collaborated with Joshua Redman, Bill Frisell, and the Mark Morris Dance Group and created a faithful arrangement of Stravinky’s The Rite of Spring and a radical reinvention of Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction. In 2017, Iverson composed and arranged Pepperland for the Mark Morris Dance Group and curated a major centennial celebration of Thelonious Monk at Duke University. With Mark Morris Dance Group he played Robert Schumann’s chamber music with Yo-Yo Ma; for the release of The Rest is Noise he toured with Alex Ross and performed examples of 20th-century repertoire. Iverson describes his piano concerto for ACO, Concerto to Scale, as being of, “modest dimensions but of sincere intent.”
Clarice Assad is a Brazilian-American Grammy-nominated composer, pianist, vocalist, bandleader and educator. A versatile musician of depth and imagination, she has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Orquestra Sinfônica de São Paulo, the Albany Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the New Century Chamber Orchestra, the BRAVO! Vail Music Festival and the La Jolla Music Festival, among others. Her works have been recorded by some of the most prominent names and groups in classical music today, including Yo-Yo Ma, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Eugenia Zuckerman, Chanticleer and Liang Wang. Assad is a founding member of the Chicago-based music and poetry publishing company Virtual Artists Collective and VOXPloration, an award-winning research based outreach program and workshop for children and adolescents on spontaneous music creation, composition, and improvisation. Her piece Dreamscapes for violin and chamber orchestra is based loosely on Assad’s research on the subject of rapid eye movement (REM) and lucid dreaming. The piece follows a storyline based on notes Assad made about her own dreams, and depicts her struggle to have a pleasant dreaming experience against the strong subconscious draw of negativity.
TJ Anderson was born in 1928 in Coatesville, Pennsylvania and received degrees from West Virginia State College, Penn State University, and a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of Iowa. He also holds several honorary degrees. He now lives in Atlanta, Georgia where he is devoted full time to writing music. He studied composition with George Ceiga, Philip Bezanson, Richard Hervig, and Darius Milhaud. Anderson is well known for his orchestration of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, which premiered in Atlanta in 1972. His first opera, Soldier Boy, Soldier, is based on a libretto by Leon Forrest, and was commissioned by Indiana University. His opera Walker was commissioned by the Boston Athenaeum with a libretto by Derek Walcott and his opera Slip Knot is based on a historical paper by T.H. Breen with libretto by Yusef Komunyakaa. Anderson has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Arts, the Djerassi Foundation, the National Humanities Center (their first composer), and a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Center for the Creative Arts, Bellagio, Italy. Other honors include an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Rockefeller Center Foundation grant. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005. His piece Bahia Bahia was written in 1990 as part of his Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and is dedicated to the Brazilian composers Alda and Jamary Oliveira. It represents impressions of popular music Anderson heard on two visits to Brazil in 1976 and 1988, and was premiered in 1998 by the North Carolina Symphony. ACO presents its New York premiere.
Described as “one of the transforming figures of early 21st century jazz,” by The Guardian and as a “creator of intricately detailed contemporary classical works,” by The New York Times, Steve Lehman is a composer, performer, educator, and scholar who works across a broad spectrum of experimental musical idioms. Lehman’s music has been performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), So Percussion, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, the JACK Quartet, the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Talea Ensemble, and by the pianist Marilyn Nonken. His recording Mise en Abîme was chosen as the No. 1 Jazz Album of 2014 by NPR Music and The Los Angeles Times. The recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Award, Lehman is an alto saxophonist who has performed and recorded nationally and internationally with his own ensembles and with those led by Anthony Braxton, Vijay Iyer, George Lewis, Jason Moran, Georgia-Anne Muldrow, Meshell Ndegeocello, and High Priest of Anti-Pop Consortium, among many others. He describes his new piece for ACO, Ten Threshold Studies, as, “making use of elastic rhythms and shadowy spectral harmonies to explore the nature of hearing and perception in modern day music.”
Saxophonist and composer Hitomi Oba completed her master’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in Music Composition after receiving her bachelor’s degree in Ethnomusicology/Jazz Studies. Her projects include a sixteen-piece jazz orchestra called Jazz Nexus and an electro-acoustic pop duo, Nova. Her second jazz album, Negai, received a prestigious Swing Journal 42nd Annual Jazz Disc Award. Her commissions include works for the Los Angeles Asian American Jazz Festival, Kenny Burrell’s Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra Unlimited, the Jon Jangtet, and the Indian classical/jazz collaborative Aditya Prakash Ensemble. Oba is one of the co-founders of the new music collective LA Signal Lab, premiering and recording stylistically diverse new music with a focus on integrating improvised and pre-composed music. She teaches jazz saxophone and music theory at UCLA. Her piece, September Coming, explores ways to express the momentum and gestures of improvisational language through the orchestra, using orchestration to further enhance the spirit of improvised material. The concepts explored in the piece were inspired by the workshops, discussions, and music from the 2015 ACO Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Intensive. The first version of September Coming was read at the 2016 Buffalo Philharmonic Readings, conducted by Stefan Sanders, made possible by ACO and Earshot.
American Composers Orchestra’s 2018-2019 Concerts at Carnegie Hall featuring major premieres by
2017 Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun
Imani Winds’ Valerie Coleman
Exploring the Syrian Refugee Crisis and Iconic 21st Century Women
Friday, November 2, 2018, at7:30pm
Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall | 57th St. and 7th Ave., NYC
Tickets & Information: www.carnegiehall.org
Subscriptions now available. Single tickets available August 20, 2018.
George Manahan, music director and conductor
Imani Winds (Valerie Coleman, flute; Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboe; Mark Dover, clarinet; Jeff Scott, horn; Monica Ellis, bassoon)
Meaghan Burke, voice
Amber Treadway, director
Storm Garner, costume designer
VALERIE COLEMAN: Phenomenal Women Concerto for Wind Quintet and Orchestra (World Premiere, co-commissioned by ACO and Carnegie Hall) JOAN TOWER: Chamber Dance (2006) ALEX TEMPLE: Three Principles of Noir (World Premiere, commissioned by ACO)
ACO’s concert at Zankel Hall on November 2, 2018, features the world premiere of Valerie Coleman‘s Phenomenal Women, inspired by Maya Angelou’s poem and book, Phenomenal Woman. The concerto for wind quintet and orchestra will be performed by the Imani Winds with ACO, with each member featured in a solo interlude influenced by a different phenomenal woman – activist Malala Yousefai (oboe serenade), Brazilian Olympic Gold medalist Rafaela Silva (clarinet in choro style), athlete Serena Williams (bassoon virtuoso cadenza), Michelle Obama (flute with urban/jazz elements) and Hillary Clinton (horn fanfare). The concert also features the world premiere of Alex Temple‘s Three Principles of Noir, a piece with a time-traveling science fiction narrative centered around a Chicago historian who travels back in time to the 1893 World’s Fair. Joan Tower‘s Chamber Dance, written in 2006 for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, completes the program.
Thursday, April 11, 2019, at 7:30pm
Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall | 57th St. and 7th Ave., NYC
Tickets & Information: www.carnegiehall.org
Subscriptions now available. Single tickets available August 20, 2018.
George Manahan, music director and conductor
Helga Davis, vocalist
Ali Sethi, vocalist
Shayna Dunkelman, percussion
Khaled Jarrar, videographer
MORTON FELDMAN: Turfan Fragments (1980) GLORIA COATES: Symphony No. 1, “Music on Open Strings” (1973) DU YUN: Where We Lost Our Shadows (N.Y. Premiere, co-commissioned by ACO, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Southbank Centre, and Cal Performances)
On April 11, 2019, at Zankel Hall, ACO will give the N.Y. premiere of Du Yun‘s Where We Lost Our Shadows, a new multidisciplinary work for orchestra, film, and vocalists, co-commissioned by ACO, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Southbank Centre, and Cal Performances. Du Yun is composing Where We Lost Our Shadows in response to film captured by Ramallah-based Palestinian visual artist Khaled Jarrar, which documents the refugee crisis in Europe. The piece will be performed by ACO with singer Helga Davis, Pakistani Qawwali singer Ali Sethi, and percussionist Shayna Dunkelman, with visuals by Jarrar. The concert also includes Gloria Coates‘ Symphony No. 1, “Music on Open Strings,” from 1973, and Morton Feldman‘s 1980 work Turfan Fragments, inspired by a series of fragments of knotted carpets from the third and sixth centuries which were discovered in the Silk Road region.
About Valerie Coleman
Described as one of the “Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music” by critic Anne Midgette of The Washington Post, Valerie Coleman is among the world’s most played composers living today. The Boston Globe describes Coleman as a having a “talent for delineating form and emotion with shifts between ingeniously varied instrumental combinations,” and The New York Times has praised her “skillfully wrought, buoyant music.” With works that range from flute sonatas that recount the stories of trafficked humans during Middle Passage and orchestral and chamber works based on nomadic Roma tribes, to scherzos about moonshine in the Mississippi Delta region and motifs based from Morse Code, her body of works has been highly regarded as a deeply relevant contribution to modern music. Coleman is the founder, composer, and flutist of the Grammy-nominated Imani Winds, one of the world’s premier chamber music ensembles. She is perhaps best known for UMOJA, a composition that is widely recognized and was listed by Chamber Music America one of the “Top 101 Great American Ensemble Works.” Coleman is regularly featured as a performer and composer at many of the world’s great concert venues, series and conservatories: Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Hall, DaCamera Houston, Boston Celebrity Series, Krannert Center, Wigmore Hall, Montreal Jazz Festival, North Sea Jazz Festival, Paris Jazz Festival, The Juilliard School, The Eastman School, Curtis, Peabody, Mannes, The Colburn School, and more. She has received awards and/or honors from the National Flute Association, The Herb Alpert Awards, MAPFUND, ASCAP Concert Music Awards, NARAS, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund, Artists International, Wombwell Kentucky Award, and Michelle E. Sahm Memorial Award, to name a few. Her works are published by Theodore Presser, International Opus, and her own company, V Coleman Music, and can be heard on Cedille Records, BMG France, Sony Classics, eOne (formerly Koch International Classics), and Naxos.
Valerie Coleman’s piece for ACO, Phenomenal Women, is a concerto for wind quintet and chamber orchestra, to be premiered by ACO with the Imani Winds, and is inspired by Maya Angelou’s poem and book Phenomenal Woman. The multi-movement work travels through varied sound worlds including atonality, urban, classical, Brazilian choro, bebop, swing and Afro-Cuban jazz. Coleman says of the new work, “Musical motifs will be extracted from Angelou’s sensuous and peppery verses. Each movement will carry emboldened harmonies and improvisational-stylized riffs from the soloists, evolving into virtuoso exchanges between forces. Phenomenal Women is about celebrating women’s efforts to overcome adversity, no matter where you are.”
Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. During a career spanning more than 50 years, she has made lasting contributions to musical life in the United States as composer, performer, conductor, and educator. Her works have been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, including the Emerson, Tokyo, and Muir quartets; soloists Evelyn Glennie, Carol Wincenc, David Shifrin, and John Browning; and the orchestras of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., among others. In 1990, Tower became the first woman to win the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Silver Ladders. She was the first composer chosen for a Ford Made in America consortium commission of sixty-five orchestras. The Nashville Symphony and conductor Leonard Slatkin recorded that work, Made in America, with Tambor and Concerto for Orchestra, for the Naxos label. The top-selling recording won three 2008 Grammy awards: Best Contemporary Classical Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best Orchestral Performance. Nashville’s latest all-Tower recording includes Stroke, which received a 2016 Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Tower’s tremendously popular five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman have been played by over 500 different ensembles. She is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972. Joan Tower’s music is published by Associated Music Publishers.
Tower describers her Chamber Dance, written for Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, as chamber music. She writes in her note for the work, “It is chamber music in the sense that I always thought of Orpheus as a large chamber group, interacting and ‘dancing’ with one another the way smaller chamber groups do. Like dancers, the members of this large group have to be very much in touch with what everyone else is doing, and allow for changing leadership to guide the smaller and bigger ensembles.”
As someone who loves both the Western classical tradition and the world of pop culture, Alex Temple has always felt uncomfortable with stylistic hierarchies and the idea of a pure musical language. She prefers to look for points of connection between things that are not supposed to belong together, distorting and combining iconic sounds to create new meanings – often in service of surreal, cryptic, or fantastical stories. She is particularly interested in reclaiming socially disapproved-of (“cheesy”) sounds, playing with the boundary between funny and frightening, and investigating lost memories and secret histories. Temple’s work has been performed by a variety of soloists and ensembles, including Mellissa Hughes, Timo Andres, Mark Dancigers, American Composers Orchestra, Chicago Composers Orchestra, Spektral Quartet, Fifth House Ensemble, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, and Ensemble de Sade.
Temple received her B.A. from Yale University in 2005, where she studied with Kathryn Alexander, John Halle and Matthew Suttor, and released two albums of electronic music on a micro-label that she ran out of her dorm room. In 2007, she completed her M.A. at University of Michigan, where she studied with Erik Santos and visiting professors Michael Colgrass, Tania León and Betsy Jolas, as well as collaborating with a troupe of dancers and playing in an indie bossa-nova band. She recently completed a DMA at Northwestern University, where she studied with Hans Thomalla and Jay Alan Yim.
Alex Temple’s new work for ACO, Three Principles of Noir, explores a narrative that tells the story of a time-traveling Chicago historian. The piece delves into the universal themes of morality, motivation, and the consequences of one’s intentions – whether or not action is taken. Temple outlines the “three principles of noir” in her note for the new work: “1. It doesn’t matter how well you plan it. You won’t get away with it. / 2. It doesn’t matter whether you did it or not. You won’t get away with it. / 3. It doesn’t matter whether you did it or not. You’re a bad person anyway.”
Morton Feldman was born in New York in 1926 and died there in 1987. Just like Cage, a close friend, he was an American composer – an American artist – an American in the true sense of the word. Feldman identified himself by differentiating his views on composition from those of his colleagues in Europe. He was proud to be an American because he was convinced that it enabled him the freedom, unparalleled in Europe, to work unfettered by tradition. And, he was an American also in what may have been a slight inferiority complex in the face of cultural traditions in Europe, something he proudly rejected and secretly admired. Like any true artist, Feldman was endowed with a sensitivity for impressions of a wide variety of sources, literature and painting in particular. His affinity to Samuel Beckett has enriched music literature by a unique music theatre piece, Neither, and two ensemble works. His friendship with abstract impressionist painters gave birth to a range of masterpieces, Rothko Chapel in particular.
But even the knotting of oriental rugs gave Feldman musical ideas, exemplified in the work ACO will perform, Turfan Fragments. A series of archaeological expeditions to East Turkestan, conducted by Sir Aurel Stein in the early part of the 20th century, unearthed several fragments of knotted carpets dating from the third and sixth centuries. Feldman writes, “Though these fragments were too small to indicate either its design or provenance, they did convey a long tradition of carpet weaving. This is to a large degree the extended metaphor of my composition: not the suggestion of an actual completed work of ‘art,’ but the history in Western music of putting sounds and instruments together.”
An American composer who has made her career for the most part in Germany, Gloria Coates was born in Wisconsin in 1938. From rural Wisconsin, she headed to New York City to attend Columbia University for undergraduate studies in music; she then earned a master’s degree from the University of Louisiana in 1965. She returned to Columbia for post-graduate work, studying under American composer icons Jack Beeson and Otto Luening, and then moved to Salzburg to take lessons from Alexander Tcherepnin at the Mozarteum there. She established a second residency in Munich in 1969. Coates has been instrumental in bringing American concert music to Germany; the reverse has been far more common over the centuries and Coates is among those who feel it is time to return the favor. She organized and developed the German-American Contemporary Music Series concerts in Munich in the early 1970s and, as an influential member of the International League of Women Composers, has helped bring American women composers in particular to a wider European audience.
Coates has written sixteen full-scale symphonies, eleven string quartets, several orchestral works, and a number of song cycles. The 1978 premiere in Warsaw of her Symphony No. 1, “Music for Open Strings” brought her acclaim; the work was among the finalists for the 1986 International Koussevitsky Award. Symphony No. 1 “Music for Open Strings,” was written in 1973 and is scored for a string orchestra playing entirely on retuned open strings. The work opens with the strings tuned to a minor pentatonic scale (B flat, C, D flat, F, G flat), which are returned to their normal tuning movement by movement.
Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China, currently based in New York, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, and curator, working at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, pop music, oral tradition, visual arts, electronics and noise. Hailed by The New York Times as a leading figure in China’s new generation of composers and often cited as a key activist in New York’s “new movement in new music,” she was selected by the National Public Radio as one of the 100 composers under 40. Known as chameleonic in her protean artistic outputs, her music is championed by some of today’s finest performing artists, ensembles, orchestras and organizations. In addition, Du Yun has also made works in the art world, including the 4th Guangzhou Art Triennial, Sharjah Biennial (UAE), Auckland Triennial, and Istanbul Biennial. Du Yun is on the composition faculty at SUNY-Purchase. She was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and currently she serves as the Artistic Director of MATA, a pioneering organization dedicated to commissioning and championing young composers from around the world. In 2017, Du Yun was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera Angel’s Bone.
In the 2018-19 season, ACO will work with Du Yun as she creates a new orchestral work titled Where We Lost Our Shadows, in response to film captured by Khaled Jarrar, which documents the refugee crisis in Europe. The work is being co-commissioned by ACO, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Southbank Centre, and Cal Performances. Du Yun writes, “At the heart of this project lies the footage that Khaled documented following a Syrian family migrating across the Aegean sea (the mother of the family was a Palestinian refugee, who first sought refuge in Syria when she was an eight-year-old girl herself). The concerto-orchestral work, while showing only some of the footage, will mostly focus on the perpetual movement of human procession and migration, and the question of Exodus. The musical language is to take the Qawwali of Raga Aiman Kalyan (a type of devotional music) and explore its provenance (13th century Muslim India, according to legend); its subsequent migration through space and time (Central Asia, Bengal, the global South Asian diaspora); and its migration through genres, forms, techniques. The text for the work is from the poem Vehicles In The Dark, by the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan. The work, to some degree, explores both cold hard reality and transcending unifying moments. As the piece progresses, the narrative, music and video will shift away from depicting reality as it is, to exploring symbolic, poetic, and allegorical depictions of the central themes of migration and exodus.”
Special project support for Valerie Coleman’s Phenomenal Women is provided by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Special project support for Alex Temple’s Three Principles of Noir is provided by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation and the MAP Fund supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Special project support for Du Yun’s Where We Lost Our Shadows is provided by Morgan Stanley and the Howard and Sarah D. Solomon Foundation.
Photo: ACO at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, December 2017. Photo credit: Jennifer Taylor
American Composers Orchestra Derek Bermel, Artistic Director & George Manahan, Music Director
Performs in the New York premiere of Fellow Travelersby composer Gregory Spears & librettist Greg Pierce
Co-presented with PROTOTYPE Festival and John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Fri., Jan. 12, 2018 at 8pm | Sat., Jan. 13, 2018 at 2pm & 8pm | Sun., Jan. 14, 2018 at 2pm Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice | 524 W. 59th Street | NYC Tickets: $30-$75 at 212.352.3101 or www.prototypefestival.org
American Composers Orchestra (ACO) continues its 2017-2018 season, Dreamscapes, under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel, Music Director George Manahan, and President Edward Yim, with New York premiere performances of Fellow Travelers as part of the PROTOTYPE Festival from Friday, January 12, 2018 through Sunday, January 14, 2018 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Gerald W. Lynch Theater. Based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel and directed by Kevin Newbury, composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers is an extraordinary personal journey through the intriguing, gut-wrenching world of the McCarthy era 1950s American witch-hunts, and the often overlooked “Lavender Scare.”
“We’re so excited to work again with Greg Spears. Several years ago, ACO read, performed, and recorded his hypnotizing orchestral work Finishing, which among other devices employs dog-whistles and microcassette tapes,” said ACO Artistic Director Derek Bermel. “We all became instant Spears fans, and the enthusiasm has not waned with time. I’m personally thrilled that ACO will perform the New York premiere of Fellow Travelers; Greg’s lush and dramatic score is a powerful vessel for communicating this moving story. To be collaborating with PROTOTYPE and John Jay College of Criminal Justice supports our belief in collaborating with like-minded partners to produce important work.”
About Fellow Travelers
At the height of the McCarthy era in 1950s Washington, D.C., recent college grad Timothy Laughlin is eager to join the crusade against Communism. A chance encounter with handsome State Department official Hawkins Fuller leads to Tim’s first job, an illicit love affair with a man, and an entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal. This acclaimed Cincinnati Opera productionpairs American Minimalism with Medieval troubadour melodies, reflecting the tension between two men’s professional, public lives and their private, forbidden longings.
“Opera thrives on stories with rich subtext, where characters cannot fully express themselves in words,” states Spears. “Both politicians and gay men and women in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s lived in a world full of coded sensibility – a culture operating under the surface and in counterpoint with the rigid formality of 1950s mores. In both the fraught political world of the McCarthy Era and the private world of Hawk and Tim, dialogue could only tell part of the story. My goal was to craft a musical language for Fellow Travelers that would foreground the undercurrent of clandestine machinations and forbidden longing churning under the surface of Greg Pierce’s elegant adaptation. My hope is that the nuanced machinery of opera might play some small part reminding us of this history, while also preserving in music the sensibility of doubleness that so often defined gay experience in this era.” Photo: Philip Groshong
Gregory Spears (Composer) music work has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe). In recent seasons, he has been commissioned by The Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Cincinnati Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seraphic Fire, The Crossing, and the JACK Quartet among others. Spears’ Fellow Travelers was written with playwright Greg Pierce and premiered in 2016 at Cincinnati Opera in a ten-performance run. It was hailed as “one of the most accomplished new operas I have seen in recent years” (Chicago Tribune) and an opera that “seems assured of lasting appeal” (The New York Times). The premiere of Fellow Travelers was also included in The New York Times’ Best in Classical Music for 2016. Spears’ children’s opera Jason and the Argonauts, written with Kathryn Walat, also premiered in the summer of 2016 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and was subsequently performed on tour the following fall. His opera about space exploration, O Columbia, was written in collaboration with Royce Vavrek and premiered in 2015 at Houston Grand Opera. Spears and Walat’s first opera, Paul’s Case, was described as a “masterpiece” (New York Observer) and was developed by American Opera Projects. It was premiered by Urban Arias in 2013, restaged at the PROTOTYPE Festival in 2014, and presented in a new production by Pittsburgh Opera. Spears has won prizes from BMI and ASCAP as well as awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Vagn Holmboe Competition. His music is published by Schott Music and Schott PSNY.
Greg Pierce(Librettist) grew up in Shelburne, Vermont. His play Slowgirl was the inaugural play of Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater (LCT3). It was subsequently produced by Steppenwolf Theatre and the Geffen Playhouse, among others. His play Her Requiem, a Lincoln Center Theater commission, was also produced by LCT3. The Landing, a musical written with composer John Kander, premiered at the Vineyard Theatre in NYC. His second musical with Kander, Kid Victory, was co-produced by Signature Theatre in Virginia and the Vineyard Theatre. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, co-written with director Stephen Earnhart, based on the novel by Haruki Murakami, premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival, and went on to play the Singapore Arts Festival. The Quarry, with music by Pierce’s brother Randal Pierce was commissioned and produced by Vermont Stage Company. Pierce has received fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Yaddo, The Djerassi Institute, the New York Public Library, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. He currently holds commissions from Second Stage Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club/Sloan Foundation. His work has been developed with Naked Angels, The New Group, Atlantic Theatre Company, Asia Society, the Rattlestick Theater, and the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival. He recently wrote a film for Lionsgate. He has a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the WGA.
Kevin Newbury (Director) is a theatre, opera, and film director based in New York City. Newbury has directed over sixty original productions and his work has been presented by many opera companies, festivals, and symphonies including the Park Avenue Armory, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, The Santa Fe Opera, Barcelona Liceu, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Minnesota Opera, The San Francisco Symphony, L’Opera de Montreal, The Prototype Festival, Urban Arias (DC), Bard Summerscape, Portland Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Philadelphia Orchestra, Seattle Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Cincinnati Opera, The Virginia Arts Festival, and The Wexford Festival in Ireland, among many others. Kevin is especially committed to developing and directing new work. He has directed over two dozen world premiere operas and plays, many of which were subsequently published or recorded. Recent world premiere highlights include Bates/Campbell’s The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs (Santa Fe Opera), Spears/Pierce’s Fellow Travelers (Cincinnati Opera, New York Times Best of 2016), Todd Almond’s Kansas City Choir Boy (starring Courtney Love, PROTOTYPE/NYC and Boston, LA and Miami), Puts/ Campbell’s The Manchurian Candidate and Cuomo/Shanley’s Doubt (Minnesota Opera), and Lopez/Cruz’s Bel Canto (Lyric Opera of Chicago, broadcast on PBS’ Great Performances and recently nominated for the 2016 International Opera Awards: Best World Premiere). Newbury’s first two short films, Monsura Is Waiting and Stag, have screened at a total of forty film festivals and have each won festival awards. Both of his films are now available online. His third short, Epiphany V, a classical music video, will be released in mid 2017. Other upcoming projects include Fairouz/Hanif’s Bhutto (Pittsburgh Opera and Beth Morrison Projects) and Fellow Travelers (Lyric Opera of Chicago).
Sterling Zinsmeyer (Executive Producer and Co-Commissioner) conceived the idea, commissioned, and developed Fellow Travelers into a chamber opera. He spent most of his career in New York City, early on working in classical arts management with Sol Hurok and theater production with producer Saint Subber. This career was interrupted by the AIDS epidemic, in which Zinsmeyer spent twenty years as a leader in developing special needs residences for persons living with HIV/AIDS. Ten years ago, Zinsmeyer resumed his arts career by developing independent films, serving as Executive Producer on the award-winning film Latter Days; other films include Adam & Steve, The Deceptionand Young Blue Eyes. Zinsmeyer and his husband, Louis Bixenman, reside in Santa Fe, New Mexico along with their three adorable critters: Oliver, Marcus and Tyler.
Thomas Mallon (Author) is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author’s crisp wit and interest in the “bystanders” to larger historical events. He is the author of nine books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, and most recently, Finale. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One’s Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos, and In Fact). He is a former literary editor of Gentleman’s Quarterly, where he wrote the “Doubting Thomas” column in the 1990s, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and other periodicals. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2005-2006. His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style. He was elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.
George Manahan (Music Director) The wide-ranging and versatile George Manahan has had an esteemed career embracing everything from opera to the concert stage, the traditional to the contemporary. He is the Music Director of American Composers Orchestra and the Portland Opera (OR), previously served as Music Director of New York City Opera for fourteen seasons, and has appeared as guest conductor with the Opera Companies of Seattle, Santa Fe, San Francisco, Chicago, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Opera National du Paris and Teatro de Communale de Bologna, the National, New Jersey, Atlanta, San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis Symphonies, and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. A recipient of Columbia University’s Ditson Conducting Award, he was honored four times by the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) for his commitment to 20th-century music during his tenure as Music Director of the Richmond Symphony (VA). Dedicated to the music of our time, he has led premiers of Tobias Picker’s Dolores Claiborne, Charles Wuorinen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, David Lang’s Modern Painters, Hans Werner Henze’s The English Cat, Terence Blanchard’s Champion, the New York premiere of Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner and Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman’s Grammy Award winning Ask Your Mama, a collaboration with soprano Jessye Norman, The Roots, and the orchestra of St. Luke’s. Recent Seasons have included appearances at the Santa Fe Opera, Rose Theater at Lincoln Center in a concert performance of Gluck’s Alceste featuring Deborah Voigt, the Music Academy of the West, and the Aspen Music Festival. The Live from Lincoln Center broadcast of his New York City Opera production of Madame Butterfly won an Emmy Award. Manahan’s discography includes the Grammy Award nominated recording of Edward Thomas’ Desire Under the Elms, with the London Symphony, and Steve Reich’s Tehillim on the EMI-Warner Brothers label. He is Director of Orchestral Activities at the Manhattan School of Music as well as frequent guest conductor at the Curtis Institute of Music.
FELLOW TRAVELERS
Gregory Spears, composer
Greg Pierce, librettist
Kevin Newbury, director
George Manahan, conductor
Braden Toan, assistant conductor
G. Sterling Zinsmeyer, executive producer
with American Composers Orchestra
Cast:
Timothy Laughlin: Aaron Blake
Hawkins Fuller: Joseph Lattanzi
Mary Johnson: Devon Guthrie
Senator Potter & Bartender: Vernon Hartman
Estonian Frank, Interrogator, & Sen. McCarthy: Marcus DeLoach
Potter’s Assistant, Bookseller, & Priest: Christian Pursell
Tommy McIntyre: Paul Scholten
Miss Lightfoot: Alexandra Schoeny
Lucy: Cecilia Violetta Lopez
Fellow Travelers is a Cincinnati Opera Production, developed and co-commissionedby G. Sterling Zinsmeyer and Cincinnati Opera, and co-presented by PROTOTYPE Festival with John Jay College of Criminal Justice and American Composers Orchestra.
About PROTOTYPE
PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now launched in January 2013, unleashing a powerful wave of opera- and music-theatre from a new generation of composers and librettists. Across its first five seasons, PROTOTYPE produced and presented a total of 160 performances of 32 presentations, and shared the work of more than 500 local, national, and international artists. Now in its sixth season, PROTOTYPE, as Opera News proclaimed, “has become a major leader in opera theatre for the twenty-first century.”
Founded by Kristin Marting (of HERE), Beth Morrison (of Beth Morrison Projects), and Kim Whitener (of HERE), and now produced and directed by them along with new co-director Jecca Barry, PROTOTYPE supports and spotlights a diverse range of culturally and socially engaged work from intrepid creators across ethnicity and gender. Half of PROTOTYPE’s lead artists to date have been women, and the Festival has presented work from Belgian, Chinese, Dutch, Egyptian-American, Indian-American, Irish, Kazakh, Korean-American, Lithuanian, Mexican, Russian, and Slovenian lead artists.
Reflected in Glass: Philip Glass and the Next Generation
Friday, December 8, 2017 at 7:30pm Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall | 57th St. and 7th Ave., NYC Tickets & Information: www.carnegiehall.org (http://bit.ly/ReflectedinGlass) Subscriptions now available; single tickets available August 28, 2017.
PAUCHI SASAKI: GAMA XVI for Orchestra and Speaker Dress with composer as electronics soloist
(2017, World Premiere, ACO/Carnegie Hall Commission) BRYCE DESSNER: Réponse Lutosławski(2014, New York Premiere) PHILIP GLASS: Violin Concerto No. 2, “American Four Seasons” (2009) Conversation with Philip Glass and Pauchi Sasaki, moderated by ACO President, Ed Yim
Reflected in Glass is Philip Glass’ first concert as Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair, which he holds for the 2017-2018 season. It features Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 2, “The American Four Seasons,” with Tim Fain as soloist. Glass’ work is paired with two composers he has mentored and inspired – Pauchi Sasaki and Bryce Dessner. Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławski is the creative fruit of his study of Lutosławski’s string orchestra piece Musique funèbre. Pauchi Sasaki’s GAMA XVI features the composer as electronics soloist, wearing and performing an original Speaker Dress made from 100 speakers.
Philip Glass is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of our time. In the early 1960s, following studies at the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and while there, earned money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation. By 1974, Glass had a number of innovative projects, creating a large collection of new music for The Philip Glass Ensemble and for the Mabou Mines Theater Company. This period culminated in Music in Twelve Parts, and Einstein on the Beach for which he collaborated with Robert Wilson. Since Einstein, Glass has expanded his repertoire to include music for opera, dance, theater, chamber ensemble, orchestra, and film. ACO has a long history of performing Glass’ work frequently, going back to the world premiere of his first violin concerto written for the late Paul Zukofsky in 1987. ACO recorded Glass’ Heroes symphony in 1997 and most recently gave the U.S. premiere of his Symphony No. 9 at Carnegie Hall on Glass’ 75th birthday in 2012. Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 2 was written for violinist Robert McDuffie in 2009. The work is a companion piece to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” but Glass states in the note for the piece that McDuffie and he did not agree on which movement corresponded to which season. He writes, “This struck me as an opportunity, then, for the listener to make his/her own interpretation. Therefore, there will be no instructions for the audience, no clues as to where Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall might appear in the new concerto – an interesting, though not worrisome, problem for the listener.”
Pauchi Sasaki’s interdisciplinary approach integrates musical composition with the design of multimedia performances and the application of new technologies. A composer, performer, and improviser, she collaborates actively on projects linked to film, dance, theater, installation, site specific, and interdisciplinary performances; Sasaki has performed internationally in Peru, the U.S., Japan, Spain, Chile, Colombia, and Switzerland. This year she was selected by Philip Glass to become his protégé as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative for a one-year mentorship. Sasaki’s classical violin studies began at age five; she studied Andean music at CEMDUC; classical music of North India with maestro Ali Akbar Khan in San Rafael, California; and Klezmer music with Alicia Svigals in New York. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from PUCP in Lima and a master’s degree in Recording Media and Experimental Music from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her compositions involve acoustic, amplified, and electronic instrumentation influenced by improvisational aesthetics and ethnic musical traditions. Her work also focuses on the development of real time interactive music and self-designed instruments using Max Msp and circuit bending. This branch of her work seeks the embodiment of electronic music performance integrating the emission of electronic sounds with corporal expressivity. Her piece for ACO, GAMA XVI, is a performative electroacoustic composition for orchestra and speaker dress – a wearable sound sculpture created with 100 speakers.
Photo: Juan Pablo Aragon
Bryce Dessner is one of the most sought-after composers of his generation, with a rapidly expanding catalog of works commissioned by leading ensembles. Known to many as a guitarist with The National, he is also active as a curator – a vital force in the flourishing realm of new creative music. His orchestral, chamber, and vocal compositions have been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Metropolitan Museum of Art (for the New York Philharmonic), Kronos Quartet, BAM Next Wave Festival, Barbican Centre, Edinburgh International Festival, Sydney Festival, eighth blackbird, So Percussion, New York City Ballet, and many others. He has curated Mountains and Waves at the Barbican, and founded MusicNOW in Cincinnati. Dessner now resides in Paris and has been increasingly active composing for major European ensembles and soloists. Last fall he premiered a new piece entitled Wires commissioned for Ensemble Intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher, as well as recent solo works for violinists Pekka Kuusisto and Jennifer Koh, and a concerto for renowned pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque. Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławski was written as an homage to Witold Lutosławski͛’s composition for string orchestra, Musique funèbre. “This was an amazing process of discovering one of the 20th century’s great musical minds and allowing his adventurous spirit to influence my own musical decisions,” Dessner says. “I like to think that his music opened a window in a certain direction for me, or pushed open a door, through which I could then pass and take my journey with the music.”
Avery Fisher Career Grant-winning violinist Tim Fain was featured on the soundtracks to the films Moonlight, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Swan, where he also was seen on screen. Recipient of the Young Concert Artists International Award, he has appeared internationally as soloist with the Baltimore Symphony and Cabrillo Festival (Marin Alsop), the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Pittsburgh, Hague and Buffalo Philharmonics, Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestras, and National Orchestra of Spain. His recitals have taken him to the world’s major music capitals, he has toured with Musicians from Marlboro, as a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and around the globe in a duo-recital program with Philip Glass. He collaborated with Google on a Virtual Reality music video for his composition, Resonance, which introduced its 360 stereoscopic VR capability for YouTube, and was recently shown at The Sundance Film Festival. His multi-media solo evening Portals premiered to sold-out audiences on both coasts and continues to travel world-wide. Featuring a new work written for him by Philip Glass, Portals includes collaborations with Benjamin Millepied, Leonard Cohen, pianist Nicholas Britell and radio personality Fred Child. He has collaborated with an eclectic array of artists from Pinchas Zukerman and Mitsuko Uchida, to the Mark Morris Dance Group and New York City Ballet to Iggy Pop, Rob Thomas (Matchbox 20), and he has performed for the Dali Lama. His discography includes River of Light, (Naxos), and Philip Glass: The Concerto Project IV with the Hague Philharmonic and Tim Fain plays Philip Glass (Orange Mountain Music), and First Loves (VIA). Photo: Bill Bernstein
American Composers Orchestra Continues 40th Anniversary Season
Reflected in Glass: Philip Glass and the Next Generation
Friday, December 8, 2017 at 7:30pm Music by Philip Glass, Pauchi Sasaki, and Bryce Dessner
Featuring George Manahan, ACO Music Director; Pauchi Sasaki, Electronics & Speaker Dress; and Tim Fain, Violin
Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall | 57th St. and 7th Ave. | NYC Tickets: $41 & 51 at www.carnegiehall.org, 212-247-7800, or the Carnegie Hall Box Office (154 West 57th Street, NYC)
American Composers Orchestra (ACO) continues its 2017-2018 season, under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel, Music Director George Manahan, and President Edward Yim, with Reflected in Glass: Philip Glass and the Next Generation, on Friday, December 8, 2017 at 7:30pm at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall (57th St. and 7th Ave.). Reflected in Glass is Philip Glass’ first concert as Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair, which he holds for the 2017-2018 season.
The concert features Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 2, “The American Four Seasons,” with Tim Fain as soloist. Glass’ work is paired with two composers he has mentored and inspired – Pauchi Sasaki and Bryce Dessner. Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławski, which receives its New York premiere in this performance, is the creative fruit of his study of Lutosławski’s string orchestra piece Musique funèbre. Pauchi Sasaki’s GAMA XVI, co-commissioned by ACO and Carnegie Hall, features the composer as electronics soloist, wearing and performing an original Speaker Dress made from 100 speakers.
The performance ends with a rare behind-the-scenes conversation between Glass and Sasaki, whose collaboration was formally supported by the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Moderated by Provost and Dean of The Juilliard School Ara Guzelimian, they will discuss their close working relationship and the mentorship experience. Glass and Sasaki’s work with American Composers Orchestra this season is made possible by the Rolex Institute.
Reflected in Glass Concert Program:
PAUCHI SASAKI: GAMA XVI for Orchestra and Speaker Dress with composer as electronics soloist (2017, World Premiere, ACO/Carnegie Hall Commission)
BRYCE DESSNER: Réponse Lutosławski (2014, New York Premiere)
PHILIP GLASS: Violin Concerto No. 2, “American Four Seasons” (2009)
Conversation with Philip Glass and Pauchi Sasaki, moderated by Juilliard Provost and Dean Ara Guzelimian
ACO’s 2017-2018 season, Dreamscapes, features ten world, U.S., and New York premieres by a diverse set of composers. ACO continues its concerts at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall (December 8, 2017 and April 6, 2018) while expanding its presence in New York to include the 40th Birthday Concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center (November 7, 2017) and as part of the 2018 PROTOTYPE Festival (January 12-14, 2018) in Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers. ACO continues to take its commitment to fostering new work beyond the stage in its annual Underwood New Music Readings (June 21 and 22, 2018) for emerging composers, now in its 27th year, and through EarShot, the National Orchestra Composition Discovery Network, which brings the Readings experience to orchestras across the country. In addition, this season ACO launches its Commission Club, through which members invest in the lifespan of a commission: from the composer’s first kernel of artistic inspiration to the realization of the music as a printed score, the early rehearsals, and through the premiere performance. In its inaugural season, ACO’s Commission Club will support The Bad Plus founding member, composer, and pianist Ethan Iverson as he creates his first orchestral work, Concerto to Scale, which he will perform with ACO on Friday, April 6, 2018 at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall.
In 2017-2018, ACO celebrates 40 years as the only orchestra in the world wholly dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation, and promotion of music by American composers. To date, ACO has performed music by 800 American composers, including 350 world premieres and newly commissioned works. This season explores the overarching theme of dreams as an inspiration for both music itself and community created through music – celebrating ACO co-founder Francis Thorne’s dream of an orchestra to champion the American composer; iconic composer Philip Glass’ dream for the next generation; and the American dream of inclusiveness reflected in the infinite ways American orchestral music illustrates geographic, stylistic, gender, and racial diversity.
About the Music
Philip Glass is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of our time. In the early 1960s, following studies at the University of Chicago and The Juilliard School, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and while there, earned money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation. By 1974, Glass had a number of innovative projects, creating a large collection of new music for The Philip Glass Ensemble and for the Mabou Mines Theater Company. This period culminated in Music in Twelve Parts, and Einstein on the Beach on which he collaborated with Robert Wilson. Since Einstein, Glass has expanded his repertoire to include music for opera, dance, theater, chamber ensemble, orchestra, and film. ACO has a long history of performing Glass’ work frequently, going back to the world premiere of his first violin concerto written for the late Paul Zukofsky in 1987. ACO recorded Glass’ Heroes symphony in 1997 and most recently gave the U.S. premiere of his Symphony No. 9 at Carnegie Hall on Glass’ 75th
birthday in 2012. Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 2 was written for violinist Robert McDuffie in 2009. The work, which will be performed by ACO with soloist Tim Fain, is a companion piece to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, but Glass states in the note for the piece that he and McDuffie did not agree on which movement corresponded to which season. He writes, “This struck me as an opportunity, then, for the listener to make his/her own interpretation. Therefore, there will be no instructions for the audience, no clues as to where Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall might appear in the new concerto – an interesting, though not worrisome, problem for the listener.”
Pauchi Sasaki’s interdisciplinary approach integrates musical composition with the design of multimedia performances and the application of new technologies. A composer, performer, and improviser, she collaborates actively on projects linked to film, dance, theater, installation, site specific, and interdisciplinary performances. Sasaki has performed internationally in Peru, the U.S., Japan, Spain, Chile, Colombia, and Switzerland. In 2016, she was selected by Philip Glass to become his protégé as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative for a one-year mentorship. Her compositions involve acoustic, amplified, and electronic instrumentation influenced by improvisational aesthetics and ethnic musical traditions. Her work also focuses on the development of real time interactive music and self-designed instruments using Max Msp and circuit bending. This branch of her work seeks the embodiment of electronic music performance integrating the emission of electronic sounds with corporal expressivity. Sasaki’s classical violin studies began at age five; she studied Andean music at CEMDUC; classical music of North India with maestro Ali Akbar Khan in San Rafael, California; and Klezmer music with Alicia Svigals in New York. She studied with composers César Bolaños, Maggi Payne, John Bischoff, Fred Frith, Chris Brown, James Fei, Les Stuck, Laetitia Sonami, and Pauline Oliveros. Sasaki holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from PUCP in Lima and a master’s degree in Recording Media and Experimental Music from Mills College in Oakland, California. An active film scorer, her music is featured in more than 30 feature and short films, and she has been honored with awards from the Festival de Cinema Latino Americano di Trieste; the International Latin American Film Festival of Lima; CONACINE, the National Film Council of Peru; the Paul Merritt Henry Prize; and Goethe-Institut’s artist residency in Brazil, among many others. Her current project GAMA has been presented at the Tokyo Experimental Festival, The Mario Testino Museum, Art Basel Miami, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart, The Kitchen, and Grand National Theater, among others. Sasaki’s piece for ACO, GAMA XVI, is a performative electroacoustic composition for orchestra and speaker dress – a wearable sound sculpture created with 100 speakers. Of the piece, Sasaki says, “In GAMA XVI, the string orchestra describes a space that is constantly changing its shape, a place that breathes and is alive. This image is reinforced by the quadraphonic spatialization of pre-recorded electronics and the movement of the Speaker Dress throughout the performance space. The morphing behavior is described by the oscillation between the parameters of pressure and looseness, harmony and dissonance, discontinuity and rhythm, timid whispers – fainting with the glissandos – and strong affirmations and releases of sound. There is an underlying will, a constant search for movement.” Photo of Pauchi Sasaki and Speaker Dress: Juan Pablo Aragon
Bryce Dessner is one of the most sought-after composers of his generation, with a rapidly expanding catalog of works commissioned by leading ensembles. Known to many as a guitarist with The National, he is also active as a curator – a vital force in the flourishing realm of new creative music. His orchestral, chamber, and vocal compositions have been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Metropolitan Museum of Art (for the New York Philharmonic), Kronos Quartet, BAM Next Wave Festival, Barbican Centre, Edinburgh International Festival, Sydney Festival, eighth blackbird, So Percussion, New York City Ballet, and many others. He has curated Mountains and Waves at the Barbican, and founded MusicNOW in Cincinnati. Dessner now resides in Paris and has been increasingly active composing for major European ensembles and soloists. Last fall he premiered a new piece entitled Wires commissioned for Ensemble Intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher, as well as recent solo works for violinists Pekka Kuusisto and Jennifer Koh, and a concerto for renowned pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque. Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławskiwas written as an homage to Witold Lutosławskı͛ ’s composition for string orchestra, Musique funèbre. “This was an amazing process of discovering one of the 20th century’s great musical minds and allowing his adventurous spirit to influence my own musical decisions,” Dessner says. “I like to think that his music opened a window in a certain direction for me, or pushed open a door, through which I could then pass and take my journey with the music.”
PROTOTYPE Festival: Fellow Travelers by Gregory Spears (New York Premiere)
Friday, January 12, 2018 at 8pm
Saturday, January 13 at 2pm and 8pm
Sunday, January 14 at 2pm
Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice | 524 W. 59th St., NYC
VIP Memberships now available. Single tickets are available for VIP Members after Labor Day and for the general public after September 18, 2017.
Gregory Spears, composer
Greg Pierce, librettist
Kevin Newbury, director
George Manahan, conductor
Braden Toan, assistant conductor
G. Sterling Zinsmeyer, executive producer
with American Composers Orchestra
Cast:
Timothy Laughlin: Aaron Blake
Hawkins Fuller: Joseph Lattanzi
Mary Johnson: Devon Guthrie
Senator Potter & Bartender: Vernon Hartman
Estonian Frank, Interrogator, & Sen. McCarthy: Marcus DeLoach
Potter’s Assistant, Bookseller, & Priest: Christian Pursell
Tommy McIntyre: Paul Scholten
Miss Lightfoot: Alexandra Schoeny
Lucy: Cecilia Violetta Lopez
At the height of the McCarthy era in 1950s Washington, D.C., recent college grad Timothy Laughlin is eager to join the crusade against Communism. A chance encounter with handsome State Department official Hawkins Fuller leads to Tim’s first job, an illicit love affair with a man, and an entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal. Based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers is an extraordinary personal journey through the intriguing, gut-wrenching world of the 1950s American witch-hunts, and the often overlooked “Lavender Scare.” Directed by Kevin Newbury and featuring American Composers Orchestra in the opera’s New York debut, this acclaimed Cincinnati Opera productionpairs American Minimalism with Medieval troubadour melodies, reflecting the tension between two men’s professional, public lives and their private, forbidden longings.
“Opera thrives on stories with rich subtext, where characters cannot fully express themselves in words,” states Spears. “Both politicians and gay men and women in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s lived in a world full of coded sensibility – a culture operating under the surface and in counterpoint with the rigid formality of 1950s mores. In both the fraught political world of the McCarthy Era and the private world of Hawk and Tim, dialogue could only tell part of the story. My goal was to craft a musical language for Fellow Travelers that would foreground the undercurrent of clandestine machinations and forbidden longing churning under the surface of Greg Pierce’s elegant adaptation. My hope is that the nuanced machinery of opera might play some small part reminding us of this history, while also preserving in music the sensibility of doubleness that so often defined gay experience in this era.”
Gregory Spears writes music that blends aspects of romanticism, minimalism, and early music. His work has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe). In recent seasons, he has been commissioned by The Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Cincinnati Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seraphic Fire, and the JACK Quartet, among others. Spears’ children’s opera Jason and the Argonauts premiered in summer 2016 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and was performed on tour that fall. His opera about space exploration, O Columbia, premiered in 2015 at Houston Grand Opera. Spears’ first opera, Paul’s Case, described as a “masterpiece” (New York Observer) was developed by American Opera Projects and premiered by Urban Arias in 2013. It was restaged at the PROTOTYPE Festival in New York, and presented in a new production by Pittsburgh Opera in 2014. He has won prizes from BMI and ASCAP as well as awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Vagn Holmboe Competition. He holds degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music (BM), Yale School of Music (MM), and Princeton University (PhD). His music is published by Schott Music and Schott PSNY.
Fellow Travelers is a Cincinnati Opera Production, developed and co-commissionedby G. Sterling Zinsmeyer and Cincinnati Opera, and co-presented by PROTOTYPE Festival with John Jay College of Criminal Justice and American Composers Orchestra.
American Composers Orchestra’s 40th Birthday Concert & Gala Tuesday, November 7, 2017 at 7:30pm Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall | Broadway at 60th St., NYC
Thank you to everyone who helped us celebrate American Composers Orchestra’s 40th Birthday and important contributors to American music:
Ellen and James S. Marcus Francis Thorne Paul Lustig Dunkel Jamie, Nina & Alexander Bernstein Paola Prestini
Video
Learn more about the honorees below
George Manahan, music director & conductor Dennis Russell Davies, conductor Derek Bermel, clarinet Mikaela Bennett, soprano
Jakub Józef Orliński, countertenor
ELIZABETH OGONEK: Sleep and Unremembrance (2015) (U.S. Premiere) LEONARD BERNSTEIN: Clarinet Sonata (1941-42, orchestrated by Sid Ramin 1994) PAOLA PRESTINI: Prelude and Aria from Gilgamesh (2016) (NY Premiere) DUKE ELLINGTON: Black, Brown & Beige (1943) FRANCIS THORNE: Fanfare, Fugue and Funk (1972) Selections from the American Songbook for voice and orchestra including George GERSHWIN: Fascinatin Rhythm Jerome KERN: All The Things You Are Harold ARLEN: Over the Rainbow
Our Honorees:
Mr. and Mrs. Marcus
Ellen and James S. Marcus are dedicated and passionate supporters of classical music. ACO has been fortunate to be among the beneficiaries of their commitment and generosity. Our 40th Birthday Concert & Gala are made possible through their generous sponsorship.
When Mr. Marcus passed away in July 2015, thoughtful tributes were made by The New York Times and WQXR among many others. Their impact and influence on American music is nothing short of incredible, and their legacy is one that continues to enable many artistic visions to thrive today.
Ellen Marcus was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio. After attending the University of Michigan, she moved to New York City in 1959, took courses at the New York Institute of Finance and was registered to sell securities. During this time, she worked on Wall Street for a number of prominent firms. Afterward, Ellen sold residential real estate for Stribling from 1995 until 2012. Ellen met James S. Marcus in 1970 and they married in 1974. A devoted opera-lover, Jim introduced Ellen to the art form and through him she became involved in the life of the Met. Jim served as Met chairman from 1986 to 1993 and as honorary director of the Met until his death in 2015. In 2010, the Marcuses donated $10 million to the Juilliard School to create the Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts. Ellen has served on the auxiliary board of Lenox Hill Hospital since 1975 and currently sits on the boards of Young Concert Artists, MasterVoices and the Juilliard School. She is chairman of the patron program at WNET and a member of the Cosmopolitan Club’s board of governors. In addition to Ellen’s interest in opera, she is a lover of Broadway and cabaret music and is an aficionado of the American Songbook.
Francis Thorne
Francis Thorne‘s music has always had a healthy respect for the vernacular, both popular song and jazz. Born in Bay Shore, New York in 1922 into a musical family (his grandfather was Gustave Kobbé who is best known for Kobbé’s Opera Book), he started picking out tunes when he was five years old. By the age of nine he was entertaining his parents’ dinner guests.
His first formal training took place under Paul Hindemith at Yale University. After college came three-and-a-half years in the Navy during World War II, followed by nine years on Wall Street. All this time he kept up his jazz piano which brought him in contact with Duke Ellington whose personal recommendation led to a two-year stint as jazz pianist at Manhattan’s Hickory House – his first professional job as a musician. His return to the world of music reactivated his desire to compose, which brought him to David Diamond and two years of private study with him in Florence, Italy. Shortly thereafter his Elegy for Orchestra was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy conducting three subscription concerts in November, 1964.
The principal founder of American Composers Orchestra, of which he was both President and CEO, he has helped to commission and perform works by numerous other composers. He was also President/Treasurer of the Thorne Music Fund as well as Executive Director of Music Theatre Group, the Naumburg Foundation, and American Composers Alliance. He served on the Boards of Composers Recordings, Inc., American Music Center, the Virgil Thomson Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, among several others. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, for which he has been Treasurer and has sat on the Music Committee, Thorne’s own music is published by Merion Music, Inc. (BMI) and distributed by Theodore Presser Company–Rosalie Calabrese
Paul Lustig Dunkel
Paul Lustig Dunkel, one of America’s most versatile conductors, has been hailed for his command of the classical repertoire and applauded as a pre-eminent exponent of the music of our time. He served as Music Director and Conductor of the Westchester Philharmonic (WP) from its founding in 1983 to 2008, and has taken his place in the history of American contemporary music as a founder of the American Composers Orchestra (ACO) in 1978 with Dennis Russell Davies, Francis Thorne and Nicholas Roussakis. Until he stepped down in 2000, Mr. Dunkel was instrumental in elevating the ensemble to its position as a leader in American music. He also enjoys an active career as a flutist, noted for his brilliance as a performer and his desire to expand the flute repertory through premieres and commissions. Melinda Wagner’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion was commissioned for him by the Westchester Philharmonic in recognition of his fifteenth year with that orchestra. Premiered and recorded for Bridge Records by the Westchester Philharmonic, the work was performed with Mr. Dunkel as soloist with ACO in Carnegie Hall and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. His recordings for Bridge, Summit, CRI and New World Records have received wide critical acclaim, and his recording of The Early Music of Elliott Carter conducting the ACO was selected as one of the Top 10 recordings of the year by Time and Newsweek.
Since the inception of his career, Mr. Dunkel has been active in all aspects of classical music, and the depth and range of his talents and experience have taken him around the world. He has been Music Director of the Denver Chamber Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Vermont Mozart Festival, and has appeared as guest conductor with orchestras throughout the United States at the Kremlin and in Taiwan. He conducted the Washington Opera premiere of The Postman Always Rings Twice by Stephen Paulus and, at the invitation of Virgil Thomson, a New York City revival of his Four Saints in Three Acts. He has been involved extensively in the dance world, appearing with many companies here and abroad. He also served as Co-Director with pianist Michael Boriskin of Music from Copland House, a chamber music ensemble dedicated to the advocacy of American music based at the long-time home of Aaron Copland.
Maestro Dunkel played a crucial role in the extraordinary success of what Symphony magazine called “the suburban miracle” at the Westchester Philharmonic, where he was largely responsible for performances at the highest level and for its ever-growing audience and subscriber base and public profile until his retirement. He and the orchestra were the recipients of the 2000 Leonard Bernstein Award for Educational Programming from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the American Symphony Orchestra League for excellence and innovation in music education. “Exploring New Worlds: Music of the Americas” and its ground-breaking program of student commissioning of a new work by a young composer was featured on “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS and recognized by the Westchester Arts Council with a 2001 Award.
Active in all aspects of classical music as conductor, flutist, composer/arranger and educator, Mr. Dunkel, an original member of Speculum Musicae, was principal flute of the American Symphony Orchestra under Stokowski, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble and many others. He has participated in the Spoleto, Casals, Aspen, Stratford Marlboro and Estival Festivals and toured with Music from Marlboro.
He has received the American Symphony Orchestra’s Leopold Stokowski Conducting Award, a Grammy nomination, awards from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, Harriet Ditson Fund, New York State Council on the Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Silver Jubilee Award for outstanding alumni from Queens College, and many regional and
local awards for his work in the community.
His has just completed his memoir, Dancing on My Head, exploring his musical education in New York City with witty and penetrating commentary on music, musicians and cultural institutions.
Jamie, Nina & Alexander Bernstein
Jamie, Alexander and Nina photo by Steve Sherman
Jamie Bernstein is a writer, narrator, broadcaster and film maker who has transformed a lifetime of loving music into a career of sharing her knowledge and excitement with others.
Inspired by her father Leonard Bernstein’s lifelong impulse to share and teach, Jamie has devised multiple ways of communicating her own excitement about orchestral music. Beginning 15 years ago with “The Bernstein Beat,” a family concert about her father’s music modeled after his own groundbreaking Young People’s Concerts, Jamie has gone on to design, write and narrate concerts for worldwide audiences of all ages about the music of Mozart, Copland, Stravinsky and many others. Jamie creates and narrates two educational concerts a year with the New World Symphony in Miami; these engaging, informal “Discovery Concerts” are specially designed to attract audiences of all ages who are less familiar with concertgoing.
Jamie travels the world as a concert narrator, appearing everywhere from Beijing to London to Vancouver. A frequent speaker on musical topics, Jamie has presented talks around the world, from conferences in Japan to seminars at Harvard University. In Spanish-speaking locations such as Madrid and Caracas, Jamie narrates en español – thanks to her Chilean-born mother, Felicia Montealegre, who raised her children to be bilingual.
In her role as a broadcaster, Jamie has produced and hosted shows for radio stations in the United States and Great Britain. She has presented the New York Philharmonic’s live national radio broadcasts, as well as live broadcasts from Tanglewood.
Jamie is the co-director of a film documentary, Crescendo: the Power of Music — which focuses on children in struggling urban communities who participate in youth orchestra programs for social transformation inspired by Venezuela’s groundbreaking El Sistema movement. The film has won numerous prizes on the festival circuit, and is now viewable on Netflix. More about Crescendo: the Power of Music can be found at http://www.crescendofilmdoc.com
Jamie has also directed her father’s chamber opera, Trouble in Tahiti, in various locations around the country, including the Moab Music Festival and Festival del Sole in Napa, CA.
Jamie is currently at work on a memoir, title to be announced, which will be published by HarperCollins in the spring of 2018, when her father’s centennial celebrations will be well under way around the world. Jamie and her siblings, Alexander and Nina, will be racking up unprecedented mileage points!
Jamie also writes articles and poetry, which have appeared in such publications as Symphony, DoubleTake, Gourmet, Opera News, and Musical America. She also edits “Prelude, Fugue & Riffs,” a newsletter about issues and events pertaining to her father’s legacy.
More about Jamie’s multifaceted life can be found on her website: jamiebernstein.net
Alexander Bernstein is Leonard Bernstein’s second child. He is president of Artful Learning, Inc., and founding chairman of The Leonard Bernstein Center For Learning. Prior to his full-time participation in the center, Bernstein taught for five years at the Packer-Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York, first as a second grade teacher, then as a teacher of drama for the middle school. He has studied acting, performed professionally, and worked as a production associate at the ABC News Documentary Unit. Bernstein holds a Master’s degree in English education from New York University and a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.
Nina Bernstein Simmons is Leonard Bernstein’s youngest daughter. After several years working as an actress, initially at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, she turned her attention to tending her late father’s legacy. In the earliest days of the internet, she worked with the Library of Congress on making the Bernstein Archives digitally available to the public. The fruits of that collaboration can be seen at the Library’s American Memory website. From 2000 until 2005, Nina worked on a film about her sister, Jamie, and her remarkable journeys around the world bringing Bernstein’s music and teaching legacy to new audiences. Leonard Bernstein: A Total Embrace premiered in Germany in December of 2005. Since 2008, Nina has been working as a food educator in underserved communities.
Paola Prestini
Paola Prestini is “the enterprising composer and impresario” (The New York Times) behind the new Brooklyn venue National Sawdust and the “Visionary-In-Chief” (Time Out NY) of the production company VisionIntoArt (VIA), home to VIA Records. Named one of NPR’s “Top 100 Composers in the World under 40,” her compositions are deemed “radiant… amorously evocative” by The New York Times, and “luminously involving” by The LA Times. She has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, and the Kronos Quartet and creates large scale multimedia works including The Hubble Cantata (a Virtual Reality space operatic experience), Aging Magician, and the opera Gilgamesh with Michael Counts, Cerise Jacobs and Beth Morrison Projects. Other recent works include Two Oars with Robert Wilson, The Hotel That Time Forgot for the ACO at Zankel Hall, and The Colorado, an eco-film cantata currently on tour in halls and film festivals.
Photo Gallery
(click on images for full slideshow)
Photo Credit: Noah Stern Weber
We proudly announce the 26th edition of ACO’s annual roundup of the country’s brightest young and emerging composers.
Sessions will take place under the baton of Music Director George Manahan with an open rehearsal on June 22, 2017 and a recorded reading on June 23. Both are free and open to the public.
This year, six of the nation’s most promising composers in the early stages of their professional careers have been selected from over 250 submissions received from around the country. The selected composers – James Diaz, Nick DiBerardino, Martin Kennedy, Hilary Purrington, Alexander Timofeev, and Yucong (Zoe) Wang – represent a broad spectrum of musical backgrounds and sound worlds. They will receive a reading of a new work and one composer will be selected to receive a $15,000 commission for a new piece to be performed by ACO during an upcoming season.
Register here for the free open rehearsal on Thursday, June 22 (10 AM – 1 PM) – SPACES STILL AVAILABLE
Run-through performance on Friday, June 23 (7:30 – 10:30 PM ) – SOLD OUT
Both events are at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.Tickets are free but registration is required.
Career Development Workshop
In addition, composers, students, or anyone interested in learning more about the business of being a composer is invited to attend a free Career Development Workshop on Friday, June 23 from 11 AM-4:30 PM at Cary Hall, DiMenna Center for Classical Music. Workshops include talks on Intellectual Property, Copyright Law and Commissioning Agreements; a panel discussion on career strategy with some of the most successful young composers working today; and a panel discussion on programming with major music presenters. read full details– SOLD OUT
The Underwood Readings are the core of ACO’s ongoing professional training programs for emerging American composers. At the readings, composers will meet with ACO artistic staff, orchestra members, the conductor and mentor composers. Members of ACO’s composer advisory panel and guest composers participate in preliminary reviews of scores, provide critical commentary and feedback, post-reading evaluations and selection of the composer to receive the commission award.
The readings include two sessions with the orchestra, a working rehearsal and a run-through performance. The performances are professionally recorded, and each composer is given a high-quality audio recording to be used for archival, study and portfolio purposes. Composers also participate in a series of professional development workshops covering such topics as promotion, score preparation and publishing, copyright and commissioning agreements, and other career essentials. Transportation and meals are provided for all participants.
The Underwood New Music Readings are part of EarShot, the national orchestral composition discovery network. EarShot activities include new music readings and other composer development programs with orchestras around the country. EarShot is coordinated by ACO in collaboration with American Composers Forum, the League of American Orchestras, and New Music USA (formerly American Music Center and Meet The Composer).
Lead support for the Underwood New Music Readings comes from Mr. and Mrs. Paul Underwood. Support of readings also comes from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Fromm Music Foundation. Additional funding provided by the League of American Orchestras with support from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.
Also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
American Composers Orchestra Announces 2017-2018 Season: Dreamscapes Derek Bermel, Artistic Director & George Manahan, Music Director
40th Birthday Concert & Gala
November 7, 2017 at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
Music by ACO Co-Founder Francis Thorne, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington,
George Gershwin, Paola Prestini, and Elizabeth Ogonek
Two Performances at Carnegie Hall December 8, 2017 and April 6, 2018 at Zankel Hall
Music by Philip Glass, Pauchi Sasaki, Bryce Dessner, Ethan Iverson, Clarice Assad,
Steve Lehman, TJ Anderson, and Hitomi Oba
Fellow Travelers by Gregory Spears at the PROTOTYPE Festival
January 12-14, 2018 at Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
co-presented with PROTOTYPE Festival and John Jay College of Criminal Justice
The 27th Annual Underwood New Music Readings on June 21 & 22, 2018
ACO’s annual roundup of the country’s brightest young and emerging composers at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music
American Composers Orchestra (ACO) announces its complete 2017-2018 season, Dreamscapes, under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel, Music Director George Manahan, and President Edward Yim, featuring ten world, U.S., and New York premieres by a diverse set of composers. ACO continues its concerts at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall (December 8, 2017 and April 6, 2018) while expanding its presence in New York to include performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center (November 7, 2017) and as part of the 2018 PROTOTYPE Festival (January 12-14, 2018). ACO continues to take its commitment to fostering new work beyond the stage in its annual Underwood New Music Readings (June 21 and 22, 2018) for emerging composers, now in its 27th year, and through EarShot, the National Orchestra Composition Discovery Network, which brings the Readings experience to orchestras across the country.
In 2017-2018, ACO celebrates 40 years as the only orchestra in the world wholly dedicated to the creation, performance, preservation, and promotion of music by American composers. To date, ACO has performed music by 800 American composers, including 350 world premieres and newly commissioned works. This season explores the overarching theme of dreams as an inspiration for both music itself and community created through music – celebrating ACO co-founder Francis Thorne’s dream of an orchestra to champion the American composer; iconic composer Philip Glass’ dream for the next generation; and the American dream of inclusiveness reflected in the infinite ways American orchestral music illustrates geographic, stylistic, gender, and racial diversity.
“I am particularly excited by the breadth and depth of American music that ACO will explore – classic American works by Gershwin, Ellington, and Bernstein, music by modern masters like Philip Glass and T.J. Anderson, and compositions by a wide range of young composers fluent in styles ranging from contemporary jazz to indy-rock to samba to performance art and opera,” said ACO Artistic Director Derek Bermel. “Featuring four world and U.S. premieres and six New York premieres, as well as our annual readings of emerging compositional voices, ACO’s season offers a vital and eclectic mix that is quintessentially American.”
“In my first full season with ACO, the upcoming year fills me with excitement and hope for what this organization can contribute to the musical landscape,” said ACO President Edward Yim. “In addition to concerts with our wonderful and long-time collaborators at Carnegie Hall, we are particularly happy to work for the first time with the visionary team at the PROTOTYPE Festival and to celebrate our 40th anniversary with a tribute to American composers and those who support them at our fall gala.”
In addition to performances by the orchestra in New York, throughout the 2017-2018 season, ACO will partner with other orchestras in EarShot, a nationwide network that takes the ACO New Music Readings experience across the country, designed as an opportunity for emerging composers to develop their works with a professional orchestra. To date, over fifty composers have been selected for New Music Readings with orchestras. EarShot partnerships have included the New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Berkeley Symphony, Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Memphis Symphony Orchestra, Naples Philharmonic, Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Pioneer Valley Symphony (MA), New York Youth Symphony, and the San Diego Symphony. EarShot is a partnership among American Composers Orchestra, League of American Orchestras, American Composers Forum, and New Music USA.
The deadline for composers interested in applying to both the Underwood New Music Readings and the EarShot Readings is October 16, 2017. Application guidelines and information are available at www.americancomposers.org/composers/calls-for-submissions.
ACO also continues its thriving education program, Music Factory, which since 1999 has brought composers into New York City’s public schools, reaching over 3,000 students every year. Music Factory is a hands-on and minds-on creativity-based initiative, designed to maximize learning and develop a diversity of transferable skills among children from fourth grade through high school through in-school and after-school programs with partner schools and community organizations. During the 2017-2018 school year, Music Factory will partner with a dozen schools and community organizations throughout Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. ACO’s Compose Yourself program provides in-depth study, including group lessons and readings, for promising high school composers. Compose Yourself students compiled an impressive list of honors in national young composers’ competitions in 2017, and all the program’s graduates have gained seats in conservatory composition departments.
ACO launches its Commissioning Club with the 2017-2018 season, through which members invest in the lifespan of a commission: from the composer’s first kernel of artistic inspiration to the realization of the music as a printed score, the early rehearsals and through the premiere performance. Members of the Commissioning Club support all expenses in the commission process including fees paid to the composer, printing and engraving costs, as well as rehearsal and production costs related to the concert premiere. Throughout the season, members are invited to exclusive preview events with the composer to learn about the composer’s vision, hear excerpts of the work in-progress, and experience a full orchestral rehearsal of the piece before its premiere. In its inaugural season, ACO’s Commission Club will support Ethan Iverson as he creates a new piano concerto, which he will perform with ACO on April 6, 2018 at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall. For more information about ACO’s Commissioning Club, contact Lyndsay Werking at Lyndsay@americancomposers.org, or 212.977.8495 x204.
Hilary Purrington Wins $15,000 Underwood Emerging Composer Commission from American Composers Orchestra
Alexander Timofeev wins Audience Choice Award
American Composers Orchestra (ACO) has awarded composer Hilary Purrington its 2017 Underwood Commission, bringing her a $15,000 commission for a work to be premiered by ACO in a future season. Chosen from six finalists during ACO’s 26th Underwood New Music Readings on June 22 and 23, 2017, in one of the most coveted opportunities for emerging composers in the United States, Purrington won the top prize with her work Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky.
In addition, for the eighth year, audience members at the Underwood New Music Readings had a chance to make their voices heard through the Audience Choice Award. The winner this year was composer Alexander Timofeev, for his piece Fantasme for Orchestra. As the winner, Timofeev will also be commissioned by ACO to write a work to be premiered in a future season.
“Hilary Purrington’s music spoke in a highly personal voice,” said ACO Artistic Director Derek Bermel. “Her work unfolded assuredly, revealing an orchestral palette at once austere and lyrical.”
“Alexander’s piece really appealed to many of us for its wonderful craft and orchestral command; we were sure that it would be a strong contender for audience favorite, said ACO President Ed Yim. “It is great that this annual reading puts trust both in the mentor composers to show us the future as well as in a well informed and passionate public. And I’d like to take this opportunity to commend all the participants this year who each had strong and varied points of view.”
“The Underwood New Music Readings were beyond anything I expected or anticipated,” Purrington said. “I learned so much from our mentor composers, conductor George Manahan, and the extraordinary musicians of the American Composers Orchestra. I’m honored and thrilled to receive the Underwood Commission, and I’m very excited to compose for these incredible and fearless musicians!”
“It was an amazing experience to workshop my composition Fantasme, and a big honor to win the Audience Choice Award,” adds Timofeev. “The many comments and suggestions from the participating composers, mentor composers, and ACO musicians created an atmosphere of musical friendship and support. I felt very comfortable getting to know the talented people at ACO – a big musical family where everyone is an active supporter of new music.”
2017 Underwood Commission winner Hilary Purrington is a New York City-based composer of chamber, choral, and orchestral music. Her work has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC), among others. In the summer of 2012, she received funding through a Wagoner Foreign Study Grant to study Music Composition and German Language at the Freie Universität Berlin, and in the summer of 2013, she participated as a Fellow at the Yale School of Music Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Her music was performed at the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL, and has been performed by many distinguished ensembles including the Peabody Modern Orchestra, Yale Philharmonia, American Modern Ensemble, and the ChoralArt Camerata. Recent commissions include new works for the Chicago Harp Quartet, the Musical Chairs Chamber Ensemble, and the Melodia Women’s Choir of NYC. Upcoming projects include commissions from Washington Square Winds, inFLUX, and the New York Youth Symphony. Purrington holds degrees from the Yale School of Music, The Juilliard School, and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.
2017 Audience Choice winner Alexander Timofeev (b. 1983) debuted as a composer at age 19 performing his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2003) with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Moldova. He premiered his works at the Thailand International Composition Festival, Hariclea Darclee Festival and Voice Competition (Romania), Oxford Piano Festival (UK), Novye Imena (Russia), Northern Lights Festival (USA) and received awards for his compositions at Sergey Slonimsky International Competition (Russia), Valasske Mezirici International Festival and Cimbalom Competition (Czech Republic), and Carl Filtsch International Competition (Romania). He is the winner of the 2016 Richard Weerts Composition Competition, and a finalist of the 2016 Thailand International Composition Festival. His recent premieres include the Five Songs on Poems by Agnesa Rosca for Soprano and Piano (2015), Concerto for Two Pianos and Chamber Orchestra (2014), and Concerto for Cimbalom and Orchestra (2013). In 2008 Timofeev founded the International Society of Pianists and Composers, a non-profit organization that promotes contemporary music written for piano. Started as a creative circle of composers and performers, graduates of the Eastman School of Music, it now represents a growing network of musicians from over 20 countries. Timofeev completed his D.M.A. at the University of Maryland, College Park, and holds an M.M. from the Eastman School of Music and a B.M. from Rowan University. He currently resides in Philadelphia and is an Artist-in-Residence at Rowan University.
About the Underwood New Music Readings
The 26th Annual Underwood New Music Readings were under the direction of ACO’s Artistic Director, composer Derek Bermel, and were conducted by ACO Music Director George Manahan, with Libby Larsen, David Rakowski, and Trevor Weston as mentor composers. The conductor, mentor composers, and principal players from ACO provided critical feedback to each of the participants during and after the sessions. In addition to the Readings, the composer participants took part in workshops with industry professionals. This year’s New Music Readings attracted over 250 submissions from emerging composers around the country.
For over a generation, ACO’s Underwood New Music Readings have been providing all-important career development and public exposure to the country’s most promising emerging composers, with over 150 composers participating. Readings alumni have gone on to win every major composition award, including the Pulitzer, Grammy, Grawemeyer, American Academy of Arts & Letters, and Rome Prizes. Orchestras around the globe have commissioned ACO Readings alumni.
The New Music Readings have served as a launch pad for composers’ careers, a tradition that includes many of today’s top composers, such as Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Joseph Schwantner, both of whom received Pulitzer Prizes for ACO commissions; and ACO’s own Artistic Director Derek Bermel, as well as composers Lisa Bielawa, Anthony Cheung, Anna Clyne, Cindy Cox, Sebastian Currier, Jennifer Higdon, Pierre Jalbert, Aaron Jay Kernis, Hannah Lash, Ingram Marshall, Carter Pann, P.Q. Phan, Tobias Picker, Narong Prangcharoen, Paola Prestini, David Rakowski, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Christopher Rouse, Huang Ruo, Eric Samuelson, Carlos Sanchez-Guiterrez, Kate Soper, Gregory Spears, Joan Tower, Ken Ueno, Dan Visconti, Melinda Wagner, Wang Jie, Dalit Warshaw, Randall Woolf, Nina Young, and Roger Zare.
The 27th Annual Underwood New Music Readings are scheduled for June 21-23, 2018 in New York City.
In addition to Hilary Purrington, the 2017 Underwood New Music Readings participants were:
James Diaz: From infinity New York-based composer James Diaz (b. 1990) is the winner of the 2015 National Prize of Music in Composition by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia for his Concerto for Percussion Trio and Orchestra, Saturn Lights. As winner of the 2014 Prize of Music in Composition for the reopening of the Teatro Colón, his orchestral piece Eclosion was premiered by conductor Claudio Cruz and the National Symphony Orchestra of Colombia and recently has been recorded by the conductor Cecilia Espinosa and the EAFIT Symphony Orchestra for the upcoming album, New Colombian Music for Orchestra. studied composition with Moisés Bertrán, Harold Vázquez and Gustavo Parra at the National Conservatory of Music, where he received his B.M. in Composition in 2015. He was a two-time Composition Fellow at the International Winter Festival of Campos do Jordao, Brazil; and is currently pursuing an M.M. in Composition at the Manhattan School of Music, where he is studying composition with Reiko Fueting.
Nick DiBerardino: Mercury-Redstone 3 Rhodes Scholar Nick DiBerardino (b. 1989) composes music that is diverse in style but always oriented toward meaningful narrative arcs. DiBerardino has received recognition from many institutions, including the Music Teachers’ National Association, the National Federation of Music Clubs, the New York Art Ensemble, the Boston New Music Initiative, PARMA Recordings, the New York Youth Symphony, ASCAP, and the American Composers Forum. Recent accolades include winning the Portland Chamber Music Festival Composition Competition, garnering a soundSCAPE Composition Prize, and receiving a Horizon Award from Connecticut’s Westport Arts Advisory Committee. DiBerardino’s orchestral music has been programmed by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and the Minnesota Orchestra. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University and an M.Phil with distinction the University of Oxford, and also holds an M.M. from the Yale School of Music. DiBerardino is pursuing a Post-Baccalaureate Diploma in composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he has studied with Jennifer Higdon and David Ludwig.
Martin Kennedy: Siren, blind Martin Kennedy (b. 1978) began his training at Indiana University, where he received a B.M. in both Composition and Piano Performance. He went on to earn an M.M. in Composition at Indiana University and a Doctor of Musical Arts at the Juilliard School where he was a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow. Kennedy’s music has been performed internationally by numerous artists and ensembles, including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestra Teatro Comunale di Bologna, South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, Wisconsin Philharmonic, Bloomington Camerata, Symphony in C, and Tuscaloosa Symphony. He is the recipient of several prestigious prizes, including the ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize, the ‘2 Agosto’ International Composition Prize, a BMI Student Composer Award, five ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, the Suzanne and Lee Ettleson prize, the ASCAP Raymond Hubbel Award, fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo Artist Colonies, an Aaron Copland Award, and two Indiana University Dean’s Prizes in Composition. Previously a member of the academic faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, he is currently the Director of Composition and Theory at Central Washington University in Washington State.
Yucong (Zoe) Wang: Blackbird Yucong (Zoe) Wang (b. 1993) began studying piano at age six and composition when she was 11. In 2011, she entered the Shanghai Conservatory as the top-ranked student, studying composition with Professor Gang Chen and Professor Huang Lv. In 2013, she entered the Eastman School of Music to pursue a B.M. in composition. Wang’s compositions have been performed at many concerts in Shanghai, at the Eastman School of Music, the George Eastman House, the Strong National Museum, and the University of Oregon. In 2016, she collaborated with the Deviant Septet, and her piece, The Ecstasy of Six Persian Poems, was performed by the septet at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity. In the same year, she was commissioned to write a piece for the 2016 Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum. Her past composition awards include second prize in the Confucius Award Composition Competition (2009) for her Chinese instrumental trio, Yi, and first prize in the Young Promise Composition Competition (2011) for her mixed quintet, The Reverse of 12 Hours. She also received the Eastman School’s Belle Gitleman award in 2016 for her chamber pieces, Five Wright Songs and The Ecstasy of Six Persian Poems.
Yucong (Zoe) Wang (b. 1993) began studying piano at age six and composition when she was 11. In 2011, she entered the Shanghai Conservatory as the top-ranked student, studying composition with Professor Gang Chen and Professor Huang Lv. In 2013, she entered the Eastman School of Music to pursue a B.M. in composition. Wang’s compositions have been performed at many concerts in Shanghai, at the Eastman School of Music, the George Eastman House, the Strong National Museum, and the University of Oregon. In 2016, she collaborated with the Deviant Septet, and her piece, The Ecstasy of Six Persian Poems, was performed by the septet at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity. In the same year, she was commissioned to write a piece for the 2016 Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum. Her past composition awards include second prize in the Confucius Award Composition Competition (2009) for her Chinese instrumental trio, Yi, and first prize in the Young Promise Composition Competition (2011) for her mixed quintet, The Reverse of 12 Hours. She also received the Eastman School’s Belle Gitleman award in 2016 for her chamber pieces, Five Wright Songs and The Ecstasy of Six Persian Poems.
Blackbird, Movement II. Aggregation The documentary Le peuple migrateur directed by Jacques Perrin instigated my inspiration to write this piece. I was fascinated by its depiction of the movements of birds, and struck by the power of nature that dominates all creatures. During the writing process of the piece, I did not have any specific breed of bird in mind. Only after I finished it, one of my best friends suggested the title “Blackbird,” not referring to the specific breed, but rather the bird that exists in the Ancient Chinese Mythology. The piece has two movements. ~Zoe Wang
Alexander Timofeev (b. 1983) debuted as a composer at age 19 performing his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2003) with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Moldova. He premiered his works at the Thailand International Composition Festival, Hariclea Darclee Festival and Voice Competition (Romania), Oxford Piano Festival (UK), Novye Imena (Russia), Northern Lights Festival (USA) and received awards for his compositions at Sergey Slonimsky International Competition (Russia), Valasske Mezirici International Festival and Cimbalom Competition (Czech Republic), and Carl Filtsch International Competition (Romania). He is the winner of the 2016 Richard Weerts Composition Competition, and a finalist of the 2016 Thailand International Composition Festival. His recent premieres include the Five Songs on Poems by Agnesa Rosca for Soprano and Piano (2015), Concerto for Two Pianos and Chamber Orchestra (2014), and Concerto for Cimbalom and Orchestra (2013). His compositions have been broadcast on WQXR and presented in live performances on Pro TV (Romania) and Tele-Radio Moldova. In 2008 Timofeev founded the International Society of Pianists and Composers (ispci.org), a non-profit organization that promotes contemporary music written for piano. Started as a creative circle of composers and performers, graduates of the Eastman School of Music, it now represents a growing network of musicians from over 20 countries. Alexander Timofeev completed his D.M.A. at the University of Maryland, College Park. He holds an M.M. from the Eastman School of Music and a B.M. from Rowan University. He studied composition with Lawrence Moss, Harold Oliver and Zlata Tkach. Timofeev currently resides in Philadelphia; he is an Artist-in-Residence at Rowan University.
Fantasme for Orchestra (2016)
“Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies.” This quote by the British philosopher Alan Watts can inspire us to love and appreciate music in all its forms. We subconsciously experience joy when we hear music – an act that comforts us in the lonely, dark universe. Once I had experienced such joy when I heard a melody by Mozart. I immediately realized that I found an idea that ignited my senses and feelings. In order to give this musical thought a new perspective, I began to disintegrate it into basic elements from which I could build a new meaning. The result was Fantasme – a sequence of contrasting musical images, an emotional journey that could take the listener in an unexpected direction.
~Alexander Timofeev
Hilary Purrington (b. 1990) is a New England-based composer whose work has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC), among others. In the summer of 2012, Purrington received funding through a Wagoner Foreign Study Grant to study Music Composition and German Language at the Freie Universität Berlin, and in the summer of 2013, she participated as a Fellow at the Yale School of Music Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Most recently, she was featured in the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL. Purrington’s music has been performed by many distinguished ensembles, including the Peabody Modern Orchestra, the Yale Philharmonia, the American Modern Ensemble, and the ChoralArt Camerata. Recent commissions include new works for the Chicago Harp Quartet, the Musical Chairs Chamber Ensemble, and the Melodia Women’s Choir of NYC. Upcoming projects include commissions from Washington Square Winds, inFLUX, and the New York Youth Symphony. Purrington holds degrees from The Juilliard School and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. She is currently pursuing a Master of Musical Arts at the Yale School of Music.
Likely Pictures in Haphazard Sky (2016) contrasts moments of delicate sparseness with passages of rich textures and emphatic lyricism. Throughout the work, the fragments introduced in the sparse, faltering opening gradually coalesce into distinct melodic ideas. The title comes from a poem called “Starlight” by William Meredith. Meredith uses constellations to explore, among other things, our natural fear of randomness and our instinctive desire to find or create meaningful patterns. ~Hilary Purrington
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Carlos Bandera is a composer who is fascinated by musical architecture and by the music of the past. His recent music explores these fascinations, often by placing a musical quotation, be it a phrase, scale, or sonority, within dense microtonal textures.
Lily Chen (b. 1985), born in Taiwan, is a composer exploring timbral materials with subtle theatrical potentials in both acoustic and electronic music, which shape evocative atmospheres that point towards poetic commentary on her observations on literary, emotional, or social aspects of the contemporary condition. In December 2017, she received her Ph.D. in music composition from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied with Ken Ueno, Franck Bedrossian, Edmund Campion, and Cindy Cox. She also holds M.M. (2009) and B.F.A. (2007) from Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan, under the instruction of Chung-Kun Hung. Since 2005, Lily has received several prizes, including the George Ladd Prix de Paris for one research year in Paris, 1st Prize of Asian Composers League Young Composers Award, 2nd Prize of National Taiwan Orchestra Symphony Competition, winner of !BAMM! Student Composers Competition, 1st and 2nd Prizes of Nicola de Lorenzo Prize in Music Composition. Her music has also been performed at several international festivals in United States and Asia, including June in Buffalo, Mise-en Festival, International Computer Music Conference, SEAMUS, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and Asian Composers League Conference and Festival. Lily has also collaborated with several ensembles and orchestras, such as St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Eco Ensemble, Ensemble Signal, Mivos Quartet, Splinter Reeds, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Ensemble Mise-en, Ensemble Exceptet, Ensemble Cairn, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, and Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra. For more information, please visit – http://chenlily.com
Composer Scott Lee writes concert music infused with the visceral sounds of popular music. Lee has worked with leading orchestras such as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Winston-Salem Symphony members, Symphony In C, and the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, chamber groups such as the Jack Quartet, yMusic, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Deviant Septet, chatterbird, and ShoutHouse, as well as multi-platinum pop artist Ben Folds. He has received commissions from the Aspen Music Festival, the Baltimore Classical Guitar Society, loadbang, the Raleigh Civic Symphony, and the American Craft Council.
An American composer of chamber, orchestral, vocal, choral, and electronic music, Ryan’s works have been performed across the United States and abroad by Alarm Will Sound, “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, Orkest de Ereprijs, the USC Thornton Symphony, numerous university wind ensembles, the Donald Sinta Quartet, FearNoMusic, and the City of Tomorrow, among others. His music has received recognition from BMI, ASCAP, SCI, the American Modern Ensemble, the National Band Association, Tribeca New Music, and the Texas Music Educators Association. Ryan grew up in Texas and is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where he was selected as Salutatorian for the class of 2016 and named the Thornton School of Music’s Outstanding Graduate. He is currently a master’s student at the Yale School of Music. His past teachers include Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Andrew Norman, Ted Hearne, Frank Ticheli, and Donald Crockett. Recent and upcoming projects include Mysterious Butterflies for chamber ensemble and eight voices, a wind ensemble version of Like an Altar with 9,000 Robot Attendants commissioned by a consortium of 30 university wind ensembles organized by conductor H. Robert Reynolds, a commission for the Big 12 Band Directors Association, and pieces for chamber ensemble and orchestra to be premiered at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 2018.
Tomàs Peire Serrate was born in Barcelona. He studied piano at the Sant Cugat del Vallès conservatory, where he grew up, and History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. After few years performing and teaching he decided to focus on composition, first studying at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (Barcelona) with Salvador Brotons, and in 2009 at the Sibelius Academy of Helsinki (Finland) with Tapio Tuomela and Risto Väisänen. In 2011 he moved to New York with the La Caixa Fellowship to pursue a Master´s in Scoring for Film and Multimedia at the New York University, where he graduated in 2013 obtaining the Elmer Bernstein Award. That year he moved to Los Angeles to explore the film music industry and participate as a composer in different projects including writing the music for the films The Anushree Experiements and Prism, and orchestrating and arranging music for If I Stay, Minions or Love and Friendship.
Described as “particularly evocative,” “fluid and theatrical… the music [that] makes its case with immediacy” (The Arts Fuse) as well as both “assertive and steely,” and “lovely, subtle writing” (Wall Street Journal) the music by the award-winning composer and pianist Liliya Ugay has been performed in many countries around the globe. Recipient of a 2016 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2017 Horatio Parker Memorial prize from the Yale School of Music, Ugay has collaborated with the Nashville Symphony, Albany Symphony, New England Philharmonic, Yale Philharmonia, Raleigh Civic Symphony, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Molinari Quartet, Antico Moderno, Omnibus ensemble, and Paul Neubauer among others. Her music has been featured at the Aspen, American Composers, New York Electroacoustic Music, June in Buffalo, and Darmstadt New Music festivals, as well as the 52nd Venice Biennale. During 2017-2018 Ugay will be working on a new opera as a Resident Composer at the American Lyric Theater. Originally from Uzbekistan, Liliya is currently a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate at the Yale School of Music studying with Aaron Kernis and David Lang. Besides new music, Liliya is passionate about the music of the repressed composers from the Soviet era. She regularly presents a series of the lecture-recitals on this topic with guidance of Boris Berman.
Composer’s Chair, which he holds for the 2017-2018 season. It features Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 2, “The American Four Seasons,” with Tim Fain as soloist. Glass’ work is paired with two composers he has mentored and inspired – Pauchi Sasaki and Bryce Dessner. Dessner’s Réponse Lutosławski is the creative fruit of his study of Lutosławski’s string orchestra piece Musique funèbre. Pauchi Sasaki’s GAMA XVI features the composer as electronics soloist, wearing and performing an original Speaker Dress made from 100 speakers.
dance, theater, installation, site specific, and interdisciplinary performances; Sasaki has performed internationally in Peru, the U.S., Japan, Spain, Chile, Colombia, and Switzerland. This year she was selected by Philip Glass to become his protégé as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative for a one-year mentorship. Sasaki’s classical violin studies began at age five; she studied Andean music at CEMDUC; classical music of North India with maestro Ali Akbar Khan in San Rafael, California; and Klezmer music with Alicia Svigals in New York. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from PUCP in Lima and a master’s degree in Recording Media and Experimental Music from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her compositions involve acoustic, amplified, and electronic instrumentation influenced by improvisational aesthetics and ethnic musical traditions. Her work also focuses on the development of real time interactive music and self-designed instruments using Max Msp and circuit bending. This branch of her work seeks the embodiment of electronic music performance integrating the emission of electronic sounds with corporal expressivity. Her piece for ACO, GAMA XVI, is a performative electroacoustic composition for orchestra and speaker dress – a wearable sound sculpture created with 100 speakers.
Yucong (Zoe) Wang (b. 1993) began studying piano at age six and composition when she was 11. In 2011, she entered the Shanghai Conservatory as the top-ranked student, studying composition with Professor Gang Chen and Professor Huang Lv. In 2013, she entered the Eastman School of Music to pursue a B.M. in composition. Wang’s compositions have been performed at many concerts in Shanghai, at the Eastman School of Music, the George Eastman House, the Strong National Museum, and the University of Oregon. In 2016, she collaborated with the Deviant Septet, and her piece, The Ecstasy of Six Persian Poems, was performed by the septet at the Warren and Patricia Benson Forum on Creativity. In the same year, she was commissioned to write a piece for the 2016 Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum. Her past composition awards include second prize in the Confucius Award Composition Competition (2009) for her Chinese instrumental trio, Yi, and first prize in the Young Promise Composition Competition (2011) for her mixed quintet, The Reverse of 12 Hours. She also received the Eastman School’s Belle Gitleman award in 2016 for her chamber pieces, Five Wright Songs and The Ecstasy of Six Persian Poems.
Alexander Timofeev (b. 1983) debuted as a composer at age 19 performing his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2003) with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Moldova. He premiered his works at the Thailand International Composition Festival, Hariclea Darclee Festival and Voice Competition (Romania), Oxford Piano Festival (UK), Novye Imena (Russia), Northern Lights Festival (USA) and received awards for his compositions at Sergey Slonimsky International Competition (Russia), Valasske Mezirici International Festival and Cimbalom Competition (Czech Republic), and Carl Filtsch International Competition (Romania). He is the winner of the 2016 Richard Weerts Composition Competition, and a finalist of the 2016 Thailand International Composition Festival. His recent premieres include the Five Songs on Poems by Agnesa Rosca for Soprano and Piano (2015), Concerto for Two Pianos and Chamber Orchestra (2014), and Concerto for Cimbalom and Orchestra (2013). His compositions have been broadcast on WQXR and presented in live performances on Pro TV (Romania) and Tele-Radio Moldova. In 2008 Timofeev founded the International Society of Pianists and Composers (ispci.org), a non-profit organization that promotes contemporary music written for piano. Started as a creative circle of composers and performers, graduates of the Eastman School of Music, it now represents a growing network of musicians from over 20 countries. Alexander Timofeev completed his D.M.A. at the University of Maryland, College Park. He holds an M.M. from the Eastman School of Music and a B.M. from Rowan University. He studied composition with Lawrence Moss, Harold Oliver and Zlata Tkach. Timofeev currently resides in Philadelphia; he is an Artist-in-Residence at Rowan University.
Hilary Purrington (b. 1990) is a New England-based composer whose work has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC), among others. In the summer of 2012, Purrington received funding through a Wagoner Foreign Study Grant to study Music Composition and German Language at the Freie Universität Berlin, and in the summer of 2013, she participated as a Fellow at the Yale School of Music Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Most recently, she was featured in the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL. Purrington’s music has been performed by many distinguished ensembles, including the Peabody Modern Orchestra, the Yale Philharmonia, the American Modern Ensemble, and the ChoralArt Camerata. Recent commissions include new works for the Chicago Harp Quartet, the Musical Chairs Chamber Ensemble, and the Melodia Women’s Choir of NYC. Upcoming projects include commissions from Washington Square Winds, inFLUX, and the New York Youth Symphony. Purrington holds degrees from The Juilliard School and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. She is currently pursuing a Master of Musical Arts at the Yale School of Music.