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
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 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.
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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.