Thank you for joining us for New Canons. Whether you are in New York City at the DiMenna Center, our Groupmuse in Murray Hill, or joining us online from across the world, we are so excited to share this experience with you.
Saturday, October 23, 2021 – 2:15pm
Mary Flagler Cary Hall at DiMenna Center (Hudson Yards, New York City)
Groupmuse in Murray Hill (New York City)
Virtual Network via Cleanfeed (Worldwide)
AMERICAN COMPOSERS ORCHESTRA
Peter Askim, Guest Conductor
GUEST ARTISTS
Bergamot Quartet (Murray Hill, New York City)
Ligeti Quartet (United Kingdom)
Alexandra Quartet (United Kingdom)
Diego Tejedor, Violin (Argentina)
Bernd Keul, Bass (Germany)
Gaurab Chatterjee, Hand percussion (India)
Jocelyn Clark, Gayageum (South Korea)
Patti Kilroy, Violin (Los Angeles)
Haruna Walusimbi, Kalimba (Uganda)
Trevor New, Viola and Electronics (Hudson Yards, New York City)
RAQUEL ACEVEDO KLEIN
Polyphonic Interlace
RAY LUSTIG
Latency Canons
CHRIS KALLMYER
All Possible Music
PAULINE OLIVEROS
Environmental Dialogue
TREVOR NEW
Cohere 1
New Canons is made possible in part by a NYSCA Restart NY: Rapid Live Performance grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Raquel Acevedo Klein is an active conductor, vocalist, composer, and instrumentalist from Brooklyn, NY. Raquel has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall, Town Hall, BAM, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Celebrate Brooklyn!, Little Island, National Sawdust, the Guggenheim, Rockefeller Center, the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and elsewhere. She has premiered works and operas by Philip Glass, Caroline Shaw, John Adams, Nico Muhly, Paola Prestini, Bryce Dessner, Missy Mazzoli, and George Lewis to name a few. She has recorded and performed with artists including Glen Hansard, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, The National, Grizzly Bear, Cory Smythe, Sufjan Stevens, The Knights, NY Philharmonic, and International Contemporary Ensemble among others. She conducts for the Grammy Award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus and New Jersey Symphony Orchestra among others. Her performances and curations have caught the attention of publications including the NY Times, LA Times, The New Yorker, and Time Out New York.
About Polyphonic Interlace
A surround-sound music experience, Polyphonic Interlace invites participants to travel amidst a sea of voices emerging from several directions. All are welcome to play the piece’s musical tracks from their smartphones or speaker devices following a countdown at the start of the event. Music made entirely of Klein’s voice emanates from the house speakers and participants’ devices, transforming into a sonic tapestry of stories from across New York City at the cusp of the reopening. The tracks can be accessed at www.polyphonicinterlace.com.
Composer-performer Ray Lustig’s diverse and evolving work spans symphonic, chamber, electronic, multimedia, and theatrical. His music is presented in venues ranging from New York City clubs and galleries to major concert halls, stages, and festivals around the world. His music-theater work SEMMELWEIS premiered in the 2018-19 season with fourteen performances in Budapest and touring performances throughout Hungary. Pandemic-era performances included charitable and educational online showings of SEMMELWEIS, as well as online performances of orchestral and chamber works created to be played live over the internet. Lustig’s #composagrams series—a diary of fifteen second music videos for Instagram with an intentionally homemade ethos—has spawned a novel genre of miniature works with a “use what you have available to you” spirit, and staked out the internet as an artistic space with its own creative benefits and boundaries. His latest collaborative project Manicburg—an all-composer band—will be unveiled with releases this year. American Composers Orchestra commissioned Lustig to write Latency Canons in 2013 as part of the CoLABoratory a research and development lab encouraging composers to experiment and push the boundaries of American orchestral repertoire.
In the Composer’s Own Words
In the spirit of using the problem as its own solution, Latency Canons incorporates technology’s limitations as the central idea. Musicians in different places play simple lines together using ordinary video-conferencing software, and the random blips freezes, and delays themselves create a counterpoint of beautiful, unexpected relationships, like echoes in a digital cathedral that wraps around the world.
During the performance, the audience sees musicians on stage directly, as well as musicians playing offstage and in remote locations, on camera and webcast through video-conferencing software. Each laptop’s screen is projected to an overhead screen that allows the audience to both hear and see all the musicians involved.
Latency Canons poses the question of how we make music together in our world, how that may be changing, and what this will mean for the musical experience. Our technology is drawing us closer and closer together in so many ways, and the attitude of the work is one of communion over distances. This is a different kind of music making that, along with its limitations, has the potential to bring people together in different ways than ordinary chamber music. In realizing the work, we have tried to maintain the simplest possible setup, with basic free software that is easy to use. I’ve tried to avoid having this piece exist as a specialized high-tech feat, but rather as an idea that anyone with a computer and an internet connection could hope to try on their own.
Chris Kallmyer is an artist that creates collective experiences with music, art, and design. The work is driven by his interest in the perception of community, listening, landscape, and embodied experience. He often collaborates with museums and symphonies to create interventions that confront pressing issues of institutional reform through the experience of sound in situ. This means that the work can take on many forms including installations, public artwork, curatorial projects, publications, workshops and performances. Kallmyer has garnered commissions from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, STUDIO TeatrGaleria in Warsaw, and the City of Los Angeles among other spaces in America and Europe. He’s created interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with organic food pioneers Sue Conley and Albert Strauss, and musicians Mark Mothersbaugh, Moses Sumney, Julia Holter, and Justin Vernon & Aaron Dessner’s Eaux Claires Festival. His 2018 collaboration with the photographer David Maisel was recently acquired into the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
About All Possible Music
All Possible Music is a collection of speculative scores that describe all of the music that could ever happen. The piece explores the contextual nature of music, encompassing both real and imagined sounds to describe a world that is mundane, spectacular, sometimes humorous, and always alive: a blissful symphony for an audience of careful listeners; dance floor hits in a cabin set deep in the woods; visionary drum machines that heal the earth and its people.
Pauline Oliveros‘ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the ’50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960’s she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and many awards. Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded “Deep Listening ®,” which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. “Deep Listening is my life practice,” Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, Troy, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through The Pauline Oliveros Trust and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc.
In the Composer’s Own Words
Each person finds a place to be, either near to or distant from the others, either indoors or out-of-doors. Begin the meditation by observing your own breathing. As you become aware of sounds from the environment, gradually begin to reinforce the pitch of the sound. Reinforce either vocally, mentally or with an instrument. If you lose touch with the source, wait quietly for another. Reinforce means to strengthen or sustain. If the pitch of the sound sources out of your range, then reinforce it mentally.
Trevor New is a classically trained and self-taught Electro Acoustic Violist based in Brooklyn who is known for creating and performing intuitive and scored soundscapes that evoke a cinematic journey. He is a performer, composer, sound designer, engineer/producer and educator working with leading artists, composers and developers of music technology. New is driven by the exploration of diverse music formats: found sounds, live looping, modular synthesis, digital processing methods, film, orchestra. His passion is creating new music that explores contrasting styles, timbres and performance approaches hence a devotion to Electro Acoustic Viola blended with classical elements. As Immersive performances continue to rapidly emerge, New is actively at the forefront both as an artist, musician, mentor and technologist.
In the Composer’s Own Words
Cohere 1 is a piece written for decentralized simultaneous telematic performance. It features a soloist and orchestra, 3 quartets in separate locations, each with an audience and 6 international soloists from around the world. They will be playing together in real time, seeing, listening, and reacting to one another. The core of this piece is about discovering connections to the world around us in unexpected places and seeing how they fit together, it’s about deepening that feeling of connection with people near and far, being able to feel like they’re right next to you. This piece plays with sounds of greetings, time and space, and the digital networks that connect to all of us, this is what they sound like.
The Alexandra Quartet has come together especially for this project, comprising current and former members of the Solem Quartet and guest principals at orchestras such as Manchester Camerata and English National Ballet. The quartet’s members have worked closely with living composers such as Anna Meredith, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Thomas Ades and Colin Matthews, and ensembles such as London Contemporary Orchestra, Manchester Collective and Aurora Orchestra. The quartet also does session work and has recorded and performed with artists including Michael Bublé, Eminem, Clean Bandit, Ed Sheeran and Paul Weller. They are regular guests at the BBC Proms and have appeared often on BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM. Between them they have toured Asia, Europe and the US extensively. Having discovered both the power and the limitations of online conferencing software all too well last year, the quartet is looking forward to making music out of this very specific set of parameters, and to joining up with wonderful musicians from all over the world. Members of the quarter include Michael Jones and William Newell, violins; Alex Koustas, viola; and Stephanie Tress, cello.
Active as a composer, conductor, and bassist, Peter Askim is Founder and Artistic Director of The Next Festival of Emerging Artists, Director of Orchestral Studies at NC State University and conductor of the Raleigh Civic Symphony and Chamber Orchestra. As a conductor, he is known for innovative programming, championing the work of living composers and his advocacy of underrepresented voices in the concert hall. He has conducted premieres by composers such as Brett Dean, Aaron Jay Kernis, Jessica Meyer, Nico Muhly, Rufus Reid, Christopher Theofanidis, Jeff Scott and Aleksandra Vrebalov, and led the American premiere of Florence Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America. His work was featured on HBO and National Public Radio conducting folk-rock legend Richard Thompson’s soundtrack for The Cold Blue. He has collaborated with such artists as Miranda Cuckson, Matt Haimovitz, Vijay Iyer, Jennifer Koh, Nadia Sirota, Sō Percussion and Jeffrey Zeigler. As a composer, he has been called a “Modern Master” by The Strad and has had commissions and performances from such groups as the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Honolulu Symphony, the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Cantus Ansambl Zagreb and the American Viola Society. Askim is the founder of The Next Festival of Emerging Artists, dedicated to the next generation of performers, composers and choreographers.
Bergamot Quartet is fueled by a passion for exploring and advocating for the music of living composers, continually expanding the limits of the string quartet’s rich tradition in western classical music. With a priority given to music by women, they aim to place this new, genre-bending music in meaningful dialogue with the histories that precede it with creative programming, community-oriented audience building, and frequent commissioning. Highlights of their 2021 season are recording their debut album featuring a work by member Ledah Finck with percussionist Terry Sweeney as guest artist; a co-commission of Darian Thomas with Sō Percussion as part of Sō’s Flexible Commissions project, to be released as a collaborative album in late 2021; and Slow Movement, a multimedia work created by Bergamot and fashion designer Whitney Newton that focuses on questions of sustainability. Bergamot is also dedicated to supporting young composers and in 2020-2021 has been the virtual ensemble-in-residence for the Junior Bach program at the Peabody Institute and MATA Jr. 2021. Bergamot Quartet is Ledah Finck and Sarah Thomas, violins; Amy Tan, viola; and Irène Han, cello. Based in New York City, Bergamot Quartet is currently the Graduate String Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music.
Gaurab “Gaboo” Chatterjee is a drummer/composer and a founder member of the Kolkata-based rock band, Lakkhichhara. Lakkhichhara has been an integral part of the music scene of Eastern India for the last 26 years. Having released 5 studio albums apart from multiple singles and songs in compilation albums. Gaurab has been a part of the Indo Jazz band Kendraka since 2012. Gaurab also works as a music director for Bengali films and plays as a session drummer for different artists as well. He is a part of the Indo-Australian band The Three Seas. The Three Seas have two studio albums and they have toured India and Australia extensively. Gaurab is a part of Pandit Tanmoy Bose’s Taaltantra. He performs with the Kolkata based Popcult and has been a part of the project “Beat Goes Bach” from Malaysia. Gaurab has performed with artists like Bickram Ghosh, Purbayan Chatterjee, Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, Subhen Chatterjee, Kala Ramnath. Gaurab has worked extensively with folk musicians from different parts of India.
Jocelyn Clark is a professor at Pai Chai University (培材大學校) in South Korea. After graduating from high school in Juneau, Alaska, she spent 20 years in Japan, China, and Korea studying traditional music. Clark has a 2005 Ph. D. from Harvard University in East Asian Languages and Civilizations where she wrote on the Korean musical genre gayageum byeongchang (伽倻琴竝唱) focusing on the tension between its oral transmission/low social standing and its tenuous relationship to Chinese classical poetic texts of the High Tang period. She is the first foreign official government jeonsuja (傳受者) in the national treasure system—under North Jeolla Province Intangible Cultural Property No. 40: Gayageum Sanjo (伽倻琴散調), and under National Intangible Cultural Property No. 23: Gayageum Sanjo and Byeongchang. She has commissioned and/or premiered over 30 new solo and ensemble works for Korean gayageum alone and with her ensemble IIIZ+ (guzheng 古筝, koto お琴, gayageum 伽倻琴, and percussion), and as a founding director of the CrossSound new music festival (Alaska 1999-2010).
Based in Cologne, Germany, Bernd Keul is an active musician, composer, collector, and researcher. Originally a bassist performing with rock bands, he has branched out into theater, radio, film music and world music, with a focus on African and Indian works. Keul regularly performs on hybrid instruments and custom controllers, performing telematic music with multichannel sound. Before the pandemic, he most recently collaborated with Robert Willson in Europe and China.
Violinist, pedagogue, and recording artist Patti Kilroy is a uniquely modern-minded musician, most known for her stylistic versatility and her work with technology and violin extended techniques. Praised for her “intensely focused” playing by The New York Times, she uses both her extensive performance résumé and experience with music running the stylistic gamut as tools in her work as an Assistant Professor at California State University, Los Angeles. To learn more about her career engagements and research interests, visit pattikilroy.com.
The Ligeti Quartet are dedicated to modern and contemporary string quartet music. They have established a reputation as one of the UK’s most innovative classical ensembles by championing today’s most exciting composers and artists. Having played at landmark venues around the world including Carnegie Hall, Curtis Institute, Wigmore Hall, Purcell Room, Barbican Hall, they also regularly escape the stage to appear at museums, galleries, theatres, pubs, an IMAX Theatre, a fishing boat, a cave, and on iceberg sculptures as part of a Greenpeace campaign. They have commissioned many new works and have collaborated with artists from all types of musical backgrounds including Anna Meredith, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Stef Conner, Kerry Andrew (Juice Vocal Ensemble), Kate Whitley, Laura Jurd and Elliot Galvin (Dinosaur), Meilyr Jones, Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy), Sean Noonan, Seb Rochford (Polar Bear), Shabaka Hutchings (Sons of Kemet) and Submotion Orchestra. Since the lockdowns of 20/21, Ligeti Quartet have launched their Workout! Scheme in which they give online workshops and performances of 100 new pieces. The final round is currently open for submissions, deadline December 1, 2021 and is open to all. For this performance, the Ligeti Quartet is Natalie Klouda, guest violin; Patrick Dawkins, violin,; Richard Jones, viola; and Val Welbanks, cello.
Diego Tejedor studied violin with Elías Khayat and John Anthony Calabrese (USA) in Argentina, and with Ina Dimitrova (Bulgaria) and Daniel Dodds (Australia) Switzerland. Tejedor was outstanding as a soloist with the National Radio Youth Orchestra under the direction of Bracha Waldma, performing Bethoven’s Romanza for violin and Orchestra No. 2. He also performed Beethoven’s first Romanza for violin and orchestra with the Symphony Orchestra of the Faculty of Medicine under the direction of Daniel Hathaway. Tejedor was the winner of the scholarship awarded by the Foundation “El Sonido y el Tiempo” in 2005. He was awarded a scholarship by the Musikhochschule Luzern in Lucerne, Switzerland, which enabled him to study with Professor Ina Dimitrova from 2005 to 2009. During his stay in Switzerland, he was a member of the Junge Philharmonie Zentralschweiz, the Camerata Luzern, the 21st Century Orchestra, the SJSO Schweizer Jugend-Sinfonie-Orchester, and the LSO Luzerner Sinfonieorchester. In 2009, Tejedor auditioned successfully for the 5th chair in the second violin section of the Orquesta Estable del Teatro Colón. Since 2012 he has been part of Orquesta Estable Teatro Colón.
NSIBAMBI HARUNA WALUSIMBI is a graduate of Makerere University with Bachelors of Arts and a Diploma in Music Dance and Drama. He is currently the Managing Director of Nile Beat Artists – one of the most popular and oldest cultural troupes in Uganda. He is deeply rooted in Ugandan indigenous music and play a wide range on instruments. Mr. Walusimbi is a Royal musician in the Busoga and Buganda kingdoms and was featured prominently in the movie Throw Down Your Heart by Bela Fleck. He is a regular resident artist at Oakland University and has represented Uganda at various cultural festivals in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden and India, among others.
VIOLIN I
Karla Donehew Perez
Concertmaster
Deborah Wong
Martin Agee
Ann Labin
VIOLIN II
Josh Henderson
Principal
Katherine Hannauer
Yukie Handa
VIOLA
Paul Laraia
Principal
Sandra Robbins
CELLO
Gene Moye
Principal
Sarah Carter
BASS
Gail Kruvand
Principal
Richard Sosinsky
FLUTE
Alex Sopp
OBOE
Alexandra Knoll
CLARINET
Jo-ann Sternberg
BASSOON
Harry Searing
FRENCH HORN
Laura Weiner
TRUMPET
Tim Leopold
TROMBONE
Mike Seltzer
TUBA
Ray Stewart
TIMPANI
Jonathan Haas
PERCUSSION
Charles Descarfino
HARP
Jacqui Kerrod
KEYBOARD
Chris Oldfather
PERSONNEL MANAGER
Jonathan Taylor
LIBRARIAN
Manly Romero
American Composers Orchestra (ACO) advances orchestral music by identifying, developing and supporting American composers. ACO champions overlooked voices, identifies and amplifies emerging artists, supports innovative compositions and interpretations, provides experiences that embrace discovery, and nurtures a vibrant community of creators, listeners and patrons.
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Groupmuse is an online platform that has connected musicians to audiences since 2013 in living rooms, outdoor backyards, and other untraditional concert spaces. Groupmuse is a worker-owned cooperative and has presented more than 700 online concerts in support of musicians impacted by COVID-19. groupmuse.com
The Groupmuse Foundation is a parallel nonprofit dedicated to expanding classical music to be more inclusive and vibrant by empowering musicians through financial, technological, and career support. groupmuse.org
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American Composers Orchestra (ACO) is dedicated to the creation, celebration, performance, and promotion of orchestral music by American composers. With commitment to diversity, disruption and discovery, ACO produces concerts, pre-college and college education programs, and emerging composer professional development to foster a community of creators, audience, performers, collaborators, and funders.
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