|
||||
|
|
||
|
|
ACO 2008-09 With 10 commissions, 9 world premieres, and works by five composers first identified through the ACO New Music Readings Program.
American Composers Orchestra's 2008-09 concert season is its 32nd year as the nation's most adventurous champion of inventive new American orchestral music. The new season, devoted to works for ACO's pioneering Orchestra Underground, continues ACO's explorations of how today's orchestral composers are taking in the world around them -- the sounds, sights, colors, technologies, world influences, and issues -- and bringing it all together in a new, flexible orchestral ensemble geared to experimentation, innovation, and collaboration.
Fresh from winning ASCAP's
prestigious 2008 Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming,
the new ACO season includes three concerts, presented by Carnegie
Hall in Zankel Hall, with three performances at the Annenberg Center
for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia; ACO expands The season is notable for its focus on emerging composers, with no fewer than five composers who have "come up through the ranks" of ACO's highly regarded emerging composers programs -- Kati Agócs, Derek Bermel, Fang Man, Clint Needham, and Greg Spears. Bermel, ACO's Music Alive Composer-in-Residence, is completing his three-year residency and is featured as composer, performer, and educator. ACO's artistic director, Robert Beaser, is also represented in an ACO-commissioned guitar concerto, Beaser's first ACO performance in New York since 1999.
Orchestra
Underground:
Friday,
November 14, 2008 at 7:30pm, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, NYC
Fred
Ho, following his two-year battle with cancer, celebrates with
his first orchestral commission. Ho describes When the Real
Dragons Fly! for saxophone and orchestra
Jeffrey
Milarsky, a leading conductor of contemporary music in New York
City, is a frequent collaborator with ACO and a former member of the
orchestra. In the United States and abroad, he has premiered
Orchestra Underground: Collaborations, New & Green
Friday,
Feb. 20, 2009, at 7:30PM, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, NYC
Rand
Steiger writes that Cryosphere, for live electronics and
orchestra, "draws inspiration from the Earth's frozen surfaces,
Fang
Man was selected to participate in the New Music Readings in
2006. She won that year's Underwood Emerging Composer Commission and
then departed for IRCAM
The
adventurous George Manahan conducts. Manahan is well-known to
New York audiences as the music director of the New York City Opera,
where he has earned
Orchestra
Underground:
Friday,
May 1, 2009, at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, NYC
Robert
Beaser has been associated with ACO since 1988, when he was the
Meet The Composer/Composer-in-Residence. He has served as ACO's
artistic director
Thomas
Larcher is a rapidly rising Austrian composer whose piano
concerto, Böse Zellen (Malignant Cells),
Lukas
Ligeti is writing what he calls "a concerto of sorts for
electronic percussion and orchestra."
Derek
Bermel, ACO's Music Alive Composer-in-Residence and the
winner of the 2008 Alpert Award in the Arts, is completing his
three-year residency with the orchestra at the end of the 2008-09
season.
Underwood New Music Readings in NYC
Thursday
and Friday, May 7 & 8, 2009
The proceedings are open to the public free of charge. ACO's artistic director, Robert Beaser, directs the readings. The deadline for composers interested in applying to the Underwood New Music Readings is Friday, November 21, 2008. Application guidelines and other information are available at www.americancomposers.org/nmr/.
Philadelphia Concerts, Residency & Readings ACO enters into the fourth year of its residency at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, bringing its Orchestra Underground concerts to the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The residency includes concerts, master classes, outreach activities, and new music readings for regional emerging composers.
Subscriptions for three concerts in Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall are currently available for $108 or $138 and can be purchased at CarnegieCharge 212-247-7800, www.carnegiehall.org, or at the Carnegie Hall Box Office. Single tickets are priced at $38 or $48, and go on sale to the public September 2. For ACO's series at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, subscriptions and tickets are available by calling 215-898-3900 or online at www.pennpresents.org.
Major support of American Composers Orchestra is provided by Amphion Foundation, Argosy Contemporary Music Fund, Arlington Associates, ASCAP, ASCAP Foundation, Bay and Paul Foundations, BMI, BMI Foundation, NY City Council Member Gale A. Brewer, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Edward T.Cone Foundation, Consolidated Edison, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, EMCArts, Fromm Music Foundation, GAP Foundation, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, The Irving Harris Foundation, Victor Herbert Foundation, Jephson Educational Trust, Jerome Foundation, The J.M. Kaplan Fund, John and Evelyn Kossak Foundation, Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation, Meet the Composer, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Susan and Ford Schumann Foundation, Virgil Thomson Foundation, Paul Underwood Charitable Trust, The Sonata and Watchdog Charitable Trusts, The Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation, and The Helen F. Whitaker Fund. ACO programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. ACO's residency at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is made possible by The Philadelphia Music Project, an Artistic Initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, administered by the University of the Arts. Derek Bermel is the Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with American Composers Orchestra. Music Alive is a national program of the League of American Orchestras and Meet The Composer. |
|
|
top | home | concerts | box office | join our email list |
its career-launching programs for emerging composers with the 18th
annual Underwood New Music Readings in New York City and a
Philadelphia set of Readings co-sponsored with Penn Presents at the
Annenberg Center for the Arts. ACO will continue its Composers
OutFront! series, featuring composer-performers in venues around the
city. ACO's concerts include ten commissions, nine world premieres,
and several U.S., New York, and Philadelphia premieres, including new
works by 
as
a liberation song bidding "farewell to obstructionists and
gatekeepers who prevent the real creative forces in humanity"
from soaring. The title, based on a traditional Chinese folk song
used to say farewell, suggests the sweeping vision of his music. The
composer will join the orchestra on baritone saxophone to combine
asynchronous tunes and melodies of various musical traditions,
creating what many have described as brilliant and chaotic sounds.
and
recorded works by contemporary composers, including Charles
Wuorinen, Fred Lerdahl, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Lasse
Thoresen, Gerard Grisey, Jonathan Dawe, Tristan Murail, Ralph Shapey,
Luigi Nono, Mario Davidovsky, and Wolfgang Rihm. Milarsky is
professor of music at Columbia University, where he is the music director/conductor
of the Columbia University Orchestra and the newly formed Manhattan
Sinfonietta, which concentrates on 20th- and 21st-century scores. He
is also on the faculty of The Manhattan School of Music as artistic
director and conductor of the percussion ensemble and directs AXIOM,
Juilliard's newest contemporary music ensemble. Milarsky's most
recent foray with ACO was last season's Playing it UNsafe, a weeklong
laboratory for the development of experimental new orchestra music
that included five world premieres.
innovators
of a new art form synthesizing film, sound, and video in live
performance. In this new work, sampled audio/visual/film materials
and live orchestral music are mixed, woven, and integrated to create
a multi-layered narrative flow that reveals intriguing structural
formations and compelling meanings. Each sample is a portion or
fragment of audio and visual material extracted from its original
found footage source, like movies or early television. Some of these
samples are used to derive motivic musical material for the
orchestral score. At other times the inspiration flows in reverse, as
orchestral rhythms and intervals suggest the content and manner of
the visual rhythms and melodies. Sometimes an audio sample is used as
an instrument, thus expanding the orchestral sound and texture.
particularly
the way glaciers and icebergs are formed and destroyed. It will
embrace the beauty and mystery of these structures, while also
lamenting their precipitous and unnatural loss. The winds, brass,
harps, principal strings, and percussion instruments play into
microphones, and their signals are transformed by a computer that
runs software developed at University of California at San Diego by
Miller Puckette. These transformed instrumental sounds then emerge
from small speakers located within the orchestra to enable them to
blend naturally with their original sources."
in
Paris for a year-long intensive residency in new digital music
technologies. Orchestra Underground will premiere Resurrection,
a clarinet concerto written specifically for Derek Bermel in his
role as clarinetist. The title of the work is taken from the subtitle
of Composition V-Resurrection of the Dead, a painting by
Wassily Kandinsky. The painting became the inspiration for musical
structure, and computer analysis applications help create a unique
relationship between the structure of the painting and the pitch and
time structure of the music. Musical influences for the clarinet and
for the orchestra come from Peking Opera and jazz.
a
reputation for maintaining the highest musical standards. He is
especially well-known for his leadership of productions as diverse as The
Mother of Us All, Intermezzo, Xerxes, Macbeth,
Lizzie Borden, and Tosca. Manahan has been a regular
guest conductor with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Australia,
Seattle Opera, Santa Fe Opera companies, and Opéra National de
Paris-Bastille, where he has led world premieres of works by Philippe
Fénelon, Judith Weir, Krzysztof Penderecki, Hans Werner Henze,
David Lang, Tobias Picker, and Wolfgang Rihm. His last outing with
ACO was as guest conductor in the 2006 Underwood New Music Readings.
since
2000 and is responsible for helping ACO bring more than 100 world
and New York premieres to audiences in Carnegie Hall. His Guitar
Concerto is his first work ACO has performed since 1999. It is co-commissioned
by an appropriately broad consortium: ACO, the Albany Symphony
Orchestra, and Bruckner Orchester Linz. Beaser and Fisk have been
close friends since attending Yale together, and the idea of writing
a concerto for Fisk has been on Beaser's "to-do" list for
nearly two decades.
when paired with Beaser's new concerto, initiates an informal
composer exchange between ACO and Bruckner Orchester Linz, where
Davies serves as music director. The work is a tour-de-force inspired
by a film of the same name by Barbara Albert. The composer used
images from the film to develop tightly constructed motivic and
structural material that is then spun-out in aggressive and wild ways.
The
composer will be the soloist, performing on the Marimba Lumina. The
instrument, an electronic MIDI controller designed by
California-based engineer Don Buchla that includes a traditionally
arrayed set of electronic bars, brings an extended vocabulary and
range of expression to the mallet instrument family. Ligeti is a
composer-performer comfortable in a variety of settings. His music
brings together disparate sources from European-American modernism,
jazz improvisation, and African rhythmic influences.
His
influence in programming ACO's Orchestra Underground and Composers
OutFront! events have extended ACO's range and programmatic
diversity, and enhanced its focus on the composer-performer and on
the integration of improvisation into an orchestral setting. Called
"eclectic with wide open ears," by the Toronto Star, Bermel
has been hailed by colleagues, critics, and audiences across the
globe for his creativity as a composer and his virtuosity and
charisma as a clarinetist. Known for drawing freely from a rich
variety of musical traditions, he filters the sounds of the world
through his own musical palette, crafting a singular artistic vision.
His new work, as yet untitled, is co-commissioned with the esteemed
Koussevitsky Foundation and ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, providing
the finale to Bermel's influential and successful residency.
ACO
will hold its 18th Annual Underwood New Music Readings for emerging
composers in New York City May 7-8, 2009, at Miller Theater. In what has become a rite
of passage for aspiring orchestral composers, up to ten composers
from throughout the United States will be selected to receive a
reading of a new work, and one composer will be selected to receive a
$15,000 commission for a work to be performed by ACO during an
upcoming season. Each participating composer receives a rehearsal,
reading, and a digital recording of his or her work. Review and
feedback sessions with ACO principal players, mentor-composers, guest
conductors, and industry representatives provide crucial artistic,
technical, and conceptual assistance. To date, more than 100
composers have participated in the New Music Readings, including such
award-winning composers as Melinda Wagner, Derek Bermel, Randall
Woolf, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and Jennifer Higdon.
The
residency culminates in the second ACO/Penn Presents New Music
Readings and Lab on Thursday, April 16, at 1:30PM (Readings), and Friday, April 17, at 7:30PM (Concert-Lab). This event will bring back to Philadelphia ACO's expertise in new
music and its proven track record in identifying promising composers.
The Readings/Lab will be a two-day public discovery of the top
emerging composers from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. The
first day will be modeled after ACO's annual Underwood New Music
Readings. Composers will be selected on the basis of a competitive
review of scores. They will have the opportunity to hear a reading of
their new work and receive critical feedback from a panel of
mentor-composers and ACO principals. The second day, ACO's Orchestra
Underground will present the new works in a Laboratory Performance
that includes discussion with the composers.