Performances
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Dear Friends,Welcome to American Composer Orchestra’s final concert of the 2017-2018 season at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall. ACO has enjoyed a whirlwind of a season, celebrating our 40th birthday with a gala concert featuring music of American composers past and present; hosting the kickoff event in Carnegie Hall’s focus on this season’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair (and ACO board member) Phillip Glass; and along with the PROTOTYPE Festival, co-presenting the NY Premiere of Greg Spears’ acclaimed opera Fellow Travelers.Tonight’s program, “Dreamscapes”, occurs at a milestone in American history. Fifty years ago this past Wednesday—April 4, 1968—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. In the spirit of what Dr. King described as the “fierce urgency of now,” ACO presents five works written by living composers, each of whom uses music to contemplate an aspect of our shared humanity. Despite the setbacks and angst of our era, we at ACO hope that the spirit of the world Dr. King imagined in his speech is embodied in this concert, and that through creativity we might indeed strive toward “a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”One of America’s preeminent contemporary composers, T.J. Anderson, celebrates his 90th birthday this year. We are proud to present NY premiere of Bahia Bahia, a joyous work inspired by journeys to Salvador and dedicated to two Brazilian composer colleagues. Traveling in the other direction—from Rio to Chicago—composer, pianist, and singer Clarice Assad weaves a different kind of expedition, through the volatile and peaceful vagaries of sleep. We are thrilled to feature internationally acclaimed violinist Elena Urioste as the soloist in the NY premiere of Assad’s mesmerizing concerto Dreamscapes.We’ll also hear three world premieres by composers whose background in jazz has led them to collaborate with artists and ensembles from multiple genres. Hitomi Oba’s September Coming—a direct result of her participation in ACO’s Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute—incorporates aspects of her own improvisational language, informed by ethnomusicological research. Steve Lehman’s Ten Threshold Studies explores both perceptual and physical boundaries, filtered through the medium of symphonic forces. And Ethan Iverson’s brash sense of humor melds with a deft technique in a stylistic homage: Concerto to Scale, with the composer himself as the intrepid piano soloist.As ACO sets its sights on the next 40 years, our goal is to highlight the breadth and diversity of American symphonic creativity. Society should follow its artists: their imagination, and their vision. The word “composer” in our name is deliberate and meaningful. They are our guiding star.Have a great evening, and thank you again for joining us!Derek BermelArtistic Director

When we began assembling programs around commissions from Valerie, Alex Temple, and Du Yun, we didn’t set out with the goal of featuring women (the iconic Morton Feldman being the sole male voice in our concerts this season). We simply programmed the music we wanted to share with you—music we believe in, music we love. But taking a step back, we were pleased that the result is a season of women’s voices, which demonstrates their vitality in American music today. An exciting generation of composers emerges with every call for scores and reading sessions that ACO produces through the annual Underwood New Music Readings in New York (May 23 and 24—mark your calendars!) and through EarShot in partnership with orchestras nationwide. With all that talent, inclusion and quality definitely go hand in hand. We hope that our beloved and iconic American composers—such as Copland, Bernstein, and Barber—would have been darn pleased. A final note, to one of our great living American composers: September 8marked the 80th birthday of the remarkable Joan Tower. Joan wrote her first large orchestral work for ACO in 1981, and we are delighted to help celebrate her milestone year with a performance of Chamber Dance tonight. It was commissioned by our good colleagues at Orpheus Chamber Orchestra about a decade ago, and by bringing it back, ACO stands strong in our commitment to help cement great works of American music into the standing repertoire

Dear Friends,Welcome to American Composer Orchestra’s first concert of the 2017-2018 season at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall. ACO had an exciting kick-off to its season with a gala 40th Birthday concert last month celebrating the music of American composers past and the present, and now we are honored to be the first event in Carnegie Hall’s focus on this season’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair, Phillip Glass. He is one of our most iconic and cherished artistic voices, and ACO is proud to be able to count him among one of our long-time board members.Here is one of our favorite quotes by Philip (from his fascinating book Words Without Music): “For me music has always been about lineage. The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.” He has influenced a generation of emerging American composers including the two on our program tonight and with the idea of “response” connecting them further: Philip’s to Vivaldi, Bryce’s to Lutoslawski, and Pauchi’s to Philip. Lineage is everything, indeed.Tonight’s program includes a discussion at which Philip and Pauchi will discuss their working and creative relationship. ACO would like to thank the Rolex Institute and the Rolex Mentor Protégé Program for their support of Phillip’s and Pauchi’s work on this program.Phillip is an inspiration to us with the range of his artistic collaborations. Before multi-disciplinary was such a buzzword, he worked side-by-side with pioneering artists including director Robert Wilson, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet Allen Ginsberg, and filmmaker Martin Scorsese. As ACO sets its sights on the next 40 years, our goal is to weave contemporary American orchestral music into fascinating and illuminating collaborations, exemplified by the ground-breaking path Philip has shown us.Artistic institutions should follow their artists, their imagination, and their vision. Having the word “composer” in our name is very deliberate and meaningful, for if we follow them, they will lead us, and our audiences, into the future.Have a great evening and thank you again for joining us!

CARLOS BANDERA: Materia Prima (World premiere, ACO Underwood Commission Winner 2018)ELLEN REID: Floodplain (New York premiere, Commissioned by Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra with the generous support of Linda and Stuart Nelson, and RTÉ National Symphony)CARLOS SIMON: Fate Now ConquersKAKI KING: Modern Yesterdays (World premiere of orchestrations by D. J. Sparr, ACO commission)www.americancomposers.org/events/modern-yesterdays

Carnegie Hall co-presents Sanctuary with ACO, a concert that explores the places, company, and states of mind in which composers seek inviolable refuge. Lisa Bielawa’s Sanctuary, a concerto for violinist Jennifer Koh, is an extraordinary historical research project around this powerful word, documenting the rhetoric around founding American principles and every important struggle along the way to a more perfect union.  In Restless Oceans, Anna Clyne finds inspiration in a poem by Audra Lorde; the musicians raise their voices in song and use their feet to stand united in a defiant work that embraces the power of women.  Hannah Kendall’s alternately buoyant and serene Tuxedo: Vasco ‘de’ Gama takes its title from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconic collection of 16 diagrammatic block pieces. With a nod to the traditional African-American spiritual “Wade in the Water”, the work conjures both the majesty and elegance highlighted by the artist as well as her own reflective take on the history of globalization and multiculturalism ushered in by the famed Portuguese explorer.  Newly commissioned works by Dai Wei and Paula Matthusen complete this rich musical odyssey into the human soul that is both internal and external, local and international, abstract yet wholly tied to our everyday existence.

inti figgis-vizueta: Seven Sides of Fire (World Premiere)Mark Adamo: Last Year: Concerto for Cello and String OrchestraYvette Janine Jackson: Hello Tomorrow! (World Premiere)Viet Cuong: re(new)al for chamber orchestra and percussion quartetwww.americancomposers.org/events/the-natural-order

This evening American Composers Orchestra (ACO) is excited to present Where We Lost Our Shadows, a concert that threads its way through culture and time with three wholly original voices, reimagining the orchestra along the way. ACO first commissioned Du Yun six years ago, premiering her hypnotizing Slow Portraits, and since then she has continued to captivate audiences worldwide with works that defy traditional boundaries between theater, film, and music. Native New Yorker Morton Feldman and expatriate composer Gloria Coates, who has resided in Germany for many decades, are two true American mavericks of our era.In the spirit of bringing our audience and composers together, last season ACO launched its Commission Club, whose members take a deep dive into the creative process. Our first Commission Club composer was Ethan Iverson,who shared insights about writing his offbeat and jazz-tinged Concerto to Scale. This season, in conversation with Du Yun, audience members followed the creative arc of the work you’re hearing tonight, witnessing how she and her collaborators constructed an artistic narrative and brought it to the stage.We hope you’ll join us next season for our third Commission Club and our featured composer Mark Adamo, whose piece speaks to issues in the environment. His apocalyptic Last Year mourns four extreme landscapes,with the deep-voiced cello of virtuoso Jeffrey Ziegler as narrator. Next season in Zankel Hall, alongside Adamo’s work, ACO presents two more musical portraits of our natural world: the world premiere of Nina C. Young’s complete song cycle Out of whose womb came the ice, depicting Ernest Shackleton’s daring expedition to Antarctica, and the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’s mesmerizing Become River. ACO also focuses on New England—the “cradle” of American classical music—presenting the world premiere of a guitar concerto for dazzling virtuoso JIJI by Underwood Readings commissionee Hilary Purrington, the New York premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Evidence, and an array of world-premiere arrangements of Ives songs by Purrington, Jonathan Bailey Holland, and Hannah Lash for mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton.In the meantime, we invite you to open your ears for tonight’s concert, and please join us afterwards in the lobby to celebrate Gloria Coates’s 80thbirthday and her enormous contribution to American music!

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A celebration of composers with roots in New England, ACO’s season opener includes the world premieres of Hilary Purrington’s Harp of Nerves featuring guitarist JIJI and orchestrations of Selected Songs by Charles Ives, arranged by Purrington, Hannah Lash, and Jonathan Bailey Holland, featuring mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton. The New York City premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Evidence completes the program.

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