American Composers Orchestra Announces a Special EarShot Showcase in NYC – January 12, 2026
Photo Credit: Alfred Kan
Monday, January 12, 2026 at 10:30 AM
ACO 2026 EarShot Showcase - Working Rehearsal
The DiMenna Center for Classical Music | NY, NY
Tickets: Free, with option to donate
Monday, January 12, 2026 at 7:30 PM
ACO 2026 EarShot Showcase - Concert
The DiMenna Center for Classical Music | NY, NY
Tickets: $10, with the option to donate.
Program Details:
Joseph Sowa - Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars
Chelsea Komschlies - The Sunken Cathedral
Marina López - Moño
Sepehr Pirasteh - will the mountains sing for me
Iván Enrique Rodríguez - Sinfonía No. 2: Naa Okùnkùn ti Òkúnta Dídán
Patricia Leonard - "John Adams Theme" from My Dearest Friend
Mélisse Brunet, conductor
Celebrated as an “essential organization” (The New York Times) with “an expansive vision of orchestral composition” (Represent Classical), the American Composers Orchestra (ACO) announces a special EarShot Showcase on January 12, 2026 at 7:30 PM at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music. The program, conducted by Mélisse Brunet, features new works by Joseph Sowa, Chelsea Komschlies, Marina López, Sepehr Pirasteh, Iván Enrique Rodríguez, and Patricia Leonard. These promising artists have had works read by ACO’s national and international EarShot partner orchestras. The inaugural showcase features composers selected from the past few seasons, providing connections to industry leaders and producing high-quality recordings to drive future performances and commissions. The Showcase program will be workshopped by ACO in a public working rehearsal on January 12 at 10:30 AM. Currently celebrating its 49th season, American Composers Orchestra presents this showcase as a preview of its landmark 50th anniversary, which will see signature events and performances throughout the 2026-2027 and 2027-2028 seasons. Lead support for the EarShot Showcase is provided by the Fromm Music Foundation.
Encompassing all of ACO's composer advancement initiatives, EarShot is the first ongoing, systematic program for developing relationships between composers and orchestras on the national level. Serving over 390 composers since its inception, EarShot began in NYC with new music Readings in 1991. It expanded in 2008 to national Readings in partnership with orchestras nationwide, in collaboration with the League of American Orchestras, New Music USA, and American Composers Forum. EarShot has also included the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute, CoLABoratory, Pathways, and more. Readings composer alumni have gone on to win every major composition award, including Pulitzer, GRAMMY®, Grawemeyer, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Rome Prizes. Since 2009, more than 25 works have been commissioned by partner orchestras from EarShot participants, and more than half of selected EarShot composers report receiving a commission directly resulting from their participation.
EarShot now includes orchestral readings, CoLABoratory residencies, professional development, commissioning/consortia, and publishing. Its goal is to broaden the definition and role of the composer and build replicable models for co-created projects between composers, artists, and community partners. Artistic projects developed via EarShot are a key component of ACO’s concert programming. ACO’s EarShot programs serve as replicable models for organizations nationwide seeking to undertake similar work.
The Sunken Cathedral by Chelsea Komschlies is based on the ancient Breton legend of the cathedral of Ys, the same myth behind Debussy’s piano prelude La cathédrale engloutie. As the story goes, the mythical city of Ys was submerged in the sea ages ago, but on rare occasions, the city’s cathedral rises to the surface, and the sound of its bells and organ can be heard. “In my telling,” says Komschlies, “the organ and other instruments of the cathedral have long been inhabited by merfolk and seawater, altering their scales, harmonies, and resonance… Based on science and intuition, I have woven crossmodal correspondences through the entirety of the piece in such a way that I hope that listeners will see and feel the wet, dark coldness of the underwater world contrasting with the bright warmth of the sun as the cathedral rises out of the sea.” The piece blends elements from various musical traditions, including 19th-century tone poem, fantasy film score, contemporary sculptural timbral writing, and microtonal harmonies. Komschlies was a 2022 Tucson Symphony Orchestra EarShot Participant, as well as a Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program Recipient.
Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars by Joseph Sowa was inspired by two poems—When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which inspired the piece’s title. The piece seeks to capture the wonder of staring into the star-filled sky on a dark summer night. The adventure of driving up into the canyon, the stillness of watching the stars come out in silence, and the excitement of being connected to nature. Sowa was a 2023 Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra EarShot Participant, and Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars is on the roster of EarShot Publishing, administered in partnership with Boosey & Hawkes.
The title of Marina López’s piece Moño means “bow” in Spanish. López states the piece is “a meditation on the music of my grandparents’ youth… It reconciles my grandparents’ music with an 18th-century classical form, our collective western canon's grandparents’ music.” Moño draws from Damaso Perez Prado’s Mambo in Mexico City during the 50s and the music from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema during the 30s and 40s—the pastoral idyllic movies about rancheros and mariachis, and the urban movies with cabarets and ficheras. It combines Sonata form with a loose interpretation of the Mambo dance form. Moño is an EarShot Publishing Work. López was a 2022 Houston Symphony EarShot Participant, in addition to a Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program Recipient.
Sepehr Pirasteh’s will the mountains sing for me borrows a melody from an old song Pirasteh’s father used to sing called Be Koohaye Saboonat, meaning "to the mountains of Saboonat." The metaphors in the piece refer to feelings of love, longing, waiting for loved ones, and never seeing loved ones again. “Saboonat is the name of a small city where my dad was born in Iran and lived for a few years when he was young until he migrated to the city of Shiraz,” Pirasteh says. “I wanted to express the idea of shared memories within specific communities and how certain events or phenomena change and shape our perceptions and memories, which previously held different meanings and emotions. Now, after all these years, and especially after years of living in the United States, I realize that home has different meanings for me. The melodies I used to hear are no longer the same. Now that I am far away from the place I used to call home, and I cannot go back or see my loved ones, those mountains are alive and set my heart on fire. I no longer see those mountains that my dad used to sing about. I no longer associate that song with my childhood and the soothing characteristics of it. It is now integrated with the complexity of my exile and the events that continue to unravel in my home country.” will the mountains sing for me is a Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra Co-Commission following Pirasteh’s participation in the 2024 Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra EarShot Readings.
Sinfonía No. 2: Naa Okùnkùn ti Òkúnta Dídán (Yoruba for The Darkness of the Shining Stone) by Iván Enrique Rodríguez is a symphony of classical proportions. “After countless afternoons spent searching for the right words to express this work and several pages written in absolute honesty, I sharply confront the same feelings and fears, along with my passion for my Puerto Rican, Latin, and AfroCaribbean heritage that originally inspired this composition,” states Rodríguez. “Each movement represents challenges, hardships, and fears that have been intrinsic to my life, experiences so complex and daunting that only music can express them. Using a single melody fragmented into four sections and ultimately unified in the symphony’s central theme, I seek to present a familiar moment that visits my mind. In that mysterious hour of the morning when I confront my reflection for the first time, a weary but persistent question captures my attention: Will everyone see in my face what I myself perceive? Perhaps this question has been answered many times, both physically and emotionally. Yet it continues to visit me every morning.” Rodríguez was a 2023 Dallas Symphony Orchestra EarShot Participant and Naa Okùnkùn ti Òkúnta Dídán is on the roster of EarShot Publishing, administered in partnership with Boosey & Hawkes.
“John Adams Theme” is an instrumental work that opens Patricia Leonard’s opera, My Dearest Friend and evokes patriotism, courage, impending war, and personal family sacrifices, which were necessary for shaping a new America. My Dearest Friend was inspired by Leonard’s study of hundreds of letters between America's first "power couple," John and Abigail Adams. “I wanted to design an opera for soprano and baritone that encompassed the span of John and Abigail's entire relationship from early courtship and married life in the 1760s to their active roles in major political events, and ultimately to Abigail's death in 1818,” Leonard says. "My Dearest Friend" was the loving salutation John and Abigail used in their letters to one another. “In performance, I encourage the musician to embrace these sentiments with the very hope and determination that embodies the American spirit,” Leonard concludes. Leonard was a 2024 ROCO EarShot Participant.
As ACO prepares to celebrate this cohort of promising EarShot alumni, the organization also celebrates a milestone achievement from fellow alum Huang Ruo, an alumnus of ACO’s 2022 Earshot Readings, who has maintained his connection to ACO through multiple performances over the years, including the New York premiere of his opera with David Henry Hwang, at Perlman Arts Center. ACO’s world premiere recording of An American Soldier, released in May 2025 on Platoon, is currently nominated for a 2026 GRAMMY® Award for Best Opera Performance. This marks the first GRAMMY® nomination in ACO’s nearly 50-year history. Of the album, Gramophone Magazine wrote, “In this excellent premiere recording, An American Soldier emerges as powerful as any – and may well be with us for a long time, thanks to the libretto’s larger sociological perspectives coupled with the music’s high-octane conviction.”
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Lead support for the inaugural EarShot Showcase is provided by the Fromm Music Foundation.
Corporate gifts to match employee contributions are made by Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Triton Container International Incorporated of North America, and Neiman Marcus.
Public funds are provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, Office of Brooklyn Borough President Reynoso, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
