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American Composers Orchestra, 4/25/08
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Carnegie Hall News
Back to Press Release List > 03/25/2008 - American Composers Orchestra, 4/25/08
JEFFREY MILARSKY CONDUCTS THE AMERICAN COMPOSERS ORCHESTRA IN
PLAYING IT UNsafe
ON FRIDAY, APRIL 25 AT 7:30 P.M. IN ZANKEL HALL
Experimental New Works by Five Emerging Composers Featured in the Program
On Friday, April 25 at 7:30 p.m. in Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall presents conductor Jeffrey Milarsky and the American Composers Orchestra (ACO) in a program titled Playing it UNsafe, part of the 2007–2008 Orchestra Underground Series. This performance is the culminating event in the ACO’s Playing it UNsafe project, the nation's first professional laboratory for the creation of cutting-edge new orchestral music. The project includes five days of open rehearsals, readings, and discussions with five innovative composers—Anna Clyne, Jonathan Dawe, Charles Mason, Ned McGowan, and Dan Trueman—who were each challenged to stretch their own musical sensibilities and to test the possibilities of the orchestra itself. The five composers and the works featured in this innovative program were selected from nearly 200 proposals received in a national call for ideas to challenge conventional notions about orchestral music. ACO’s Executive Director Michael Geller says of the project: “Playing it UNsafe represents another step in our continuing efforts to imagine the orchestra of the future and create new opportunities for today’s composers.”
Opening the April program is Anna Clyne’s TENDER HOOKS, a concerto for laptop duet with orchestra and visual choreography created live on a laptop computer controlled by a theremin, one of the original electronic instruments. Laptop musician Jeremy Flower joins the orchestra as soloist, and computer-graphics artist Joshue Ott creates the visual elements of the piece. Jonathan Dawe’s Overture and Ballet Music from Armide is based on music fragments from Lully’s opera and incorporates influences of East Coast hip-hop as well as Iraqi folk music. The new work transplants the story of Armide, a Crusade-era sorceress who falls in love with her sworn enemy, to an imaginary future Iraq.
With Additions, Charles Mason utilizes the acoustic architecture of Zankel Hall by strategically placing musicians in various public spaces before the concert. By offering layers of the composition beforehand, the work’s basic musical elements will have been heard by the audience by the time that it is performed in its entirety. Ned McGowan’s Bantammer Swing, a work for contrabass flute and orchestra, explores the range of expressions and characters of each. And in Dan Trueman’s Silicon/Carbon: an anti-Concerto Grosso, eight laptop musicians from the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) join the ACO and Mr. Trueman, who performs on Hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian string instrument known for its distinctive high-ringing sound.
About the Composers
London-born Anna Clyne is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. Her work, which includes collaborative projects with cutting-edge choreographers, filmmakers, visual artists and musicians, has been commissioned and performed throughout the US and internationally. Recent honors include commissions from Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Roulette/Jerome Foundation, awards from ASCAP and SEAMUS, performances by the American Composers Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and a residency with the Los Angeles-based Hysterica Dance Company.
Jonathan Dawe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1965 and studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and The Juilliard School with Milton Babbitt. Upon receiving his doctorate at Juilliard in 1995, he joined the faculty. His music spans from grand orchestral forces to delicate chamber music combinations. His The Flowering Arts for orchestra, commissioned by James Levine and The Boston Symphony Orchestra, premiered in January 2006 in four performances in Symphony Hall. Hailed as "a powerful premiere" by The Boston Globe, the work was commissioned to celebrate the orchestra's 125th-year anniversary.
Charles Mason has been composing and living in the city of Birmingham for the last 17 years, winning the 2005–2006 Samuel Barber Rome Prize Fellowship in composition. Mason’s other awards include International Society for Bassists Composition Competition, Premi Internacional de Composició Musical Ciutat de Tarragona Orchestra Music prize, National Endowment of the Arts Artist Fellowship, Dale Warland Singers Commission Prize, BMI Young Composers Award, and Bourges Electro-Acoustic Composition Competition. His music has been performed throughout the world including the Aspen Summer Music Festival, Foro Internacional de Música Nueva in Mexico, and new music festivals in Prague, Bucharest, Bulgaria, and Sao Paulo. Mason is executive director of Living Music Foundation and chair of music at Birmingham-Southern College where he teaches music composition.
Ned McGowan has built his career by collaborating closely with ensembles such as the Axyz Ensemble, Calefax, the Zephyr Quartet, and Hexnut. After finishing studies in flute at the San Francisco Conservatory and the Cleveland Institute of Music, he moved to Amsterdam to continue his research. Over the course of eight years, he studied flute and composition in Amsterdam and The Hague, exploring a wide range of subjects—from extended techniques to Carnatic forms and rhythms, from jazz improvisation to West African drumming. In 2007, his specific fascination with Carnatic music led to an extended stay in India studying performance, rhythm, and composition.
Dan Trueman has been active as an experimental instrument designer and is a co-founder of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk). PLOrk recently received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to support a mobile musical laboratory that students will use to explore new ways of making music with laptops and local area networks. He is also a member of interface, an electronic-improvisation ensemble, and Trollstilt, a fiddle and guitar duo. While many of his compositions are for his own ensembles, he also composes for other ensembles. A collection of his chamber works have been recorded on the Bridge Records CD Machine Language. His work Five (and-a-half) Gardens—for the ensembles So Percussion and Trollstilt, with animated paintings—has been presented at the Whitney Museum, the Third Practice Electro-Acoustic Festival, and elsewhere.
About the American Composers Orchestra
Jeffrey Milarsky is a leading conductor of contemporary music having premiered and recorded works by a number of leading composers, including Charles Wuorinen, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Jonathan Dawe, and Wolfgang Rihm, among others. Mr. Milarsky is professor of music at Columbia University, where he is the music director/conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. He regularly conducts The Juilliard Orchestra, with whom he has premiered more than 150 works of Juilliard student composers over the past 15 years. As an active chamber and orchestral musician, Mr. Milarsky performs and records regularly as a chamber and orchestral musician with the New York Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, American Composers Orchestra, Stamford Symphony, and Concordia. He has recorded extensively for Angel, Bridge, Teldec, Telarc, New World, CRI, MusicMasters, EMI, Koch, and London records.
Founded in 1977 by composers Francis Thorne and Nicholas Roussakis, Music Director Dennis Russell Davies, and Resident Conductor Paul Lustig Dunkel, the American Composers Orchestra has presented works by 500 composers, including over 100 world premieres and commissions. Notable artists who have worked with the orchestra include Emanuel Ax, Itzhak Perlman, Leonard Bernstein, and Keith Jarrett. Among the honors received by the ACO are special awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and from BMI recognizing the orchestra’s contribution to American music; and an annual ASCAP prize singling out the ACO as “the orchestra that has done the most for new American music in the United States.” During the 2003–2004 season, the orchestra kicked off the Orchestra Underground series in Zankel Hall with the world premiere of Gotham, a multimedia piece written by composer Michael Gordon.
Program Information
Friday, April 25, 2008 at 7:30 p.m.
Zankel Hall
AMERICAN COMPOSERS ORCHESTRA
Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor
Jeremy Flower, Laptop
Ned McGowan, Contrabass Flute
Joshue Ott, superDraw
Princeton Laptop Orchestra
Dan Trueman, Hardanger Fiddle
PLAYING IT UNsafe
ANNA CLYNE TENDER HOOKS
JONATHAN DAWE Overture and Ballet Music from Armide
CHARLES MASON Additions
NED MCGOWAN Bantammer Swing
DAN TRUEMAN Silicon/Carbon: an anti-Concerto Grosso
Bank of America is the Proud Season Sponsor of Carnegie Hall.
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Ticket Information
Tickets, priced at $36 and $46, are available at the Carnegie Hall Box Office, 154 West 57th Street. They may also be charged to major credit cards by calling CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800 or by visiting the Carnegie Hall website, www.carnegiehall.org.
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