Contemporaneous playing Ryan Brown’s Big Dig at Fordham University last month

This Thursday at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, Contemporaneous is delving into some of the most exciting music we know and love from this generation. We are incredibly excited to be presented by MATA and feel like kindred spirits with their mission of championing the work of young composers.

Our program features music by four young New York composers whose music captures the visceral nature of improvised music from indie rock to Central African folk. Each of the four pieces was written for a specific band, and two were written for the composer’s own groups. All of the pieces we are performing involve some element of live improvisation and also draw more generally on the energy and spontaneity of improvisation. We are having a blast with the music and know you will, too!

Best known for his work as an electric guitarist with the indie-rock band The National, Bryce Dessner regularly writes for and plays on the new music scene as well, with such luminaries as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Nico Muhly, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. He has worked with Bang on a Can now for over 15 years and wrote his piece O Shut Your Eyes Against the Wind specifically for the All-Stars in 2010. From the strange and beautiful sound of a bowed electric guitar in the opening, the piece morphs gradually and organically into a driving and manic climax of pulsing rock-infused rhythm.

Passenger Fish is an opera-in-progress that composer/keyboardist Wil Smith is writing for his own band of the same name. The opera takes place in an airport, and our excerpt focuses on the inner struggle of a soul-searching and benevolent flight attendant. As she comforts a crying baby, she reflects on her work with “lazy, dumb, and insincere” adults. “But tears are such a weak defense against the world’s incompetence,” she says, encouraging the baby to be even more of a grown-up than its parents. Contemporaneous soprano and co-executive director Lucy Dhegrae will sing this role in our performance.

Now a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, California-native Ryan Brown wrote his piece Big Dig for the Robin Cox Ensemble, which was founded by Ryan’s former teacher, composer/violinist Robin Cox. The high-energy rhythms stem from Central African mbira music, in which he was immersed at the time he was composing this piece. It’s a really fun and grooving piece that we love to play!

Our performance on Thursday will be the sixth time Contemporaneous has performed David Moore’s …and then it rained, which he wrote for his 13-member band Bing and Ruth. The score invites the performers to make many decisions of texture, instrumentation, and structure. For this reason, no two performances will be the same, but Moore’s heartfelt melody and arrestingly beautiful harmonies always come through. This piece can be found on Bing and Ruth’s most recent album City Lake, which is released on the composer’s own label Happy Talk.

We can’t wait to share this music live at Galapagos on Thursday and hope to see you there!

— David Bloom, co-artistic director, Contemporaneous

At MATA Interval 6.3 on May 16th, an evening we’re sharing with the explosive C4 Choral Collective at the always hip Galapagos Art Space — a purple-lit water-filled venue that feels like a mix between a night in Bora Bora and a flight on Virgin America — Contemporaneous will be playing new music by Ryan Brown, Bryce Dessner, David Moore, and Wil Smith.

The question is: how did we come up with that list?

The process of programming new music is fundamentally different from that of programming old music. For the most part, the reason to program an old piece falls somewhere on the spectrum between “I’ve always wanted to play ‘insert-masterwork here” and “man, lots of people will show up if we play ‘insert-well-known-work-here.” There’s obviously some wiggle room in there, and some more out of the box thinking, such as “everyone knows ‘insert-famous composer-here’, but do they know his less talented distant relative?!” or “do they know his weirdly awful piece that he wrote as a joke?!”

There happens to be an extremely long list of very amazing and very well-known pieces that have already been written, and if that’s your territory, then finding a justification for which piece you choose to program might very well be the most difficult part of the concert. In the end, it usually comes down to those two sides of proprietary appropriation — “this is our Beethoven 7,” or “Beethoven 7 is what you want to pay to hear.”

Programming new music is not like that.

Chances are high that most people in the audience will never have heard any of the pieces that we’ll be performing. In most cases, most of the performers have never heard any of the pieces that they’ll be performing before we email them PDFs of their parts.

And that is so exciting. Programming new music is its own justification, its own idealistic utopian dream. And for all that perceived conceptualism, the programming of new music is a concrete method of bringing people together and making them feel good.

When you bring new music into the world, as performers and as audience — for listening too is part of the creation — you’re making an attempt at lining people up with just the stories, passions, and experiences that they need. Within new music is the expression of a time that is uniquely our own, the sonic wind patterns of our own lives. Who can deny that feeling of hearing the perfect piece of music for your moment in time, just the right song for a Sunday afternoon, or just the right 2 hour long oratorio for a long drive? New music is about chasing that connection, and finding that harmony between yourself and someone (or everyone) else. With Beethoven, the question is “how do I relate to the music of Beethoven?” With new music, the question is “how do we, this music and I, relate to everything else?”

And so when we decide that we’re going to play music by Ryan Brown, Bryce Dessner, David Moore, and Wil Smith, what we’re really saying is this:

We think you’re going to love this. We think you’re going to love this because we love this and because the people that wrote this love this. We think you’re going to love this because we love this, the people that wrote this love this, and you’re just not that different from us or from the people that wrote this.

Tune in next week for another blog post about why you might love each piece particularly!

—Dylan Mattingly, co-artistic director, Contemporaneous

Talea, called a “vital part of the New York contemporary-classical scene” by The New York Times, performs works by young composers from six countries culled from the more than 600 submissions to our annual call for scores. Evan Antonellis’s MATA commission sets the stage with a poetic series of miniature journeys for ensemble. David Fennessy takes us on a journey of memory, inspired by the “Thirteen Factories of Canton.” Taylor Brook presents a memory of the summer morning on the lake of Schoenberg’s “Farben.” The remaining journeys are more internal: Milica Djordjevic’s moves into the subconscious, while Hugo Morales continues the inward motion, releasing the sounds inherent in objects. Mauro Lanza allows those objects to move on their own and settle, as ashes, into shapes.

Program:
David Fennessy: 13 Factories
Taylor Brook: Against the Morning
Milica Djordjevic: Manje te u majke groze [One Less Horror for your Mother] (with soprano Jamie Jordan)
Mauro Lanza: Aschenblum
Evan Antonellis: Transparent Itineraries (World Premiere MATA commission)
Hugo Morales Murguia: Tonewood

Roulette
509 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 PM

$20 General Admission
$10 Students (at door with ID)
$100 Festival Pass (entry to all events)
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Opera and song are flourishing these days with ample room for interdisciplinary cross-pollination. The daring Stewart Wallce (Harvey Milk (1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2008) is joined by vocal virtuoso and composer Joan La Barbara, Steven Burke, Paola Prestini, and independent opera’s rising composer/librettist duo, David T. Little and Royce Vavrek. Together, the panel explores the ways that composers, poets, and librettists collaborate and create.

Free and Open to the Public

2:00 PM

Location:
620 Dodge Hall
Columbia University
Broadway at 116th St.

MATA presents an evening of works that stand at the intersection of new music, performance art and sound art. Known for her work with concrete sounds, Dutch-Welsh composer Jobina Tinnemans follows the lead of the late Cornelius Cardew incorporating nonmusicians into a new music context. Her MATA commission, a concerto grosso for solo knitters, instrumental ensemble and a ripieno orchestra of knitters, visualizes the passage of time through its trace in fibre. In addition MATA presents Henry Vega’s ritualistic invocations for vocalist and electronic sounds performed by American expat vocalist Stephanie Pan accompanied by video projection by Emanuel Flores, Jessie Marino’s performance art piece written for the two performers of On Structure, and Seth Cluett’s enactment of weather patterns on a metal tray of water activated by electronic sounds and three clarinets.

Program:
Jobina Tinnemans: Killing Time for knitters and ensemble (World Premiere MATA commission)
Seth Cluett: Cloud-to-Air for three clarinets, water-filled metal tray, sine tones and projections
Jessie Marino: Rot Blau I for two performers
Henry Vega: Wormsongs for vocalist and electronics

Roulette
509 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 PM

The performance of Killing Time is sponsored in part by Lion Brand yarn.
$20 General Admission
$10 Students (at door with ID)
$100 Festival Pass (entry to all events)
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Meitar, Israel’s premier new music ensemble, will workshop and discuss new works by selected American and Israeli composers. Featuring composers Lydia Ainsworth, Jenny Beck, Marek Poliks, Tomer Hod, and Ziv Cojocaru. With special guest Hannah Levinson.

Free and Open to the Public

At BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.)
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street
New York

2:00 PM

Because of security restrictions, please rsvp to email hidden; JavaScript is required if you would like to attend.

Meitar, Israel’s leading new music ensemble, comes to us direct from Tel Aviv for their American debut. Ha’aretz has called them “some of [Israel’s] best musicians” and they have won numerous awards in Israel and performed in some of the most prestigious venues and festivals globally. The concert will feature a world premiere MATA commission by Bryan Jacobs; a world premiere by Israeli composer Ofer Pelz; Enda Bates’s crepuscular Calls from the Fog for flute and electronics; Marcin Stancyzk’s alien solo for cello and electronics Mosaique; and direct from Mercury, a brand new arrangement of Christopher Bailey’s microtonal hymn of self-immolation, performed in the Mercurian language by the mesmerizing duo of Sukato and Meredith Borden and accompanied by live video by Charles Woodman.

Bryan Jacobs: Play May Shay Fay Bay (World Premiere MATA Commission)
Christopher Bailey: Mergurs Ehd Ffleweh Bq Nsolst (with vocalists Sukato and Meredith Borden, and video by Charles Woodman)
Marcin Stanczyk: Mosaique
Ofer Pelz: Chinese Whispers (World Premiere)
Enda Bates: Calls from the Fog

Roulette
509 Atlantic Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
7:30

$20 General Admission
$10 Students (at door with ID)
$100 Festival Pass (entry to all events)
Buy tickets

Experts from around the field hold a session on the business of being a composer — those secrets, tips, and best practices that aren’t taught at the conservatory — panel led by Ralph Jackson, with New Music USA’s Program Manager, Scott Winship, and Composer Advocate, Frank J. Oteri, Symphony Space’s Laura Kaminsky, Schirmer’s Director of Promotion, Peggy Monastra, Sean Hickey (NAXOS), Mary Madigan, and special guests.

Free and Open to the Public
At BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.)
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street
New York

2PM

Because of security restrictions, please rsvp to email hidden; JavaScript is required if you would like to attend.

MATA celebrates its Quinceañera with an evening of fun and surprises. Featuring performances by the 2013 MATA Festival ensemble-in-residence Meitar as well as special guests.

7PM

At Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street
(between 10th and 11th Avenues)

$50 General Admission
Free to Holders of Festival Passes
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