American Composers Orchestra & Groupmuse Foundation Co-Present a Hybrid In-Person & Virtual Concert
New Canons
A Hybrid In-Person & Virtual Concert Music by Pauline Oliveros, Ray Lustig, Trevor New
Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 2pm (music starts at 2:15pm)
American Composers Orchestra at DiMenna Center for Classical Music | 450 W. 37th St. | NYC Bergamot Quartet at Murray Hill Groupmuse | Address provided upon ticket purchase Virtual Event | Streaming link provided 24 hours before event Tickets & Information: bit.ly/ACONewCanons
American Composers Orchestra (ACO) continues its 2021-2022 season, under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel and President Melissa Ngan, on Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 2pm (music starts 2:15pm) with New Canons, a hybrid in-person and virtual concert co-presented with Groupmuse Foundation featuring Pauline Oliveros’ Environmental Dialogue from 1974; Ray Lustig’s Latency Canons commissioned by ACO in 2013; and Cohere, a newly commissioned work by Trevor New. At the DiMenna Center, the concert will also include a participatory performance of Raquel Acevedo Klein’s Polyphonic Interface as well as an interlude featuring Chris Kallmyer’s All Possible Music. Audience members can choose to attend this performance in one of three ways – at DiMenna Center for Classical Music (450 W. 37th St., NYC), at a private residence in Murray Hill facilitated by Groupmuse, or virtually. The program explores latency – the delay between live and transmitted sound – with Lustig’s piece using it intentionally and New’s work striving to eliminate it.
Audiences and performers alike will be dispersed and networked together in real time – American Composers Orchestra led by Peter Askim will perform at the DiMenna Center, the Bergamot Quartet will perform at the Murray Hill Groupmuse location, and three additional string quartets and seven soloists will participate from locations around the world, including the Ligeti Quartet (UK), Solem Quartet (UK), Diego Tejedor, violin (Argentina); Bernd Keul, bass (Germany); Raymond Seng’enge, violin (Tanzania); Gaurab Chatterjee, hand percussion (India); Jocelyn Clark, gayageum (Korea); Patti Kilroy, violin (Los Angeles) and Trevor New, viola (New York).
Ray Lustig's Latency Canons, commissioned by ACO in 2013 and developed over a series of workshop performances before being premiered at Carnegie Hall that year, calls for multiple string quartets and ACO to perform together while spread across the world. The New York Times described the piece as, “a surreally beautiful, contrapuntal soundscape.” Lustig says, “In the spirit of using the problem as its own solution, Latency Canons incorporates technology’s limitations as the central idea. Musicians in different places play simple lines together using ordinary video-conferencing software, and the random blips freezes, and delays themselves create a counterpoint of beautiful, unexpected relationships, like echoes in a digital cathedral that wraps around the world. Latency Canons poses the question of how we make music together in our world, how that may be changing, and what this will mean for the musical experience. Our technology is drawing us closer and closer together in so many ways, and the attitude of this work is one of communion over distances.”
Trevor New uses technology to manipulate latency for remote musicians in Cohere. New says, “I want the audience to experience the ways we are connected by creating a digital space for us to see, hear, and feel interactions with others, whether they are next door or around the world. To achieve this experience, I am using Clean Feed to achieve low-latency performances. With it, I capture sound being played from different locations around the world and remove the latency effect by matching up the sounds into a single downbeat.”
Pauline Oliveros' Environmental Dialogue invites the audience to hear and respond to sounds within their own space as well as the communal space shared by participants near and far. Oliveros published Environmental Dialogue in her Sonic Meditations collection in 1974. To perform the work, participants gather at a specified location. Then, Oliveros writes, “as each person becomes aware of the field of sounds from the environment, each person individually and gradually begins to reinforce the pitch of any one of the sound sources that has attracted their attention.…The result of this meditation will probably produce a resonance of the environment.”
A surround-sound music experience, Raquel Acevedo Klein’s Polyphonic Interlace invites participants to travel amidst a sea of voices emerging from several directions. All are welcome to play the piece’s musical tracks from their smartphones or speaker devices following a countdown at the start of the event. Music made entirely of Klein’s voice emanates from the house speakers and participants’ devices, transforming into a sonic tapestry of stories from across New York City at the cusp of the reopening. The tracks can be accessed at www.polyphonicinterlace.com.
Chris Kallmyer’s All Possible Music is a collection of speculative scores that describe all of the music that could ever happen. The piece explores the contextual nature of music, encompassing both real and imagined sounds to describe a world that is mundane, spectacular, sometimes humorous, and always alive: a blissful symphony for an audience of careful listeners; dance floor hits in a cabin set deep in the woods; visionary drum machines that heal the earth and its people.
All in-person audience members will be required to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 with a vaccine authorized by the World Health Organization or the Food and Drug Administration and must maintain appropriate face coverings in accordance with current CDC guidelines. Learn more here.
About the Composers
Chris Kallmyer is an artist that creates collective experiences with music, art, and design. The work is driven by his interest in the perception of community, listening, landscape, and embodied experience. He often collaborates with museums and symphonies to create interventions that confront pressing issues of institutional reform through the experience of sound in situ. This means that the work can take on many forms including installations, public artwork, curatorial projects, publications, workshops and performances. Kallmyer has garnered commissions from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, STUDIO TeatrGaleria in Warsaw, and the City of Los Angeles among other spaces in America and Europe. He has created interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with musicians like Mark Mothersbaugh, Moses Sumney, and Justin Vernon & Aaron Dessner’s Eaux Claires Festival.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Raquel Acevedo Klein is an active conductor, vocalist, instrumentalist, and visual artist. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall, Town Hall, BAM, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Celebrate Brooklyn!, National Sawdust and elsewhere. She has recorded and performed with the likes of Glen Hansard, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, The National, Grizzly Bear, The Knights, New York Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble and Mariinsky Orchestra among others. Klein is a touring vocalist with Anthony Braxton for his retrospective Braxton75 concert season, and conducts for the Grammy Award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus. She has premiered works by Philip Glass, John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Nico Muhly, Caroline Shaw, Paola Prestini, Bryce Dessner, Missy Mazzoli, Shara Nova, and Aleksandra Vrebalov, and more.
Composer-performer Ray Lustig’s diverse and evolving work spans symphonic, chamber, electronic, multimedia, and theatrical. His music is presented in venues ranging from New York City clubs and galleries to major concert halls, stages, and festivals around the world. His music-theater work SEMMELWEIS premiered in the 2018-19 season with fourteen performances in Budapest and touring performances throughout Hungary. Pandemic-era performances included charitable and educational online showings of SEMMELWEIS, as well as online performances of orchestral and chamber works created to be played live over the internet. Lustig’s #composagrams series – a diary of fifteen second music videos for Instagram with an intentionally homemade ethos – has spawned a novel genre of miniature works with a “use what you have available to you” spirit, and staked out the internet as an artistic space with its own creative benefits and boundaries. His latest collaborative project Manicburg – an all-composer band – will be unveiled with releases this year. He lives in New York and teaches at the Juilliard School.
Trevor New is an electro-acoustic violist and composer creating innovative originals. His scored and improvised soundscapes evoke a cinematic journey. He is a Brooklyn-based artist who has performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia as a soloist, chamber musician, and recording artist. He has appeared as a soloist performing the Elgar Cello Concerto transcribed for viola, and premiering the Henderson Viola Concerto with the Chelsea Symphony of New York in 2014. As a chamber musician he has played with the Balkan Chamber Orchestra on a multi-city tour of Japan, Chris McNulty on her Jazz album Eternal, Joe Daley’s Portraits and Virtues, David Chesky’s Joy and Sorrow, Feist’s Metals, Hip-hop violinist and Emmy Award-winner Damien Escobar, and in the TV orchestra of television’s first drama about life in a symphony, Mozart in the Jungle. In 2018, New performed a concert series with Academy Award-winner Joe Hisaishi, playing his film scores, including Spirited Away at Carnegie Hall.
Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the 1950s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960s she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, New York, NY,The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and The John Cage award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded Deep Listening®, which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.
About the Partners
American Composers Orchestra (ACO) advances orchestral music by identifying, developing and supporting American composers. ACO champions overlooked voices, identifies and amplifies emerging artists, supports innovative compositions and interpretations, provides experiences that embrace discovery, and nurtures a vibrant community of creators, listeners and patrons. americancomposers.org
Groupmuse is an online platform that has connected musicians to audiences since 2013 in living rooms, outdoor backyards, and other untraditional concert spaces. Groupmuse is a worker-owned cooperative and has presented more than 700 online concerts in support of musicians impacted by COVID-19. groupmuse.com
The Groupmuse Foundation is a parallel nonprofit dedicated to expanding classical music to be more inclusive and vibrant by empowering musicians through financial, technological, and career support. groupmuse.org
American Composers Orchestra – 2021-2022 Program Highlights
Welcome Back Family and Friends Chamber Concert
Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 7pm
DiMenna Center for Classical Music | 450 W. 37th St. | NYC
Performed by ACO Musicians
Tickets & Information: bit.ly/ACOFamily
STEVEN GERBER: Five Greek Folksongs (after Ravel)
AUGUSTA GROSS: Towards Night (New York Premiere)
ALVIN SINGLETON: Argoru VIII
KAREN LEFRAK: Daybreak; When (New York Premiere)
MELINDA WAGNER: Unsung Chordata
EDWARD THOMAS: Reflections
JONATHAN BAILEY HOLLAND: Mobius (New York Premiere)
ROBERT BEASER: Selections from Souvenirs
New Canons
Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 2pm (music starts at 2:15pm) | In-Person & Virtual
Co-Presented by American Composers Orchestra and Groupmuse Foundation
DiMenna Center with American Composers Orchestra | 450 W 37th St., | NYC
Murray Hill Groupmuse with Bergamot Quartet | Address provided upon ticket purchase
Virtual Event | Streaming link provided 24 hours before event
Tickets & Information: bit.ly/ACONewCanons RAQUEL ACEVEDO KLEIN: Polyphonic Interlace (2021, Pre-Show at the DiMenna Center)
RAY LUSTIG: Latency Canons (2013, ACO Commission) CHRIS KALLMYER: All Possible Music (2019, Interlude at the DiMenna Center) PAULINE OLIVEROS: Environmental Dialogue (1974) TREVOR NEW: Cohere (ACO Commission, World Premiere) Sanctuary Friday, March 25, 2022 at 7:30pm Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall | 57th St. & 7th Ave. | NYC Marin Alsop, Conductor Jennifer Koh, Violin Tickets & Information: bit.ly/ACOSanctuary ANNA CLYNE: Restless Oceans (2018) HANNAH KENDALL: Tuxedo: Vasco 'de' Gama (2020) DAI WEI: New Work (ACO Commission, World Premiere) PAULA MATTHUSEN: New Work (ACO Commission, World Premiere) LISA BIELAWA: Sanctuary (Co-commissioned by ACO, New York Premiere) The Gathering: A Collective Sonic Ring Shout Saturday, May 7, 2022 at 8pm Apollo Theater | 253 W 125th St. | NYC Tickets & Information: bit.ly/ACOGathering Co-Presented by the American Composers Orchestra and the Apollo Co-Curated with National Black Theatre In Partnership with Gateways Music Festival and Harlem Chamber Players Conceived & Directed by Jonathan McCrory JOEL THOMPSON: Seven Last Words of the Unarmed (New York Premiere) JASON MICHAEL WEBB & LELUND THOMPSON: New Commission (World Premiere) COURTNEY BRYAN: Sanctum for orchestra and recorded sound TOSHI REAGON: New Commission (World Premiere) CARLOS SIMON: Amen! (New York Premiere of orchestral version)