Outpost Concert Series

Author: iandicke

  • Mivos Quartet

    Mivos Quartet

    The Mivos Quartet, “one of America’s most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles” (The Chicago Reader), is devoted to performing works of contemporary composers and presenting diverse new music to international audiences. Since the quartet’s beginning in 2008 they have performed and closely collaborated with an ever-expanding group of international composers representing a wide aesthetic range of contemporary composition.  

    Highlights during the 2022/23 season will include performances and residencies at Walker Arts Center with Cécile McLorin Salvant and Ambrose Akinmusire, UPenn, ECLAT Festival (DE), Columbia University, Peak Performances with Mary Halvorson, and the announcement of a new album of Steve Reich string quartets.

    Mivos is invested in commissioning, premiering, and growing the repertoire of new music for string quartet, striving for rich collaborations with composers over extended periods of time. Recently, Mivos has collaborated on new works with Jeffrey Mumford (LA Philharmonic/Library of Congress), Michaela Catranis (Fondation Royaumont), Chikako Morishita (rainy days festival), George Lewis (ECLAT Festival Commission), Sam Pluta (Lucerne Festival Commission), Eric Wubbels (CMA Commission), Kate Soper, Scott Wollschleger, Patrick Higgins (Zs), and poet/musician Saul Williams. For this work and the continuation of it, the quartet was the recipient of the 2019 Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Prize for Interpreters of Contemporary Music. 

    Beyond expanding the string quartet repertoire, Mivos is committed to working with guest artists exploring multi-media projects and performing improvised music. Mivos has worked closely with artists such as Cécile McLorin Salvant (Ogresse), Ambrose Akinmusire (Origami Harvest), Ned Rothenberg, Timucin Sahin, Nate Wooley, and most recently guitarist, composer, and 2019 MacArthur Fellow, Mary Halvorson.

    Mivos has performed to critical acclaim on prestigious series such as Noon to Midnight (USA), Lucerne Festival (CH), Jazz at Lincoln Center (USA), the New York Phil Biennial (USA), Wien Modern (AT), the Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (DE), rainy days festival (LU), Asphalt Festival (DE), HellHOT! New Music Festival (Hong Kong), Shanghai New Music Week (CN), Música de Agora na Bahia (Brazil), Aldeburgh Music (UK), and Lo Spririto della musica di Venezia (IT). 

    In addition to their performance season, Mivos is committed to the education of young composers and string players, and is regularly the quartet in residence at the Creative Musicians Retreat at the Walden School (USA) and the Valencia International Performance Academy and Festival (ES). The quartet has conducted workshops at Columbia University, Harvard University, Boston University, UC Berkeley, US San Diego, Duke University, Royal Northern College of Music (UK), Shanghai Conservatory (China), University Malaya (Malaysia), Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the Hong Kong Art Center, and MIAM University in Istanbul (Turkey) among others. Along with their work at educational institutions, Mivos grants the Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize, a yearly award to support the work of emerging and mid-career composers residing in the USA, and the I-Creation prize, a competition for composers of Chinese descent worldwide.

    The members of Mivos are violinists Olivia De Prato and Maya Bennardo, violist Victor Lowrie Tafoya, and cellist Tyler J. Borden. Mivos operates as a non-profit organization dedicated to performing, commissioning, and collaborating on music being written today.

    FREE ADMISSION

    More info: https://www.mivosquartet.com/

  • HUB New Music

    HUB New Music

    Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music is a “nimble quartet of winds and strings” (NPR) forging new paths in 21st-century repertoire. The ensemble’s ambitious commissioning projects and “appealing programs” (New Yorker) celebrate the rich diversity of today’s classical music landscape.

    Founded in 2013, Hub New Music has grown into a formidable touring ensemble driven by an unwavering dedication to building community through new art. Across its career, Hub has commissioned dozens of new works and continues to usher in a fresh and culturally relevant body of work for its distinct combination of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. Hub is proud to collaborate with today’s most celebrated emerging and established composers, and is equally proud to count many of them as friends. 

    Highlights in 2022-23 include concerts throughout the U.S. with presenters such as Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, Soka Performing Art Center, Celebrity Series of Boston, and Brigham Young University. The group also has upcoming residencies at the University of Michigan, University of Southern California, and Brown University. 

    Beginning in spring 2023, Hub celebrates its tenth anniversary with its largest commission project to date featuring new works from Andrew Norman, Tyshawn Sorey, Angélica Negrón, Marcos Balter, Donnacha Dennehy, Nico Muhly, and Jessica Meyer. As part of the project, the ensemble launches a fellowship in collaboration with the Luna Lab, awarded to recent alumna Sage Shurman. Other upcoming commission projects include a new concerto, The Bird While, for Hub and Symphonic Winds by Gala Flagello with the University of Michigan Symphony Band, and new quartets by James Diaz and Daniel Thomas Davis.  

    Hub is also thrilled to give the world premiere of Carlos Simon’s Requiem for the Enslaved at Boston’s historic Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in October 2022. The work was recently released on Decca Classics, in celebration of Juneteenth. The album-length work honors the lives of 272 slaves sold by Georgetown in 1838, and also features trumpeter MK Zulu and spoken word artist Marco Pavé. Hub’s debut album, Soul House, released on New Amsterdam Records, was called “ingenious and unequivocally gorgeous” by the Boston Globe. The group looks forward to upcoming recording projects with Silkroad’s Kojiro Umezaki and the Asia America New Music Institute (AANMI).

    Hub New Music is a group of passionate educators whose approach to teaching melds the artistic and entrepreneurial facets of modern musicianship. The ensemble was recently in residence with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Nancy and Barry Sanders Composer Fellowship program, working with 10 outstanding high school aged composers. Other residency activities include those at New England Conservatory, Princeton, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Texas-Austin, UC Irvine, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 2020, Hub launched its K-12 program HubLab, using storytelling and improvisation to create original pieces with students of any musical level. 

    Hub New Music is Michael Avitabile (flutes), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinets), Meg Rohrer (violin/viola), and Jesse Christeson (cello). The ensemble’s name is inspired by its founding city of Boston’s reputation as a hub of innovation. Hub New Music is exclusively represented by Unfinished Side. 

    FREE ADMISSION

    More info: https://hubnewmusic.org/

  • Splice Ensemble

    Splice Ensemble

    SPLICE Ensemble is a trumpet, piano, and percussion trio focused on cultivating a canon of electroacoustic chamber music. Called a “sonic foodfight” by Jazz Weekly, SPLICE Ensemble works with composers and performers on performance practice techniques for collaboration and integrating electronics into a traditional performance space, and they were recently awarded a Chamber Music America grant for a commission of a new 25-minute work with composer Caroline Miller. The resident ensemble of both SPLICE Institute and SPLICE Festival, SPLICE Ensemble has been a featured ensemble at M Woods in Beijing, SEAMUS, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, SCI National, Electronic Music Midwest, and New Music Detroit’s Strange Beautiful Music 10. They have recorded on both the SEAMUS and Parma Labels.

    FREE ADMISSION

    More info: https://splicemusic.org/ensemble/about

  • Ann DuHamel

    Ann DuHamel

    Pianist Ann DuHamel’s performances have been praised as poetic and “… a delight for the ears and the soul” (Encuentro Universitario Internacional de Saxofón, Mexico City). Hailed as a “forward thinking classical pianist” (Midwest Record) for her debut album Rückblick: New Piano Music Inspired by Brahms (Furious Artisans, 2020), she actively champions contemporary composers, recently commissioning works by Marc Chan, Flannery Cunningham, Jocelyn Hagen, Edie Hill, and Tyler Kline, among others.

    Ann has performed and presented in 16 countries on 4 continents, including Sala Verdi in Milan, Italy; the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland; and Trinity College in Oxford, England. In demand as a collaborative pianist, Ann’s performed chamber music with members of the Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, as well as with Martha Councell-Vargas, flute; Preston Duncan, saxophone; and Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano. Her performance at Carnegie Weill Recital Hall with ensemble: Périphérie was lauded by the New York Concert Review as “outstanding,” praising the group of “superb musicians” who “played with power and assurance.”

    Ann’s latest project, “Prayers for a Feverish Planet,” features 60 new works for piano and piano/electronics about climate change. Ann is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Minnesota Morris, and serves as Immediate Past President of Minnesota Music Teachers Association. She earned the Doctorate of Musical Arts degree at the University of Iowa under the tutelage of Ksenia Nosikova.

    FREE ADMISSION

    More info: https://annduhamel.com/

  • Nadia Shpachenko

    Nadia Shpachenko

    GRAMMY® winning pianist Nadia Shpachenko will present five World Premieres of pieces written for two of her upcoming recording projects. She will perform soccer-inspired pieces by Ian Dicke, Dana Kaufman, David Sanford, and Adam Schoenberg written for her GOAT project, as well as a new work by Lewis Spratlan written for Shpachenko’s all Spratlan recording project. Shpachenko’s GOAT Project was supported, in part, by New Music USA.

    A “gifted and versatile pianist” (San Francisco Chronicle) and GRAMMY® winner Nadia Shpachenko enjoys bringing into the world things that are outside the box – powerful pieces that often possess unusual sonic qualities or instrumentation. Nadia’s concert highlights include recitals at Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall, Disney Hall, on the Piano Spheres and Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella and Chamber Music Series, and with numerous orchestras in Europe and the Americas. An enthusiastic promoter of contemporary music, Nadia premiered more than 90 works by Elliott Carter, Paul Chihara, George Crumb, Daniel Felsenfeld, Tom Flaherty, Annie Gosfield, Vera Ivanova, Leon Kirchner, Amy Beth Kirsten, Hannah Lash, James Matheson, Missy Mazzoli, Harold Meltzer, Isaac Schankler, Adam Schoenberg, Lewis Spratlan, Gernot Wolfgang, Iannis Xenakis, Peter Yates, Jack Van Zandt, and many others.

    Described as “an exceptional recording of newly composed piano works” (Textura Magazine), Nadia’s Reference Recordings CD Woman at the New Piano was nominated for 58th GRAMMY Awards® in 3 categories. Described as “a most invigorating and distinctive release” (Fanfare Magazine), Nadia’s 2018 Reference Recordings release Quotations and Homages features premieres of solo and collaborative works for 6 pianists (performed with Ray-Kallay Duo, HOCKET and Genevieve Feiwen Lee) inspired by a variety of earlier composers and pieces. Described as “superb… evocative… pure magic” (I Care If You Listen), Nadia’s 2019 Reference Recordings CD The Poetry of Places features premieres of solo and collaborative works (performed with LA Phil pianist Joanne Pearce Martin and LAPQ percussionists Nick Terry and Cory Hills) inspired by diverse buildings. The Poetry of Places album won the 2020 62nd Best Classical Compendium GRAMMY® Award. She is also featured on Isaac Schankler’s 2019 Aerocade Music album Because Patterns, Gernot Wolfgang’s 2019 Albany Records album Vienna and the West, José Serebrier’s 2021 Reference Recordings album Last Tango Before Sunrise, and Wouter Kellerman’s 2021 South African Music Award winning album We’ve Known All Times. She is a Steinway Artist and professor of music at Cal Poly Pomona University.

    FREE ADMISSION, RESERVATIONS REQUIRED

    More info: http://nadiashpachenko.com/

  • Hub New Music

    Hub New Music

    Due to the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, this performance has been postponed. We will update this site when Hub New Music’s performance is rescheduled for the 2022-23 season.

    Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music – composed of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello – is forging new pathways in 21st-century repertoire. The ensemble’s ambitious commissioning projects and “appealing programs” (New Yorker) celebrate the rich diversity of today’s classical music landscape. Its performances have been described as “gobsmacking” (Cleveland Classical), “innovative” (WBUR), and “the cutting edge of new classical music” (Taos News).

    Highlights for the 2020-21 concert season include performances presented by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Williams Center for the Arts at Lafayette College, Texas Performing Arts, Celebrity Series of Boston, Sacramento State Festival of New American Music, and a European debut at the Alba Music Festival (Italy). The season features premieres of new works by Christopher Cerrone and Eric Nathan; and multiple performances of recent commissions by Hannah Lash, Kati Agócs, Takuma Itoh, and Michael Ippolito.

    Hub’s debut album, Soul House, released on New Amsterdam Records in 2020 was called“ingenious and unequivocally gorgeous” by the Boston Globe. The ensemble’s upcoming recording with Silkroad’s Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi) and Asia-America New Music Institute (AANMI) will be released on Tōrō Records. 

    Hub New Music brings its passion for adventurous and relevant programming to global audiences as both a quartet and as collaborative artists. Recent projects include Terra Nova with composer/songwriter collective Oracle Hysterical; The Nature of Breaking, a 30-minute collaborative work with composer/harpist Hannah Lash; and a choreographed production of Robert Honstein’s Soul House with Boston’s Urbanity Dance. Upcoming projects include Requiem for the Enslaved, an evening length mass by Carlos Simon supported by Georgetown University’s GU272 Project that honors the lives of 272 African American slaves and their descendants; a new ‘modular’ work by Sō Percussion’s Jason Treuting; and new works by composers Nina C. Young, Nathalie Joachim, and Laura Kaminsky. 

    For its visionary programming, HNM was named one of WQXR’s “10 Cutting-Edge Artists that Have Captured the Imagination” in 2016, and has been featured in major press outlets including the Boston Globe, New York Times, WFMT (Chicago), The New Yorker, WBUR (Boston), Houston Chronicle, and several others. 

    More info: http://www.hubnewmusic.org/

  • Longleash

    Longleash

    Longleash (Pala Garcia, violin; John Popham, cello; Julia Den Boer, piano) is an ensemble with a traditional instrumentation and a progressive identity. The “expert young trio” (Strad Magazine) takes its name from Operation Long Leash, a Cold War era CIA operation that promoted American avant-garde artists in Europe. “Fearlessly accomplished” (Arts Desk UK), Longleash has quickly earned a reputation in the US and abroad for innovative programming, artistic excellence and new music advocacy. 

    Recent and upcoming engagements include Five Boroughs Music Festival (NYC), Electric Earth Concerts (New Hampshire), Princeton Sound Kitchen (New Jersey), (le) Poisson Rouge (NYC), Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concert Series (Chicago), Bowerbird (Philadelphia), Ecstatic Music Festival (NYC), National Sawdust (Brooklyn), and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy, NY). Appearances abroad include Jeunesse (Vienna), Átlátszó Hang (Budapest), FUAIM Music (Cork, Ireland), Trondheim International Chamber Music Festival (Norway), Echoraum (Vienna), and Open Music (Graz, Austria).

    In the 2019-20 season, Longleash collaborates with Greek collective meta.ξ, filmmakers Pascal Perich and Caroline Mariko Stucky, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, and composers Wang Lu, Anthony Vine, Johan Svensson, Reiko Fueting, and Sarah Hennies. The recipient of grants from New Music USA, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Music Academy of the West, and Chamber Music America, Longleash has premiered over 30 works, and received critical acclaim for their “tight playing,” “lucid interpretations,” and “inspired” premiere recordings (Tempo).

    Longleash has given workshops at University College Cork, Royal Irish Academy of Music, The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, Manhattan School of Music, Hunter College, New York University, The Graduate Center (CUNY), and Ohio University. In 2015, Longleash founded The Loretto Project (Kentucky), an annual new music series and tuition-free composition workshop that supports promising collegiate composers while presenting socially-minded programs and celebrating diverse cultural perspectives.

    FREE ADMISSION

    More info: https://www.longleash.org/

    Download the Concert Program

  • Now Hear Ensemble

    Now Hear Ensemble

    Now Hear Ensemble combines the intimacy of the classical concert experience with electronic music, video art, installation art, and contemporary theater, embracing both contemporary music and pop culture, as they believe a cross-genre approach leads to new territory for creativity.

    Based in Los Angeles, the Now Hear Ensemble has performed at renowned venues such as the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley, the Conrad Prebys Music Center at UC San Diego, the Center for New Music in San Francisco, the Fisher Museum at the University of Southern California, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara and the Carlsbad Music Festival. Now Hear has held residencies at Avaloch Farm Institute, UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara and has had their music featured by BBC Radio 3.

    Since their founding in 2012, the ensemble has commissioned and premiered over 25 new works from composers such as Florent Ghys, Dan VanHassel, Carolyn Chen, Anthony Paul Garcia, Nick Norton, Constantin Basica, Joshua Carro, Jon Myers, Luke Taylor, Federico Llach, Marc Evans, Anders Lind, Mateo Lugo, Daniel Miller, Fernando Rincón Estrada, Eoin Callery, Kevin Zhang, David Gordon, Iván Naranjo, Brandon Rolle, Mason Hock, Heena Yoon, David Werfrelmann, and Todd Lerew. Past projects have included a collaboration with California-based composers that resulted in their debut album and tour, “Made in California,” as well as commissions of  installations and concert music made with bicycle wheels, paper shredders, ping-pong tables, megaphones, and custom-made instruments.

    FREE ADMISSION

    More info: http://www.nowhearensemble.com/

    Download the Concert Program

  • Mobius Trio

    Mobius Trio

    “The most inventive and exciting young guitar ensemble today.”
    – Sergio Assad, Grammy Award-winning guitarist

    Mobius Trio has made it its mission to fully integrate the classical guitar into the 21st century’s nascent musical lexicon. The Trio exclusively performs music that they have commissioned; they seek to expand the guitar ensemble’s repertoire to encompass all of the myriad currents passing through contemporary art music. Mobius Trio has commissioned over three dozen composers in their first few years of existence, and that pace isn’t slowing. Recent commissions include Sergio Assad, Luciano Chessa, and Ryan Brown, with more pieces and collaborations on the way.

    Mobius Trio was formed in 2010 by guitarists Robert Nance, Mason Fish, and Matthew Holmes-Linder while studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. They started things off with a bang, commissioning and learning five pieces within the span of a couple of months, and performing many of those pieces at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center the following April. Matt, Rob, and Mason are all accomplished, competition-winning guitarists in their own right, and they all live and work in San Francisco.

    Free Admission

    More info: https://mobiustrio.com/

  • The Living Earth Show

    The Living Earth Show

    Called “outstanding” by the San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” by the Charleston City Paper, and “a fully distorted perpetual motion of awesome” by I Care If You Listen, The Living Earth Show (guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson) is a megaphone and canvas for some of the world’s most progressive artists. One of the premiere contemporary chamber arts ensembles in the United States, The Living Earth Show received the grand prize in the SAVVY Chamber Arts Competition and runner-up in the open division of the M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition, has
    commissioned and premiered over 60 new works by some of the most vital composers in the world, and released two critically acclaimed albums, and has performed, lectured, and given masterclasses across the country.

    Memorizing every work it performs, The Living Earth Show thrives on pushing the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility in its presentation of commissioned electro-acoustic chamber music. It has presented seasons of commissioned multimedia productions since 2011, working with dance companies, visual artists, sculptors, poets, and other musicians to craft compelling, immersive, San Francisco-centric work. The ensemble has commissioned and premiered works by such composers as Anna Meredith, Timo Andres, Nicole Lizée, M. Lamar, Raven Chacon, Christopher Cerrone, Alireza Mashayekhi, Jacob Cooper, Brian Ferneyhough, Samuel Adams, Ken Ueno, Luciano Chessa, Danny Clay, Sharmi Basu, Ted Hearne, Sarah Hennies, Morgan Craft, Adrian Knight, Ava Mendoza, Alden Jenks, and Zachary James Watkins. Many of these commissions can be found on the group’s critically acclaimed albums High Art (Innova Records, 2013) and Dance Music (New Amsterdam Records, 2016).

    The Living Earth Show’s 2018-19 San Francisco season includes several world premiere variable media productions. The first, “Hyphen”, is curated by composer Farnood HaghaniPour and investigates the sonic unification (if any exists) of Iranian musical artists living in Iran and abroad, featuring new works written by Alireza Mashayekhi, Aida Shirazi, Nima Rowshan, and HaghaniPour himself, presented in conjunction with projected video created by Iranian video artists of the composers’ choosing. The second, “American Music”, is a show of works written by eight composers illustrating the range of works created within and about the current borders of the United States. The third, COMMANDO, features works by the ensemble created in collaboration with eight of the most renowned queer and trans vocalists on the west coast, blending rock, metal, spoken word, and chamber music in the service of using traditionally masculine and heteronormative art forms as sites to celebrate and revel in queerness. The final work, “Tremble Staves”, is a multimedia production created for the ensemble by Raven Chacon and will be presented in the waters of Sutro Baths. The Living Earth Show will also release its third album, “Echoes”, created in collaboration with Kronos Quartet and Youth Speaks, and serve as artists in residence at the University of South Carolina and the University of Michigan.

    Free Admission

    More info: https://thelivingearthshow.com