Author: iandicke

Described by the Warsaw Music Journal as “unquestionably one of the greatest performers of 20th century music,” and the New York Times as “an artist of intense concentration and conviction,” Jeffrey Jacob received his education from the Juilliard School (Master of Music) and the Peabody Conservatory (Doctorate) and counts as his principal teachers, Mieczyslaw Munz, Carlo Zecchi, and Leon Fleisher. Since his debut with the London Philharmonic in Royal Festival Hall, he has appeared as piano soloist with over 25 orchestras internationally including the Moscow, St. Petersburg, Seattle, Portland, Indianapolis, Charleston, Saõ Paulo and Brazil National Symphonies, the Silesian, Moravian, and North Czech Philharmonics, and recently, the London Symphony and the New Jersey Philharmonic. A noted proponent of contemporary music, he has performed the world premieres of works written for him by George Crumb, Vincent Persichetti, Gunther Schuller, Samuel Adler, Francis Routh, and many others. He has performed solo recitals in London, Dublin, Glasgow, Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest, Milan, Madrid, Helsinki, Rio de Janeiro, Saõ Paulo, Havana, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Jakarta, Tokyo, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto, Ottawa, and throughout the U.S.

Mr. Jacob has recorded over 120 works for solo piano and piano and orchestra including his critically acclaimed series of CDs of the complete piano music of Samuel Barber and George Crumb and major works of Bela Bartok. Fanfare Magazine recently devoted a feature article to his series of CDs for New Ariel Recordings entitled “Contemporary American Eclectic Music for the Piano.” Additionally, he has made radio recordings for Radio Warsaw, Radio Prague, and Brazil National Radio, as well as a series of recordings of American music for the BBC.

As a composer, he has written four symphonies, three piano concertos, and numerous works for piano and chamber ensemble. Raymond Leppard and the Indianapolis Symphony premiered his Symphony: Winter Lightning. The London Symphony recorded his Symphony No. 3. The Moscow and St. Petersburg Symphonies premiered respectively his Piano Concertos 1 and 2 with the composer as soloist. The Gregg Smith Singers premiered his Sleeping at Last for mixed chorus and solo cello. Mr. Jacob’s Persistence of Memory was premiered by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony at the 1999 College Music Society National Convention, and was selected by the Charles Ives Center for American Music for a performance by the Charleston Symphony at the 2002 Charleston Spoleto Festival. Other works have been premiered and recorded by the Orquesta de Baja California, the Chamber Orchestra of the Rhein, the North Czech Philharmonic, the Cavani Quartet and sopranos Mary Nessinger and Laurel Thomas. Two CDs of Mr. Jacob’s orchestral music have been released by Centaur Records and Vienna Modern Masters, and recordings of individual works appear on several labels including Albany, Opus One, Capstone, and New Ariel. Currently Emeritus Professor at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, he recently received the Artist of the Year Award from the International New Music Consortium at New York University for his work as composer, pianist and educator.

Free Admission

More info: http://jeffreyjacob.org

Praised by the Boston Globe as “superb”, the dynamic bass clarinet/marimba duo Transient Canvas (Amy Advocat, bass clarinet & Matt Sharrock, marimba) has been blazing its own trail in the world of contemporary music since 2011. In under five years, they have premiered over 60 new works, essentially creating an entirely new repertoire for their unique instrumentation. Fearless in their programming and hungry for new collaborations, TC has performed anywhere from microbreweries to Jordan Hall and actively seeks out new composers who will stretch their instrumentation to its limits.

Transient Canvas performs almost exclusively works written for them. Their mission is to provide a blank slate or canvas for composers to explore while simultaneously making bass clarinet and marimba a new standard ensemble. They have worked with a wide variety of composers, including well established artists such as Marti Epstein, Curtis Hughes, John McDonald and Andy Vores and emerging voices such as Victoria Cheah, Peter Van Zandt Lane, Adam Roberts, and Tina Tallon.

Dedicated to spreading their repertoire, Transient Canvas has performed across the United States. Their 2014-15 season included a featured performance on the closing concert of the first annual New Music Gathering at the San Francisco Conservatory, a shared recital with pianist Taka Kigawa on the Firehouse New Music Series in Brooklyn, and a collaborative concert with Chamber Cartel and the artwork of Igor Korsunskiy at the Goat Farm Arts Center in Atlanta. In their hometown of Boston, they have been featured performers with the Equilibrium Concert Series, the Fifth Floor Collective, Opensound, and the innovative new Original Gravity Concert Series which pairs local composers with local beers at Aeronaut Brewing Company.

Free Admission

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

The Argus Quartet was formed in the summer of 2013 and is receiving invitations from concert series throughout the United States and abroad. Recent performances include appearances at Carnegie Hall, Laguna Beach Live!, the Hear Now Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, the Birdfoot Festival, and the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam. This season also includes performances with the Brentano Quartet and clarinetist David Shifrin at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Oneppo Chamber Series, and Carnegie Hall. The Argus Quartet will serve as the Ernst Stiefel Quartet in Residence at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts during the 2016-17 season.

Argus is dedicated to reinvigorating the audience-performer relationship through innovative concerts and diverse repertoire – connecting with and building up a community of engaged listeners is at the core of the quartet’s mission. The quartet also believes that today’s ensembles can honor the storied chamber music traditions of our past while forging a new path forward. In that spirit, their repertoire includes not just staples of the chamber music canon but also a large number of pieces by living composers.

Through Chamber Music America and the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, Argus has commissioned a number of new works including quartets by Donald Crockett, composer and GRAMMY nominee Eric Guinivan, and the 2014 Hermitage Prize winner Thomas Kotcheff. Argus served as the Quartet in Residence at New Music on the Point under the guidance of the JACK Quartet, and was also selected as one of three ensembles to perform works from Kronos Quartet’s “Fifty for the Future” commissioning project at Carnegie Hall.

The quartet recently began an appointment as the Yale School of Music’s Fellowship Quartet in Residence and is the first ensemble to be mentored by the Brentano String Quartet in that capacity. In addition to their teaching responsibilities at Yale, Argus has worked with students through residencies and masterclasses at James Madison University, Rockport Music, the Milken School, the Young Musicians Foundation, California State University Long Beach, and the Birdfoot Festival.

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More info: http://argusquartet.com

Since 2009, the GRAMMY-nominated Los Angeles Percussion Quartet (LAPQ) has forged a distinct identity as a world-class contemporary chamber music ensemble that is dedicated to commissioning and presenting new works for percussion quartet. Originally, members Nick Terry, Matt Cook, Justin DeHart, and Cory Hills joined together to create a classical percussion ensemble that would champion the important contributions of 20th century West Coast composers while collaborating with local artists to continue the tradition of innovation and exploration. Today, the group continues their mission while broadening creative output through recordings, performances, and educational outreach.

LAPQ’s partnership with Sono Luminus Records has contributed some of the most dynamic and realistic recordings of percussion music to date. Rūpa-Khandha, LAPQ’s seminal album recorded at Skywalker Ranch in Marin, CA, pioneered a new level of sonic achievement in 2012 as the first 7.1 surround-sound high-fidelity recording of percussion chamber music. The quartet’s recorded performance was praised by Neue Musikzeitung for presenting “the entire color-spectrum of global percussion instruments intelligently and with great competency,” while Percussive Notes hailed LAPQ’s commitment towards “championing composers of thought- provoking and uncompromisingly intelligent music.” The album won multiple nominations in the 55th GRAMMY Awards, including the prestigious category of Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. In 2014, LAPQ released their second surround sound album with Sono Luminus Records, entitled The Year Before Yesterday, featuring works by Shaun Naidoo, Eric Griswold, Nick Deyoe, Isaac Schankler, Joseph Pereira, and PAS Hall of Fame member William Kraft. The album was hailed by the New York Times as “mesmerizing,” with “colorful, atmospheric and…supremely melodic music.”

LAPQ’s performances range in scope from living room salons, art museums, and warehouses, to appearances in distinguished concert series, including Festival Mozaic, Laguna Beach Music Festival, Percussive Arts Society International Convention showcases, Southern California Marimba Competition, Monday Evening Concerts, Music and Conversations, People Inside Electronics, Morrison Artists, Fullerton Friends of Music, April in Santa Cruz, L.A. Composers Project, and a concerto with the South Dakota Black Hills Symphony Orchestra. Equally committed to outreach and education, the quartet currently presents workshops and masterclasses to young musicians at middle schools, high schools, and universities, such as the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts, Chapman University, Stanford University, CSU Sacramento/Bakersfield/East Bay/Long Beach, and Occidental College.

The individual members of the group are all active freelance performers and educators residing in Southern California. Collectively, they are graduates of America’s leading music institutions, including USC, UC San Diego, California Institute of the Arts, Oberlin Conservatory, and Northwestern University. The members of Los Angeles Percussion Quartet are proud Yamaha Performing Artists and receive generous support from Innovative Percussion, REMO, Black Swamp Percussion, and Sabian Cymbals.

Free Admission

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

XelmYa (Alexa Renger – violin, Sylvia Hinz – recorder, Guests – violoncello) was founded in 2008 in Berlin, Germany. One of their goals: to push, foster and develop the instrumentation of the baroque trio sonata into contemporary music and modern times. Since their formation, they performed numerous premieres composed especially for this instrumentation by e.g. Matthias Spahlinger (DE), Makiko Nishikaze (JP), Gunnar Karel Másson (IS), Luis Hilario Arévalo (MX), Arturo Corrales (SV), Tania Sikelianou (GR), Damian Barbeler (AU), and John Strieder (DE). The promotion of contemporary music and music by female composers are two of the main topics of XelmYa.

Sylvia holds contact with many international composers and develops concepts and programmes for concerts, realised at e.g. the festival “Klangwerkstatt Berlin“ or the concert series „unerhoerte Musik“ and FAT CAT CONCERTS. Exceptional: the project “CONTEMPORARY BACH!” Excerpts of „The art of Fugue“ by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed contrastive with contemporary pieces. They were invited to perform two concerts at the festival “Sonic 3.0” in Copenhagen. The plans for the near future include premieres by Petra Vermote (BE), Maxim Kolomiiets (RU), Roodabe Shamloo (IR), Louis Aguirre (CU), Massimiliano Viel (IT), Martin Gaughan (UK), Zeynep Gedizlioglu (TR), and others, especially the programme “au coeur du silence” featuring works by female composers.

More info: https://sylviahinz.wordpress.com/tag/xelmya/

Composer and UCR faculty member Ian Dicke premieres a large scale song cycle for piano/vocalist and live electronic processing entitled Cowboy Rounds. This work explores oral tradition in the digital age through a series of “remixes” of pre-existing source material culled from the John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip, an ethnographic field collection hosted online by the Library of Congress. The program also features Dicke’s Counterpundit commissioned and performed by Los Angeles pianist and new music champion Aron Kallay.

Ian Dicke (b. 1982) is a composer inspired by social-political culture and interactive technology. Praised for his “refreshingly well-structured” (Feast of Music) and “uncommonly memorable” (Sequenza 21) catalogue of works, Dicke currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Digital Composition at the University of California, Riverside. His music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles and festivals around the world, including the New World Symphony, Alarm Will Sound, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, ISCM World New Music Days, and the Atlantic Coast Center Band Director’s Association. He has received grants, awards, and recognition from the Barlow Endowment, Fulbright Program, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, New Music USA, New York Youth Symphony, ASCAP, and BMI, among others. In addition to his creative activities as a composer, Dicke is also the founder and curator of the Outpost Concert Series in Riverside, CA.

Grammy® nominated pianist Aron Kallay‘s playing has been called “exquisite…every sound sounded considered, alive, worthy of our wonder” (LA Times). “Perhaps Los Angeles’ most versatile keyboardist,” (LaOpus) Aron has been praised as possessing “that special blend of intellect, emotion, and overt physicality that makes even the thorniest scores simply leap from the page into the listeners laps.” (KPFK) Aron’s performances often integrate technology, video, and alternate tunings; Fanfare magazine described him as “a multiple threat: a great pianist, brainy tech wizard, and visionary promoter of a new musical practice.”

Aron has performed throughout the United States and abroad and is a fixture on the Los Angeles new-music scene. He is the co-founder and board president of People Inside Electronics (PIE), a concert series dedicated to classical electroacoustic music, the managing director of MicroFest, Los Angeles’ annual festival of microtonal music, and the co-directer of the underground new-music concert series Tuesdays@MONK Space. He is also the co-director of MicroFest Records, whose first release, John Cage: The Ten Thousand Things, was nominated for a Grammy® award for Best Chamber Music Performance. Aron has upcoming recordings on MicroFest, Cold Blue, and Populist records. In addition to his solo work, Aron is currently a member of the Pierrot + percussion ensemble Brightwork newmusic, the Varied Trio, an`d the Ray-Kallay Duo. He is on the faculty of the University of Southern California and Chapman University.

More info: www.iandicke.com and http://aronkallay.com

Hailed by the Boston Globe as “elegant and exacting,” Hub New Music is a mixed quartet specializing in music of the 21st century. With a unique instrumentation of two winds and two strings, Hub explores a richly diverse palate of contemporary repertoire. Often employing a roster of local guest artists, the ensemble celebrates a musical era fueled by the spirit of collaboration and desire to shatter artistic limitations. The quartet’s name is inspired by its hometown of Boston and the notion that a Hub is a center of creativity and innovation.

Founded while studying at New England Conservatory, Hub has had the privilege of working with the nation’s most innovative musical minds including Kati Agócs, Daniel Wohl, Missy Mazzoli, Robert Honstein, and Spencer Topel. Seeking to expand the audience reach for contemporary art music, Hub fosters several interdisciplinary collaborations and community building educational programs. Recent interdisciplinary collaborations include an exploration of composer Andrew Norman’s ties to the world of architecture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. On the educational front Hub launched Composium in 2014/15, a performance project that showcased the life cycle of a new piece through conversation between composer, performer, and listener.

Hub New Music owes thanks to its supporters including the New England Conservatory Office of Entrepreneurial Musicianship through which the ensemble was founded. Hub New Music is fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas.

More info: www.hubnewmusic.org

HOCKET is a cutting edge piano duo based in Los Angeles. Lauded as “brilliant” by Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times, members Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff are both pianist-composers dedicated to commissioning and performing contemporary music. They have performed in some of the most exciting festivals and venues across the country including The Bang on Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, The Center for New Music in San Francisco, and the Carlsbad Music Festival. Together, they have premiered dozens of chamber and solo piano works and have collaborated with the premier, new music ensembles eighth blackbird and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. HOCKET is a recipient of a Presser Foundation Award to fund two upcoming commercial recordings and has been a selected artist in Firebird Ensemble’s Outstanding Young Artists Initiative. HOCKET is a performing artist on the Schoenhut Piano Company Artist Roster.

HOCKET started the current 2015/2016 season as fellows at The Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA followed immediately by a residency at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute where they collaborated with Kettle Corn New Music composers Alex Weiser, Emily Cooley, and Ryan Harper on three new commissions.

More info: www.hocket.org/

“…the formal elegance of chamber music with a pop-honed concision and rhythmic vitality” – Time Out New York

“NOW… imports a catchy inflection to classical forms… Striking a balance between the old and the new has rarely sounded this good.” -Newsweek

NOW Ensemble is a dynamic group of performers and composers dedicated to making new chamber music for the 21st century. With a unique instrumentation of flute, clarinet, electric guitar, double bass, and piano, the ensemble brings a fresh sound and a new perspective to the classical tradition, infused with the musical influences that reflect the diverse backgrounds of its members. Their 2014 – 2015 season celebrates 10 years of bringing some of the most exciting composers of their generation to national and international recognition. This past fall and spring saw the group travel to the Apples and Olives Festival in Zurich, Switzerland, Town Hall Seattle, Da Camera Houston, the Lincoln Center Atrium, and the Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert series. Upcoming projects include premieres of new works by composer Judd Greenstein, Dawn of MIDI’s Qasim Naqvi, vibrant and innovative Princeton composition fellow Gabriella Smith, UT Austin professor Yevgeniy Sharlat, and Rome Prize winner Sean Friar.

One of NOW Ensemble’s main goals has been to create a musical paradigm in which continuous collaboration between composers and the performers is taken as a given. This philosophy has been put into practice in residencies at numerous institutions including Yale, Princeton, University of Virginia, and the New College of Florida. NOW Ensemble’s performances have been featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and on live on WNYC, and its sophomore album “Awake” charted at #1 in Amazon’s Classical Chamber Music Charts. NOW’s collaboration with film maker Joshua Frankel Plan of the City was praised in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and New Yorker critic Alex Ross’s blog, where it was hailed as “gorgeous”. Since 2004, NOW has worked with over 60 of today’s most exciting composers, including Nico Muhly, Timothy Andres, Missy Mazzoli, Judd Greenstein, Kathryn Alexander, Jason Treuting, and Sean Friar. NOW has performed this new repertoire at such venues as Miller Theater, Merkin Hall, the Bang on a Can Marathon, The Kitchen NYC, The Stone, the Carlsbad Festival, the Festival International Chihuahua, the Look and Listen Festival, The Music Gallery Toronto, Sarasota’s New Music New College, the Southern Exposure Series, Pittsburgh’s Music on the Edge, Cal Arts, MIT, and Juilliard.

“The vibrant sound of NOW Ensemble… does something more than offer composers an alternative to the ubiquitous ‘Pierrot ensembles plus singer or percussion.’ It breathes the air of this planet: the musical air of indie rock, rap, jazz, pop, and minimalism variously synthesized by classically-trained composers and instrumentalists. Three of NOW’s founding members are composers, and a community of 35 like-minded others have responded to the opportunities NOW embodies: to defy specialization, reject alienation, and inspire deft musicians to convey a sense of private amusement that enlivens the music they perform.” – Jeffrey Edelstein, International Concert Review

More info: www.nowensemble.com

Florent Ghys is a composer and double bass player from Bordeaux, France, based in Brooklyn, NY.

His music has been described as ”thrilling breed of post-minimal chamber music” (Time Out NYC) and ”highly contrapuntal showcasing intelligent multi-tracking and inventive use of sampled speech” (WQXR). Journalist John Schaefer says: “Composer and bassist Florent Ghys writes pieces that blend elements of minimalism, pop music and a dose of extravagant wit”.

Florent holds a “Maîtrise” from the university of Bordeaux in Ethno-musicology with a focus on Egyptian music, a “Dîplome d’Études Musicales” from the conservatoire of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and the conservatoire of Bordeaux majoring in Double Bass Performance, and a M.M. in Music Theory and Composition from New York University Steinhardt.

He has been commissioned by ensembles and musicians such as the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Jack quartet, Cadillac Moon ensemble, Wild Rumpus, Dither quartet, and Kathleen Supove. His music has been performed at the Lincoln Center, B.A.M., Barbican Center, M.I.T., Sydney Opera House, San Martin Theater in Buenos Aires, and Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam.

Florent received a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony where he was composer in residence in 2013. His collaboration with French filmmaker Isabelle Solas on the film “En un temps suspendu” won the Sacem price for short movies, and the movie “L’âme de la Forêt” with filmmaker Julien Paumelle was selected for the Short Film Corner at the Festival de Cannes. The label Cantaloupe released two albums of his solo music in 2010 and 2011, and a third one is on the work.

As a double bass player he played with the Paris Opera Orchestra, the Wordless Music Orchestra, and the ensemble Ear Heart Music. As an arranger Florent worked with French singer-songwriter François Cha, and American singer John Lloyd Young for his shows on Broadway in 2013. As a programmer he developed several applications including one for pianist Vicky Chow to be released on Boosey and Hawkes. As a producer Florent supervised (editing and mixing) the recording of the piece Piano Counterpoint by Steve Reich to be released in late 2014 on Nonesuch.

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