Download For Immediate Release, October 22, 2012 Contact: Michael

For Immediate Release, October 22, 2012
Contact:
Michael Hershkowitz
(631) 632-7313, [email protected]
Photos available upon request.
Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players 25th Annual Premieres Concert
Four distinctive compositional voices, ranging from established composers to
those on the vanguard of current musical experimentation, will receive world premiere
performances at the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players 25th Annual
Premieres Concert at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, November 16 at the Leonard Nimoy
Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, New York, NY. Free
admission. A preview concert will be held at 8 p.m. on Thursday, November 15 at the
Staller Center Recital Hall, Stony Brook, NY.
Commissioned for their disparate aesthetic outlooks, breadth of styles, and overall
liveliness, the composers and works featured are:
• Judith Shatin, Shatin’s Vayter un Vayter (Further and Further) for bass singer,
clarinet, cello, and piano is based on three powerful Yiddish poems by Abraham
Sutzkever.
• Mark Gustavson, Turning deconstructs Charles Ives's brief song “The Cage” into a
cyclical tour de force for bass clarinet, percussion, piano and bass.
• Alex Temple, World for percussion and electronics is definitive proof of cultural
appropriation. The composer writes, “If cheesiness is the new dissonance, this piece is a
twelve-tone cluster.”
• Du Yun. Keep Something Broken for octet takes inspiration from a Marcel Proust letter
describing inconsolable loss.
(Composer bios below)
Directed by distinguished performers and educators Gilbert Kalish and Eduardo
Leandro, Stony Brook’s Contemporary Chamber Players has been called “a small army
of musicians who demonstrate consistent accomplishment “ by the New York Times. The
group has commissioned over 90 scores by composers in various stages of their careers,
including those by Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship recipients. Composers
selected for commissioning represent a wide range of styles, geographical locations, and
ages, from talented young composers to established masters.
The ensemble aims to provide copious rehearsal time and outstanding first
performances of challenging works in collaboration with the commissioned composers.
Since 1988, the premieres concerts have drawn the attention and interest of composers
and audiences. The Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players’s unique
commissioning and performance project has been recognized by composers nationally as
an outstanding contribution to contemporary music, one which is virtually unmatched by
other professional or student ensembles in the nation.
(continued)
Composer Bios:
Judith Shatin is a composer and sound artist whose musical practice engages our social,
cultural, and physical environments. With a focus on timbral exploration, she draws on
expanded instrumental palettes and a cornucopia of the sounding world, from workers
and machines in a deep coal mine, to the calls of animals, the shuttle of a wooden loom, a
lawnmower racing up the lawn. Her music reflects her multiple fascinations with
literature and visual arts, with the sounding world, both natural and built; and with the
social and communicative power of music. Shatin’s music has been performed at
international festivals, by numerous national orchestras, and is regularly performed by
ensembles such as Da Capo Chamber Players, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center, newEar, and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Judith Shatin is
currently William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor and Director of the Virginia Center for
Computer Music, which she founded at the University of Virginia in 1987. Shatin has
been honored with four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, as well as awards
from the American Music Center, Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, the New
Jersey State Arts Council, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.
Mark Gustavson, a Brooklyn native and Long Island resident, has been featured
prominently on New York stages. Included was his Twenty Variations for flute and piano
at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1983; his 1986 piano solo Dissolving Images at Merkin
Concert Hall in 1991 (which toured the U.S.); Waves for orchestra was premiered at
Carnegie Hall by the New York Youth Symphony as part of the First Music Series in
1988; his 1993 composition Quintet for clarinet, two violins, viola and cello,
commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and premiered in 1996 by Contempo; and Silent
Moon for orchestra (1998) written for and premiered by the Brooklyn Symphony
Orchestra and the first in an on going series of works inspired by Tarot cards. A Fool’s
Journey a mixed chamber ensemble piece commissioned by Parnassus for their 25th
anniversary concert was composed and premiered in 1999 at Merkin Concert Hall. He
has won honors from ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, LeagueISCM, New Music Consort and the Gaudeamus Foundation. In addition Mr. Gustavson
has been awarded the Joseph H. Bearns Prize in Music, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is
currently on the faculty of Adelphi University.
Alex Temple has released two albums of “genre-bendy” electronic music on a microlabel
that she ran out of her college dormitory room, played keyboards in an indie bossa nova
band, collaborated with choreographers and filmmakers, worked with young composers
at the New York Youth Symphony, and put on solo voice-and-electronics shows at New
York venues such as Galapagos Arts Space, the Gershwin Hotel, and the Tank. She was a
founding member of DETOUR, a New York new music concert series now run by Brian
Mark in London. She is currently living in Chicago, where she is working on her
doctoral degree at Northwestern University. In addition to composing and teaching, she
also plays synthesizer and melodica in Ben Hjertmann‘s avant-rock band The SissyEared Mollycoddles, and performs post-Cagean indeterminate music with Nomi
Epstein‘s ensemble Aperiodic. The composer writes: “My music lies somewhere between
Surrealism and Pop Art.…I prefer to find points of connection between things that aren’t
supposed to belong together, often to uncomfortable or disquieting effect. In the past few
years, I’ve come to see my work as a kind of cultural archaeology and mythmaking.…I’m particularly interested in reclaiming socially disapproved-of (“cheesy”)
sounds and telling stories of recovered memories and secret histories.”
Du Yun, a Chinese native, is a New York-based composer and musician hailed by the
New York Times as “cutting-edge… to whom the term ‘young composer’ could hardly do
justice,” “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge;” “re-invents herself daily… so
does her music,” (TONY), her music exists at an artistic crossroads of chamber music,
theater, pop music, opera, orchestral, cabaret, storytelling, visual arts and noise. Du Yun
has received commissions include from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Carnegie
Hall Weill Institution Commission, the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, the
Whitney Museum Live, the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, violinist Hillary
Hahn, cellist Matt Haimovitz, flutist Claire Chase and many more. She holds degrees
from Oberlin and Harvard, and has served on the faculty of SUNY-Purchase since 2006.
She is a founding member of the critically acclaimed International Contemporary
Ensemble (ICE). Her studio pop album, Shark in You, releases on vinyl, CD and digital
in late March 2011 on New Focus. Forthcoming recording of her concert works with ICE
is in the final stage of mixing.
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