Shows — Comments Off on Americas Society
02
Feb 22

Americas Society

March 4th 8PM, at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church, presented by the Americas Society, Ekmeles performs works of the Americas.

Ekmeles performs works by composers of the Americas focused on language and communication. Marc Sabat’s Seeds of Skies Alibis is the most ambitious and largest-scale microtonal work that Ekmeles has yet commissioned, stretching 40+ minutes of complex pitch ratios to describe the origin of the world through Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Paired with this will be, Hilda Paredes’s Fragmentos de Altazor, setting Vicente Huidobro’s metaphysical text; portions of Mauricio Kagel’s Der Turm zu Babel, telling the biblical story of the Tower of Babel in many different languages; and 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music winner Tania León’s De-Orishas, sparkling in its evocation of a variety of musical styles.

  • Marc Sabat – Seeds of Skies, Alibis (2018)
  • Tania León – De-Orishas (1988)
  • Mauricio Kagel – Der Turm zu Babel (2002)
  • Hilda Paredes – Fragmentos de Altazor (2010)

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2021-2022 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance details

  • Date: Friday, March 4th 2022
  • Time: 8:00pm
  • City: Ekmeles in New York
  • Venue: St. Ignatius of Antioch Church
  • Address: 552 West End Ave
  • Admission: Free
  • Notes: The Americas: Ekmeles performs works by Mauricio Kagel, Tania León, Hilda Parades, and Marc Sabat.
  • Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal
Shows — Comments Off on Columbia Undergraduate Composers
11
Dec 21

Columbia Undergraduate Composers

December 6th at 7:30PM, at Broadway Presbyterian Church, Ekmeles performs new works by undergraduate composers from Columbia University.

  • Gavin Goodrich – You Might Have Mentioned How the Doorknobs Work (2021)
  • Esther Ollivier – Sonder (2021)
  • Nicole Balsirow – Into the Strenuous Briefness (2021)
  • Grace D’Haiti – Small, Good Wolf (2021)
  • Oliver Pflaum – Layers (2021)
  • James Pecore – Luciferiad (2021)

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2021-2022 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

Performance details

Shows — Comments Off on University of Chicago
11
Dec 21

University of Chicago

Saturday, January 22nd, at 7:30PM, Ekmeles joins with Sandbox Percussion to perform world premiere works by students at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Music at the University of Chicago

  • Baldwin Giang – New Work (2021) WP
  • Yuting Tan – Fire and Spice (2021) WP
  • Justin Weiss – My Life in Branches (2021) WP
  • Kari Watson – [ of desire (2021) WP
  • Maria Kaoutzani – More Silent (Than Ever) (2021) WP
  • Paul Novak – dream catalog (2021) WP

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2021-2022 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

Performance details

  • Date: Saturday, January 22nd 2022
  • Time: 7:30pm
  • City: Ekmeles in Chicago
  • Venue: Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts
  • Address: 915 E 60th Street
  • Notes: U Chicago Composers: Premieres for Ekmeles and Sandbox Percussion
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Shows — Comments Off on Credo: A Surveillance Mass
25
Oct 21

Credo: A Surveillance Mass

October 30th at 8PM, Ekmeles is presented by Qubit New Music at Riverside Church Theater

CREDO envisions a contemporary mass celebrating our technoreligion, as we congregate by algorithm, confess through our phones, and put our memories and hopes in the Cloud. This collaboration between composer Alec Hall, video artist Bernhard Fasenfest, and poet Vanessa Place draws upon user data and harvested media.

Reserve your free ticket here

  • Alec Hall – CREDO (2021) World Premiere

Personnel for concert

  • Charlotte Mundy, soprano
  • Kate Maroney, mezzo soprano
  • Timothy Parsons, countertenor
  • Steven Bradshaw, tenor
  • Jeffrey Gavett, baritone and director
  • Steven Hrycelak, bass

Ekmeles’s 2021-2022 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

This program is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature and administered by LMCC; and funding from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation and administered by LMCC.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance details

Shows — Comments Off on Primo Libro
22
Oct 21

Primo Libro

November 20th at 7:30PM, Ekmeles returns to live performance at Our Saviour’s Atonement, with a program of microtonal music. Vaccination and masks required. The concert will then be repeated at Bowling Green State University November 22nd.

James Weeks – Primo Libro

The program includes a world premiere by Shawn Jaeger, playing with the boundaries between words and their meanings. James Weeks’s Primo Libro explores the origins of the madrigal through engagement with Arcadelt’s first book of madrigals, setting them in a 31-tone division of the octave. Nirmali Fenn’s Pokój w pokoju takes a different approach to microtonality, setting each half of the ensemble in a different tuning system. Stuart Saunders Smith presents a jewel of a miniature with the duet Light. Finally, Anthony Braxton’s Composition no. 255 presents a rich and monumental environment for performance, blurring lines between interpretation and improvisation.

  • James Weeks – Primo Libro (2017)
  • Shawn Jaeger – love is (2021) World Premiere
  • Anthony Braxton – Composition no. 255 (2000)
  • Nirmali Fenn – Pokój w pokoju (2018)
  • Stuart Saunders Smith – Light (2007)

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2021-2022 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

This program is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature and administered by LMCC; and funding from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation and administered by LMCC.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance details

  • Date: Saturday, November 20th 2021
  • Time: 7:30pm
  • City: Ekmeles in New York
  • Venue: Our Saviour’s Atonement Lutheran Church
  • Address: 178 Bennett Ave
  • Admission: $20/15
  • Notes: Primo Libro: Works by James Weeks, Anthony Braxton, Nirmali Fenn, and Shawn Jaeger
  • Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal
Shows — Comments Off on John Luther Adams – Veils and Vesper
09
Sep 21

John Luther Adams – Veils and Vesper

October 21 at 7:30PM at the Winter Garden in Brookfield Place, Ekmeles performs as part of John Luther Adams’s Veils and Vesper.

Experience an immersive sound installation within the Winter Garden palm trees as part of Brookfield Place‘s annual music series, New Sounds Live, curated by John Schaefer of WNYC.

The installation titled, Veils and Vesper, is a composition of synthetic sounds by John Luther Adams that is formed by the interactions of a mathematical algorithm and prime numbers to create a sensuous, ever-changing soundscape.

We will sing for one hour during this six-hour installation work for electronics that loops from October 16-24.

Further information here

  • John Luther Adams – Veils and Vesper (2006) World Premiere of version with live performers

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2021-2022 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance details

Shows — Comments Off on Undoing Language
03
Sep 21

Undoing Language

Brian O’Doherty, Structural Play: Vowel Grid, 1970. Performance, Grianan Aileach, Donegal, Ireland, 1998. 
Courtesy of the artist and Brenda Moore-McCann.

October 8 at 7PM at the Kitchen, we’re honored to participate in a program honoring Brian O’Doherty through the presentation of his early performance works. While we won’t be dressed as fashionably as the performers of the Vowel Grid above, we will be giving the very first performance of his Vowel Chorus for Five Voices!

Buy tickets here

  • Brian O’Doherty – Vowel Chorus for Five Voices (1968) World Premiere

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2021-2022 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance details

Shows — Comments Off on A Time for Everything (second time)
27
Apr 21

A Time for Everything (second time)

Last May, this was the first show we had to cancel. Now, masked up and remote, we’re excited to bring it to you! The show will go live at 5:30PM on May 8th, and stay up for a week following.

The first notes of the score of Julius Eastman's Our Father
Julius Eastman – Our Father (excerpt)

Watch the concert here!

First off, we’ll have an opening set by composer and pianist Courtney Bryan, from whose work our concert takes its title.

Then we move to Ekmeles’s portion of the show: Wolfgang Rihm’s Sieben Passionstexte is a wrenching set of seven Latin texts relating to the biblical Passion, or crucifixion story. Weaving between evocations of renaissance polyphony and stirring dissonance, the piece exists in a unique stylistic world. Courtney Bryan’s A Time For Everything, written for Ekmeles, is a set works on biblical texts drawing from the composer’s experience as a New Orleans-born jazz pianist and church musician. The works range in harmonic language from austere atonal shimmers to rich chorales. Shades of Aka pygmy music via Herbie Hancock, funeral wails, and groans mix with more traditional classical vocalism in an expression of the composer’s diverse musical interests. Finally, the late radical gay Black American composer Julius Eastman is represented with his 1989 work Our Father. Built on a sacred text of his own devising, the work echoes ancient plainchant traditions while reaching towards the future.

  • Courtney Bryan – A Time for Everything (2013) Ekmeles commission
  • Wolfgang Rihm – Sieben Passions-Texte (2001-2006)
  • Julius Eastman – Our Father (1989)

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2020-2021 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

This program is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by LMCC; and funding from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation and administered by LMCC.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance details

  • Date: Saturday, May 8th 2021
  • Time: 5:30pm
  • City: Ekmeles in Manhattan, NY
  • Venue: Online
  • Notes: A Time for Everything: Music by Courtney Bryan, Julius Eastman, and Wolfgang Rihm
  • Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal
Shows — Comments Off on Quartet
01
Feb 21

Quartet

Following a string of shows performed in isolation and brought together with innovative video and technology, Ekmeles comes together as a distanced and masked quartet, marking their first in-person performing since last January. The show will go live on February 27th at 8PM and stay online for a week following.

Excerpt from Kaija Saariaho’s Nuits, adieux

Watch the concert here!

Two microtonal world premieres – one from a composer living down the street, and one writing in Calgary, one with electronics and one without. Then a classic of live electronics and voices by Saariaho, a gossamer web built of two Emily Dickinson poems by Carolyn Chen, and a uniquely flexible soundworld written on graph paper by Nomi Epstein.

  • Jeff Myers – Advice to a Migraineure (2020) World Premiere
  • Rebecca Bruton – i n s t i t u (2021) World Premiere
  • Kaija Saariaho – Nuits, adieux (1991)
  • Carolyn Chen – fly blue between light (2015)
  • Nomi Epstein – Four Voices (2014)

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2020-2021 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

This program is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by LMCC; and funding from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation and administered by LMCC.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance details

  • Date: Saturday, February 27th 2021
  • Time: 8:00pm
  • City: Ekmeles in Manhattan, NY
  • Venue: Online
  • Notes: Quartet: Premieres by Rebecca Bruton and Jeff Myers, music by Carolyn Chen, Nomi Epstein, and Kaija Saariaho
  • Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal
Shows — Comments Off on Guide
07
Jan 21

Guide

Ekmeles returns to live-streaming with another free event creatively mixing live and pre-recorded elements, with an opening audio/visual set by Phong Tran. The performance will go live on January 16th at 8PM, and will stay online for a week following.

Excerpts from Phong Tran’s Away Message and Cassandra Miller’s Guide

Watch the concert here!

Phong Tran’s Away Message is an ambient visual mixtape about a breakup via AOL instant messenger.

  • slowdrift
  • ican’t(part1)
  • talkforasecond
  • ireallywanna
  • moodylyricposting
  • try
  • howdidyougethere
  • ifyoudon’t(part2)

Cassandra Miller’s Guide brings together two trios and a duo of mixed live and pre-recorded performers from across the country, Jessie Marino’s SOTU is a wild collage of choreography and word, Martin Iddon’s hamadryads features wine glasses and five live performances synchronized online, and finally Kayleigh Butcher and Bethany Younge’s Her Disappearance features voices filtered through PVC pipes.

  • Cassandra Miller – Guide (2013)
  • Martin Iddon – hamadryads (2010)
  • Kayleigh Butcher and Bethany Younge – Her Disappearance (2015)
  • Jessie Marino – SOTU (2019)

Personnel for concert

Ekmeles’s 2020-2021 season is made possible with funds from the Amphion Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, and the generosity of private donors.

This program is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by LMCC; and funding from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation and administered by LMCC.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Performance details

  • Date: Saturday, January 16th 2021
  • Time: 8:00pm
  • City: Ekmeles in Brooklyn
  • Venue: Online
  • Admission: Free
  • Notes: Guide: Works by Martin Iddon, Jessie Marino, Cassandra Miller, Kayleigh Butcher and Bethany Younge. Opening set by Phong Tran
  • Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal
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