29TH ANNUAL STONY BROOK PREMIERES! CONCERT
Featuring the Contemporary Chamber Players
Eduardo Leandro, director
Thursday, November 10, 2016, 8:00 PM
Recital Hall | Staller Center for the Arts
Free Admission
Friday, November 11, 2016, 8:00 PM
Roulette | 509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn NY 11217
Free Admission
2016 Program:
Kirsten Broberg: Halo (2016)
Nathan Heidelberger: come il ventro tra queste piante (2016)
Matthew Barnson: Tyger, Tyger (2016)
Aaron Helgeson: Oceans of Nothing V (2016)
Directed by distinguished performer and educator 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.
Composers
Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered.
Learn more about Paula Matthusen
Christopher Swithinbank works with various permutations of instrumental and electronic resources, mainly focusing on creating musical experiences with a relatively fixed structure (be that scored or on tape). His current hope with each work is to open up doors to worlds that might otherwise not exist, drawing together material contexts for human performers, which are resistant, require collaborative effort, and disclose the necessity of each constituent part of a whole.
Learn more about Christopher Swithinbank
Piers Hellawell
“Since the mid-1980s I’ve reacted strongly against the ornate surfaces of much instrumental music of our time. I seek in my work a more direct expression, particularly in my rhythmic and harmonic materials, yet I welcome the diversity that comes from uniting disparate, even dangerous, elements under one roof.”
Learn more about Piers Hellawell
James Wood studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, read music at Cambridge where he was an organ scholar, and later studied percussion and conducting at the Royal Academy of Music. Today he is known for his wide ranging activities as composer, conductor and virtuoso percussionist, and for a close association with an exceptionally broad spectrum of music from the middle ages to the present day.
Erin Rodgers is a composer and saxophonist dedicated to new and experimental music. Her works have been performed internationally, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; Museum Concert Hall, Taiwan; Le Cité Universitaire, Paris; and the World Saxophone Congress in St. Andrews, Scotland, with a growing number of performances locally and across the continent each year.
Click Here to Download Composers’ Full Bios