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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PRESS CONTACTS August 17, 2021 Aleba Gartner, 212/206-1450 millertheatre.com [email protected] Lauren Bailey Cognetti, [email protected]

"Those thirty minutes number among the most intense I’ve experienced as a listener... The close-up, multiple angle and high resolution shots of the performance gave a view not even accessible to an audience member sitting in the front row.” — Elizabeth Lyon in The Hudson Review

Miller Theatre at School of the Arts

announces

LIVE FROM COLUMBIA Pop-Ups from Morningside Campus

Co-presented with Columbia School of the Arts

Miller Theatre continues its popular Pop-Up Concerts series, offering audiences a virtual front-row seat to three performances filmed on Columbia University's Morningside campus.

Virtual • Free as always

Featuring performances by

Arturo O'Farrill & the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra Filmed from the Miller Theatre stage Live Stream: Saturday, September 18 at 4pm

Simone Dinnerstein, piano Filmed in 's famous reading room Video Premiere: Tuesday, October 12 at 7pm

Yarn/Wire Filmed from the Miller Theatre stage Video Premiere: Tuesday. November 9 at 7pm

Concerts in the Live from Columbia series are livestreamed or filmed live and premiered throughout the Fall 2021 season, with on-demand streaming available immediately after. millertheatre.com/live-from-columbia

* Miller Theatre will announce its full 2021-22 season later this fall.

From Melissa Smey, Executive Director Arts Initiative and Miller Theatre:

"I am thrilled to continue our Live from Columbia series with the School of the Arts, welcoming a global audience to incredible, free performances. This fall we celebrate Miller Theatre’s commitment to contemporary music, with two world premieres presented alongside important recent works. Viewers will enjoy an immersive, up- close perspective of beautifully filmed performances on the Morningside campus. I am especially excited to share one of Columbia's most iconic reading rooms in Butler Library for a rare concert event."

LIVE FROM COLUMBIA Pop-Ups from Morningside Campus Co-presented with Columbia School of the Arts

Miller invites the public to take a virtual front-row seat to performances by world-class musicians as part of its celebrated (and free) Pop-Up Concerts. In anticipation of the return of in-person programming, Miller shares rare, up-close access to concert experiences in unique Columbia settings, and highlights its commitment to contemporary music, including the long-awaited world premiere of Mundoagua, a new commission from the School of the Arts in honor of Columbia's Year of Water.

In previous years of Pop-Up Concerts, audiences sat onstage and enjoyed a free drink during these hour-long weeknight concerts, and mingled with the musicians and fellow concertgoers after the show. This season’s iteration features a change in setting for the performers and the listeners, but still offers the same intimate opportunity to experience music—virtually.

Viewers can tune in to millertheatre.com/live-from-columbia to watch and learn more.

Arturo O'Farrill, photo by Laura Mariet

Live Stream: Saturday, September 18, 2021 at 4pm Filmed from the Miller Theatre stage Arturo O’Farrill & the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra

This fall, as campus life and society relaunch, art plays a leading role. Livestreamed from the Miller stage, located just inside the entry gates to the Morningside campus, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra perform an exciting program. In 2019, Columbia University launched the Year of Water, an interdisciplinary investigation of water in all of its social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental complexities. As part of the initiative, the School of the Arts commissioned the composer, musician, and seven-time GRAMMY Award-winner Arturo O’Farrill to write a new work. Mundoagua receives its long-awaited world premiere, paired with another work by O’Farrill, Gulab Jamón, both performed by the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, “one of the best jazz orchestras in existence" (The New Yorker).

Program: Arturo O’Farrill: Mundoagua (2020) world premiere, commissioned by Columbia University School of the Arts in honor of Columbia's Year of Water Arturo O’Farrill: Gulab Jamón (2019) Commissioned by The Greene Space through the auspices of the J L Greene Foundation

*

Plus: A Special Lecture by Arturo O'Farrill Tuesday, September 14 More info and Livestream at https://lenfest.arts.columbia.edu/events/arturo-ofarrill-transposing-genres- fluidity-arts

Transposing Genres — Fluidity in the Arts Introduced by Carol Becker, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts

Arturo O’Farrill, composer, pianist, and Professor of Global Jazz Studies at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music, will discuss several aspects of his music, including how a classically trained musician with an Irish-Mexican-Cuban-German heritage and a propensity toward the avant-garde became the poster boy for Afro Latin Jazz, as well as the creative process in his music, his influences, process, and his newest composition, Mundoagua.

Co-presented by the Arts Initiative; Center for Jazz Studies, , Institute for Latin American Studies, The Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Miller Theatre, Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, and the School of the Arts. Simone Dinnerstein, photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

Video premiere: Tuesday, October 12 at 7pm Filmed in Butler Library Simone Dinnerstein, piano

Presented in collaboration with Columbia University Libraries

Composer Richard Danielpour listened repeatedly to pianist Simone Dinnerstein’s recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations over the pandemic in search of solace and peace. During that time he became inspired to write a new work for solo piano dedicated to the many individuals affected by this dark period. Dinnerstein performs An American Mosaic in the rare setting of one of Columbia’s most iconic reading rooms in the prestigious Butler Library.

Program: Richard Danielpour: An American Mosaic (2020) originally commissioned by Oregon Bach Festival Yarn/Wire, photo by Cherylynn Tsushima

Video premiere: Tuesday, November 9 at 7pm Filmed from the Miller Theatre stage Yarn/Wire Laura Barger and Julia Den Boer, piano Russell Greenberg and Sae Hashimoto, percussion

The “fearless” (Time Out NY) percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire performs a pair of works written expressly for them. Thomas Meadowcroft’s Walkman Antiquarian, which juxtaposes music technologies to create an altogether unique sonic experience, is paired with the world premiere of Laminar Flow by the Italian composer and sound artist Zeno Baldi.

Program: Thomas Meadowcroft: Walkman Antiquarian for grand piano, sampler, and two percussion (2013) Zeno Baldi: Laminar Flow for piano and percussion quartet (2020-21), world premiere

About the Artists

Arturo O’Farrill

Arturo O'Farrill (pianist, composer, and educator) was born in Mexico and grew up in City. He received his formal musical education at the Manhattan School of Music and the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. His professional career began with the Carla Bley Band and continued as a solo performer with a wide spectrum of artists including Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Bowie, Wynton Marsalis, and Harry Belafonte.

In 2007, O’Farrill founded the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the performance, education, and preservation of Afro Latin music. In December 2010, he traveled with the original Chico O’Farrill Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra to Cuba, returning his father’s musicians to his homeland. He continues to travel to Cuba regularly as an informal cultural ambassador, working with Cuban musicians, dancers, and students, and bringing local musicians from Cuba to the U.S. and American musicians to Cuba.

Arturo O’Farrill has performed with orchestras and bands including his own Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and the Arturo O’Farrill Sextet, as well as other orchestras and intimate ensembles in the U.S., Europe, Russia, Australia, and South America. An avid supporter of all the arts, he has performed with Ballet Hispanico and the Malpaso Dance Company, for whom he has written three ballets. In addition, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company toured a ballet entitled “Open Door,” choreographed by Ron Brown to several of O’Farrill’s compositions and recordings. Ron Brown’s Evidence Dance Company has commissioned him to compose New Conversations, which premiered in the summer of 2018 at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA.

He has received commissions from Meet the Composer, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Music Project, The Apollo Theater, Symphony Space, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Young People's Chorus of New York, Columbia University, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

O’Farrill’s well-reviewed and highly praised “Afro-Latin Jazz Suite” from the album CUBA: The Conversation Continues (Motéma) took the 2016 GRAMMY Award for Best Instrumental Composition and the 2016 Latin GRAMMY Award for Best Latin Jazz Album. His powerful “Three Revolutions” from the album Familia-Tribute to Chico and Bebo was the 2018 GRAMMY Award winner for Best Instrumental Composition. His most recent album Four Questions (ZOHO), which won the 2020 GRAMMY Award (his seventh) for Best Latin Jazz Album, is the first to embody all original compositions, including the title track, which features the brilliant orator Dr. Cornel West.

Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra

The GRAMMY Award-winning Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra (ALJO), led by Arturo O’Farrill, brings together big band jazz, Latin music, and eighteen of the world’s most accomplished solo musicians. Eighteen years of critically acclaimed performances internationally have firmly established the ALJO as the standard-bearer for creative interpretation of Latin jazz greats such as Tito Puente, Frank “Machito” Grillo, and Chico O’Farrill, as well as the driving force behind new commissions from Latin music’s most talented composers and arrangers.

The ALJO has performed at Midsummer Night Swing at Lincoln Center, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Boston Symphony Hall, BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, The Newport Festival, Litchfield Jazz Festival (Kent, CT), Joyce Theater (New York) and Mahalia Jackson Theater (New Orleans, GA), with Ballet Hispánico, Rialto Center for the Performing Arts (Atlanta, GA), Megaron Concert Hall (Athens, Greece), and the Taichung Jazz Festival (Taiwan), among numerous other venues around the world. The ALJO has commissioned and performed new compositions and big band arrangements by Antonio Sanchez, Miguel Zenon, Dafnis Prieto, Guillermo Klein, Pablo Mayor, Michele Rosewoman, Emilio Solla, Papo Vázquez, Vijay Iyer, as well as O’Farrill, and many others.

Simone Dinnerstein

American pianist Simone Dinnerstein is known as “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity” (The Post). Her self-produced recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 2007 brought her considerable attention, with The New York Times calling her “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.” She has made twelve albums, all of which topped the Billboard classical charts, with repertoire ranging from Beethoven to Ravel. Her most recent album is An American Mosaic (2021) featuring music by Richard Danielpour.

The New York-based pianist’s schedule has taken her around the world, playing with orchestras ranging from the and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai, and the Havana Lyceum Orchestra, which she brought from Cuba to tour the United States for the very first time. She has also played in venues from and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Seoul Arts Center, and the Sydney Opera House. Performance highlights include Piano No. 3, a composition by Philip Glass for her that was co-commissioned by twelve American and Canadian orchestras; New Work for Goldberg Variations, a collaboration with choreographer Pam Tanowitz; and the premiere of André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Aspen music festivals, working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet. Most recently, she created her own string ensemble, Baroklyn, which she directs from the keyboard. Their performance of Bach’s cantata Ich Habe Genug in March 2020 filmed live at Miller Theatre and streamed to audiences was the last concert she gave before shut down.

Dedicated to her community in Brooklyn, Dinnerstein founded Neighborhood Classics in 2009, a concert series that raises funds for music education programs in New York City schools, and Bachpacking, a music program for elementary schools. A graduate of The and the Manhattan School of Music, Dinnerstein is on the faculty of the Mannes School of Music.

Yarn/Wire

Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Sae Hashimoto and Russell Greenberg, percussion; Laura Barger and Ning Yu, piano) dedicated to the promotion of creative, experimental new music. Pianist Julia Den Boer will join as guest artist for the 2021-2022 season. Described by The Brooklyn Rail as “fascinating and exciting, with playing that is precise and full of purpose,” the ensemble is admired globally for the energy and precision it brings to performances of today’s most adventurous compositions. Founded in 2005, the ensemble seeks to expand the representation of composers so that it might begin to better reflect our communities and experience new creative potential.

Yarn/Wire appears internationally at prominent festivals and venues including the Lincoln Center Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Hall, Rainy Days Festival (Luxembourg), Ultima Festival (Norway), Transit Festival (Belgium), Dublin SoundLab, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Contempuls Festival (Prague), Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York’s Miller Theatre at Columbia University, River-to- River Festival, La MaMa Theatre, Festival of New American Music, and London’s Barbican Centre. Their numerous commissions include works from composers such as Enno Poppe, Michael Gordon, George Lewis, Ann Cleare, Raphaël Cendo, Peter Evans, Alex Mincek, Thomas Meadowcroft, Misato Mochizuki, Tristan Murail, Sam Pluta, Tyondai Braxton, Kate Soper, and Øyvind Torvund. The ensemble enjoys collaborations with genre-bending artists such as Tristan Perich, Ben Vida, Mark Fell, Sufjan Stevens, and Pete Swanson.

Through the Yarn/Wire International Institute and Festival and other educational residencies and outreach programs, Yarn/Wire works to promote not only the present but also the future of new music in the United States. Their ongoing commissioning series, Yarn/Wire/Currents, serves as an incubator for new experimental music.

Yarn/Wire has recorded for the WERGO, Northern Spy, Distributed Objects, Black Truffle, Populist, and Carrier record labels in addition to maintaining their own imprint.

Columbia University School of the Arts arts.columbia.edu

Columbia University School of the Arts awards the Master of Fine Arts degree in Film, Theatre, Visual Arts and Writing, and the Master of Arts degree in Film and Media Studies; it also offers an interdisciplinary program in Sound Art. The School is a thriving, diverse community of talented, visionary, and committed artists from around the world and a faculty comprised of acclaimed and internationally renowned artists, film and theatre directors, writers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, playwrights, producers, critics, and scholars. In 2015, the School marked the 50th Anniversary of its founding. In 2017, the School opened the Lenfest Center for the Arts, a multi-arts venue designed as a hub for the presentation and creation of art across disciplines on the University’s new Manhattanville campus.

Columbia University Libraries library.columbia.edu

Columbia University Libraries is a top-tier academic research library, serving one of the world's most important centers of research and learning. The Libraries build, sustain, and make discoverable collections that transcend traditional boundaries of format and domain, keeping pace with a dynamic and rapidly evolving information environment and creating unique opportunities for users to encounter global thought. As vital partners in the University's research and learning ecosystem, the Libraries connects users with rich and distinctive collections, fosters meaningful learning experiences, and provides innovative research support for a large, diverse user population.

Miller Theatre millertheatre.com

Miller Theatre at Columbia University is the leading presenter of new music in New York City and one of the most vital forces nationwide for innovative programming. In partnership with Columbia University School of the Arts, Miller is dedicated to producing and presenting unique events, with a focus on contemporary and early music, jazz, opera, and multimedia performances. Founded in 1988, Miller Theatre has helped launch the careers of myriad composers and ensembles over the years, serving as an incubator for emerging artists and a champion of those not yet well known in the United States. A four- time recipient of the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming, Miller Theatre continues to meet the high expectations set forth by its founders—to present innovative programs, support the development of new work, and connect creative artists with adventurous audiences.

Miller Theatre 's 2021-22 season is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by the Howard Gilman Foundation.

Support for contemporary music is provided by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music

For further information, press tickets, photos, and to arrange interviews, please contact Aleba & Co. at 212/206-1450 or [email protected].

For photos, please contact Lauren Bailey Cognetti, [email protected]

Copyright © 2021 Aleba & Co., All rights reserved.

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