FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE UPDATED January 17, 2017 November 21, 2016 Contact: Katherine E. Johnson (212) 875-5718; [email protected] CONTACT!, THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC’S NEW-MUSIC SERIES 2016–17 SEASON CONTACT! To Return to NATIONAL SAWDUST in Williamsburg, Brooklyn Two Programs To Celebrate NEW YORK–AREA COMPOSERS Part of the New York Philharmonic’s 175th Anniversary Season Celebrations Works by DAVID LANG, ZOSHA DI CASTRI, ELLIOTT CARTER, ALEXANDRE LUNSQUI, and STEVEN MACKEY January 23, 2017 WORLD PREMIERE–NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC COMMISSIONS by DAVID FULMER and SAM PLUTA Works by JACOB DRUCKMAN and ERIC WUBBELS May 22, 2017 Entering its eighth season in 2016–17, CONTACT!, the Philharmonic’s new-music series, will return to National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for two chamber programs featuring New York–area composers. This season of CONTACT! complements the Philharmonic’s 175th anniversary season celebrations, which highlight the Orchestra’s rich history of commissioning and premiering important works and salute its hometown of New York City. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is in the second year of his three-year tenure as the Philharmonic’s Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence, continues his advisory role on CONTACT!. CONTACT!, established by Music Director Alan Gilbert in the 2009–10 season, highlights the works of both emerging and established contemporary composers, performed by smaller ensembles of Philharmonic musicians in intimate venues outside the Lincoln Center campus. Since its inception, CONTACT! has presented 21 World Premieres, including Matthias Pintscher’s songs from Solomon’s garden, Sean Shepherd’s These Particular Circumstances, Carter’s Three Controversies and a Conversation, and Dai Fujikura’s Infinite String. Works by DAVID LANG, ZOSHA DI CASTRI, CARTER, ALEXANDRE LUNSQUI, and STEVEN MACKEY January 23, 2017, Co-Presented with NATIONAL SAWDUST The 2016–17 CONTACT! season opens with a program featuring David Lang’s sweet air (1999); Zosha Di Castri’s La forma dello spazio (2010); Elliott Carter’s Quintet for Piano and String (more) CONTACT! / 2 Quartet (1997); Alexandre Lunsqui’s Glaes (2007); and Steven Mackey’s Indigenous Instruments (1989). This program takes place January 23, 2017, at National Sawdust. A longtime fixture of New York’s new-music scene, David Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of one of the city’s most influential new-music collectives, Bang on a Can. He was inspired to compose sweet air, for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello, after taking his son to the dentist to have a cavity filled. The dentist gave him laughing gas, calling it “sweet air.” The composer writes: “My son experienced something — a drug — so comforting that it made him ignore all signs of unpleasantness. This seemed somehow musical to me. One of music’s traditional roles has always been to soothe the uneasy. I must say I have never been that interested in exploring this role. It is much easier to comfort the listener than to show why the listener might need to be comforted. My piece sweet air tries to show a little bit of both. In sweet air, simple, gentle musical fragments float by, leaving a faint haze of dissonance in their wake.” During the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL, David Lang’s where you go was given its New York Premiere, performed by the Yale Choral Artists, and his low resolution was given its World Premiere by violinist Jennifer Koh; the Philharmonic gave the New York Premiere of his Eating Living Monkeys in January 1991, led by Zdenek Macal. New York–based composer Zosha Di Castri is assistant professor of music at Columbia University, where she received her doctorate in composition. Her La forma dello spazio (borrowed from an Italo Calvino short story and translating to “The Form of Space”) was inspired by her love of Lee Bontecou and Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures, placing an ensemble of flute, cello, piano, violin, and cello throughout the concert hall. Ms. Di Castri says: “I wanted to create a composition in which musical gestures appear to be fairly static, yet are permitted a certain flexibility to move freely within a given space. Alluding to the idea of mobiles, La forma dello spazio has the musicians spatialized around the hall in a particular configuration. The piece begins with a solo by the violin, while the other instruments provide resonance, holding certain notes in unison, and echoing passages. Gradually the fragments accumulate and are set into orbit around the concert hall.” Elliott Carter was born in Manhattan in 1908, spent much of his career teaching at The Juilliard School, and lived in the same Greenwich Village apartment from 1945 until his death in 2012 at the age of 103. He wrote of his Quintet for Piano and String Quartet: “The work is in one movement of many changing characters and contrasts. The moods and materials of the piano are contrasted with those of the string quartet, which, itself, is a combination of four different strands that maintain somewhat independent existences, played by the four strings.” Carter’s association with the New York Philharmonic dates back to 1957, and includes Laureate Conductor Leonard Bernstein’s leading the World Premiere of Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra — which the Philharmonic commissioned for its 125th anniversary, and which Carter described as his favorite of his works — in February 1970. Philharmonic musicians performed the World Premiere of Carter’s Two Controversies and a Conversation on the June 2012 CONTACT! concerts, which the composer attended, and the Orchestra gave the New York Premiere of Carter’s Instances, his last completed work, during the inaugural NY PHIL BIENNIAL in June 2014, led by Matthias Pintscher. (more) CONTACT! / 3 Born in Brazil, Alexandre Lunsqui pursued his doctorate in composition at Columbia University and remained in New York City for another decade. His Glaes, for prepared piano and percussion, explores the microscopic possibilities of blending instrumental timbres. Both musicians perform complex rhythmic patterns from the composer’s native Brazil inside the piano, and the percussionist plays a modified berimbau (an Afro-Brazilian single-stringed percussion instrument) and a selection of glass bottles, mixing bowls, and ceramic pots. The Philharmonic gave the World Premiere of Alexandre Lunsqui’s Fibers, Yarn, and Wire during the 2011–12 season of CONTACT!, led by Alan Gilbert. His Three Short Pieces and Kinetic Study 2 were performed at the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL on a Ligeti Forward program, led by David Fulmer and performed by the Ensemble of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ALUMNI. Steven Mackey has been an influential part of the New York–area music scene since joining the Princeton University faculty in 1985. He writes that he thinks of his Indigenous Instruments, for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello, as “vernacular music from a culture that doesn’t actually exist. I fantasized about a culture and their uses for music, did thought experiments to invent the kind of instruments they might play, and wrote ‘folk melodies’ idiomatic to those instruments. The exercise was silly but did in fact succeed in leading me to sounds and textures that I would never have thought of in my mode as a serious concert-music composer.” The composer asks the ensemble to re-tune or de-tune, inspired by mbira (African thumb piano) transcriptions and the moan and pitch-bend of a UPS truck. The Philharmonic gave the New York Premiere of Steven Mackey’s Dreamhouse in 2014 during the inaugural NY PHIL BIENNIAL, led by Jayce Ogren. WORLD PREMIERE–NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC COMMISSIONS by DAVID FULMER and SAM PLUTA Works by DRUCKMAN and ERIC WUBBELS May 22, 2017, Co-Presented with and at NATIONAL SAWDUST The season’s second and final CONTACT! concert will feature the World Premieres of New York Philharmonic Commissions by David Fulmer and Sam Pluta, as well as Jacob Druckman’s Other Voices (1976) and Eric Wubbels’s katachi (2011). This program takes place May 22, 2017, at National Sawdust. Composer, violinist, and conductor David Fulmer moved to New York City in 2004, received his doctorate from The Juilliard School (where he studied composition with Milton Babbitt and violin with Robert Mann), and was appointed to the faculty of Columbia University in 2009. He has scored his World Premiere–New York Philharmonic Commission for a quintet of percussion, harp, piano, bass, and flute. “An ensemble of unusual percussion establishes a delicate sonic environment where each member of the quintet speaks and sings antiphonally to one another. Fragile textures, explosive gestures, and warm colors surface in a labyrinth at once roiling and tender.” At the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL, David Fulmer conducted works by Alexandre Lunsqui, Unsuk Chin, Dai Fujikura, and Grisey on a Ligeti Forward program, performed by the Ensemble of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ALUMNI. (more) CONTACT! / 4 Sam Pluta studied composition and electronic music at Columbia University, from which he received his doctorate in 2012. He is the technical director, member composer, and principal electronics performer for the New York–based Wet Ink Ensemble. His binary/momentary: flow state/joy state ii, commissioned by the Philharmonic and receiving its World Premiere in these performances, is composed for piano, percussion, trumpet, and two trombones. Having spent the last decade-plus pursuing both composition and improvisation, he writes that much of his recent work “explores the intersections between these two often different ways of thinking. Though all of the notes and rhythms