Événement

Ekmeles: Premieres January 2023

Friday January 21st 7:30PM, at Our Saviours Atonement Lutheran Church, Ekmeles - a "brilliant young ensemble... defining a fresh and virtuosic American sound" (The New Yorker) - sings live premieres of works previously only recorded during quarantine, as well as a US premiere.

Artun Çekems Silicone Skin and Fleshy Masses explores a hybrid human/machine sound through the combination of voices and voice-like combinations of sine waves. This electronic world is transformed from partner into antagonist in Jeff Myerss Advice to a Migraineure, whose pulsing drone evokes the omnipresent dread of someone suffering from migraines. The battle to keep out migraine triggers is expressed as a desire to close out the world and to become a walled city in the evocative text by Jennifer de Guzman. Both works are heard here in their live premieres.

Josep Sanzs King Lear sets text from Act IV, scene 6 of Shakespeares late tragedy of succession, as well as a portion of Antigone. The kings madness is paired with keening recitation of the Sophocles text, reaching across time to join two royal tragedies of power and loss. The US premiere of Younghi Pagh-Paans Hin-Nun (White Snow) brings a vision of winter with icy swirling vocal lines, evoking also the traditional color of mourning in Korean culture. We then move from narrative and poetic in the aforementioned works, to the completely abstracted in Anthony Greens BA4. The vocal mechanism is addressed in component parts in an extended metaphor around the motor cortexs mapping of our body.

Nina Fukuokas fever dream made manifest expresses the anxieties and oddities of early COVID quarantine life, and the composers experience of American politics from an outside point of view. She describes it as a double irony tribute to among other things, bad taste, nostalgia, pandemic, and -That Person-. Anna-Louise Waltons the deep glens where they lived filters small vocal sounds through a variety of PVC pipes, creating a watery and evocative texture that ebbs and flows, and earned the composer the International Alliance for Women In Music Choral/Vocal Ensemble prize for 2021. Both works are heard here in their live premieres.

Ekmeless 2022-2023 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.