PAUL KEREKES
PIANO
The music of New York-based composer-pianist Paul Kerekes is often inspired by visual ideas and formed with an improvisatory spirit aiming to recreate tactile pictures of the concepts or experiences on which they are based. His works have been described as “gently poetic” (The New York Times), “striking” (WQXR), “highly eloquent” (New Haven Advocate) and he has had the privilege of hearing his pieces performed by many outstanding ensembles, some of which include the American Composers Orchestra, the Mendelssohn-Orchesterakademie, Da Capo Chamber Players, Music from Copland House, New Morse Code, Real Loud, andPlay, Exceptet, and Thin Edge New Music Collective, in such venues as Ordway Concert Hall, Merkin Hall, (le) poisson rouge, DiMenna Center, Roulette, Symphony Space, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus and St. David’s Hall in Cardiff.
An award recipient from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, and American Composers Forum, his compositions and playing have been featured on NPR’s Performance Today, WQXR’s Q2 platform, and albums on New Amsterdam Records, Innova, New Focus, and Naxos labels. A graduate of Queens College and the Yale School of Music, he teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, and is a co-founder of Invisible Anatomy, a composer-performer collective, as well as Grand Band, a piano sextet described by the NY Times as “a kind of new-music supergroup.”
For more information, visit his website >
Core Musician Spotlight: Paul Kerekes
Joined Contemporaneous Core in: 2024
1. What is one of your favorite memories with Contemporaneous?
I began playing with Contemporaneous around 2014 when I moved to NYC after grad school and it was such a formative and exciting time. When I think of my most cherished musical memories and performance highlights from that time until now, nearly all come from working with this amazing group of people that I’m proud to call my musical family.
Probably the most ecstatic and memorable experience though was premiering Stranger Love at Disney Hall, not only because of the music itself and music making, but because it was emotional to watch Dylan take his bow afterwards, and watch David lead us so gracefully, after years of dreaming the piece. One of my first gigs with the ensemble was playing excerpts of Stranger Love at Bronx Community College circa 2015, in a beautiful old hall, where I met my fellow piano section and played with other core members. So then to cut to the premiere in LA, surrounded by those same people on a stage designed by Frank Gehry with loads of confetti dropping from the ceiling—it was all a very culminating experience. And now it’s very exciting to be working on Dylan’s next theatre piece, and think about where we will continue to go.
Some other memories that stand out as well were performing Alex Weiser’s And All the Days Were Purple on a Chelsea pier in the summer while literally looking out into an actual purple sky that early evening, doing our Colgate residencies with Prof. Ryan Chase and working with his composition students, performing Sound Patterns by Pauline Oliveros in a wooden cube at the Clark museum, and dipping our toes into the Atlantic after a preview performance of Brian Petuch’s opera in the Hamptons, to name a few. All examples of high-quality music with amazing people in beautiful settings.
2. In your wildest imagination, where do you see the future of music? What would be your dream performance?
In my wildest imagination, I picture concertos with AI soloists. I'm half-joking and far from an authority on AI, I really don't know much about it yet and tend to be in a bubble with my own artistic projects/research, but I can imagine that composers will continue to explore ways that technology can be integrated with music.
I can also imagine a wider range of influences being present in music of the future and hopefully that will be reflected in the programming as well--concerts that represent a variety of voices, styles, and time periods all coming together. A dream performance of mine has been to premiere my own composition for piano and orchestra. It's a particular combination I've always been attracted to in orchestrations that blend the two and explore its coloristic possibilities.
Orchestral works that feature piano by Barber, Bartok, Stravinsky, and Messiaen were huge influences to me over the years, as well as concertos by Ligeti, Copland, and Ravel. I'm also interested in exploring ways that visual art can be represented in the music, using gesture and harmony to evoke textural elements that give an almost tactile impression of the art. Working with dancers has always been a dream too and exploring gesture in music. Hopefully we will see more interdisciplinary collaboration in the future as well!
