Saturday, March 7, 2015 | 7:30 pm
DiMenna Center for Classical Music | Mary Flagler Cary Hall | 450 West 37 Street | New York, NY
Free admission!
Sunday, March 8, 2015 | 5:00 pm
Olin Hall | Bard College | Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Free admission!
Monday, March 9, 2015 | 7:00 pm
Side-by-side concert with Face the Music, presented by Neighborhood Classics
Primary School 142 | 100 Attorney Street | New York, NY
$15 admission at the door | All proceeds benefit the P.S. 142 music program
Self Portrait presents five works commissioned by Contemporaneous, including four world premieres and works by artists in the ensemble. The diverse pieces explore the rich, often complex, relationship between music and self-expression. Taken together, they offer a picture in sound of the ensemble at the present moment, informed by its history and imagining its future.
Tamzin Elliott, whose work The New York Times has described as “effervescent” and “fresh,” has set her poetry to music in a new cycle of songs that feature soprano Lucy Dhegrae. Drawing on disparate traditions, of songs for singer and large ensemble from Mahler to Frank Sinatra, Elliott’s music is intimate, vulnerable, and deeply affecting.
Dylan Mattingly’s Lighthouse (Refugee Music by a Pacific Expatriate) is inspired by the composer's hometown San Francisco Bay, while Finnegan Shanahan’s Water Cycle (Music for a Hudson River Railroad Dream-Map) reflects on the river that stretches from New York City up through Shanahan’s native Hudson Valley.
Impulses, by Brazilian composer and Contemporaneous clarinetist Vicente Alexim, is marked by high-energy bursts to propel and shape its dramatic transformations. Contrasting with this is the serene beauty of Still Life for Ensemble by Contemporaneous percussionist Matt Evans.
On March 9, 2015, Contemporaneous will perform at P.S. 142, a public elementary school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as a benefit for the school’s music program. Presented by the Neighborhood Classics Series, this concert will feature Contemporaneous performing alongside Kaufman Music Center’s teenage new music ensemble, Face the Music.
Self Portrait is funded by donations from 218 funders from an online fundraising campaign. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to these donors.
Self-Portrait was supported by New Music USA. To follow the project as it unfolds, visit my project page.
Self Portrait is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and Administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
