For Immediate Release, October 22, 2012

Contact:

Michael Hershkowitz

(631) 632-7313,

Photos available upon request.

Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players 25th Annual Premieres Concert

Four distinctive compositional voices, ranging from established composers to those on the vanguard of current musical experimentation, will receive world premiere performances at the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players 25th Annual Premieres Concert at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, November 16 at the Leonard NimoyThalia Theater at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, New York, NY. Free admission.A preview concert will be held at 8 p.m. on Thursday, November 15 at the Staller Center Recital Hall, Stony Brook, NY.

Commissioned for their disparate aesthetic outlooks, breadth of styles, and overall liveliness, the composers and works featured are:

• Judith Shatin, Shatin’sVayterunVayter(Further and Further) for bass singer, clarinet, cello, and piano is based on three powerful Yiddish poems by Abraham Sutzkever.

• Mark Gustavson, Turningdeconstructs Charles Ives's brief song “The Cage” into a cyclical tour de force for bass clarinet, percussion, piano and bass.

• Alex Temple, World for percussion and electronics is definitive proof of cultural appropriation. The composer writes, “If cheesiness is the new dissonance, this piece is a twelve-tone cluster.”

• Du Yun. Keep Something Broken for octet takes inspiration from a Marcel Proust letter describing inconsolable loss.

(Composer bios below)

Directed by distinguished performers and educators Gilbert Kalishand Eduardo Leandro, Stony Brook’s Contemporary Chamber Players has been called “a small army of musicians who demonstrate consistent accomplishment“ by the New York Times. The group has commissioned over 90 scores by composers in various stages of their careers, including those by Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship recipients.Composers selected for commissioning represent a wide range of styles, geographical locations, and ages, from talented young composers to established masters.

The ensemble aims to provide copious rehearsal time and outstanding first performances of challenging works in collaboration with the commissioned composers. Since 1988, the premieres concerts have drawn the attention and interest of composers and audiences.The Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players’s unique commissioning and performance project has been recognized by composers nationally as an outstanding contribution to contemporary music, one which is virtually unmatched by other professional or student ensembles in the nation.

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Composer Bios:

Judith Shatin is a composer and sound artist whose musical practice engages our social, cultural, and physical environments. With a focus on timbral exploration, she draws on expanded instrumental palettes and a cornucopia of the sounding world, from workers and machines in a deep coal mine, to the calls of animals, the shuttle of a wooden loom, a lawnmower racing up the lawn. Her music reflects her multiple fascinations with literature and visual arts, with the sounding world, both natural and built; and with the social and communicative power of music. Shatin’s music has been performed at international festivals, by numerous national orchestras, and is regularly performed by ensembles such as Da Capo Chamber Players, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, newEar, and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Judith Shatin is currentlyWilliam R. Kenan, Jr. Professorand Director of theVirginia Center for Computer Music, which she founded at the University of Virginia in 1987.Shatin has been honored with four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, as well as awards from the American Music Center, Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, the New Jersey State Arts Council, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

Mark Gustavson, a Brooklyn native and Long Island resident, has been featured prominently on New York stages. Included was his Twenty Variations for flute and piano at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall in 1983; his 1986 piano solo Dissolving Images at Merkin Concert Hall in 1991 (which toured the U.S.); Waves for orchestra was premiered at Carnegie Hall by the New York Youth Symphony as part of the First Music Series in 1988; his 1993 composition Quintet for clarinet, two violins, viola and cello, commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and premiered in 1996 by Contempo; and Silent Moon for orchestra (1998) written for and premiered by the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra and the first in an on going series of works inspired by Tarot cards. A Fool’s Journey a mixed chamber ensemble piece commissioned by Parnassus for their 25th anniversary concert was composed and premiered in 1999 at Merkin Concert Hall.He has won honors from ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, League-ISCM, New Music Consort and the Gaudeamus Foundation. In addition Mr. Gustavson has been awarded the Joseph H. Bearns Prize in Music, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is currently on the faculty of Adelphi University.

Alex Temple has released two albums of “genre-bendy” electronic music on a microlabel that she ran out of her college dormitory room, played keyboards in an indie bossa nova band, collaborated with choreographers and filmmakers, worked with young composers at the New York Youth Symphony, and put on solo voice-and-electronics shows at New York venues such as Galapagos Arts Space, the Gershwin Hotel, and the Tank. She was a founding member of DETOUR, a New York new music concert series now run by Brian Mark in London. She is currently living in Chicago, where she is working on herdoctoral degree at Northwestern University. In addition to composing and teaching, she also plays synthesizer and melodica in Ben Hjertmann‘savant-rock band The Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles, and performs post-Cagean indeterminate music with Nomi Epstein‘s ensemble Aperiodic.The composer writes: “My music lies somewhere between Surrealism and Pop Art.…I prefer to find points of connection between things that aren’t supposed to belong together, often to uncomfortable or disquieting effect. In the past few years, I’ve come to see my work as a kind of cultural archaeology and myth-making.…I’m particularly interested in reclaiming socially disapproved-of (“cheesy”) sounds and telling stories of recovered memories and secret histories.”

Du Yun, a Chinese native, is a New York-based composer and musician hailed by the New York Times as “cutting-edge… to whom the term ‘young composer’ could hardly do justice,” “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge;” “re-invents herself daily… so does her music,” (TONY), her music exists at an artistic crossroads of chamber music, theater, pop music, opera, orchestral, cabaret, storytelling, visual arts and noise. Du Yun has received commissions include from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall Weill Institution Commission, the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, the Whitney Museum Live, the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, violinist Hillary Hahn, cellist Matt Haimovitz, flutist Claire Chase and many more. She holds degrees from Oberlin and Harvard, and has served on the faculty of SUNY-Purchase since 2006.She is a founding member of the critically acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).Her studio pop album, Shark in You, releases on vinyl, CD and digital in late March 2011 on New Focus. Forthcoming recording of her concert works with ICE is in the final stage of mixing.

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