New York City–based composer inti figgis-vizueta writes magically real musical works through the lens of personal identities, braiding a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom Schools in Washington, DC, with direct Andean and Irish heritage. Previously, she was a featured composer in American Composer Orchestra’s 2019 Underwood Readings (now known as EarShot in NYC) and is currently a 2022–2023 EarShot CoLABoratory Fellow. Her musical practice is physical and visceral, attempting to reconcile historical aesthetics and experimental practices with trans and indigenous futures. Recent honors include the 2020 ASCAP Foundation Fred Ho Award and a 2022–2023 music fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. figgis-vizueta was in residency at Sō Percussion’s Brooklyn studio for the 2021–2022 season. Upcoming projects include new works for Kronos Quartet and Roomful of Teeth in collaboration with visual artist Rose Bond.
In 2022, figgis-vizueta returned to teach for her third year at Wildflower Composers (formerly Young Women Composers Camp). She also joined the Kaufman Music Center’s Luna Composition Lab as a 2021–2022 mentor, recently completing mentorship work with the inaugural Boulanger Initiative’s Elizabeth Henriksen Mentorship Program. figgis-vizueta was also on the composition faculty at the 2021–2022 Atlanticx Composition Festival, which focused on Latin American composers. figgis-vizueta’s music appears on violinist Jennifer Koh’s 2021 Grammy-nominated album Alone Together, as well as cellist Matt Haimovitz’s 2021 Grammy-nominated album Primavera I: The Wind. She has studied with Marcos Balter, George Lewis, Donnacha Dennehy, and Felipe Lara, and been mentored by Gavilán Rayna Russom, Du Yun, Angélica Negrón, Tania León, and Amy Beth Kirsten.
The increasing intensity of wildfires in the United States, alongside shifts in mainstream conversations regarding decoloniality, has made clear the need for the traditional Indigenous knowledge of fire ecology. Controlled burns were integral to Indigenous peoples as part of land stewardship and modification; fire was a source of regeneration and cultivation that cleared open areas for grazing and hunting, increased regrowth of foods and medicinals, and decreased the risk of large, uncontrolled fires drawing on built-up fuel. The genocide and displacement of American Indigenous peoples in the past 400 years disrupted the caretaking of the land and introduced the colonial practice of total fire suppression. There have been recent collaborations between government environmental agencies and tribes regarding new fire regimes, but there has yet to be any significant systemic change that would ensure continued access and stewardship by American Indigenous peoples.
Seven Sides of Fire focuses on fire ecology and Indigenous forms of transmission as sources towards new forms of perception-based music making, non-traditional notations, and the building of shared sonic imaginaries. This new work reflects on the role of fire in natural and cosmological regeneration, while disrupting the dominant Western imaginary of fire as evil, as punishment, and as unnatural. The title refers to a phrase I heard describing the sides of a controlled fire: front, rear, both sides, top, bottom, and interior. This focus on spatiality sparked ideas around organizing and bringing into relationship independent trajectories and processes among various players, organized groups, and whole instrumental families.
Oral transmission and storytelling are core to my practice, building shared imaginaries through inquiry, experimentation, and making through doing. For this work, initial questions potentially emerge: How can fire be passed around or transmitted? How does time relate to fire (cycles of burns, stages of breakdown, plant growth after)? What does control mean in a burn? These ongoing guided dialogues form the basis for the collective interpretation of given materials and gestures within player-driven structures and emergent forms.
American composer-librettist Mark Adamo’s work has returned to the stage in force in recent seasons. London’s Opera Holland Park gave the UK premiere of his first opera, Little Women, last July; that same month, Pittsburgh Festival Opera introduced its filmed version of his second opera, Lysistrata. Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires gives the Argentine premiere of Little Women in November; that same month, Boston Modern Orchestra Project gives the East Coast premiere of The Lord of Cries, the opera that Adamo co-created with composer John Corigliano for Santa Fe Opera. The autumn of 2021 included the first performances of Last Year in San Francisco and Houston, followed by Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Becoming Santa Claus—Adamo’s fourth opera. This followed the warmly received Dutch premiere by the Dutch National Opera Academy of Little Women. Other notable commissions include Aristotle for Thomas Hampson and the Jupiter String Quartet; Four Angels for the National Symphony Orchestra; The Racer’s Widow for the New York Festival of Song; and the cantata Late Victorians for Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, which recorded it on its all-Adamo recording for Naxos. His choral works have been commissioned and performed by Chanticleer, Conspirare, The Esoterics, Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and New York Virtuoso Singers. Adamo’s music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer.
In 2018, for reasons that don’t really matter now, I’d listened—really listened—to a new-to-me recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. And I marveled not only at the score’s vigor and clarity, but at its innocence, too—it portrayed each season, offering its own delights and terrors while still yielding, safely, to the next. The recording finished: I turned to the news and learned that—due to the latest in our series of once-in-a-lifetime-except-now-every-year storms—a hurricane had left the city of Houston nearly drowned.
Vivaldi couldn’t write those scores today, I thought. But—if he were alive now, and knew what we now know—what would he write?
Last Year is my answer. While The Four Seasons is a cycle of four concerti for violin and strings, mine is a single concerto in four movements (the last three played without pause) for the richer-voiced cello; I also add to the string ensemble a choir of piano, harp, timpani, and ringing percussion. The piece tries to give voice to the fears and hopes we experience during this moment of crisis; and composing it pushed me both emotionally and technically in ways I’ve never experienced before. But I was, and am, humbled to have been offered the privilege to attempt it.
Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer of electroacoustic, chamber, and orchestral music for concert, theater, and installation. Building on her experience as a theatrical sound designer, she blends various forms into her own aesthetic of narrative soundscape composition, radio opera, and improvisation. Her works often draw from history to examine relevant social issues. Jackson is a recipient of San Francisco’s Dean Goodman Choice Award for Sound Design and Theatre Bay Area’s Eric Landisman Fellowship. She was selected by the American Composers Orchestra to participate in the third Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute in conjunction with the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. Her work was featured in ACO’s EarShot Reading with the Naples Philharmonic and she is an EarShot CoLABoratory Fellow in the 2022–2023 season. Jackson studied music at the Colburn School; she holds a bachelor’s degree in music from Columbia University and a doctorate in music-integrative studies from the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on the history of production techniques and aesthetics that link radio drama and electroacoustic music, multichannel composition, and immersion.
Hello, Tomorrow!, for orchestra and electronics, takes its title from George Lefferts’s story that was adapted for the radio drama series Dimension X and X Minus One in the 1950s, and is a response to reading Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization. Both use science fiction to depict a future made unrecognizable by human (in)actions. This composition is a reflection on the actions that can be taken today to bring about positive change. Building on my body of electroacoustic radio operas, Hello, Tomorrow! invites the listener to draw upon personal experiences and knowledge to construct the narrative.
Called “alluring” and “wildly inventive” by The New York Times, the music of American composer Viet Cuong has been performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Eighth Blackbird, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Sandbox Percussion, Albany Symphony, PRISM Quartet, and Dallas Winds, among many others. Cuong’s music has been featured in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center, and his works for wind ensemble have amassed hundreds of performances worldwide. Passionate about bringing these different facets of the contemporary music community together, his upcoming projects include a concerto for Eighth Blackbird with the United States Navy Band. Cuong also enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying. His recent works thus include a snare drum solo, percussion quartet concerto, and, most recently, a double oboe concerto. He is currently the California Symphony’s Young American Composer-in-Residence, and recently served as the Early Career Musician-in-Residence at Dumbarton Oaks. Cuong holds degrees from Princeton University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Peabody Conservatory.
I have tremendous respect for renewable energy initiatives and the commitment to creating a new, better reality for us all. re(new)al is a percussion quartet concerto that is similarly devoted to finding unexpected ways to breathe new life into traditional ideas, and the solo quartet therefore performs on several “found” instruments, including crystal glasses and (reusable) compressed air cans. And while the piece also features more traditional instruments, such as snare drum and vibraphone, I looked for ways to either alter their sounds or find new ways to play them. For instance, a single snare drum is played by all four members of the quartet, and certain notes of the vibraphone are prepared with aluminum foil to recreate sounds found in electronic music. The entire piece was conceived in this way, and it was a blast to discover all of these unique sounds with the members of Sandbox Percussion.
Cooperation and synergy are also core themes of the piece, as I believe we all have to work together to move forward. All of the music played by the solo quartet comprises single musical ideas that are evenly distributed between the four soloists (for those interested, the fancy musical term for this is a hocket). The music would therefore be dysfunctional without the presence and dedication of all four members. For example, the quartet divvies up lightning-fast drum-set beats in the second movement and later shares one glockenspiel in the last movement. But perhaps my favorite example of synergy in the piece is in the very opening, where the four soloists toast crystal glasses. We always toast glasses in the presence of others, and oftentimes to celebrate new beginnings. This is my simple way of celebrating everyone who is working together to create a cleaner, more efficient world.
re(new)al is constructed of three continuous movements, each inspired by the power of hydro, wind, and solar energies. The hydro movement transforms tuned crystal glasses into ringing hand bells as the wind ensemble slowly submerges the soloists in their sound. The second movement turns each member of the quartet into a blade of a dizzying wind turbine, playing seemingly impossible 1990s-inspired drum-and-bass patterns. The closing movement simulates a sunrise and evokes the brilliance of sunlight with metallic percussion instruments. This piece was originally written with a sinfonietta accompaniment, and in its original form was commissioned for the 2017 American Music Festival by David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony’s Dogs of Desire in partnership with GE Renewable Energy. This full orchestra version was commissioned in 2018 by the Albany Symphony and is dedicated to Sandbox Percussion.