Carlos Simon is a multifaceted and highly sought-after composer and curator. His works range from concert music for large and small ensembles to film scores with influences of jazz, gospel, and neo-romanticism. Simon is the current composer-in-residence at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
This season includes premiere performances with the Minnesota Orchestra; Boston, Detroit, and National symphony orchestras; Washington National Opera (in collaboration with Mo Willems); and Brooklyn Art Song Society, following recent other commissions from the New York Philharmonic and Bravo! Vail, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Glimmerglass Festival, Sphinx Organization, Music Academy of the West, and San Francisco Chamber Orchestra.
Simon’s work spans genres, taking great inspiration from liturgical texts and writers such as Terrance Hayes, Colson Whitehead, Lynn Nottage, Emma Lazarus, Isabel Wilkerson, Ruby Aiyo Gerber, and Courtney Lett, as well as the art of Romare Bearden.
Simon’s latest album, Requiem for the Enslaved, is a multi-genre musical tribute to commemorate the stories of the 272 enslaved men, women, and children sold in 1838 by Georgetown University, and was nominated for a 2023 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Released by Decca in June 2022, this work sees Simon infuse his original compositions with African American spirituals and familiar Catholic liturgical melodies, performed by Hub New Music, Marco Pavé, and MK Zulu.
Simon earned his doctorate degree at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Michael Daugherty and Evan Chambers. He has also received degrees from Georgia State University and Morehouse College. He has served as a member of the music faculty at Spelman and Morehouse colleges, and is now an assistant professor at Georgetown University. Simon was awarded the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by the Sphinx Organization to recognize extraordinary classical Black and Latinx musicians, and was named a Sundance Institute / Time Warner Composer Fellow for his work in film and moving image.
Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, I have composed musical gestures that are representative of the unpredictable ways of fate—jolting stabs, coupled with an agitated groove with every persona. Frenzied arpeggios in the strings that morph into an ambiguous cloud of free-flowing running passages depicts the uncertainty of life that hovers over us.
We know that Beethoven strived to overcome many obstacles in his life and documented his aspirations to prevail, despite his ailments. Whatever the specific reason for including this particularly profound passage from the Iliad, in the end, it seems that Beethoven relinquished to fate. Fate now conquers.
Ellen Reid is one of the most innovative artists of her generation. A composer and sound artist whose breadth of work spans opera, sound design, film scoring, and ensemble and choral writing, she was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her opera p r i s m.
Along with composer Missy Mazzoli, Reid co-founded the Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program for young, female-identifying, non-binary, and gender non-conforming composers. Since the fall of 2019, she has served as creative advisor and composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
Reid received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and her master’s from the California Institute of the Arts. She is inspired by music from all around the globe, and she splits her time between her two favorite cities: Los Angeles and New York. Her music is released on Decca Gold.
A floodplain is a low-lying area of land near a river whose role changes depending on precipitation and weather—it can morph from a fertile home for grasses, plant, and animal life to a silty bed for the swollen river. In writing Floodplain, I was inspired by this landscape that is both lush and dangerous. Musically, I used a rhythmic figure made of sextuplets that unifies the work and alternatively propels it in different directions. I started writing Floodplain at the beginning of 2020. Once it became clear that the premiere would need to be moved due to COVID-19, I put the work on the shelf and didn’t look at it for about two years. In the interim, my concepts of unpredictability and the creative fertility found in it were fundamentally re-shaped, and Floodplain emerged as a wholly different work than the one I had conceived before the pandemic.
Carlos Bandera is a composer whose music is characterized by a glacial unfolding of sonic landscapes. He often expands simple elements into large-scale musical structures, through which he explores the interplay of harmony, noise, and texture. His music has been performed by ensembles such as the Albany Symphony, Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, Dogs of Desire, Hotel Elefant, Earspace, Hebrides Ensemble, Nebula Ensemble, Omnibus Ensemble, and Now Hear This. He has attended the Composers Conference, Copland House’s CULTIVATE, Delian Academy for New Music, and Time of Music.
Bandera’s Meristem was recently performed by the Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra during its tour across southeastern England. Other recent projects include commissions from the Albany Symphony and new pieces for Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Yarn/Wire, and the Nois Saxophone Quartet.
Bandera holds a master’s degree from the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s from Montclair State University. He is currently based in Chicago, where he is pursuing a PhD in composition and music technology at Northwestern University.
Materia Prima draws inspiration from the mythological motif of the cosmic ocean. This motif—which can be found in the creation stories of a strikingly wide variety of cultures and religions—describes a cosmic ocean of primordial, often chaotic waters from which the universe was created. The title Materia Prima (Latin for “prime, or original matter”) refers to the substance viewed as the material cause of the universe.
There are two musical elements that form my piece: sustained sounds and brief impulses. The impulses act as drops of water in a still, vast sea, creating waves of activity that disrupt the stability of the sustained material. The harmonic structure of the piece is built upon a similar opposition, one between the harmonic series of a low B-flat and the open strings of the string instruments, particularly the open A—the note from which the entire piece emerges. The piece unfolds through gradual processes of transformation as it attempts to reconcile these opposing materials. At its core, Materia Prima strives to find serene spaces in a turbulent and chaotic world.
Hailed by Rolling Stone as “a genre unto herself,” composer and guitarist Kaki King is a true iconoclast. King is known for her percussive and jazz-tinged melodies, energetic live shows, use of multiple tunings on acoustic and lap-steel guitar, and diverse range in different genres. Over the past 10 years, the Brooklyn-based artist has released six extraordinarily diverse and distinctive albums, and performed with such icons as Foo Fighters and Timbaland. From 2015 to 2019, The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body was King’s most prolific touring project and adventurous album, a provocative and beautiful piece that directly projected visual art onto her guitar to become her ontological tabula rasa. She has touched audiences worldwide in innumerable tours, playing venues and festivals as diverse as the Sydney Opera House, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi, Ferst Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Kennedy Center, MoMA, North Sea Jazz Festival, Vancouver Folk Music Festival, Singapore’s Mosaic Music Festival, Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival, Festival of Arts & Ideas, and more.
Composer and electric guitarist D. J. Sparr—recently hailed by Gramophone as “exemplary”—is one of America’s preeminent composer-performers. He has caught the attention of critics with his eclectic style, described as “pop-Romantic … iridescent and wondrous” (The Mercury News) and “suit[ing] the boundary-erasing spirit of today’s new-music world” (The New York Times). He was soloist on the 2018 Grammy Award–winning recording of the Electric Guitar Concerto with JoAnn Falletta and the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2011, Sparr was named one of NPR listeners’ favorite 100 composers. He has composed for and performed with renowned ensembles, including Houston Grand Opera, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, New World Symphony, Washington National Opera, and Eighth Blackbird. Sparr was the Young American Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony from 2011 to 2014. His music has received awards from BMI, New Music USA, and the League of Composers / ISCM. Sparr is a faculty member at the Walden School’s Creative Musicians Retreat in New Hampshire. His composition works and guitar performances appear on the Naxos, Innova, Albany, and Centaur labels.
Sparr lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his wife Kimberly, son Harris, Nannette the hound dog, and Bundini the boxer. His music is published by Bill Holab Music.
Known as one of the greatest guitar innovators of our time, Kaki King presents Modern Yesterdays, a refinement of her now signature guitar-projection mapping performance. With technicolor imagination, technical wizardry, and carefully choreographed guitar and drum playing, “she’ll do the unexpected, every time” (Digital Trends). Bridging future-forward modernity with contemplative longing, Modern Yesterdays sends audiences on an audiovisual journey reset by our recent past, arriving at the emotional place we yearn to visit.
The album Modern Yesterdays (released in late 2020 on Cantaloupe Music) derives broadly from the music composed for Data Not Found, King’s largest-scale and most theatrical performance piece yet. With the post-pandemic performance world ever-evolving, she set out to create an analog to Data Not Found, which can now be found in Modern Yesterdays: an interlocking puzzle piece nimble enough to tour the world.