Augusta Read Thomas’s music “embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). The New Yorker called her “a true virtuoso composer.” She was the longest-serving Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and, in 2013, founded the University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Composition. One of the most active composers in the world—with commissions, performances, recordings, awards, and honors—Thomas is also a long-standing, exemplary member of the profession at large. Recent and upcoming commissions include those from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Utah Symphony, London’s Wigmore Hall, Martha Graham Dance Company, Santa Fe Opera (along with a consortium of seven opera companies), JACK Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Tanglewood, Spektral Quartet, Chicago Philharmonic, Danish Chamber Players, Sejong Soloists, and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Thomas won the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, among many other coveted awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Music for me is an embrace of the world, a way to open myself to being alive in the world—in my body, in my sounds, and in my mind. I care deeply about musicality, imagination, craft, clarity, dimensionality, an elegant balance between material and form, and empathy with the performing musicians as well as everyone who works in the presenting organizations.
Although my music is meticulously notated in every detail, I like it to sound like it was being spontaneously invented. It is always in the act of becoming. I have a vivid sense that the process of the creative journey (rather than a predictable fixed point of arrival) is, for me, essential.
Organic and at every level concerned with transformations and connections, the carefully sculpted and fashioned musical materials are agile and spirited. Their flexibility allows pathways to braid harmonic, rhythmic, timbral, and contrapuntal elements that are constantly transformed—sometimes whimsical and light, sometimes jazzy, sometimes almost balletic, sometimes vaguely akin to lively and spirited music on a caffeine rush, sometimes layered and reverberating with pirouettes, fulcrum points, and effervescence.
Sun Dance unfolds a labyrinth of musical interrelationships and connections that showcase the orchestra.
—Augusta Read Thomas
George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, and trombonist. He is Case Professor of American Music and Area Chair in Composition at Columbia University, and Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work is presented by ensembles worldwide, published by Edition Peters. A Yamaha Artist, Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of computer programs that improvise in concert with human musicians.
Weathering continues my fascination with the classic trope of depiction in American music, as found in Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, Elliott Carter, Duke Ellington, and many others. This new work is part of my series of musical meditations on the sound of decolonization that ask, “If we get what we want, what will it sound like?”
The music of the new Black improvisors of the 1960s prompted a New York Times characterization: “Black, Angry, and Hard to Understand.” John Coltrane’s response was a cryptic statement of resistance: He was trying to show “the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe.” This was “stoic” (with a small “s”): enduring pain or hardship without showing feelings or complaining.
Public health researcher Arline Geronimus calls “weathering” a continuous fight-or-flight vigilance and stress response in reaction to an unrelenting anti-Blackness that can be experienced at any time, transcending class position, with lingering effects long after the experience is over. Nonetheless, the targets of the abuse are expected to respond “stoically.”
Here, we can turn to JID’s song “Kody Blu 31” (2022), which tells us that the only way to survive this Sisyphean cleft stick is to “keep on swangin’ on,” a form of New Testament hexis. Weathering (the music) is about the sound of that struggle, part of a larger call for new histories, new subjectivities, and a new identity for classical music. I am hoping that this music will provoke not stress, but empathy, since diverse forms of weathering affect us all.
—George Lewis
Jack Hughes is a composer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. He served as composer fellow for the Canton Symphony Orchestra in 2014 and San Francisco’s Volti choral ensemble in 2017. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him a Charles Ives Scholarship. The following year, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival selected him for its String Quartet Project and Commission. Other recent projects include a collaboration with Finnish American clarinettist Lucy Abrams-Husso in the creation of Ripple Reflected, a piece for clarinet and electronics that premiered in the Helsinki Winter Garden in 2021.
When composing, I work with simple energetic patterns that give rise to a work’s harmonies, melodies, rhythms, and overall form. Each of the three interconnected movements has a prominent pattern (what I call a “basic direction”) that guides the flow of the music.
Movement I is vigorous and bright. The basic direction is UP. Although there are several moments of repose and descent, the music surges ahead and eventually reaches an expansive climax.
A transition of shimmering strings leads into movement II, which is warm and introspective. The basic direction is IN. The music moves in long, slow arches and sighs in deep breaths. A yearning oboe solo forms the core.
Movement III is rhythmic and grounded. The basic direction is AROUND. The breaths from movement II continue, revealing a slow-moving bassline that continually encircles the note E—the tonic pitch of the piece. While the surface level of this music is constantly in flux, the deep background rhythms are steady and unchanging.
—Jack Hughes
Born in Buenos Aires, Guillermo Klein attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied composition. After graduating, he moved to New York City and currently lives in Upstate New York. Klein has led his own ensemble, Los Guachos, his multinational 11-piece big band, “influenced by old and new tango, American jazz, modernism, and indie rock” (The New York Times). He also collaborates with renowned jazz musicians, including Aaron Goldberg, Joshua Redman, Jorge Rossy, Rebecca Martin, Miguel Zenón, and Wolfgang Muthspiel. Klein has been commissioned by the Orquestra Jazz de Matosinhos (Portugal), UMO Jazz Orchestra (Finland), Swiss Jazz Orchestra, MIT Wind Ensemble, Orquesta Filarmónica (Argentina), and many others around the world. He teaches composition at the Jazz Campus in Basel, Switzerland.
This work is inspired by readings of The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère. In the book, the author explores the mysterious source of the impulse to believe. He mixes personal experiences with historical research of early Christianity, blending scholarship with speculation.
The music has a recurrent motif that dialogues between different forms of harmonic resonance, persistent rhythms that emerge and migrate, an overall sense of immersion, while contemplation and reflection drive this work.
—Guillermo Klein
Composer and sonic artist Nina C. Young creates works that range from acoustic concert pieces to interactive installations, exploring aural architectures, resonance, timbre, and the ephemeral. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Aizuri Quartet, Sixtrum, JACK Quartet, and others. Winner of the 2015–2016 Rome Prize, Young has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, Fromm Music Foundation, MacDowell, Montalvo Arts Center, and BMI. Recent commissions include Tread softly for the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19; Traces, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh with The Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; and Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light, a multimedia experience on ritual and polyphony for EMPAC’s (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer) High-Resolution Wave Field Synthesis Loudspeaker Array using recordings by the American Brass Quintet. Young holds degrees from MIT, McGill University, and Columbia University, and is an associate professor of composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.
Out of whose womb came the ice creates a sonic and visual glimpse of a segment of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–1917). In August 1914, at the onset of World War I, polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton gathered a crew of 27 men and set sail for the South Atlantic. They were in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration: to be the first to cross the continent by foot. Upon entering the Weddell Sea, they encountered unusually foul weather. Weaving south through the treacherous seas of ice, their ship, the Endurance, became trapped only 85 miles from their destination. After months of waiting for the ice to break, the ship was crushed and sank, leaving the crew stranded upon the ice floes without any means of contacting the outside world. In pursuit of survival, Shackleton and his crew endured 22 months traversing ice floes up the Antarctic Peninsula. The final leg included a deadly 800-mile open boat journey in their lifeboat, the James Caird, in hopes of reaching South Georgia Island. The crew was rescued on August 30, 1916; everyone survived. Though this expedition failed, it remains one of the most miraculous stories of polar exploration and human survival.
Out of whose womb came the ice looks at the expedition from the time the crew leaves port to the trapping of the Endurance in the Weddell Sea’s pack ice. The vocal and orchestra music focuses on the crew’s perception of the Endurance in relationship to their surroundings. She goes from being simply a ship, to a lifeline and memento that connects them to the world they left behind. Once she sinks, they are truly left alone. The visuals and electronics offer narrative elements drawn directly from documents of the journey: journal entries of the crew and images by the expedition’s official photographer, Frank Hurley.
—Nina C. Young