Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican–born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film, as well as robots, toys, and plants. Recent commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Sō Percussion, Kronos Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and an original score for the HBO docuseries Menudo: Forever Young.
Negrón’s recent and upcoming premieres include performances by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (featuring singer Lido Pimienta), Santa Rosa Symphony and Eugene Symphony (First Symphony project), and Hermitage Artist Retreat (as recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize). Residencies have included WNYC’s The Greene Space and the New York Botanical Garden.
Negrón regularly performs a solo show and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún. As an educator, she has been a teaching artist with New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program (2013–2021) and Lincoln Center Education (2014–2018).
Negrón lives in Brooklyn, where she’s always looking for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work. She is managed by St. Rose Management and published by Decca Publishing / Universal Music Publishing Classics & Screen.
There are certain themes in our lives that we’re afraid to confront, despite (or perhaps because of) how deeply they have shaped us. Inward Pieces is a series of short movements written for Sō Percussion inspired by four such themes in my own life. Each piece focuses on the quartet’s interactions with a series of mechanical instruments built by artist and engineer Nick Yulman. Yulman’s robotic sound machines (which he calls the Bricolo Mechanical Music System) consist of four solenoid-powered mechanical modules that attach to acoustic instruments or physical objects. Each piece requires the performers to interact with the modular music devices in different ways.
“gone” explores the visceral emptiness in the wake of absence, while searching for connections with and meaning in the people and things that remain. It uses acrylic cubes placed atop Bricolo modules to create fast, erratic, and incisive rhythms with a ghost-like presence—at times interacting with the members of Sō and at others having a mind of its own.
“wires” is a robotic chorale about searching for meaning through connection with a higher spiritual power, while reflecting on religious fanaticism. It uses books laid out on robotic modules set to the “Thing Synth” function—which turns physical objects into tunable oscillators—generating different pitches from the books’ inherent resonance. The lyrics are as follows:
Circuits deep
where wires think
Among the gears
seek what’s divine
Metallic hearts
Devoid of pulse
Lines of code
Embrace the skies
“release” is inspired by my experience of generalized anxiety disorder, while learning how to cope with what is outside of my control. It uses translucent magnetic tiles (a construction toy system for children) as they are arranged over “Thing Synths,” generating different chords and subtle sound variations. Performers explore these rhythms by placing and lifting the tiles, continually building new physical shapes and structures.
“go back” confronts the great longing for home in the diaspora, while feeling frustrated and stifled whenever I do return to Puerto Rico. It uses cacerolas and calderos (pots and pans) set on top of Nick’s mechanical devices to evoke the domestic sounds of my childhood as well as the sound of resistance. (A form of sonic protest known as cacerolazo characterizes many of the protests on the island and in the diaspora.)
—Angélica Negrón
Olivier Tarpaga is a Lester Horton Award–winning choreographer, senior lecturer in music, and director of the African Music Ensembles of Princeton University. He has performed and taught music and dance in more than 50 countries across Africa, Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. Since 1998, Tarpaga has composed and performed contemporary and traditional music, and conceived dynamic dance theater works, touring internationally with an impressive roster of collaborators and commissioning partners, including the Hollywood Bowl, New Delhi Sacred Music Festival, World Cultures Festival (Hong Kong), BaliSpirit Festival, Festival de Jazz d’Amiens, Harlem Stage, The Joyce Theater, REDCAT, Crossing the Line Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, Natanda (Sri Lanka), Drama Centre (Singapore), and Session House (Tokyo).
Tarpaga’s music and dance works have been described as “unforgettable” by the Los Angeles Times and “extraordinary” by The New York Times. Born in Kaya, Burkina Faso, he followed in the steps of his father, Abdoulaye Richard Tarpaga, who was co-artistic director of the 1960s Orchestre Super Volta. Tarpaga is founder and artistic director of the internationally acclaimed Dafra Drum (1995–present), which plays traditional Manding music, and Dafra Kura Band (2011–present), which plays contemporary African music. He is also a co-founder of Burkina Faso’s internationally acclaimed Compagnie Ta and the Philadelphia-based Olivier Tarpaga Dance Project.
Tarpaga’s commissioned works include Only One Will Rise for the Limón Dance Company, Wind of Nomads for Malaysia’s internationally renowned HANDS Percussion, Resist, Resurge: Traces of Hope for Maya Dance Theatre of Singapore, and The way of sands for the Temple of Fine Arts in Perth, Australia.
Bush Taxi: The dust, the potholes, the heat, the super old green Mercedes with a hole in the bottom, the nine passengers in a four-seater vehicle.
Pas à Pas: This song was composed in homage to my multiple childhood friends who have lost their lives in the battlefield against Jihadists in the north of Burkina Faso and in the Sahel region.
Tarpaga’s four in three: This is my contemporary offering of Koreduga played on modern drums and wood. This complex rhythm derived from the Koreduga rhythm is my favorite triplet from the Mandingo empire.
Dusty road to Dolo: The sound of the Lobi and Djan’s balafon, my grandmother’s guinea fowls climbing the baobab tree, the smell of boiling millet beer, the rooster crowing at 5 AM. The melody of this song is inspired by my childhood trips to the small village of Dolo in the west of Burkina Faso with Jeanne, my dear mother.
—Olivier Tarpaga
Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, and shape-shifting presence in modern music. He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a US Artists Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Award, and the Alpert Award in the Arts in addition to being voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat International Critics Poll four times. He was described by Pitchfork as “one of the most interesting and vital young pianists in jazz today.”
Iyer’s most recent releases on ECM Records include Love In Exile, a collaborative trio recorded with Grammy-winning vocalist Arooj Aftab and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily; Uneasy with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems with fellow pianist Craig Taborn; Far from Over with Iyer’s award-winning sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke in duo with creative music legend Wadada Leo Smith.
Iyer’s compositions have been commissioned and premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Brentano String Quartet, Imani Winds, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, The Knights, Sō Percussion, Matt Haimovitz, Claire Chase, and Jennifer Koh, among others.
Iyer has served as artistic director of the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music since 2013. He holds a lifetime position as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a Steinway artist.
Dharma-Eye takes its name from a moment in the first chapter of the Vimalakirti Sutra when the world is shown to be much more than it appears. First brought to my attention by theater director Peter Sellars, this early Buddhist text is didactic in nature, teaching concepts of nondualism, emptiness, and compassion.
Dharma-Eye is scored for piano, trumpet/flugelhorn, and four percussionists. The music is organized for creative ensemble in the tradition set forth by Wadada Leo Smith and others, describing musicians and ensembles who bring their creative input to the realization of a composed work. This is often referred to as “improvisation,” but that term falls short of capturing the structural impact of this process.
Music making becomes “listenable,” I feel, by revealing its own internal listening processes. What does listening sound like? For an individual performer, the process is audible in their relation to their surroundings, in their interactions with the sound of the room and the listening presence of others. In ensemble music, listening sounds like trust: a cultivated rapport among players, audible in mutual breathing, attunement, blending, dynamics, the ebb and flow of pulse, and the non-visual coordination of action.
This composition reduces the visual element of notation as much as possible and pushes the manageable limits of the aural. I view this piece as less a straightforward linear score than a system of ethical relations that affords individual and collective sonic agency. It offers specific strategies for building musical structure: listening and responding, aggregating and synchronizing, maintaining and transforming. These methods are meant to foster a performative vulnerability that brings the music making to life, bringing performers to the brink of possibility and revealing their interreliance. The piece invites players to proceed, through a cooperative listening practice, from emptiness to form and back.
—Vijay Iyer
A founding and current member of Sō Percussion, Jason Treuting has appeared in performance around the world, from the Barbican to Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall to Walt Disney Concert Hall. He is also a composer of works that have been performed by musical luminaries, including Caroline Shaw, Bryce Dessner, Shara Nova, Sam Amidon, Iarla Ó Lionáird, and Steve Mackey, among others.
Treuting’s composition Amid the Noise has been performed widely by Sō Percussion, Matmos, and other artists at the Lincoln Center Festival, Barbican, Walker Art Center, National Sawdust, and elsewhere. It has been presented by Fast Forward Austin, Kadence Arts (Boston), Chatterbird, and others, and was recorded by Sō Percussion for release on Cantaloupe Music. His work Go Placidly with Haste will be released by Cantaloupe in 2024.
Treuting is co-director of the percussion program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music and is a lecturer of music at Princeton University, where the members of Sō Percussion are performers-in-residence. He lives in Princeton with his partner, violist Beth Meyers, and their two daughters.
As with my earlier work Amid the Noise, Go Placidly with Haste is inspired by Desiderata, Max Ehrman’s secular prayer of the early 1920s. The first line of the poem, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste,” still resonates in many aspects of my life, and it has continued to be a touchstone of my music making.
The work is made up of several smaller movements that can be combined in any way the performers like and played on any instruments the performers choose.
Tonight we perform four movements, chosen to highlight many long-time collaborators and new friends, and also featuring the three composers whose works have been performed and premiered this evening.
—Jason Treuting