Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Michael Abels’s latest original score is for the series Star Wars: The Acolyte, featuring the original song “Power of Two” that he co-wrote with Grammy winners Victoria Monét and D’Mile. He is best-known for his genre-defying scores for the Jordan Peele films Get Out, Us, and Nope. The score for Us won World Soundtrack and Jerry Goldsmith awards, and was named “Score of the Decade” by TheWrap.
Abels’s film music has been honored by the Vancouver International Film Festival, Middleburg Film Festival, American Black Film Festival, and Museum of the Moving Image. He was also an Emmy nominee for the docuseries Allen v. Farrow. Other recent media projects include the films Bad Education, The Burial, Landscape with Invisible Hand, and Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words. Abels’s creative output includes many concert works, including the choral song cycle At War with Ourselves for Kronos Quartet, the Grammy-nominated Isolation Variation for Hilary Hahn, and the opera Omar, co-composed with Grammy-winning recording artist Rhiannon Giddens.
Abels is a frequent guest lecturer and was the 2024 commencement speaker at the USC Thornton School of Music. He is co-founder of the Composers Diversity Collective, an advocacy group to increase visibility of composers of color in film, gaming, and streaming media.
This concerto, Borders, was inspired by a museum exhibit named Sahara: Acts of Memory, which showed life in Sahara, a camp that was created in Denmark for housing refugees from the Bosnian War in the 1990s.
Among the inhabitants was graphic artist Ismet Berbić and his family. The exhibit detailed the family’s struggle to preserve individuality and culture in the face of losing country and community. Berbić used his artistry to brand the camp and label its areas and everyday items to bring a sense of belonging and identity.
Guitar virtuoso Mak Grgić was a friend of the Berbić family and experienced the Balkan War firsthand as a child.
In the first movement of this concerto, the guitar is a protagonist that is repeatedly confined by sonic bars or walls created by the orchestra. The guitar has to struggle to find its spirit and expression between these sonic bars. The second movement depicts a child running, sometimes joyfully, but also sometimes in fear.
—Michael Abels
Chicago-based composer Paul Novak’s recent projects engage with dreams and memory, queer identity, climate change and the natural world, and psychosomatic illness. He has received commissions from the Balourdet Quartet; Orchestra of St. Luke’s; ASCAP; Society of Composers, Inc.; Music from Copland House; Lynx; Quatuor Lontano; The Boston New Music Initiative; BlackBox Ensemble; and Kinetic Ensemble. His collaborators include the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Orlando Philharmonic, Reno Philharmonic, US Army Band, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, DanceWorks Chicago, Sandbox Percussion, Ekmeles, Quince Ensemble, Decoda, InfraSound Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Dmitri Atapine, Quatuor Diotima, LIGAMENT Duo, and Tribeca New Music.
In 2024, Novak received top prizes from both the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Composer Awards and BMI Composer Awards; other recent honors include Barlow and Underwood commissions, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, SCI/ASCAP Competition, Red Note Competition, League of Composers / ISCM, Lake George Music Festival, and National Association of Composers USA. He has received fellowships from Aspen, Norfolk, Copland House, Millay Arts, and I-Park, and was featured in The Washington Post’s “23 for ’23: Composers and Performers to Watch this Year.” His recent projects include collaborations with poets, visual artists, dancers, choreographers, and a spoken-word artist. Novak is an alum of the American Composer’s Orchestra 2020 Underwood New Music Readings (known today as EarShot Readings: ACO in NYC).
Forests slowly move to new geographic areas across many generations in response to environmental threats such as climate change. These migrations demonstrate the power and versatility of the natural world, which we think is static but is truly always developing and adapting. However, the phrase forest migration to me also darkly alludes to the very different migration that trees undergo as forests around the world are destroyed. And I have been thinking about the great debt musicians owe to trees. So many of the instruments we play are constructed from wood, and in a certain sense the creation of these instruments seems, poignantly, like a third type of migration.
forest migrations explores different layers of time, with active layers of surface motion always buoyed by the slow movement of the forest. Much of the material of the piece is built from tightly interwoven canons that unravel patiently throughout the ensemble like the mycelium network of a forest. Throughout the piece, the wooden instruments of the orchestra resonate in their most fundamental ways, with music built from natural harmonics, open strings, and melodies of interlocked fifths. My aim was to create a sound world that is patient and resilient, like the natural world this piece pays homage to.
—Paul Novak
Winner of the 2022 Sphinx Competition, Kebra-Seyoun Charles (they/them) is a double bassist and composer lauded for their innovative and integrated approach to musical expression as both a soloist and creator. As a modern virtuoso and composer of concertos, ballets, and pop ballads, Charles’s music has been praised for its “buoyancy and verve—pushing the far reaches of tonality while savoring hummable grooves” (I Care If You Listen). An advocate for a more inclusive classical music community, The Strad confirms that “versatility defines Charles’s approach.”
This season features the premiere of a new ballet commissioned by Peter London Global Dance Company in Miami, plus chamber collaborations with Bang on a Can, Alarm Will Sound, and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Charles has been featured on Performance Today and NPR’s From the Top, and has performed with the New World Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Wilmington Symphony Orchestra, and Sphinx Virtuosi. Other notable performances include those at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Library of Congress. Charles has also collaborated with esteemed improvisers and composers such as Jon Batiste, 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey, and jazz musician-composer Jason Moran. Originally from Miami, Charles received their bachelor’s degree from the New England Conservatory of Music and master’s from The Juilliard School.
Okay so, picture this: It’s a Saturday night and you’ve got a party later. The thing is you have a couple of hours in between. So what do you do? Go on a walk, of course. This is the narrative force behind “Nightlife,” a modern tone poem depicting scenes any of us might encounter from the streets of New York.
Musically, this piece draws from much more diverse sources; this concerto exemplifies my compositional style called Counterclassicism (counter representing both counterpoint and countercultural). In referencing counterpoint, I include modern interpretations of forms and styles deep within the canon of Western classical music, like the French Baroque and neo-classical scherzo, which still provide musical content to contemporary works. The catch though is how I recontextualize those sources; I filter the core tenants of classical music through the prism of Black American music and experiences.
The real countercultural element of this piece is its willingness to present the orchestra simultaneously as the organism we know and love, consequent of the Industrial Revolution, and as the result of incredibly dedicated and talented individuals. Through the use of body percussion found primarily within the Black church, the audience is made aware of the fact that the sound we hear is produced by perfectly crafted, singular, interpretations of the players. Simply put, I want the orchestra and the audience to have fun.
—Kebra-Seyoun Charles
Victoria Polevá is a Ukrainian pianist and composer. Born in Kyiv to a family of musicians, she studied at the Kyiv Conservatory, where she taught composition from 1990 to 2005. Her earlier works—such as the ballet Gagaku, Transform for large orchestra, and Anthem for chamber orchestra—favor avant-garde and polystylistic aesthetics. In the late 1990s, she became ever more drawn to spiritual themes and musical simplicity, developing a style that has since been called “sacred minimalism.”
In 2022, the Warsaw Philharmonic gave the premiere of Polevá’s Nova under the baton of Andrey Boreyko. Her Symphony No. 3, “White Interment,” is being toured by the Bayerische Staatsoper and conductor Vladimir Jurowski. Last summer, Bucha. Lacrimosa was performed in five world capitals by the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra under the direction of Keri-Lynn Wilson. She has been recognized with the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine. Her recordings are available on Naxos, and her scores are published by Donemus.
For me, the idea of this music comes from the Latin word bellum, which means “war.” A work written during the war. A bell announcing war, a funeral bell, a victory bell ... It is also associated with the name of the cellist who was the first performer (the name Inbal Segev means “tongue of the bell”).
But the most important thing I wanted was to reflect what happens in space after the most powerful bell chime. This is the phenomenon of the subtlest echo, an angelic choir that sounds either in the air or in the subconscious when the bell sound ends. The sound space that I wanted to recreate was the area of operation of the Bat Kol, which literally means “daughter of the voice” in Hebrew. “Some argue that the Bat Kol is an echo, others that it is a hum echoing in the air from the movement of the universe. The Bat Kol absorbs human voices and all other sounds of the world, even those that our ears are not able to hear ...” This most tender sound carries meanings that everyone needs in the most difficult times. The only thing a person can do is trust them.
The symphony is dedicated to musicologist Elena Dubinets, thanks to whom I felt real creative support over the last terrible year.
For me, music changes in time and reflects its changes. Especially for the version being performed this evening, I wrote a finale to the symphony, which is an unexpected ending. But it says that there is hope, and there is life, and life goes on no matter what.
—Victoria Polevá
Praised for “combining omnivory and brilliance” (The New York Times), four-time Grammy-nominated violinist and composer Curtis Stewart translates stories of American self determination to the concert stage. Tearing down the façade of “classical violinist,” Stewart is in constant pursuit of his musical authenticity, treating art as a battery for realizing citizenship. As a violinist, composer, artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra, professor at The Juilliard School, member of the PUBLIQuartet and The Mighty Third Rail, and a Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient, he realizes a vision to find personal and powerful connections between styles, cultures, and musics.
Stewart’s 2021 album of quarantined song cycles and art videos, Of Power (Bright Shiny Things), and his 2023 album, of Love.—a tribute to his late mother—were nominated for Grammys in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category. He has been commissioned to compose new solo, chamber, and orchestral works by the Seattle Symphony, Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and members of the New York Philharmonic, and The Knights, among others.
Sampling music, words from communities where the work is performed—the work spins the idea of “outreach” on its head. Using sounds and thoughts from outside the concert stage to elevate concert music, including various forms of call and response between audience and performer—performer + listener in counterpoint.
The recorded voice in this original version are quotes from my own mother, Elektra Kurtis, who was one of my musical inspirations.
—Curtis Stewart