The New Juilliard Ensemble, Led by Joel Sachs, Performs Works by Luo, Moore, Abrahamsen, and Maxwell Davies on Season Opener on Saturday, September 24 at 8 PM in Juilliard's Peter Jay Sharp Theater
The New Juilliard Ensemble (NJE), now in its 19th season and led by founder and director Joel Sachs, performs three concerts and six world premieres this upcoming season and will be featured in the closing night concert of Juilliard’s FOCUS! 2012 festival, celebrating the centennial of American composer John Cage.
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The season opens on Saturday, September 24 at 8 PM in Juilliard’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater with Joel Sachs leading the New Juilliard Ensemble in two world premieres: Chinese-American composer Jing Jing Luo’s Tsao Shu (2011), composed for the New Juilliard Ensemble, and American composer and Juilliard alumnus Carman Moore’s Concerto for Ornette (2011) with Juilliard saxophonist Morgan Jones; plus two Western Hemisphere premieres: Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s Wald (2008-9) and British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ De Assumptione Beatae Mariae Virginis (2001).
FREE tickets will be available beginning September 9 at the Janet and Leonard Kramer Box Office at Juilliard (155 West 65th Street). Box Office hours are Monday through Friday from 11 AM to 6 PM. For further information, call (212) 769-7406 or go to www.juilliard.edu.
Jing Jing Luo’s Tsao Shu (2011) receives its world-premiere performance on this concert. Ms. Luo writes in her program note: “Tsao Shu for piano and a large ensemble is about the free motion of strokes in Chinese ink brush calligraphy. In recent years, I found more meanings in simplicity; less is more. I realized that I approach the sound as the possibility; one possibility transforms into more possibilities.” Ms. Luo explores the reflections of calligraphy in sound.
Chinese composer Jing Jing Luo’s first piano concerto won the second prize in a China National Symphonic Composition Competition, bringing her to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation and Asian Cultural Council in New York. In 1982, the Foundation selected her as the visiting scholar for a one-year fellowship to study at Columbia University and Juilliard, where she studied with Chou Wen Chung, George Edwards, and Vincent Persichetti. She received a three-year master’s degree from the New England Conservatory of Music and earned her Ph.D. from SUNY at Stony Brook. Ms. Luo’s additional study with Jacob Druckman and Bernard Rands at the Aspen Music Festival inspired her to create the successful chamber work entitled, The Spell, which won the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. Ms. Luo’s commissions and performances include new works for the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Philharmonic, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Nieuw Ensemble of Amsterdam, American Dance Festivals, among others.
Carman Moore’s Concerto for Ornette (2011) will have its world premiere performance on this concert. Saxophone soloist Morgan Jones is in the master of music program in Jazz Studies at Juilliard and had the unique privilege of meeting Ornette Coleman in preparation of this work, which honors the legendary saxophonist. Mr. Moore writes in his program note: “Concerto for Ornette consists of a stand-alone notated work (including a part for alto saxophone) and a totally improvised part for a featured saxophone soloist asked to improvise to what he or she hears. Each of the three movements begins with a statement played by the reading saxophone leading into the orchestra’s thematic activities and the improviser’s work.”
Carman Moore was born in Lorain, Ohio and earned his bachelor of music degree from Ohio State University before moving to NYC where he studied composition privately with Hall Overton and at The Juilliard School with Luciano Berio and Vincent Persichetti, earning his master of music degree with distinction. He has composed works for symphony and chamber ensembles while writing lyrics for pop songs, gradually adding opera, theater, dance, and film scores to his body of work.
Saxophonist and composer Morgan Jones hails from Davis, California and is in the second year of the master of music degree program, where he studies with Steve Wilson. He also studied privately with saxophonist Ron Blake and pianist Frank Kimbrough. He is a graduate of the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California (2010). While at USC, Mr. Jones studied with Bob Sheppard, Alan Pasqua, Russ Ferrante, and Daniel Pollack and shared the stage with such notables as Maria Schneider, Kurt Elling, John Clayton, Bob Mintzer, Peter Erskine, and the late James Moody. He has been a featured performer at numerous jazz festivals in the United States, Europe, and South America, including the Monterey Jazz Festival, where he garnered the Monterey Jazz Competition’s “Outstanding Soloist” award. For his original compositions, New Orleans and The Loneliest Monk, he received ASCAP Young Jazz Composer Awards in 2005 and 2006.
Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s Wald (2008-9, Western Hemisphere premiere) is a series of variations from the beginning of the composer’s woodwind quintet, Walden (1978). The composer writes that Wald is a twin piece to Walden, but also to his former piece, Schnee. The composer borrowed the title, Walden, from the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau and his book about Walden Pond.
Composer Hans Abrahamsen was born in Copenhagen and studied horn and music theory at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He also studied composition privately from Nørgård and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. He has been the artistic director of the Esbjerg Ensemble since 1988 and a teacher of instrumentation at the Royal Danish Academy of Music since 1982.
British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies borrowed the title of his work, De
Assumptione Beatae Mariae Virginis (2001, Western Hemisphere premiere),
from a chapter in the 13th-century compilation of largely mythical
lives of the saints, by the Dominican monk Jacobus de Voragine, the Legenda
Aurea or Golden Legend. The work is scored for four woodwinds, three brass,
keyboard, percussion and string quintet.
Composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies lives in the Orkney Islands off the most rugged north coast of Scotland, where he writes most of his music. His major works includes operas and music-theater works, orchestral works, including eight symphonies, fourteen concerti, several light orchestral works, and five large-scale works for chorus. Chamber music includes the landmark cycle of ten string quartets commissioned by Naxos Records. Maxwell Davies is internationally active as a conductor, having held the position of composer/conductor with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the BBC Philharmonic, and is the composer laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He is a University of London professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music, where he works regularly with student composers and performers.
The next New Juilliard Ensemble concert takes place on Tuesday, November 8 in Alice Tully Hall and features works by Richard Causton, Philip Glass, Arlene Sierra, Richard Wilson, and Conrad Winslow.
About the New Juilliard Ensemble
The New Juilliard Ensemble (NJE), led by founding director Joel Sachs, celebrates the liveliness of today’s music, focusing primarily on repertory of the last decade. Now in its 19th season, NJE presents music by a variety of international composers writing in the most diverse styles. Its members are current students at Juilliard, who are admitted to the ensemble by audition. The Ensemble appears regularly at MoMA’s Summergarden and has been a featured ensemble four times at the Lincoln Center Festival. New Juilliard Ensemble members joined members of the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble with conductor Pierre Boulez for the 2008 FOCUS! festival, which celebrated composer Elliott Carter’s 100th year.
In January 2009, the New Juilliard Ensemble opened the FOCUS! 2009 Festival, CALIFORNIA: A Century of New Music, which showcased West Coast composers. In Spring 2009, the New Juilliard Ensemble toured Japan; in December 2009, they performed aleatoric music at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with an exhibition of Persian and Turkish “divining” manuscripts. The New Juilliard Ensemble appeared in the FOCUS! 2010 Festival, Music at the Center: Composing an American Mainstream and opened the FOCUS! 2011 Festival, Polish Modern: New Directions in Polish Music Since 1945.
About Joel Sachs
NJE founder and director Joel Sachs Joel Sachs, founder and director of the New Juilliard Ensemble, performs a vast range of traditional and contemporary music as conductor and pianist. As co-director of the internationally acclaimed new-music ensemble Continuum, Dr. Sachs has appeared in hundreds of performances in New York, nationally, and throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He also has conducted orchestras and ensembles in Austria, Brazil, China, El Salvador, Germany, Iceland, Mexico, Switzerland, and Ukraine, and has held new-music residencies in Berlin, Shanghai, London, Salzburg, Curitiba (Brazil), Helsinki, and the Banff Centre (Canadian Rockies).
One of the most active presenters of new music in New York, Joel Sachs founded the New Juilliard Ensemble in 1993. He produces and directs The Juilliard School’s annual FOCUS! festival, has been artistic director of Juilliard’s concerts at New York’s Museum of Modern Art since 1993, and also was a co-director of the former Sonic Boom Festival of contemporary music, a project of a consortium of New York City’s most prestigious new-music ensembles.
A member of Juilliard's music history faculty, Joel Sachs has written a biography of the American composer Henry Cowell, to be published by Oxford University Press, and appears on radio as a commentator on recent music. He received Columbia University’s Alice M. Ditson Award to a conductor for service to American music, and was made an honorary member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in recognition of accomplishments in the arts. A graduate of Harvard College (BA) and Columbia University (MA and Ph.D.), he has taught at Juilliard since 1970. He has been awarded research grants by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
New Juilliard Ensemble
2011-2012 Season
Saturday, September 24, 8 PM, The Peter Jay Sharp Theater
New Juilliard Ensemble
Joel Sachs, conductor
Morgan Jones, saxophone
Hans Abrahamsen (Denmark) – Wald (2008-9) (Western Hemisphere premiere)
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (U.K.) – De Assumptione Beatae Mariae Virginis (2001) (Western Hemisphere premiere)
Jing Jing Luo (China-U.S.) – Tsao Shu (2011) (world premiere, composed for the New Juilliard Ensemble)
Carman Moore (U.S.) Concerto for Ornette (2011) (world premiere)
FREE tickets will be available beginning September 9 at the Janet and Leonard Kramer Box Office at Juilliard (155 West 65th Street). Box Office hours are Monday through Friday from 11 AM to 6 PM. For further information, call (212) 769-7406 or go to www.juilliard.edu.
Tuesday, November 8, 8 PM, Alice Tully Hall
New Juilliard Ensemble
Joel Sachs, conductor
Richard Causton (U.K.) - Chamber Symphony (2009) (Western Hemisphere premiere)
Philip Glass (U.S.) - Concerto for harpsichord and orchestra (2002)
Arlene Sierra (U.S./U.K.) - Colmena (2008)
Richard Wilson (U.S.) – Speculation (2011)
(world premiere, composed for the New Juilliard Ensemble)
Conrad Winslow (U.S.) – Assorted Passions (2011) (world premiere, composed for the New Juilliard Ensemble)
FOCUS! 2012 Festival – Centennial of John Cage
Friday, February 3, 8 PM, Alice Tully Hall
New Juilliard Ensemble
Joel Sachs, conductor
John Cage – The Seasons (1947)
John Cage – Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950-51)
John Cage – Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58)
Thursday, April 12, 8 PM, Alice Tully Hall
New Juilliard Ensemble
Joel Sachs, conductor
David Horne (U.K.) – work (tba)
Toshi Ichiyanagi (Japan) - Between Space and Time (2001) (Western Hemisphere premiere)
Wei-Chieh Lin (China/U.S.) – new work (2012) (world premiere, composed for the New Juilliard Ensemble)
Robert Nasveld (Holland) - Six Cavafy Songs for baritone and ensemble (2009) (Western Hemisphere premiere)
Sun Young Park (Korea/U.S.) - new work (2012), (world premiere, composed for the New Juilliard Ensemble)
Manuel Sosa (Venezuela/U.S.) - …Perpetuum… (2012) (world premiere, composed for the New Juilliard Ensemble)
FREE tickets to these events will be available at the Janet and Leonard Kramer Box Office at Juilliard two weeks prior to performances. For further information, call (212) 769-7406 or go to www.juilliard.edu.
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