The New Juilliard Ensemble

When Joel Sachs proposed the idea of a new music ensemble to Juilliard’s President Polisi in 1993, he felt that students urgently needed exposure to new music and that such an ensemble could make a significant contribution to New York. The new chamber orchestra called the New Juilliard Ensemble, after a short-lived ensemble from the 1960s, also describes its mission to perform a repertory for chamber orchestra that is seldom heard -- for 13 to 20 players.

Now in its tenth season, The New Juilliard Ensemble performs works from the contemporary musical literature, usually featuring music that is no more than 10 years old. A large part of the repertory has been composed for the New Juilliard Ensemble - as of last season, 44 compositions, perhaps 20% of the total programming. At the end of this season, the Ensemble will have performed fifty-five world premieres, seventy U.S. premieres, and twenty-eight New York premieres. These new pieces, often generous gifts of composers delighted by the opportunity to write for extraordinary young musicians, have come all over the world, including, Argentina, Bolivia, Israel, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, many European countries, and the United States.

Repertoire chosen for each New Juilliard Ensemble season is selected in part for the challenges each work will bring to Juilliard students as part of the experience of playing in the Ensemble, is for students to develop the skills necessary to perform technically challenging new music. In addition, the Ensemble offers opportunities for Juilliard composers by performing new pieces each year by Juilliard composition students who are selected through an annual blind audition. This season’s Juilliard composers include Kati Agocs, Jonathan Keren, and Dinuk Wijeratne. The members of the ensemble also have been able to work with exceptionally interesting composers from around the world. Among the many composers who have come to help at rehearsals have been Tony Prabowo (Indonesia), John Psathas (New Zealand), Agustin Fernandez (Bolivia), Mark Kopytman (Israel), Americans Steve Reich, Elliott Sharp, Robert Beaser, and John Corigliano, among others.

Since the first years, the Ensemble's concert season has gradually expanded to include touring. This season on November 28, a group of eight will appear in the Festival Whynote in Dijon, France. This unusual program, which was requested by the festival, features music by Japanese composers who have lived extensively in the West, and American composers who have been influenced by Japanese music and culture. The concert will be previewed in Juilliard’s Paul Hall on Nov. 22 at 8 PM. Works to be performed include Ushio Torikai’s Gathered, Scatter, Karen Tanaka’s Invisible Curve (US premiere), Jackson Hill’s Hikyoku (New York premiere), Toshio Hosokowa’s Vertical Time Study I John Cage’s Aria, with solos from Concert, Joji Yuasa’s Paul Chihara’s Amatsu Kaze (preview of the world premiere), Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo, and Suguro Goto’s Giseion to Gousei (Onomatopoeia and Montage). Earlier tours have included a weeklong residency at the Seminars for Young Composers near Warsaw, a weeklong residency at the Moscow Conservatory, and a week at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem, as part of an international conference on the teaching of composition in the late 20th century. In 2001, a group performed in a festival marking the opening of the Leipzig Hochschule's new auditorium, performing jointly with Leipzig students. Last spring a larger ensemble performed at the University of Maryland, near Washington, in conjunction with the opening of its new performing arts center.

The Ensemble also has regularly given four performances in the Summergarden festival and for the past two seasons, NJE was invited to be part of the Lincoln Center Festival, for which it performed music by Salvatore Sciarrino (2001) and Guo Wenjing (from Beijing) and Chinese-American Bright Sheng (2002), each time in conjunction with operas by those composers.

There will be five New Juilliard Ensemble concerts at Juilliard this season, on Sept. 21, November 22, Dec. 10, Jan. 24 (the opening concert of Focus! 2003) and April 15.