“TRANSFORMING TIME”
A WORLD PREMIERE BY TYSHAWN SOREY
SARAH ROTHENBERG, PIANIST
TYSHAWN SOREY, GUEST COMPOSER and PERCUSSIONIST
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 | 8 PM
Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School
200 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School
200 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012
"Sorey is one reason the worlds of jazz and classical music — of music that’s improvised and music that’s notated — seem less and less separate today [...] He does not so much bridge genre divides as cast them aside, as if they were a vestige of a prehistoric era, before artists as versatile as himself walked the earth." – Adam Shatz (New York Times)
Composer Tyshawn Sorey. Photograph by Michael Starghill Jr. (New York Times)
TICKETS:
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PROGRAM:
Morton FELDMAN - KING OF DENMARK (1964) [8']
Tyshawn Sorey, percussion
Tyshawn SOREY - (UNTITLED WORK FOR SOLO PIANO) (2024) [ca. 45'] *
Sarah Rothenberg, piano
* World Premiere, Written for Sarah Rothenberg
Morton FELDMAN - KING OF DENMARK (1964) [8']
Tyshawn Sorey, percussion
Tyshawn SOREY - (UNTITLED WORK FOR SOLO PIANO) (2024) [ca. 45'] *
Sarah Rothenberg, piano
* World Premiere, Written for Sarah Rothenberg
DESCRIPTION:
Tyshawn Sorey’s major new piano work receives its world premiere. Tyshawn Sorey and Sarah Rothenberg’s deep musical relationship grew out of their work together on the DACAMERA-Rothko Chapel commission of Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), and it was during their performances at New York’s Park Avenue Armory that Sorey first conceived of this piece. The intensity and hyper-sensitivity of Sorey’s music corresponds to Rothenberg’s pianism, and this expansive new solo work probes emotional depths and upends our sense of time.
ARTIST BIOS:
TYSHAWN SOREY:
2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey is celebrated for his extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work, while also offering incomparable virtuosity, and effortless mastery of highly complex scores. He has performed globally with his own ensembles, as well as alongside industry titans including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, King Britt, Claire Chase, Roscoe Mitchell, and Steve Lehman, among many others.
As a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow, the bar is set high for Sorey’s continued evolution and success. His composition Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) was honored as a Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music, and has been recorded with the Houston Chamber Choir and DaCamera for release in 2024. Adding to his reputation as a multi-faceted talent, Downbeat Magazine recognized Sorey with its 2023 Critics Poll Award as a Rising Star Producer, while frequently placing him near the top of its Composer and Drum Set performance lists. Other recent accolades include the Fromm Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and the Koussevitzsky Prize.
Sorey has composed works for the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, soprano Julia Bullock, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, cellist Seth Parker Woods, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, pianist Awadagin Pratt and vocal group Roomful of Teeth, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, as well as for countless collaborative performers. His music has been performed in notable venues such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Hollywood Bowl, the 92nd Street Y, Park Avenue Armory, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Lucerne Festival, and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. His compositions are published by Edition Peters.
Sorey joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020, where he maintains a vigorous touring schedule in addition to his academic duties. He was selected as a Peabody Resident at Johns Hopkins University for Fall 2023, and has taught and lectured on composition and improvisation at an impressive assortment of institutions, including: Columbia University, Harvard University, Darmstadter Ferienkurse, Wesleyan University, The New England Conservatory, University of Michigan, The Banff Centre, Berklee College of Music, Mills College, University of Chicago, and The Danish Rhythmic Conservatory.
In spring 2023, Sorey debuted a musical collaboration with percussion ensemble Yarn/Wire titled “Be Holding,” a multimedia adaptation of the book-length poem by Ross Gay about the beauty and cultural significance of Julius Erving’s momentous sky hook dunk during the 1980 NBA Finals. The production included performances by professional wordsmiths Yolanda Wisher and David A. Gaines, along with students from Girard College, and was featured in the New York Times. In the future, Sorey plans to continue pushing boundaries, extending cultural norms, and reformulating public perceptions of modern Black/Afrodiasporic creative practice through the breadth and depth of his works.
As a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow, the bar is set high for Sorey’s continued evolution and success. His composition Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) was honored as a Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music, and has been recorded with the Houston Chamber Choir and DaCamera for release in 2024. Adding to his reputation as a multi-faceted talent, Downbeat Magazine recognized Sorey with its 2023 Critics Poll Award as a Rising Star Producer, while frequently placing him near the top of its Composer and Drum Set performance lists. Other recent accolades include the Fromm Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and the Koussevitzsky Prize.
Sorey has composed works for the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, soprano Julia Bullock, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, cellist Seth Parker Woods, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, pianist Awadagin Pratt and vocal group Roomful of Teeth, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, as well as for countless collaborative performers. His music has been performed in notable venues such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Hollywood Bowl, the 92nd Street Y, Park Avenue Armory, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Lucerne Festival, and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. His compositions are published by Edition Peters.
Sorey joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020, where he maintains a vigorous touring schedule in addition to his academic duties. He was selected as a Peabody Resident at Johns Hopkins University for Fall 2023, and has taught and lectured on composition and improvisation at an impressive assortment of institutions, including: Columbia University, Harvard University, Darmstadter Ferienkurse, Wesleyan University, The New England Conservatory, University of Michigan, The Banff Centre, Berklee College of Music, Mills College, University of Chicago, and The Danish Rhythmic Conservatory.
In spring 2023, Sorey debuted a musical collaboration with percussion ensemble Yarn/Wire titled “Be Holding,” a multimedia adaptation of the book-length poem by Ross Gay about the beauty and cultural significance of Julius Erving’s momentous sky hook dunk during the 1980 NBA Finals. The production included performances by professional wordsmiths Yolanda Wisher and David A. Gaines, along with students from Girard College, and was featured in the New York Times. In the future, Sorey plans to continue pushing boundaries, extending cultural norms, and reformulating public perceptions of modern Black/Afrodiasporic creative practice through the breadth and depth of his works.
Film still from Sarah Rothenberg’s The Departing Landscape, photography by John Carrithers.
SARAH ROTHENBERG:
Committed to creating new audiences for classical music and jazz, and a firm believer in the accessibility of great music of all genres, Sarah Rothenberg is recognized internationally as a pianist of “power and introspection” (The New York Times) and “a prolific and creative thinker” (The Wall Street Journal). A “trailblazer” in innovative programming, Sarah Rothenberg has a unique career as pianist, writer, producer, and creator of interdisciplinary performances linking music to literature, visual art and ideas. She is Artistic Director of DACAMERA, internationally recognized as a vanguard model of a multi-genre music institution for performance, community engagement, and arts advocacy; and was previously co-founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival in New York.
A pianist of “heart, intellect and fabulous technical resources” (Fanfare), she has performed at Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Great Performers at Lincoln Center (New York), Barbican Centre (London), The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), Gilmore Piano Festival, 92nd Street Y, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Library of Congress, Van Cliburn Foundation, The Getty Museum, Ojai Festival and concert series across the United States. Recent world premieres include Vijay Iyer’s solo piano work, “For My Father;” written for Rothenberg, and Tyshawn Sorey’s MONOCHROMATIC LIGHT (AFTERLIFE), which was named by The New York Times and The New Yorker as one of the top ten classical performances of 2022, and was followed by 11 performances at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in a staging by director Peter Sellars with art of Julie Mehretu. Highlights in 2024-2025 include performances in Lisbon, Brussels and Paris with cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton of D’est en musique, created with filmmaker Chantal Akerman; Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas performed at Rothko Chapel; and performances in Los Angeles, New York, Washington and Houston of a major new piano work composed for Sarah by 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey.
Original productions conceived, directed and performed by Sarah Rothenberg include A Proust Sonata, which received its New York premiere to critical acclaim in 2018; In the Garden of Dreams, fin-de-siècle Vienna in music, art, ideas; The Blue Rider: Kandinsky and Music, originally commissioned and produced by Works & Process at The Guggenheim and Columbia University’s Miller Theater; and Chopin in Paris: Epigraph for a Condemned Book (Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven; University Musical Society, Ann Arbor; Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Champaign-Urbana). Her film, The Departing Landscape, a COVID-era memorial featuring Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari, received national attention in its 2020-21 streaming premiere (“entrancing”- Alex Ross of The New Yorker). Sarah Rothenberg’s Music and the Literary Imagination series, created for DACAMERA and inspired by the writings of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Baudelaire, and Anna Akhmatova was presented by Great Performers at Lincoln Center for five consecutive seasons. Moondrunk, a staging of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, inaugurated Lincoln Center’s New Visions series in 1999. She appeared as soloist in over 75 performances of choreographer/director Martha Clarke’s Cheri at New York's off-Broadway Signature Theatre, Ravenna Festival, Kennedy Center, and London’s Royal Opera House. Her lectures and performances on art and music include The Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum (New York), Museum of Fine Arts Houston and The Menil Collection.
Sarah Rothenberg’s scholarly research has resulted in her U.S. premiere performances and recordings of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr (Independent Record Companies Award for Best Solo Classical Recording 1996); Rediscovering the Russian Avant-Garde: Lourié, Mosolov and Roslavetz (GM); and Shadows and Fragments: Piano Works of Brahms and Schoenberg. She is featured in the new British film documentary, Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn (2023). Additional acclaimed recordings include Messiaen Visions de l’Amen (with Marilyn Nonken), and DACAMERA’s Rothko Chapel: Satie, Cage and Feldman on ECM, as well as works of Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter, Shulamit Ran, George Perle, Tobias Picker, Joan Tower and George Tsontakis, in collaboration with the composers. This season will see the release of works of Iyer, Sorey, Feldman and Beethoven.
Sarah Rothenberg’s writings appear in literary, art and musical publications, including The Musical Quarterly, Brick, Nexus, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, The Threepenny Review, PN Review (UK), Perspectives in New Music; and the books The Crisis of Criticism (ed. Berger/New Press); Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings (Parrish Art Museum); Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil (White/Menil Collection) and the Moody Center’s recent Artists and the Rothko Chapel.
Sarah Rothenberg is currently on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate Program in Writing. Formerly chair of the music department at Bard College, Sarah Rothenberg has taught at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, been a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, and visiting artist-in-residence at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at University of Houston and Banff Centre for the Arts.
Sarah Rothenberg’s early training was at The Juilliard School with Herbert Stessin. After graduating from The Curtis Institute of Music, where her teachers were Seymour Lipkin and Mieczeslaw Horszowski, she studied the music of Olivier Messiaen in Paris with the composer’s wife, Yvonne Loriod. Sarah Rothenberg is a recipient of the Medal of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government.
A pianist of “heart, intellect and fabulous technical resources” (Fanfare), she has performed at Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Great Performers at Lincoln Center (New York), Barbican Centre (London), The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), Gilmore Piano Festival, 92nd Street Y, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Library of Congress, Van Cliburn Foundation, The Getty Museum, Ojai Festival and concert series across the United States. Recent world premieres include Vijay Iyer’s solo piano work, “For My Father;” written for Rothenberg, and Tyshawn Sorey’s MONOCHROMATIC LIGHT (AFTERLIFE), which was named by The New York Times and The New Yorker as one of the top ten classical performances of 2022, and was followed by 11 performances at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in a staging by director Peter Sellars with art of Julie Mehretu. Highlights in 2024-2025 include performances in Lisbon, Brussels and Paris with cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton of D’est en musique, created with filmmaker Chantal Akerman; Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas performed at Rothko Chapel; and performances in Los Angeles, New York, Washington and Houston of a major new piano work composed for Sarah by 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey.
Original productions conceived, directed and performed by Sarah Rothenberg include A Proust Sonata, which received its New York premiere to critical acclaim in 2018; In the Garden of Dreams, fin-de-siècle Vienna in music, art, ideas; The Blue Rider: Kandinsky and Music, originally commissioned and produced by Works & Process at The Guggenheim and Columbia University’s Miller Theater; and Chopin in Paris: Epigraph for a Condemned Book (Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven; University Musical Society, Ann Arbor; Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Champaign-Urbana). Her film, The Departing Landscape, a COVID-era memorial featuring Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari, received national attention in its 2020-21 streaming premiere (“entrancing”- Alex Ross of The New Yorker). Sarah Rothenberg’s Music and the Literary Imagination series, created for DACAMERA and inspired by the writings of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Baudelaire, and Anna Akhmatova was presented by Great Performers at Lincoln Center for five consecutive seasons. Moondrunk, a staging of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, inaugurated Lincoln Center’s New Visions series in 1999. She appeared as soloist in over 75 performances of choreographer/director Martha Clarke’s Cheri at New York's off-Broadway Signature Theatre, Ravenna Festival, Kennedy Center, and London’s Royal Opera House. Her lectures and performances on art and music include The Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum (New York), Museum of Fine Arts Houston and The Menil Collection.
Sarah Rothenberg’s scholarly research has resulted in her U.S. premiere performances and recordings of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr (Independent Record Companies Award for Best Solo Classical Recording 1996); Rediscovering the Russian Avant-Garde: Lourié, Mosolov and Roslavetz (GM); and Shadows and Fragments: Piano Works of Brahms and Schoenberg. She is featured in the new British film documentary, Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn (2023). Additional acclaimed recordings include Messiaen Visions de l’Amen (with Marilyn Nonken), and DACAMERA’s Rothko Chapel: Satie, Cage and Feldman on ECM, as well as works of Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter, Shulamit Ran, George Perle, Tobias Picker, Joan Tower and George Tsontakis, in collaboration with the composers. This season will see the release of works of Iyer, Sorey, Feldman and Beethoven.
Sarah Rothenberg’s writings appear in literary, art and musical publications, including The Musical Quarterly, Brick, Nexus, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, The Threepenny Review, PN Review (UK), Perspectives in New Music; and the books The Crisis of Criticism (ed. Berger/New Press); Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings (Parrish Art Museum); Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil (White/Menil Collection) and the Moody Center’s recent Artists and the Rothko Chapel.
Sarah Rothenberg is currently on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate Program in Writing. Formerly chair of the music department at Bard College, Sarah Rothenberg has taught at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, been a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, and visiting artist-in-residence at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at University of Houston and Banff Centre for the Arts.
Sarah Rothenberg’s early training was at The Juilliard School with Herbert Stessin. After graduating from The Curtis Institute of Music, where her teachers were Seymour Lipkin and Mieczeslaw Horszowski, she studied the music of Olivier Messiaen in Paris with the composer’s wife, Yvonne Loriod. Sarah Rothenberg is a recipient of the Medal of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government.