“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:
Please make sure that you are signed up for MEC's mailing list for updates on when tickets become available.
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:
Sarah Rothenberg is a pianist of “heart, intellect and fabulous technical resources” (Fanfare) and “a prolific and creative thinker” (Wall Street Journal) who is recognized internationally for her innovative interdisciplinary performances linking music to literature and visual art. Active as performer, writer, concert curator and institution builder, she has been artistic director of Da Camera in Houston since 1994, general director since 2011, and previously was co-founder of the Bard Music Festival.
Her critically-acclaimed interdisciplinary projects, which she conceives, directs and performs, include In the Garden of Dreams, interweaving music, art and ideas of fin-de-siècle Vienna; The Blue Rider, commissioned by Works & Process at The Guggenheim for the Kandinsky exhibit and New York’s Miller Theater; and Moondrunk, which inaugurated Lincoln Center’s New Visions series. Rothenberg’s Music and the Literary Imagination programs on Marcel Proust, Anna Akhmatova, Thomas Mann, Charles Baudelaire and others have been presented across the US and by Great Performers at Lincoln Center (New York), Barbican Centre (London), The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam).
Committed to performing neglected repertoire as well as new music, she has performed over 85 premieres. Recordings include the U.S. premiere of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr; Rediscovering the Russian Avant-Garde: Lourié, Mosolov and Roslavetz; Shadows and Fragments: Piano Works of Brahms and Schoenberg; and works of Wuorinen, Carter, Perle, Ran, Tower, Tsontakis, Ruders, Picker (with Brentano Quartet) in collaboration with the composers, as well as Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen (with Marilyn Nonken) and forthcoming on ECM, Music for Rothko Chapel: Satie, Cage, Feldman. Last season, she appeared as solo pianist in 48 performances of Martha Clarke’s dance/music/theater adaptation of Colette’s Cheri at New York’s off-Broadway Signature Theatre; this season includes performances at the Ravenna Festival (Italy), Kennedy Center (DC) and a return to the Bard Music Festival.
Her writings appear in Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Brick, Nexus (Netherlands), The Musical Quarterly, Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, The Crisis of Criticism. A graduate of The Curtis Institute of Music, her teachers were Seymour Lipkin, Mieczeslaw Horoszowski and Herbert Stessin, and she studied in Paris with Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen. In 2000, she received the French Medal of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. She lives in Houston and New York.
Her critically-acclaimed interdisciplinary projects, which she conceives, directs and performs, include In the Garden of Dreams, interweaving music, art and ideas of fin-de-siècle Vienna; The Blue Rider, commissioned by Works & Process at The Guggenheim for the Kandinsky exhibit and New York’s Miller Theater; and Moondrunk, which inaugurated Lincoln Center’s New Visions series. Rothenberg’s Music and the Literary Imagination programs on Marcel Proust, Anna Akhmatova, Thomas Mann, Charles Baudelaire and others have been presented across the US and by Great Performers at Lincoln Center (New York), Barbican Centre (London), The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam).
Committed to performing neglected repertoire as well as new music, she has performed over 85 premieres. Recordings include the U.S. premiere of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr; Rediscovering the Russian Avant-Garde: Lourié, Mosolov and Roslavetz; Shadows and Fragments: Piano Works of Brahms and Schoenberg; and works of Wuorinen, Carter, Perle, Ran, Tower, Tsontakis, Ruders, Picker (with Brentano Quartet) in collaboration with the composers, as well as Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen (with Marilyn Nonken) and forthcoming on ECM, Music for Rothko Chapel: Satie, Cage, Feldman. Last season, she appeared as solo pianist in 48 performances of Martha Clarke’s dance/music/theater adaptation of Colette’s Cheri at New York’s off-Broadway Signature Theatre; this season includes performances at the Ravenna Festival (Italy), Kennedy Center (DC) and a return to the Bard Music Festival.
Her writings appear in Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, Brick, Nexus (Netherlands), The Musical Quarterly, Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, The Crisis of Criticism. A graduate of The Curtis Institute of Music, her teachers were Seymour Lipkin, Mieczeslaw Horoszowski and Herbert Stessin, and she studied in Paris with Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen. In 2000, she received the French Medal of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters. She lives in Houston and New York.