Curtis Institute of Music to Celebrate New Music Month with Concerts in March and April

Curtis Institute of Music will present New Music Month, a celebration of musical innovation and ingenuity featuring four exciting contemporary classical music concerts on March 30 and April 2, 13, and 23. Curtis has a longstanding and evolving history of commissioning alumni to compose new music for the school’s symphony orchestra, its ensembles, and Curtis on Tour programs, going back to its founding by Mary Louise Curtis Bok in 1924. New Music Month highlights this tradition and underscores Curtis’s unwavering dedication to the discovery and presentation of repertoire by composers from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Throughout the month, Curtis will be collaborating with various local arts institutions and ensembles to elevate the presence of new classical music in Philadelphia using the social media hashtag, #NewMusicPhilly. These organizations and artists include Bowerbird, the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, The Crossing, ENA Ensemble, Network for New Music, Penn Live Arts, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the University of Pennsylvania Department of Music, the Viano Quartet, Wildflower Composers, and a series of concerts at the Black Squirrel Club curated by Micah Gleason, the Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at Curtis.

On March 30 at 7:30 p.m., the school’s cutting-edge new music group, Ensemble 20/21, presents “Intersection,” a program highlighting music by composers who explore the terrain between traditional genre boundaries, featuring the world premiere of composer Dmitri Tymoczko’s Nerdz for chamber ensemble, and the Philadelphia premiere of Angélica Negrón’s dóabin, inspired by the invented language of a pair of twins. The concert also includes Anna Meredith’s astonishing 1980s electronica meets ’90s clubland composition Tuggemo; the first movement of Edgar Meyer’s virtuosic Concert Duo for Violin and Bass; Courtney Bryan’s gospel and jazz-flavored fusion of the sacred and secular, Soli Deo Gloria for two guitars; acclaimed composer Tyshawn Sorey’s shimmering, lyrical work, For Fred Lerdahl; and avant-garde icon György Ligeti’s minimalist composition, Six Bagatelles, for woodwind quintet.

The Curtis Presents series continues on April 2 at 7:30 p.m., when Curtis honors the life, legacy, and genius of alumnus, longtime faculty member, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, and prolific writer Ned Rorem (’44) with a “Ned Rorem Celebration Concert” at Field Concert Hall. Praised by Time magazine as “the world’s best composer of art songs,” Mr. Rorem wrote nearly 500 of them during his lifetime. Curtis’s concert opens with four selected songs and an aria from his three-act opera Our Town, performed by soprano Sarah Fleiss, mezzo-soprano Katie Trigg, and pianist Miloš Repický—Hirsig Family Chair in Vocal Studies at Curtis.

The celebration continues with Rorem’s French-inflected Sonata No. 2, featuring celebrated pianist Amy Yang (’06), associate dean of piano studies and artistic initiatives at Curtis. Internationally acclaimed baritone and alumnus Jarrett Ott (Opera ’04) returns to the school to perform Mr. Rorem’s Santa Fe Songs, set to twelve poems on love, spirituality, and nature by New Mexico poet and essayist Witter Brynner. Mr. Ott will interpret the song cycle alongside a string trio of Curtis students and Mr. Repický at the piano.

The Curtis Presents series closes on Tuesday, April 23, at Field Concert Hall with a retrospective program highlighting iconic Curtis Composers, featuring boundary-pushing chamber works and early-career classics that shaped the landscape of contemporary classical music. Selections include Jennifer Higdon’s (’88) Autumn Music for wind quintet; Leonard Bernstein’s (Conducting ’41) Sonata for Clarinet and Piano; David Serkin Ludwig's (’01) Three Pictures from the Floating World for bassoon and string trio; Samuel Barber’s (’34) Canzone (Elegy), for flute and piano; Ned Rorem’s (’44) Mountain Song for chamber ensemble; Julius Eastman’s (’63) Piano Pieces 1–1V; and recently appointed composition faculty member Jonathan Bailey Holland’s (’96) Introit for brass quintet.

Ensemble 20/21, finishes its sold-out year on Saturday, April 13, 2024, at Gould Rehearsal Hall with a “Portrait of George Lewis.” A diverse concert of highlights from the MacArthur Fellow, pioneering composer, musical polymath, and trombonist’s catalogue opens with The Deformation of Mastery, inspired by African American literary theorist Houston A. Baker Jr.’s influential book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, a chamber orchestral work composed with the intent to break down and disrupt all notions of authenticity in Afrodiasporic sonic expression. This work is followed by his unnerving, quirkily percussive String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living and the striking work Anthem for mezzo-soprano, flute, tenor saxophone, drums, percussion, piano, violin, and electronics, which examines power and image, and how societies assign almost superhuman abilities to artists or bands with the expectation that the masses idolize and worship them.

The program continues with The Mangle of Practice, a delightfully volatile piece for violin and piano—inspired by a 1984 article of the same title written by renowned British sociologist of science Andrew Pickering—that explores the unpredictable nature of change and how human interactions transform situations, or, in this instance, music. Born Obbligato, which lifts textural and structural ideas from Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, and enhances the fourth movement with percussion, closes the concert.

For more information about New Music Month, visit curtis.edu/newmusicphilly.

Ticketing Information

Single tickets and subscriptions are available for Curtis’s 2023–24 season. Single tickets for the remaining performances in the 2023–24 Curtis Presents and Ensemble 20/21 series start at $24 and can be purchased at Curtis.edu. Learn more about other upcoming Curtis performances at Curtis.edu/Calendar.

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