American Composers Orchestra & Groupmuse Foundation to Co-Present NEW CANONS Hybrid In-Person & Virtual Concert

American Composers Orchestra will continue its 2021-2022 season, under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel and President Melissa Ngan, on Saturday, October 23, 2021 at 2pm (music starts 2:15pm) with New Canons, a hybrid in-person and virtual concert co-presented with Groupmuse Foundation featuring Pauline Oliveros' Environmental Dialogue from 1974; Ray Lustig's Latency Canons commissioned by ACO in 2013; and Cohere, a newly commissioned work by Trevor New. At the DiMenna Center, the concert will also include a participatory performance of Raquel Acevedo Klein's Polyphonic Interface as well as an interlude featuring Chris Kallmyer's All Possible Music. Audience members can choose to attend this performance in one of three ways - at DiMenna Center for Classical Music (450 W. 37th St., NYC), at a private residence in Murray Hill facilitated by Groupmuse, or virtually. The program explores latency - the delay between live and transmitted sound - with Lustig's piece using it intentionally and New's work striving to eliminate it.

Audiences and performers alike will be dispersed and networked together in real time - American Composers Orchestra will perform at the DiMenna Center, the Bergamot Quartet will perform at the Murray Hill Groupmuse location, and three additional string quartets and seven soloists will participate from locations around the world, including the Ligeti Quartet (UK), Solem Quartet (UK), Diego Tejedor, violin (Argentina); Bernd Keul, bass (Germany); Raymond Seng'enge, violin (Tanzania); Gaurab Chatterjee, hand percussion (India); Jocelyn Clark, gayageum (Korea); Patti Kilroy, violin (Los Angeles) and Trevor New, viola (New York).

Ray Lustig's Latency Canons, commissioned by ACO in 2013 and developed over a series of workshop performances before being premiered at Carnegie Hall that year, calls for multiple string quartets and ACO to perform together while spread across the world. The New York Times described the piece as, "a surreally beautiful, contrapuntal soundscape." Lustig says, "In the spirit of using the problem as its own solution,a??Latency Canonsa??incorporates technology's limitations as the central idea. Musicians in different places play simple lines together using ordinary video-conferencing software, and the random blips freezes, and delays themselves create a counterpoint of beautiful, unexpected relationships, like echoes in a digital cathedral that wraps around the world. Latency Canonsa??poses the question of how we make music together in our world, how that may be changing, and what this will mean for the musical experience.a??Our technology is drawing us closer and closer together in so many ways, and the attitude of this work is one of communion over distances."

Trevor New uses technology to manipulate latency for remote musicians in Cohere. New says, "I want the audience to experience the ways we are connected by creating a digital space for us to see, hear, and feel interactions with others, whether they are next door or around the world. To achieve this experience, I am using Clean Feed to achieve low-latency performances. With it, I capture sound being played from different locations around the world and remove the latency effect by matching up the sounds into a single downbeat."

Pauline Oliveros' Environmental Dialogue invites the audience to hear and respond to sounds within their own space as well as the communal space shared by participants near and far. Oliveros published Environmental Dialogue in her Sonic Meditations collection in 1974. To perform the work, participants gather at a specified location. Then, Oliveros writes, "as each person becomes aware of the field of sounds from the environment, each person individually and gradually begins to reinforce the pitch of any one of the sound sources that has attracted their attention....The result of this meditation will probably produce a resonance of the environment."

A surround-sound music experience, Raquel Acevedo Klein's Polyphonic Interlace invites participants to travel amidst a sea of voices emerging from several directions. All are welcome to play the piece's musical tracks from their smartphones or speaker devices following a countdown at the start of the event. Music made entirely of Klein's voice emanates from the house speakers and participants' devices, transforming into a sonic tapestry of stories from across New York City at the cusp of the reopening. The tracks can be accessed at www.polyphonicinterlace.com.

Chris Kallmyer's All Possible Music is a collection of speculative scores that describe all of the music that could ever happen. The piece explores the contextual nature of music, encompassing both real and imagined sounds to describe a world that is mundane, spectacular, sometimes humorous, and always alive: a blissful symphony for an audience of careful listeners; dance floor hits in a cabin set deep in the woods; visionary drum machines that heal the earth and its people.

All in-person audience members will be required to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 with a vaccine authorized by the World Health Organization or the Food and Drug Administration and must maintain appropriate face coverings in accordance with current CDC guidelines. Learn more here.