MUSIC FROM COPLAND HOUSE And CUNY Graduate Center Series FREE FOR ALL Return This Fall

Emerging from the pandemic, the widely-acclaimed Music from Copland House ensemble - hailed by The New Yorker as "bold, adventurous, and superb" - and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York restart their live Monday evening concert series, journeying across America's vast, variegated musical landscape.

Called FREE FOR ALL!, the series opens the doors of the handsome, acoustically-superb Baisley Powell Elebash Hall, and offers free admission, making these concerts accessible and welcoming to all without financial barriers to attending. The title, however, is meant to not only convey the admission price, but also exhilarating, unpredictable adventures exploring the nation's rich, diverse, and often bewildering sonic legacy.

The hour-long concerts begin on October 24, 2022 and run through May 1, 2023, starting at 7:30pm. The series showcases a dozen World or New York Premieres by Gabriella Smith, Shawn Okpebholo, John Musto, Juhi Bansal, and Kenji Bunch, among others. The six programs explore the fragility of freedom, the inspiration of America's natural terrain and resources, the immigrant experience, and the turmoil of the Civil War era. The series finale brings six World Premieres by rising-star young composers commissioned by Copland House for its much-admired, annual CULTIVATE institute, marking its 10th Anniversary this year; the concert also serves as the closing event in the American Composers Orchestra's SONiC Festival, celebrating composers under 40.

FREE FOR ALL! features Founding, Principal, and Guest Artists of Music from Copland House, and includes such vocal luminaries as soprano Tony Arnold, tenor Nicholas Phan, and baritone William Sharp. MCH is also offering several rising-star instrumentalists from The Graduate Center's doctoral program the opportunity to perform side-by-side as Guest Artists with the ensemble at several of these concerts - an important aspect of Copland House's mission championing next-generation artists. Every concert will be followed immediately by lively OFFBEAT/ ONSTAGE artist talks and audience Q&As. Several of the concerts will be filmed live by CUNY-TV for subsequent telecast to its estimated viewership of over 7 million households in metro New York.

Elebash Hall is located at 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street), Manhattan.

Tickets are free, but reservations strongly encouraged. Reservations are available HERE for the fall season, and HERE for the 2023 spring programs.

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is a leader in public graduate education devoted to enhancing the public good through pioneering research, serious learning, and reasoned debate. The Graduate Center offers ambitious students more than 40 doctoral and master's programs of the highest caliber, taught by top faculty from throughout CUNY - the nation's largest public urban university. Through its nearly 40 centers, institutes, initiatives, and the Advanced Science Research Center, The Graduate Center influences public policy and discourse and shapes innovation. With its extensive public programs, The Graduate Center is one of New York City's leading venues for culture and conversation.

ABOUT COPLAND HOUSE

Copland House is an award-winning creative center for American music based at Aaron Copland's National Historic Landmark residence in Westchester County, NY. For nearly 25 years, it has welcomed and collaborated with musical dreamers and explorers of all backgrounds and identities who, like Copland, change the way we interact with the world around us. Copland House is the only composer's home in the U.S. devoted to nurturing and renewing America's rich musical legacy heritage through a broad range of activities that resonate far beyond its walls, across the nation and the world. Lauded for "the richness of its offerings" (The New York Times), its programs uniquely embrace the entire artistic process, from creation and development to study, performance, and preservation, and are built around multi-faceted composer support, live and recorded performances, and in-school and on-site educational activities.

MUSIC FROM COPLAND HOUSE (MCH), Copland House's celebrated, touring resident ensemble, has been hailed for its "absorbing concert experiences" (Opera News) gathered from its journeys across 150 years of America's vast musical landscape. MCH champions classic and forgotten voices from the nation's past, and celebrates today's established and rising creators of all backgrounds and identities. This singular American repertory ensemble has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR, Euro-Radio, and other

major media; and engaged by Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, University of Chicago, Smithsonian Institution, the Caramoor, Bard, Bowdoin, and Ecstatic Festivals, and other top-tier concert presenters. MCH can be heard on the Arabesque, Koch International, and COPLAND HOUSE BLEND labels, and has commissioned nearly 100 works. Inspired by Copland's peerless, lifelong advocacy of American composers, the ensemble also regularly undertakes educational and community outreach activities. Founded in 1999, Music from Copland House boasts a stellar roster of Founding, Principal, and Guest Artists; as The Chicago Tribune raved, "Copland would have been proud of all of them."