Next Festival Unveils 12th Season, Featuring Guest Artist Seth Parker Woods & More

The Next Festival of Emerging Artists, a trailblazing arts immersion program for early-career string musicians, composers, and choreographers, launches an expansive 12th season from June 1-14, 2024. The Next Festival of Emerging Artists, founded in 2013, provides 20 young string performers (ages 20-30), selected from a global open call, with a countryside residency, New York performance tour, and groundbreaking cross-disciplinary workshop with early-career composers and choreographers chosen by leaders in the field.

The Festival features 9 premieres in two weeks by some of today's most exciting composers, including Curtis Stewart, Michael Dudley Jr., Rebecca Saunders and Next Festival Artistic Director Peter Askim. Two-time GRAMMY nominee Seth Parker Woods, "a cellist of prodigious technical gifts and sharp intellect" (The New York Times), appears as 2024 Festival Guest Artist. The Next Festival Artists participate in recording sessions of the newly-commissioned works and take part in multi-disciplinary collaborations with composers and choreographers, including Pulitzer Prize and GRAMMY-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis, along with Festival Artistic Director Peter Askim, and Choreography Mentor Sidra Bell.

On Friday, June 7, 2024 at 7:30pm at PS21/Center for Contemporary Performance in Chatham, NY and Saturday, June 8, 2024 at 7:30pm at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center in NYC, Peter Askim leads an orchestra of String Performance Fellows in a program of three new world premiere commissions: Essay #1: Leave the People by GRAMMY nominee Curtis Stewart, ...there is yet beauty by ASCAP Award-winning Michael R. Dudley, and a new work by Askim. The evening also includes with Herencia, a deeply personal ode to hybrid cultural identities by cellist Andrea Casarrubios and the East Coast Premiere of the wildly unpredictable Ire: Concerto for Cello, Strings, and Percussion by Rebecca Saunders with Seth Parker Woods as soloist.

Co-commissioned with the American Composers Orchestra and workshopped in 2023 EarShot Readings, Dudley's ...there is yet beauty is meant to evoke hope amidst chaos, within both the musicians and audience.

Stewart's Essay #1: Leave the People takes the audience through a multi-part logical argument about the nature of academia in classical music: who is remembered, who is lauded, who is leading the way? Who is used and who is left behind, and does it matter? Stewart was inspired to write the piece after the lawsuits around affirmative action directed at schools, which got him thinking about how these institutions commend other creatives that are deeply influenced by Black music. He says, "So, I asked myself: What would American music be without Blackness? What would American conservatories be without blackness? What would American classical music be without blackness?"

Casarrubios' Herencia was commissioned by the Sphinx Organization and is the Spanish translation for both "inheritance" and "heritage." The composer says, "For this work, my inspiration was not a particular musical "heritage" or genre; rather, it was the artists who would be playing it. I envisioned the remarkable musicians of Sphinx Virtuosi taking the stage to play this piece, and I thought of how each individual has trailing behind them a unique history of unfathomable complexity; an epic that they bring to bear in every moment of performance. I also imagined the way this collection of histories would one day coalesce with a shared intention to illuminate their world - your world - with music."

Askim's new work is a study in emotional cross-currents - music that is at times unyielding and relentless, at times soaring and transcendent: breathless, cascading, exuberant, and complicated - but always in motion.

Sunders' Ire (2012) is the last in a series of three string works - the others being Still and Fletch - which explore the sonic potential of a tiny fragment of sound, the trill. The composer says of the piece, "the sonic potential is pushed almost to breaking point, the bow revealing again and again the fast quasi-mechanical manic trilling sound that lies hidden beneath the surface of silence."

The following week, young composers and choreographers at the beginning of their careers, selected by Aaron Jay Kernis, Sidra Bell and Peter Askim, are invited for workshops at Gibney Dance Studio in NYC. The Next Festival's 2024 Choreographer, Composer and String Performance Fellows premiere new music and dance works in a free, public showing at the studio on Thursday, June 13, 2024 at 3:00pm. This is the culmination of a week-long workshop, consisting of rehearsals, collaboration and spontaneous creation, aided by mentors Aaron Jay Kernis, Peter Askim, and choreographer Sidra Bell. The composers will guide Composer Fellows in the creation of new music to be played by the Festival's String Performance Fellows alongside new dance works supported by Bell. The workshop's unique structure focuses on developing new languages to work across disciplinary boundaries, prioritizing processes rather than a finished product.

NextFest 2024 Program Information

PERFORMANCES:
Friday, June 7, 2024 at 7:30pm
PS21/Center for Contemporary Performance | 2980 NY-66, Chatham, NY 12037
Tickets (Pay As You Wish): bit.ly/ps21-concert-june7
All proceeds benefit the Crellin Park Summer Camp Scholarship Fund

Saturday, June 8, 2024 at 7:30pm
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | 129 W 67th St, New York, NY 10023
Tickets ($25/$15): bit.ly/kaufman-concert-june8

COMPOSER / CHOREOGRAPHER OPEN WORKSHOP:
Thursday, June 13, 2024 at 3:00pm
Gibney Dance Studio, Studio H | 53A Chambers St, New York, NY 10007
Tickets (Donation Based): bit.ly/comp-choreo-june13

About The Next Festival of Emerging Artists

The Next Festival has supported more than 250 emerging artists with professional development in contemporary music, entrepreneurship, collaboration, jump-starting professional careers by treating emerging artists like established talent, not students. Collaborating directly with major composers and performing alongside leading soloists, Fellows dramatically expand their network. Festival alumni become working musicians, leaders in their fields, and socially-conscious citizens.

Past participants include performers with the Handel and Haydn Society, the Executive Director of Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and players for the Le Concert des Nations, Malmo Symphony Orchestra (Sweden) and improvising chamber ensemble 9 Horses. They've also launched non-profits like Performers for Change, Sound Off: Music For Bail, Bass Players for Black Composers, and more.

Prioritizing artist futures, not the bottom line, the Festival supports Fellows through a radical "pay-what-you-can" model, ensuring that deserving talent is able to participate regardless of financial circumstances.

A champion of living composers, The Next Festival commissions new compositions by both established and early career composers every year, presenting over 75 guest artists since 2013, including Pulitzer, GRAMMY, and MacArthur award winners. Learn more at next-fest.org.

"It's amazing how meaningfully crafted Next Fest was, as an experience and as a statement in a field that often can feel tough and impersonal. I've praised it many times out loud. Thanks for all you do to make this field more human." - Julia Weldon, 2022 Next Fest Performance Fellow

About Founder and Artistic Director Peter Askim
Founder and Artistic Director of The Next Festival of Emerging Artists, Peter Askim is a composer, conductor, Director of Orchestral Studies at NC State University and conductor of Raleigh Civic Orchestras. As a conductor, he has led the American Composers Orchestra, Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and Vermont Symphony Orchestra. Askim was featured on HBO and NPR Music conducting folk-rock legend Richard Thompson's soundtrack for "The Cold Blue." As a composer, he has been called a "modern master" by The Strad and worked with groups like Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Honolulu, and American Viola Society. Through the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, Askim is known for innovative programming and championing the work of living composers and underrepresented voices.

About Seth Parker Woods

GRAMMY-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator, reimagining traditional works and commissioning new ones to propel classical music into the future. As The New York Times wrote, "Woods is an artist rooted in classical music, but whose cello is a vehicle that takes him, and his concertgoers, on wide-ranging journeys."

He has collaborated with a wide range of artists representing the classical, popular music, and visual art worlds and has been nominated for two GRAMMY Awards, first in 2023 as a member of celebrated new music ensemble Wild Up, and again in 2024 for his autobiographical solo tour-de-force, Difficult Grace (Cedille 2023).

Woods serves on the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California. He holds degrees from Brooklyn College, Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, and a PhD from the University of Huddersfield. Learn more at www.sethparkerwoods.com.