The League of Composers Set for NY Philharmonic Biennial

The League of Composers/ISCM - the nation's oldest organization devoted to contemporary music - joins the NY PHIL BIENNIAL to present the Orchestra of the League of Composers performing a New York Premiere by Huck Hodge (United States, b. 1977), a U.S. Premiere by Felipe Lara (Brazil, b. 1979), and works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Charles Wuorinen (United States, b. 1938) and Paul Moravec (United States, b. 1957). Taking place at Columbia University's Miller Theatre on Wednesday, June 1st at 7:30pm, the program will be conducted by Louis Karchin, Music Director of the Orchestra of the League of Composers. Charles Wuorinen will conduct his own work with pianist Anne-Marie McDermott as soloist.

Rome Prize-winning composer Huck Hodge's Ale?theia (2011), for large chamber ensemble, won the League of Composers/ISCM's 2014 Composers' Competition. The score is inscribed with the following quote from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's 1978 speech How To Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later: "Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change. ... Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real."

Felipe Lara's Fringes (2015) explores how large waves of sound travel through a performance space. Several performers from each of the orchestra's units are placed on the "fringes" of the concert hall, and the composer controls the flow of timbres as they are passed throughout the venue and around the audience.

The title of Sempre Diritto! (1992) by Paul Moravec - who received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Music - translates as "straight ahead!" which visitors to Italy often hear when asking for directions. In Sempre Diritto! Moravec offers a sort of musical itinerary through Venice, where destinations are rarely "straight ahead." The composer notes: "The spiral winding themes suggest to me the natural contours of the streets, which contribute so much to the city's incomparably enchanting effect."

Flying to Kahani (2005) for piano and chamber orchestra by Charles Wuorinen - who received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Music and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" - refers to the undiscovered "second moon of Earth" in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which is also the basis of an opera by Wuorinen. Flying to Kahani, which the composer calls a "small piano concerto," is partly derived from vocal elements in that opera. Because the work was premiered alongside a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, Wuorinen uses C natural as the central pitch of Flying to Kahani; the work's last five pitches reverse the first five notes of the Mozart concerto.

The Orchestra of the League of Composers, an ensemble founded in 2009, has commissioned and premiered ten new works - by Alvin Singleton, Jason Treuting, Missy Mazzoli, Arthur Krieger, David Rakowski, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Keith Fitch, Wang Jie, Suzanne Farrin, and Morris Rosenzweig - and presented eighteen New York or World Premieres. It has been particularly active in advocating the late, groundbreaking works of Elliott Carter. Photo: Ezra Margono