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WINDSYNC wind quintet
Garrett Hudson, flute
Emily Tsai, oboe
Graeme Steele Johnson, clarinet
Kara LaMoure, bassoon
Anni Hochhalter, horn
Mark Mellits: Wind Quintet “Apollo”- New York Premiere
Akshaya Avril Tucker: Hold Sacred - New York Premiere
Jean-Philippe Rameau/arr. Kara LaMoure: Pastoral Suite
Valerie Coleman: Wind Quintet “Umoja”
Miguel de Aguila: Quinteto Sinfónico - New York Premiere
Miguel de Aguila: Sambeada - New York Premiere
Nathalie Joachim: "Stumble, Fall, Fly" (2023) - East Coast Premiere
Co-commission with lead commissioner Emerald City Music (Seattle)
This concert will be approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes in length, including intermission
$20 - general admission
$17 - seniors and those with disabilities
NOTE: Seats are not assigned
Free tickets for New School students, faculty and staff can be reserved via the ticket purchase button with inclusion of N#. Please present school ID upon entry to event.
Please note: this season we will not be mailing paper tickets, but will have check-in lists for all registered ticket buyers at the event. We will send periodic reminders regarding your upcoming event.
Accessible seating, large print programs, and assistive listening devices available. Requests for additional accommodations can be made at time of ticket purchase.
Any questions? Call +1 212.229.5873 or contact nsc@newschool.edu
WindSync is a collective of outstanding North American wind musicians who came together as performers, educators, and community-builders; launching an international touring career after winning the 2012 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh competition and the 2016 Fischoff National Chamber Music competition. The ensemble has appeared in recital at some of North America’s best-known venues, including Ravinia, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Strathmore Mansion, and the Library of Congress.
Their commissions and premieres include The Cosmos, a concerto for wind quintet and orchestra by Pulitzer finalist Michael Gilbertson, collaborative works for quintet and percussion with Ivan Trevino and Erberk Eryılmaz, and recent works by Mason Bynes and Akshaya Avril Tucker. WindSync’s album All Worlds, All Times was released on Bright Shiny Things in 2022, debuting at No. 2 on the Billboard Traditional Classical chart.
Nathalie Joachim is a Grammy-nominated performer and composer. The Haitian-American artist is hailed for being “a fresh and invigorating cross-cultural voice”. (The Nation). Her creative practice centers an authentic commitment to storytelling and human connectivity while advocating for social change and cultural awareness, gaining her the reputation of being “powerful and unpretentious.” (The New York Times)
Ms. Joachim is co-founder of the critically acclaimed duo Flutronix and has performed and recorded with an impressive range of today’s most exciting artists and ensembles, including Gabriel Kahane, Miguel Zenón, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the contemporary chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird with whom she held tenure as flautist for many years. As a composer, Joachim is regularly commissioned to write for instrumental and vocal ensembles, dance and interdisciplinary theater
Valerie Coleman-Page is an internationally acclaimed, Grammy-nominated visionary who commands a multi-faceted career as both flutist and composer. Recently named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the year, she is the flutist of the contemporary ensemble, Umama Womama, an alumna of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Bowers Program (formerly known as CMS Two), laureate of Concert Artists Guild competition, and the creator/former flutist of the ensemble Imani Winds.
Listed as “one of the Top 35 Women Composers” by the Washington Post, Valerie has recently become the first African-American woman to be commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. Her work, UMOJA, was listed by Chamber Music America as one of the “Top 101 Great American Ensemble Works”.
Three-time Grammy nominated American composer Miguel del Aguila was born in Uruguay. In over 135 works that combine drama, driving rhythms and nostalgic nods to his South American roots, he has established himself among the most distinctive and highly regarded composers of his generation. His music enjoys over 200 performances yearly.
He was 2021 composer in residence with Danish Chamber Players/Ensemble Storstrøm, after residences with Orchestra of the Americas, New Mexico Symph, Fresh Ink, CTSummerfest, Talis, and Chautauqua. 2021 commissions include works for Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Fivebyfive, and the Eroica Trio. He was honored with 3 Latin Grammy nominations, Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, New Music USA/Music Alive, Magnum Opus Award, Lancaster Symph. Composer of the Year, and Copland Foundation among others.
Akshaya Avril Tucker is a composer who draws inspiration from the music and dance traditions of South Asia, having trained as a cellist and Odissi dancer from a young age. She explores meditative, gestural and effervescent soundscapes. Her music has been performed by Brooklyn Rider, A Far Cry, members of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Salastina Music Society, Duo Cortona, Third Coast Chamber Collective, Hindustani vocalist Saili Oak, and many others. Recent commissions include works for Brooklyn Rider (co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall), Carpe Diem String Quartet, and WindSync. She won an 2019 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. She holds an M.M. in Composition from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Music from Brown University. She is pursuing a composition doctorate at the University of Southern California.
Composer Marc Mellits is a leading American composer of his generation, with hundreds of performances throughout the world annually, making him one of the most performed living American composers. From Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, to prestigious music festivals in Europe and the US, Mellits’ music is a mainstay on programs throughout the world. His unique musical style is an eclectic combination of driving rhythms, soaring lyricism, and colorful orchestrations that all combine to communicate directly with the listener. He started composing very early, and was writing piano music long before he started formal piano lessons at age 6. He studied at the Eastman School of Music, Yale School of Music, Cornell University, and Tanglewood. Mellits often is a miniaturist, composing works that are comprised of short, contrasting movements or sections.
Founded at The New School in 1957 as New School Concerts, this series was renamed the Schneider Concerts in 1993 in honor of founding artistic director Alexander “Sasha” Schneider, conductor, violinist, and member of the famed Budapest String Quartet. Initially founded with a very simple idea of access to all for an exceptionally high level of chamber music performance (ticket that cost only $1) that idea has expanded greatly in the past 60+ years, and now includes: affordable ticket prices, a focus on serving elderly New Yorkers, going beyond ADA compliance, supporting emerging chamber artists, opening our vision to include multidisciplinary approaches to chamber music, and continually reviewing our work through a lens of Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice to ensure that we move beyond classical music's historical white focus, to be welcoming to and supportive of audiences and artists from all backgrounds. The series has been guided by Frank Salomon since 1959 and administered by Rohana Elias-Reyes since 2001. Guided by music advisors John Dalley, Pamela Frank, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin, Anthony McGill, Kurt Muroki, Tara O’Connor, and Arnold Steinhardt, the series continues Mr. Schneider’s commitment to provide early career exposure to exceptional young artists and ensembles, and offer outstanding, accessible concerts at modest ticket prices to ensure access to all. Pianist Peter Serkin, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and the Guarneri, Dover, and Calidore string quartets are among the many artists and ensembles to receive early career exposure on the series.
Committed to amplifying diverse voices, The New School offers more than a thousand public programs and events each year, providing fresh perspectives and unique learning opportunities. These lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and performances feature prominent and emerging artists, activists, and thought leaders.
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The Balourdet String Quartet was formed in 2018 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The Quartet is recipient of the 2020 Fischoff Competition Gold Medal and second prize at the 2019 Carl Nielsen International Chamber Music Competition in Copenhagen, Denmark. The Quartet is currently participating in the New England Conservatory's Professional Chamber music Program. Its members have attended festivals including the Aspen Music Festival, Heifetz Institute, Kneisel Hall, Music Academy of the West, Sarasota Music Festival, and Taos School of Music. The varied musical backgrounds of all four members include education at Colburn Conservatory, Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, Northwestern University, and Rice University and chamber music coaching with members of the Borromeo, Brentano, Cavani, Cleveland, New Zealand, and Tokyo string quartets as well as Cho-Liang Lin. The Balourdet String Quartet recently attended the 2019 Aspen Music Festival Advanced String Quartet Studies program where it worked with the American, Escher, and Pacifica Quartets as well as James Dunham, Sylvia Rosenberg, and Donald Weilerstein. The Balourdet has also shared the stage with Cho-Liang Lin and performed Brahms Sextet No.1 with members of the Dover Quartet in summer 2019 at the Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival.
At last, Beethoven felt ready to enter the weighty string quartet medium and offer his first set of quartets for publication in 1801. Interestingly, the first quartet he wrote chronologically is known to us as Op. 18 No. 3, in D Major, and this F Major Quartet, written second, was placed at the beginning of the set. Whether or not this was an intentional choice, the piece presents rather well what the rest of this set and the later works would end up featuring: a radical evolution of the quartet medium he inherited from the reins of Haydn and Mozart. This was all a product of Beethoven’s painstaking and probing working process unsurpassed by any composer before or since.
The work begins with a fragment of a melody played in unison, followed by a mysterious silence. The fragment returns, more searchingly into another silence, only to be completed in a classical phrase structure. Immediately, there is another surprise as the phrase repeats as a forte outburst. The motive that comprises the opening phrase is a monorhythm which repeats in the movement literally hundreds of times, yet much like Beethoven’s future Fifth Symphony, its effect only enhances the energy and drama of the work. The first forte outburst serves as the precursor of many sudden dynamic contrasts, the motive acting as the thread stringing the music tightly together through all upheavals.
An early draft of this quartet which Beethoven sent to his trusted friend, violinist and theologian Karl Amenda, is a unique vantage point into Beethoven’s working process and coming of age. While the overall thematic structure remains the same as in the final version, the dizzying amount of detail-oriented changes the piece underwent is shocking to compare. The most important revelation from the earlier version is Beethoven’s clear handwritten indications that the pathos-laden and dramatic slow movement is meant to correspond to the events of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliette. With this discovery, one can only wonder if other abstract instrumental compositions of Beethoven, an ardent Shakespeare reader, were also meant to have programmatic ties. However, this is the only such example from his whole output that is explicitly stated, and Beethoven felt as though his music should speak for itself in the listener’s imagination. Even without knowing any programmatic connections, this movement would have been most striking for a listener of the era, especially with the melodramatic climaxes and painfully pronounced pauses.
Following this Adagio, the last two movements serve largely as comic relief, with an especially virtuosic violin passage in the Scherzo’s trio catapulting the energy to a feverish height. The mood returns to playfulness throughout the satisfying finale movement, culminating in a jolly bon voyage tune combined with the main theme at the close.
“Strum is the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally written for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition.
Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”
— Jessie Montgomery
The Fourth String Quartet of Béla Bartók is a landmark example of his compositional ethos, synonymous with all of the stylistic traits of his mature writing. It combines his sharp formal and technical mastery of pre-and post-twentieth century musical language and his devotion to folk music traditions of his native Hungary and beyond as one of the first modern ethnomusicologists. Above all else, his work reflects his prioritizing the myriad possible uses of symmetry in music. This quartet is groundbreaking in introducing various symmetries as the fabric of the main thematic material, the pitch centers of the five movements, and the function of each movement in the overall form of the piece. Bartok had a keen interest in arch form, congruous halves melded together around a central point, and the Fourth Quartet is the quintessential example of this form at all levels. All of these elements enhance a unique expressivity also apparent in the work’s scintillating energy and wide range of colors.
The first and the fifth movement pair as high energy movements presenting music as rhetoric — pitch motives going back and forth in discourse between voices, sometimes argumentatively.
They feature the same symmetrical motif throughout both movements, as well as an
Arabian-inspired tune heard gently in the first movement and roaringly in the last. Even within the intellectual discourse of the movements, a dance element is omnipresent. The second and fourth movements are hushed interludes which demonstrate music as a form of serious play, delicate yet full of inextinguishable energy. The second movement is a highly chromatic, eerie, and devilishly fast scherzo. The fourth is entirely plucked, with some of Bartók’s trademark snap-pizzicato and other extended techniques creating a unique sound world. At the center of the arch lies a serene and otherworldly slow movement that fits Bartók’s textural genre of “night music.” This third movement begins with the unfolding of a 6-note drone, featuring a delayed vibrato effect one can imagine as pulsating heat waves on a hot summer evening. The lengthy cello solo is said to emulate a Hungarian reed instrument called the Tárogató, and the subsequent solos of the other instruments vividly portray bird calls and even insects. The movement returns to tranquility at the end, with each instrument poetically dropping out in the reverse order they first entered.
Thank you to our audience, Jessie Montgomery, The New School, the Schneider Concert Series, and the New England Conservatory for allowing us to perform for you today. It is a pleasure to play these works and a very special occasion to perform “Strum” by the Mannes School of Music’s newest violin and composition faculty member, Jessie Montgomery.
— Notes by the Balourdet String Quartet, except where otherwise noted.
Cho-Liang Lin was born in Taiwan. A neighbor’s violin studies convinced this 5-year old boy to do the same. At the age twelve, he moved to Sydney to further his studies with Robert Pikler, a student of Jenő Hubay. After playing for Itzhak Perlman in a master class, the 13-year old boy decided that he must study with Mr. Perlman’s teacher, Dorothy DeLay. At the age fifteen, Lin traveled alone to New York and auditioned for the Juilliard School and spent the next six years working with Ms DeLay.
A concert career was launched in 1980 with Lin’s debut playing the Mendelssohn Concerto with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta . He has since performed as soloist with virtually every major orchestra in the world. His busy schedule on stage around the world continues to this day. However, his wide ranging interests have led him to diverse endeavors. At the age of 31, his alma mater, Juilliard School, invited Lin to become faculty. In 2006, he was appointed professor at Rice University. He is currently music director of La Jolla SummerFest and the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival. Ever so keen about education, he was music director of the Taiwan National Symphony music camp and youth orchestra for four years.
In his various professional capacities, Cho-Liang Lin has championed composers of our time. His efforts to commission new works have led a diverse field of composers to write for him. The list includes John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, Tan Dun, John Williams, Steven Stucky, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Bright Sheng, Paul Schoenfield, Lalo Schifrin, Joan Tower and many more. Recently, he was soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Nashville Symphony and Royal Philharmonic. He is a member of the New School Concerts music advisory committee.
Lin performs on the 1715 Stradivari named “Titian” or a 2000 Samuel Zygmuntowicz. His many concerto, recital and chamber music recordings on Sony Classical, Decca, BIS, Delos and Ondine can be heard on Spotify or Naxos.com. His albums have won Gramophone Record Of The Year, Grammy nominations and Penguin Guide Rosettes.
Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, ballet, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn… (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Passage (2019) a ballet commissioned by Dance Theatre of Harlem, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Caught by the Wind (2016) for the Albany Symphony and the American Music Festival.
The New York Philharmonic has selected Montgomery as one of the featured composers for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights in the United States to women. Other forthcoming works include a cadenza for the Brahms Violin Concerto, to be premiered by Hilary Hahn; a cello concerto for Thomas Mesa jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, and The Sphinx Organization; and a new orchestral work for the National Symphony.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and recent member of the Catalyst Quartet, she continues to maintain an active performance career as a violinist appearing regularly with her improvising duo Big dog little dog with bassist Eleonore Oppenheim.
Montgomery’s teachers and mentors include Sally Thomas, Ann Setzer, Alice Kanack, Joan Tower, Derek Bermel, Mark Suozzo, Ira Newborn, and Laura Kaminsky. She holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. Montgomery is on both the composition and violin faculty at Mannes.