YIVO Presents: Continuing Evolution: Yiddish Folksong in Classical Music

A Digital Musical Performance Preview

(New York, NY) – On Tuesday, June 30, 2020, at 4:00pm (EDT), YIVO will host a digital musical performance preview, Continuing Evolution: Yiddish Folksong in Classical Music, featuring five world premiere compositions commissioned for the occasion by YIVO. The new works by composers Martin Bresnick, Marti Epstein, Aaron Kernis, Judith Shatin, and Alex Weiser all engage with Yiddish folksongs, and reflect different meanings of Yiddish folksong today.

The new compositions will be presented alongside archival recordings from the YIVO archive of the folksongs they are reimagining, which range from lullabies to protest songs. Performances will be by ensemble Cantata Profana featuring singers Annie Rosen and Emily Donato, violinist Jacob Ashworth, and pianist Daniel Schlosberg.

This concert is a preview of a longer concert YIVO had originally planned to present this June. YIVO will present a full version of this concert in person when it is safe to do so. The full concert, curated by composer and YIVO’s Director of Public Programs Alex Weiser, will survey the history of Yiddish folksongs in classical music repertoire. The concert will  feature selections from Joel Engel’s 1909 cycle—the first example of a classical composition employing Yiddish folksongs—works by composers affiliated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music, works by composers Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, Stefan Wolpe, and more. The chronological span of the repertoire will culminate with the five new works, which continue this story into the present moment.

When: Tuesday, June 30, 2020 | 4:00pm (EDT)
Where: facebook.com/yivoinstitute and youtube.com/yivoinstitute
Information Available at: yivo.org/Continuing-Evolution

This program is part of the Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series. The Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series is made possible by a generous gift from the Estate of Sidney Krum. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

For more information contact:
Alex Weiser
Director of Public Programs

THE PERFORMERS

A fearless ensemble of inquisitive musicians, Cantata Profana boldly juxtaposes masterpieces from the medieval era to the 21st century in lovingly curated shows filled with unexpected works and daring theater. At the heart of each signature Cantata Profana production is a vision for a new kind of programming: breathing life into classical music by carefully weaving together rarely-heard works from every chapter of music history and reveling in how it all fits together.

A “crack ensemble” (New Yorker) with “a taste for the dramatic” (New York Times), Cantata Profana is passionately dedicated to new music, old music “to most anything, so long as the mixture is put together thoughtfully and put across persuasively” (New York Times). Our artists are specialists in a dizzying array of musical genres, able to transform themselves from “a stylish early music ensemble” (New York Times) into “exacting and sensitive” performers of contemporary music (Boston Globe) all within one show.

Cantata Profana has been presented by Music Mountain, MATA Festival, The Stone, Princeton Sound Kitchen, American Composer’s Alliance, Baruch Performing Arts Center, the Yale Center for British Art, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and HERE Arts; our Spotlight Series continues for a third year at New York’s most fabulous cabaret, Joe’s Pub at the Public; and we collaborate with our sister company Heartbeat Opera on everything from their Halloween Drag Extravaganzas to full opera productions.

THE COMPOSERS

Martin Bresnick

Martin Bresnick's compositions, from opera, chamber and symphonic music to film scores and computer music, are performed throughout the world. Bresnick delights in reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, bringing together repetitive gestures derived from minimalism with a harmonic palette that encompasses both highly chromatic sounds and more open, consonant harmonies and a raw power reminiscent of rock. At times his musical ideas spring from hardscrabble sources, often with a very real political import. But his compositions never descend into agitprop; one gains their meaning by the way the music itself unfolds, and always on its own terms.

Besides having received many prizes and commissions, the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Commission, among many others, Martin Bresnick is also recognized as an influential teacher of composition. Students from every part of the globe and of virtually every musical inclination have been inspired by his critical encouragement.

Martin Bresnick's compositions are published by Carl Fischer Music Publishers, New York; Bote & Bock, Berlin; CommonMuse Music Publishers, New Haven; and have been recorded by Cantaloupe Music, New World Records, Albany Records, Bridge Records, Composers Recordings Incorporated, Centaur, Starkland Records and Artifact Music.

Marti Epstein

Marti Epstein (November 25, 1959) started studying composition in 1977 with Professor Robert Beadell at the University of Nebraska.  She has degrees from the University of Colorado and Boston University, and her principal teachers were Cecil Effinger, Charles Eakin, Joyce Mekeel, Bunita Marcus, and Bernard Rands.

Marti was a fellow in composition at the Tanglewood Music Center in 1986 and 1988 and worked with Oliver Knussen and Hans Werner Henze.  As a result of her association with Henze, she was invited by the City of Munich to compose her puppet opera, Hero und Leander, for the 1992 Munich Biennale for New Music Theater.  She was on the jury for the 1994 Biennale.

Marti has received commissions from the Paul Jacobs Memorial Commissioning Fund, the CORE Ensemble, ALEA III, Sequitur New Music Ensemble, the Fromm Foundation, guitarist David Tanenbaum, the American Dance Festival, the A*DEvant-garde Festival of Munich, tubist Samuel Pilafian, flutist Marianne Gedigian, the New England Brass Quintet, the Iowa Brass Quintet, Boston Conservatory, Boston University Marsh Chapel Choir, pianist Kathleen Supové, the CrossSound New Music Festival of Juneau Alaska, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, the Radius Ensemble, the Ludovico Ensemble, and the Callithumpian consort. The Longy School of Music commissioned her to compose Quartet for BSO English horn soloist Robert Sheena to be played at the Inauguration of Karen Zorn, their new president. Marti’s music has been performed all over the world by ensembles, which include the San Francisco Symphony, the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Frankfurt, the Atlantic Brass Quintet, and Ensemble Modern.

The Atlantic Brass Quintet, Sequitur New Music, The Seattle Trumpet Consort, pianist Kathleen Supové, guitarist Ulf Golnast, Robert Sheena with the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble, and the University of Iowa Brass Quintet have recorded Marti’s music.  In 2015, the Ludovico Ensemble recorded and released Hypnagogia, a CD of Marti’s music. She was a resident at the MacDowell Colony in 1998 and in 1999.  She was a recipient of a 1998 Fromm Foundation Commission, and she won the 1998 Lee Ettleson Composition Prize.  She is a recipient of a 2005 grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Marti is an active pianist and a devoted teacher.  She plays prepared piano with guitarist David Tronzo in the Epstein/Tronzo Duo.  She is Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music, where she has taught harmony, counterpoint, and composition since 1991, and is also on the faculty of Boston Conservatory.

Aaron Jay Kernis

Winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, 1998 Pulitzer Prize, and 2011 Nemmers Award, Aaron Jay Kernis is one of America's most honored composers. His music appears prominently on concert programs worldwide, and he has been commissioned by America’s preeminent performing organizations and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco, Toronto, and Melbourne (AU) Symphonies, Los Angeles and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Joshua Bell, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and Sharon Isbin. Recent and upcoming commissions include his 4th Symphony for the New England Conservatory (for its 150th anniversary) and Nashville Symphony; concerti for violinist James Ehnes, cellist Joshua Roman, violist Paul Neubauer, and flutist Marina Piccinini; a horn concerto for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Grant Park Music Festival; a work for the Borromeo String Quartet; and a piece for the San Francisco Girls and Brooklyn Youth Choruses with The Knights for the New York Philharmonic Biennial.

His works have been recorded on Virgin, Dorian, Arabesque, Phoenix, Argo, Signum, Cedille and many other labels. Recent recordings include his Goblin Market, and Invisible Mosaic II (Signum); Three Flavors, featuring pianist Andrew Russo, violinist James Ehnes and the Albany Symphony with conductor David Alan Miller (Albany); and a disc of his solo and chamber music, On Distant Shores, (Phoenix). Kernis’s conducting engagements include appearances with the Pascal Rioult Dance Company, at major chamber music festivals in Chicago and Portland, and with members of the San Francisco and Minnesota Orchestras and New York Philharmonic.

He is the Workshop Director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab and, for 11 years, served as New Music Adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra, with which he co-founded and directed its Composer Institute for 15 years. Kernis teaches composition at Yale School of Music, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Classical Music Hall of Fame. Leta Miller's book-length portrait of Kernis and his work was published in 2014 by University of Illinois Press as part of its American Composer series.

Judith Shatin

Composer Judith Shatin is renowned for her acoustic, electroacoustic and digital music. Called “highly inventive on every level” by the Washington Post, her music combines an adventurous approach to timbre with dynamic narrative design. She draws on expanded instrumental palettes and a cornucopia of the sounding world, from machines in a coal mine to the calls of animals, the shuttle of a wooden loom, the pull of a zipper. Described as “powerful and distinctive” by Fanfare and “both engaging and splendidly controlled” by the San Francisco Chronicle, her music reaches from chamber to choral and orchestral; from purely electronic to electroacoustic and multimedia formats. An innovator in the world of electronic music, she also continues to create richly imagined acoustic music. Both are informed by her multiple fascinations with literature and the visual arts, with the sounding world, both natural and built; and with the social and communicative power of music.

Shatin has received commissions from organizations including the Barlow Endowment, Fromm Foundation, Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress and ensembles such as the National Symphony, the Dutch Hexagon Ensemble, Ensemble Berlin PianoPercussion, Kronos Quartet, the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival and Scottish Voices. Honors include four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, as well as grants from the American Music Center, Lila Acheson Wallace-Readers Digest Arts Partners Program, Meet the Composer and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her music is widely recorded on labels including Centaur, Innova, Neuma, New World Records and Ravello. Nathan Carterette’s new CD, Poets of the Piano, Acts of Faith, features her Chai Variations on Eliahu HaNavi, a set of 18 variations on this beautiful melody, composed during a residency at Brahmshaus in Baden-Baden. Shatin is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia, where she founded the Virginia Center for Computer Music and led the program to national prominence.

Alex Weiser

Broad gestures and rich textures are hallmarks of the “compelling” (The New York Times), “deliciously wistful” (San Francisco Classical Voice), “personal, expressive, and bold,” (I Care If You Listen) music of composer Alex Weiser. Born and raised in New York City, Weiser creates acutely cosmopolitan music combining a deeply felt historical perspective with a vibrant forward-looking creativity. Weiser’s debut album and all the days were purple, was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Music. Released by Cantaloupe Music in April 2019, the album includes songs in Yiddish and English and has been praised as “ravishing” (The New Yorker), “reverent and magical... devastatingly beautiful,” (American Record Guide), “gorgeous” (Tablet Magazine), “utterly original and exquisitely unsettling... sweeping, bewitching, divinely dissonant... pitch-perfect.” (In Geveb).

Weiser recently completed an opera with librettist Ben Kaplan called State of the Jews. Hailed as “stunning, heavenly, marvelous” by Israeli National Public Radio, the opera is based on the life of Theodor Herzl and juxtaposes a historical narrative focusing on the last year of his life, with the more intimate story of Theodor’s conflicted relationship with his wife, Julie Herzl, and the toll his political views and activities took on their family life. Developed as a part of a two-year fellowship with American Opera Projects, the LABA fellowship of the 14th Street Y, a Roulette residency, and with support from the ConEd Exploring the Metropolis Composer Residency program, the opera received a series of preview performances at the 14th Street Y in December 2019 and awaits a premiere production. Weiser is the Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where he curates and produces programs.

YIVO

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is dedicated to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jewry worldwide. For nearly a century, YIVO has pioneered new forms of Jewish scholarship, research, education, and cultural expression. Our public programs and exhibitions, as well as online and on-site courses, extend our outreach to a global community. The YIVO Archives contains 24 million unique items and YIVO’s Library has over 400,000 volumes—the single largest resource for the study of East European Jewish life in the world. yivo.org / yivo.org/the-whole-story