June in Buffalo 2025: Meridian Arts Ensemble

We are pleased to welcome the Meridian Arts Ensemble as a resident ensemble at June in Buffalo 2025.

For nearly four decades, Meridian Arts Ensemble (MAE) has been redefining what a brass quintet can be. With a fearless approach to new music and an insatiable appetite for collaboration, the ensemble has expanded the brass repertoire in ways few could have imagined, including by adding percussion to the standard two trumpets, horn, trombone, and tuba instrumentation. At June in Buffalo 2025, they bring their signature mix of precision, adventurousness, and sonic firepower.

From early collaborations with composers like Elliott Sharp and Milton Babbitt to their more recent work with David Sanford (June in Buffalo 2025 Senior Faculty), MAE has built a repertoire that defies expectation. Their performances seamlessly shift between rigorously notated complexity
and serene beauty, often pushing brass instruments into uncharted territory. Their discography—spanning eleven albums—includes works that fuse contemporary classical music with jazz, rock, and the avant-garde, all delivered with the ensemble’s unmistakable edge.

Beyond their experimental leanings, MAE is a seasoned performer on the international stage. With appearances across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, they have established themselves as a leading force in chamber music, equally at home in concert halls, jazz clubs, and festival stages. Their dedication to commissioning and premiering new works has ensured that the brass quintet remains a vital and evolving format.

At June in Buffalo, their role as resident ensemble means they will be both interpreters and guides—working closely with composers, shaping new pieces, and demonstrating firsthand the potential of brass music. For audiences and participants alike, Meridian Arts Ensemble promises performances that challenge, excite, and redefine the sound of brass.

 

Credo by David Sanford will be featured on MAE's June in Buffalo program.
Take a listen here!

 

Talea Ensemble Residency

The internationally-renowned Talea Ensemble made their anticipated second trip to Buffalo and are preparing to premiere six works by UB graduate student composers Andres Bonilla-Garcia, Lihuen Sirvent, Jackson Roush, Francisco Corthey, Sohwa Lee, and Chi-Yen Huang. Each composer participated in a recorded workshop during the ensemble’s fall residency, and embarked on edits, revisions, and in a few cases complete rewrites of their drafted pieces. The pieces are extremely diverse in terms of instrumentation (from trio to full ensemble), use of electronics, use of contemporary or extended techniques, and they includes sonic material similar to that found during Beethoven’s time, Korean folk tunes, noise, and everything in between. This concert is FREE and open to the public.

Location: Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall

Date: March 14, 2025 

Time: 3:00PM

 

About Talea Ensemble

Heralded as “a crucial part of the New York cultural ecosphere” by the New York Times, the Talea Ensemble is comprised of nineteen of New York City’s finest classically-trained musicians, with a mission to champion musical creativity, cultivate curious listeners, and bring visionary new works to life with vibrant performances that remain in the audience’s imagination long after a concert.

Recipients of the 2014 Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, Talea has brought to life more than 30 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008. Partnering with institutions like the Austrian Cultural Forum or the French American Cultural Exchange, Talea has helped introduce NYC audiences to important works of such esteemed composers as Pierre Boulez, Georg Friedrich Haas, Beat Furrer, Pierluigi Billone, or Georges Aperghis.

Praised for their “verve and immaculate virtuosity” by the Washington Post, the Talea Ensemble is sought after both in the U.S. and Europe for its range, precision, risk-taking, and superior performance quality. Recent festival engagements include performances at Lincoln Center Festival, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, the Fromm Concerts at Harvard University, Warsaw Autumn Festival, Wien Modern, Chicago’s Contempo series, Royaumont Voix Nouvelles, Vancouver New Music, and many others. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels, and been radio-broadcast on ORF (Austria), HRF (Germany), and WQXR’s Q2.

Talea assumes an ongoing role in supporting a new generation of composers, and has undertaken residencies in music departments at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, New York University, and many others.

 

James Falzone's Ricercar in Sixth Tone Harmony

Program Note

Falzone's piece searches for a new harmony by revisiting the sixth-tone system, developed over a hundred years ago in the first modernist efflorescence of microtonality, but worthy of a fresh reconsideration. It seeks to answer the question, "By expanding the gamut of available pitches," [that is, by "adding more notes,"] "can we both create interesting relationships of dissonance in addition to expanding the acoustic framework of harmony?"

Behind the Score:

Recently released on New World Records is a portrait album of Falzone's music, featuring performances by ensembles with a variety of instrumental forces, including the Arditti Quartet and ELISION Ensemble, as well as an orchestral work for the Ostrava New Orchestra. Taken together, these pieces investigate how unexpected but compelling results might emerge from seemingly euphonious and otherwise familiar materials.

About the album:

Falzone has a unique approach to music, and the result is multilayered. Recommended for the adventurous! —Fanfare

The music has a sensuous and imaginative quality that goes beyond the purely cerebral. —Fanfare

 

 

Brian Caswell's Arrow Through the Window

 

 

Program Note

This work is an answer to a question that I have long been asking: how can multiple meters happen at the
same time?

Arrow Through the Window has two groups of musicians. The two groups share a common pulse, or beat. But the larger groupings of that pulse – or in other words, the meter – differ.

What you are hearing tonight is an excerpt of the piece. It is the first major section of the piece. There are three more major sections to follow.

 

Behind the Score:

Brian Caswell has spent his time at UB exploring diverse musics such as Jazz and Latin drumming and pipe organ playing. He has written Minimalist process pieces, and Neoclassical pieces. Brian's approach was to use this time to continually search. This cycle of exploration has led back to where he started: Jazz composition and piano playing. However, his approach to this music is entirely different than where he was five years ago. It might be better categorized as "Third Stream," which describes a music in between Jazz and Classical. His piece Arrow Through the Window is an arrival point for the composer, which embraces the foundations of his musical practice.

Brian's music can be found on Bandcamp.

William Brobston's SOJOURN

Program note:

SOJOURN is a meditation on a variety of musical gestures that are loosely based on the sounds emanating from a particular kinetic sculpture that I was fascinated with as a child in Birmingham, Alabama. The sounds become increasingly familiar as the tension of the piece unfolds, ultimately driving toward their impending cessation. 

Behind the Score:

Much of my compositional interest lies in the musical parameter of time. The way in which my work often explores this parameter is through the sequencing of repeated musical fragments. These fragments may act as interjections within a musical texture or they may occupy space harmoniously, depending on the nature of the piece. I am interested in the multitude of ways in which these small musical units can combine to create larger networks of sound, while also playing with the listener’s sense of time, memory, and expectation. Sojourn is an example of a piece that relies on a dense texture composed of several recurring fragments, but just as crucial to the composition is the sudden cessation of these sounds once they become familiar. 

Will supplied the following track as an example:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0LKWhvxKi0NH02F2XiNa2v?si=2e962c40689e472b

To explore more of his music, visit Will Brobston's website.

Thomas Little's Two Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel

 

First on the Sinfonietta's program is Thomas Little's Two Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel.

 

Program Note

This tone-poem is based on the first and thirty-seventh chapters of the Book of Ezekiel. The opening section sets Ezekiel (the oboe) against a foreign landscape of strings, before the heavens open to visions of the heavens, strange creatures with multiple faces, and wheels within wheels. The hymn tune “Helmsley” leads to the horn’s vox Dei, empowering Ezekiel on his mission. He soon encounters the second vision: the valley of dry bones, where God commands Ezekiel to prophesy and raise an army of skeletons from the earth. But as the second vision fades, will the people listen?

Behind the Score

The 21st-century composer comes on the heels of a vast and productive era of experimentation. Originality is no longer about generating a style sui generis; one can come up with a personal idiom by mixing and matching different things from different eras, depending on what the piece requires. To that end, Two Visions has the late-Romantic tone poem as a large-scale structure, and fill that mold with an Ivesian approach in textural layering (particularly between the oboe and strings, which bookend the piece), use of a hymn tune at a culmination point (the first vision), and the organ-esque orchestration at the beginning of the coda.

The second vision uses one of my own techniques. I call it “post-ergodic,” after James Tenney's term “ergodic form,” which describes static music of consistent parametric values. My post-ergodic music usually moves faster and consists of fragmentary material. This was taken to the limit in my percussion/electronics piece … as the sparks fly up [embedded below], where a digitized score re-composes itself for each performance, all based on an analysis of the starting motive. In the second vision of Two Visions, similar techniques control the relationships between different kinds of skittering, “bony” material across instruments. This allowed me to write fast music that never exactly repeats, and that can be as long or as short as the pacing of the music requires, and freed me to think more about how and when to tweak these parameters to shape the structure of that vision.

...as the sparks fly up 

 

 Premiered by UB faculty member Tom Kolor at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

Thomas Little’s work can be explored on his website, lentovivace.com.

His educational video series about classical music, Classical Nerd, can be seen on YouTube.

 

Concert! Slee Sinfonietta, March 11, 2025

The Robert & Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, with the Slee Sinfonietta conducted by Matthew Chamberlain, will premiere four pieces by UB graduate student composers on March 11, 7:30pm in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall.

Program:

Thomas Little, Two Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel

William Brobston, SOJOURN

Brian Caswell, Arrow Through Time

~~Intermission~~

James P.A. Falzone, Ricercar in Sixth-Tone Harmony

Falzone, in particular, takes the Sinfonietta to new places, as he utilizes his newly devised sixth-tone tuning system. The work features three separate pianos (tuned differently!) for the first time in the Sinfonietta’s history, and will show the ensemble in its largest formation in over a decade.

Brian Caswell’s work Arrow Through Time is also in an ‘absolute music’ vein and features polymeter, a technique in which different musical parts play at the same time but using different meters, or time signatures, for a richly complex rhythmic effect. 

William Brobston’s SOJOURN is a hefty revision of work presented at June in Buffalo 2024, and plays with time, memory, and expectation as fragments morph and return in unexpected ways.

Leading off the concert, and writing from specific extramusical inspiration, Thomas Little’s work Two Visions of the Prophet Ezekiel is a tone poem based on the first and 37th chapters of the Biblical book of Ezekiel.

Tickets may be purchased here ($10, or free with student ID).

Stay tuned for program notes, further details into the composers’ processes, and extra behind-the-score info this week!

June in Buffalo 2025: Slee Sinfonietta

We are excited to announce that the Slee Sinfonietta will continue its annual residency at June in Buffalo 2025. The Sinfonietta is the professional chamber orchestra in residence at the University at Buffalo and the flagship ensemble of the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music. The ensemble presents a series of concerts each year that feature performances of challenging new works by contemporary composers and lesser-known works from the chamber orchestra repertoire. This year, programming includes a concert of four premieres by the University at Buffalo PhD composers, including a dissertation work which features the novel sixth-tone tuning system devised by James Falzone and three (three!) pianos tuned to different pitch levels.

Founded in 1997 by composer David Felder and comprised of a core group including UB faculty performance artists, visiting artists, national and regional professionals and advanced performance students, the group is conducted by leading conductors and composers. This ensemble has produced world-class performances of important repertoire for over 25 years, and its activities include touring, professionally produced recordings, and unique concert experiences for listeners of all levels of experience.

The ensemble has been conducted by major figures including Brad Lubman, Case Scaglione, Charles Wuorinen, Matthias Pintscher, Jim Baker, Harvey Sollberger, Robert Treviño, and Gil Rose. Featured soloists have included, among many, sopranos Laura Aiken, Julia Bentley, and Lucy Shelton; bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood; bass Ethan Herschenfeld; violinists Jaime Laredo, Tim Fain, and Viviane Hagner, Yuki Numata Resnick, and Irvine Arditti; pianist Ursula Oppens; flutists Pierre-Yves Artaud, Mario Caroli, and Tara Helen O'Connor; and French hornist Adam Unsworth. UB faculty member performers have included Jon Nelson (trumpet), Tom Kolor (percussion), Eric Huebner (piano), Tiffany DuMouchelle (soprano), and Jonathan Golove (cello, current Artistic Director of the Center for 21st Century Music). Music recordings include releases on Mode Records, Coviello Records (recently here), and Albany Records.

The Slee Sinfonietta is an ensemble of flexible size. For June in Buffalo 2025, the Slee Sinfonietta will present programs mixing solo works, chamber music, and larger groupings.

June in Buffalo 2025: [Switch~ Ensemble]

The June in Buffalo Festival is thrilled to welcome back [Switch~ Ensemble], who have been regular performers in the Festival and at the Center. They last visited the Center for 21st Century Music for a terrific residency from February 27 to March 2, 2023 and for June in Buffalo 2024.

A new music ensemble for the 21st Century, [Switch~ Ensemble] is dedicated to the creation of new works for chamber ensemble: they bring bold new acoustic, electroacoustic, and multimedia projects to life. At the core of each performance is their commitment to the total integration of technology and live musicians. They strive for compelling artistry achieved through the seamless creation, production, and execution of new music, and believe that working directly with composers—in a medium where the score is a point of departure rather than a finish line—allows for new and thrilling musical possibilities.

[Switch~] contributes to the future of the genre by strongly advocating for and commissioning the music of a new generation of emerging young composers. They have enjoyed fruitful collaborations with both emerging and established composers, with commissions and premieres of works by composers including Anna-Louise Walton, Alican Çamci, Igor Santos, Katherine Young, Stefano Gervasoni, Stefan Prins, Wojtek Blecharz, Anthony Vine, Rand Steiger, Philippe Leroux, Timothy McCormack, Tonia Ko, James Bean, Matt Sargent, Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, Esaias Järnegard, Sivan Eldar, Julio Zúñiga, Zeynep Toraman, Alexander Schubert, Adrien Trybucki, Elvira Garifzyanova, Santiago Diez-Fischer, Lisa Streich, Anthony Pateras, and many others.

Founded in 2012 at the Eastman School of Music, the [Switch~ Ensemble] looks toward the future of contemporary music. They are dedicated to performing high-level chamber music integrated with cutting-edge technology and supporting emerging and early career composers. They are passionate about helping to build a diverse canon of 21st century works that leaves space for all voices—especially those that have historically been excluded from our field.

 The bends by Kelly Sheehan, premiered 2021

Presentation by Dani Dobkin and Matt Sargent

The Center is pleased to welcome Dani Dobkin and Matt Sargent (UB PhD, '18) for a presentation about their aesthetic and philosophical orientation toward American and European experimental and minimalist music. 

Details:

November 15, 1:00 - 4:00 pm

Baird Recital Hall

This lecture is FREE and open to the public.

For a sampling of their collaborative work, see their new album, Bend, out now. 

Bend

Sargent's compositions have been described as “bringing a sharpened sense of the transcendental into the 21st century.” (Paul Muller, Sequenza21) On Ghost Music, Bill Meyer writes, “this music isn’t about following in anyone’s footsteps; it uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential place.” (The Wire Magazine) His guitar work on Bend, a duo album with synthesist Dani Dobkin, was described as “a guitar record retrieved from far in the future.” (Antonio Poscic, Research Music)

Matt is currently engaged with expanding available repertoire for the pedal steel and electric guitar. In 2022, he commissioned new music for solo pedal steel from Michael Pisaro-Liu, Carl Stone, and Nomi Epstein. He co-composed a new work for just intonation guitar with Robert Carl, Splectar, which can be heard on Carl’s Infinity Avenue (Neuma Records, 2024). His solo pedal steel performance of Kevin Good’s Trails (2019-2022) was released by Sawyer Editions in 2023. His recording of James Romig’s hour-length piece for electric guitar, The Fragility of Time was released on A Wave Press in 2024.

Talea Ensemble Residency

“The Talea Ensemble makes modernist music not just accessible but positively engaging through its combination of commanding virtuosity and infectious commitment.”  -TimeOut New York

We are pleased to welcome Talea Enemble for the first part of a two part residency this academic year! Talea will be performing a concert of contemporary music on October 22 (tickets available here) followed by a workshop of student works the next day. The concert includes works by current UB faculty members Tiffany M. Skidmore and Ming Tsao and features the conducting talents of Jim Baker, returning to UB after conducting multiple ensembles during June in Buffalo 2024.

 

Concert Program

 

October 22, 7:30 | Lippes Concert Hall

 

Olga Neuwirth - Quasare / Pulsare II (2016) for Violin, Cello, Piano

Tiffany M. Skidmore* - The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (2015) for Flute, Bass Clarinet & Fixed Media

Igor Santos - Lamento (2016) for Flute, Clarinet, Piano, Percussion, Violin, Cello, Electronics

INTERMISSION

Pascale Criton - Process (2013/24) for Flute, Trombone, Guitar, Violin, Cello **US Premiere**

Luigi Nono - A Pierre. Dell'azzurro silenzio, inquietum (1985) for Bass flute, Contrabass clarinet, Electronics

Ming Tsao* - Not Reconciled (2002-03) - Clarinet, cello, trombone, guitar, percussion, conductor ~15 min

 

*UB faculty. 

 

Their spring visit will conclude the residency with a premiere concert on Friday, March 14 at 3:00 p.m.(free to the public!), including works written for them by UB graduate student composers Sohwa Lee, Andres Bonilla Garcia, Chi Yen Huang, Jackson Roush, Francisco Corthey, and Lihuen Sirvent.

A Sample of Talea's Work

Preview of Stephen Takasugi's Sideshow

Work with Olga Neuwirth

A Visit to Ciminelli Hall with Tomás Henriques

 🎵Meet Me in Ciminelli, Meet Me at the Hall… 🎶

The Center is pleased to announce a fruitful collaboration has begun through a co-sponsored event, our first of the new academic year. The graduate composers of the UB Music Department made a trip to Ciminelli Hall at UB’s fellow SUNY school, Buffalo State, to hear two presentations by Buffalo State professor Tomás Henriques (PhD in Music Composition, UB ‘97), one about his own musical practice and composition, and the other a talk on spatialized audio focused on its realization in Ciminelli Hall. Dr. Henriques specializes in electronic-human musical interfaces, most notably musical instruments which while electronic in nature provide haptic (physical) feedback to performers similar to videogame controllers or a buzzing cell phone.  Not only does he fabricate internationally acclaimed new hardware (2010 Guthman Award), Dr. Henriques has a unique technological skillset, allowing him to match his excellent hardware with his own excellent software, writing programs to take advantage of his invented instruments or which are themselves instruments, as well as writing CIM, a software system which allows the integration of Ciminelli Hall’s three different speaker systems.

Ordinarily, speaker systems which are themselves controlled by proprietary software, such as the Yamaha AFC (“Active Field Control”) system, cannot exchange information or be controlled by third parties. Yet, through his own communication skills, persistence, and technological wizardry, Dr. Henriques has managed to integrate the three speaker systems, controlling them through bespoke software. The graphical, intuitive interface he fashioned fascinated the UB composers. CIM is able to move a sound’s source anywhere in the concert hall, from a far back corner to the stage, at almost any speed. Multiple spatial effects, including bouncing a sound source off a wall, the Doppler effect, and even a sonic game of Pong, are all possible.

“Ciminelli Hall is one of Buffalo’s best-kept secrets,” he said.

“But, you don’t want it to be?” this author asked.

“No – tell everyone!” Henriques replied.

After the presentations, two fifth-year PhD candidates were persuaded to consider bringing their dissertation works to the hall in the next year – Lihuen Sirvent (title TBD for chamber ensemble, electronics, spatialized sound, video) and Jonathan Rainous (Meeting Place, ca. 50 minutes, for solo sax and electronics, performance in late spring or early summer). Stay tuned for performance details and other collaborative efforts!

 Double Slide Controller, Song of Solomon

 

 Sonik Spring Demonstration

June in Buffalo 2024: [Switch ~ Ensemble] Back in Buffalo

We are pleased to welcome back the [Switch ~ Ensemble] for June in Buffalo 2024. A dynamic group committed to collaboration and artistic expansion, the ensemble will perform works by participant and senior composers in several concerts and sessions throughout the festival, including two public concerts on Wednesday, June 12 at 7:30pm and Thursday, June 13 at 4pm in Slee Hall.

These concerts are free and open to the public. 

Read more about [Switch ~ Ensemble], their previous June in Buffalo performances, and their recent residency with the University at Buffalo here.

June in Buffalo 2024: The Arditti Quartet Celebrates 50 Years

Irvine Arditti Photo by Octavio Nava

The illustrious Arditti Quartet returns for June in Buffalo 2024. A momentous occasion, this festival, for which the quartet has been in residence several times (see here and here), falls within the ensemble’s fiftieth anniversary season. Founded by Irvine Arditti (violin) in 1974, the quartet has established itself as innovative and masterful interpreters of new music. Its membership currently includes Arditti, Ashot Sarkissjan (violin), Lucas Fels (cello), and Ralf Ehlers (viola). They will spend several hours in collaborative rehearsals and recording sessions with participant composers, and can be heard in a concert featuring works by senior composers this Friday, June 14 at 7:30pm in the Lippes Concert Hall.

The concert is free and open to the public.

Friday, June 14, 7:30pm:

 

Jonathan Golove EQ 

Karola Obermüller xs

Amy Williams Richter textures   // 

Hilda Paredes Hacia un Bitácora Capilar

Helmut Lachenmann Grido

June in Buffalo 2024: Opening Concert with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

June in Buffalo 2024 begins this Sunday, June 9, with a scintillating program by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Assistant Conductor and BPO Diversity Fellow Fernanda Lastra. Ushering in what promises to be a week of outstanding performances, this concert features works by this year’s senior composers–Amy Williams, Hilda Paredes, and Karola Obermüller, as well as participant composer Anna Heflin.

Musician Profile: Fernanda Lastra

We are thrilled to welcome Lastra to the stage for her first June in Buffalo appearance. She was appointed Diversity Fellow of the BPO in 2022 and promoted to Assistant Conductor in 2023. In addition to leading the orchestra throughout their regular season Classics, Pops, and Family concerts, Lastra serves on the organization's Diversity Council. She vociferously advocates for broad and creative approaches to musical performances, and particularly champions emerging and underrepresented artists. Lastra, accompanied by June in Buffalo Director Jonathan Golove and senior composer Amy Williams, discussed the state of music and the upcoming concert on Visit Buffalo Niagara's Hear Here: Live Music in Buffalo, NY podcast, linked here.

This inaugural concert will take place in Slee Hall at 2:30pm. Tickets are $10 (Free with a valid UB student ID) and open to the general public. They may be purchased from Ticketmaster or at the Slee Hall box office.

 

Program: 

Amy Williams Flood Lines

Karola Obermüller Im Vorraum

Anna Heflin Symphony N. 993 

Hilda Paredes Zaztun  

For more information about the festival, keep an eye out for future Edge of the Center posts, and read the recent Buffalo Spree article, featuring comments from Golove and Williams.