2025 Festival Schedule!

 The 2025 Festival schedule is here! Only 11 days until the festival begins! 

Sunday, June 1

 

Opening concert: Baird Recital Hall, 6:30pm

Participant composers perform their original solo works

Monday, June 2

 

Composer lecture: George Lewis, BRH, 10am-12pm

 

Afternoon workshop/concert: Kyle Hutchins, BRH, 4pm

Sax workshop for composers

 

Evening concert: Lippes Concert Hall (LCH), 7:30pm

Solo works performed by pianist Eric Huebner (JiB composers George Lewis, David Sanford, and Andrew Nixon, along with those of Roger Reynolds, Leah Muir, and György Ligeti)

Tuesday, June 3

 

Composer lecture: Karola Obermüller, BRH 10am-12pm

 

Afternoon Concert: Meridian Arts Ensemble, BRH 4pm

Works by senior and participant composers for brass quintet, including the world premiere of Peter Gilbert’s A Rift Becomes a River and George Lewis’s Tightrope (2023)

Evening concert: Slee Sinfonietta, LCH, 7:30pm

Conducted by James Baker

Large ensemble works by JiB senior and participant composers, including David Sanford’s Chamber Concerto No. 5

Wednesday, June 4

 

Composer lecture: Jonathan Golove, June in Buffalo artistic director, BRH 10am-12pm

 

Afternoon concert: Members of the Slee Sinfonietta, BRH, 4pm

Solos and chamber works by JiB composers

 

Evening concert: [Switch~ Ensemble], Lippes Concert Hall, 7:30pm

Conducted by Wei-Han Wu, with soprano Tiffany Du Mouchelle

Ensemble works by JiB composers, including George Lewis’s Anthem, David Sanford’s Grace Canticles, and Peter Gilbert’s Meditation upon the Awakening

 

Thursday, June 5

 

Composer lecture: Ming Tsao, BRH 10am-12pm

Afternoon concert: [Switch~ Ensemble], BRH, 4pm

Conducted by Wei-Han Wu

Ensemble works by JiB composers, featuring Ming Tsao’s Canon (2001) and Dritte Stimme zu Bachs zweistimmigen Rätselkanons (2023, US premiere)

 

Evening concert: Baird B1, 7:30pm

Composer’s Cabaret Improvisation Ensemble

 

 

Friday, June 6

 

Composer lecture: David Sanford, BRH, 10am-12pm

 

Afternoon concert: BRH, 2-5:30 pm [Note: unusual start time]

A special concert of the music of Morton Feldman

For Christian Wolff, performed by flutist Lihuen Sirvent and pianist James Falzone

 

Evening concert: Meridian Arts Ensemble, LCH, 7:30pm

Works by JiB composers, including David Sanford’s Credo (2021)

 

 

Saturday, June 7

Composer lecture: Peter Gilbert, BRH, 10am-12pm

Closing concert: Slee Sinfonietta, LCH, 2:30pm

Conducted by James Baker, with soprano Tiffany Du Mouchelle

Works by JiB senior composers Ming Tsao, George Lewis, and Karola Obermüller's Bridges to Ruth (2024), along with works by JiB participant composers

 

Reception to follow Slee Sinfonietta concert

 

BONUS CONCERT: Metropolis Ensemble, Silo City, 6pm

New works by UB composers

June in Buffalo in the Press!

June in Buffalo was proud to have the Buffalo Philharmonic join us at recent festivals, most recently conducted by Fernanda Lastra in the Festival's first program comprised entirely of works by female composers. On the occasion of her BPO swan song, Ms. Lastra was interviewed by a local culture magazine. From the magazine:

Lastra also supports contemporary classical music composers through continued involvement with the internationally acclaimed University at Buffalo's June in Buffalo Festival, where she has made some of the most challenging music accessible to concert-goers: "It has been a unique experience working alongside remarkable living composers at the June in Buffalo Music Festival. Collaborating directly with composers is not only fascinating but also enriching. It provides conductors real-time interactions with composers and insights that deepen our understanding of the music-making process. Moreover, the pieces highlighted in this festival often push the boundaries of music and creativity, challenging both musicians, myself as a conductor, and the audience to explore new sounds and artistic expressions that are at the forefront of contemporary classical music."

Read more at the Buffalo Spree. 

 

 

June in Buffalo 2025: Peter Gilbert

 Peter Gilbert will be joining us for June in Buffalo 2025!

“Filled with the ghosts of sounds. He captures a dark, yet hopeful wonder through variation in color, mood, and the semblance of melodies. ...Ethereal, ambient, and benignly haunting like a morning fog on the ocean. There is always something hidden, just beyond what is happening, that seems to slowly reveal itself but never quite does.” 

– Kraig Lamper, American Record Guide, 2011

Peter Gilbert writes: “I love the feeling of being enveloped in a musical experience, of disappearing into sound. I search for musical moments that can conjure up secret passageways to transcendence—that we performers, collaborators, listeners can conjure together.”

Peter Gilbert's work combines traditional instrumental writing with elements of improvisation, live-performed electronics, and other media in works for the concert hall as well as for multi-media theater, film, and installation. In his words, he attempts to “become enveloped in a musical experience, disappearing into sound.”

Gilbert has held artist residencies with numerous institutions in Europe and the US including ZKM | Institut für Akustik und Musik, Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), and the Aaron Copland House and festivals such as the Tage Aktueller Musik, Nürnberg (Germany) and the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival. Accolades and commissions have come from the Barlow Foundation, New Music USA, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Kennedy Center Education, NRW Fonds Neues Musiktheater, the Russolo Foundation, the Look & Listen Festival, the Third Practice Festival, the Washington International Composers Competition, Stadtstheater Darmstadt, the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, and Theater Russelsheim.

Gilbert taught at Harvard University, Wellesley College, and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and was co-founder of the Young Composers Program at CIM and its Co-Directer from 2003-2010. Since 2010 he has taught composition at the University of New Mexico.  Gilbert's second portrait album for New Focus Recordings was named a Best of 2021 by Sequenza21. His work as a composer, performer and producer can also be heard on Innova Recordings, GM Recordings, Sono Luminus, Affeto, Centaur, and at http://petergilbert.net.

June in Buffalo 2025: Karola Obermüller

We are thrilled to that Karola Obermüller will be joining us for a second consecutive year at June in Buffalo.

Karola Obermüller composes in search of the unknown, with layers upon layers of obscured material buried deep beneath a surface that is sometimes sumptuous, sometimes bristling with rhythmic energy. Her unique voice began forming in collages of sound made with tape recorders as a child and evolved later with composition degrees from the Meistersinger-Konservatorium Nürnberg, the Hochschule für Musik Saar, and the University Mozarteum Salzburg. Her sense of rhythm and form was forever changed by studying Carnatic and Hindustani classical music in Chennai and Delhi, India. 

 A Ph.D. at Harvard University brought her to the US where she taught at Wellesley College and at the University of New Mexico, co-directing the composition area and the annual John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium music festival, before joining the Department of Music at UC San Diego. She also lives and works part of the year in Europe and has been a visiting artist at ZKM, Deutsche Akademie Rom, Centro Tedesco di studi Veneziani, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Leipzig Gewandhaus and Hanns Eisler House, and IRCAM as well as serving as a resident composer for new music festivals at Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg, Conservatorio Piccinni di Bari (Italy), University Mozarteum Salzburg, Festival Virtuosi Century XXI, Recife (Brazil), Samobor Music Festival Croatia, and others. Obermüller frequently serves as an adjudicator for competitions such as the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Hochschulwettbewerb, the Femfestival, and the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse.  

reflejos distantes - Recorded at June in Buffalo 2024

Center for 21st Century Music · reflejos distantes

Her music, often political, always dramatic, includes operas for Staatstheater Nürnberg, Theater Bielefeld, Theater Bonn, Theater Heidelberg, and Stuttgart’s Musik der Jahrhunderte. The emotional juxtapositions of story suspended in a tableau architecture that one finds in her operas can be heard in her concert works as well which include commissions from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Music Foundation, New Music USA, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Saarländischer Rundfunk, and numerous renowned soloists and ensembles.

Obermüller works with lauded contemporary music ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Arditti Quartet, Neue Vocalsolisten, Ekmeles, MusikFabrik, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, E-MEX Ensemble, Iridium Quartet, New Thread Quartet, Soli fan tutti, Pegnitzschäfer Klangkonzepte, Ensemble Adapter, New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble, ensemble phorminx, sonic.art saxophone quartet, Splinter Reeds, Gewandhaus-Ensemble Avantgarde, and AsianArt Ensemble. She has received numerous awards including the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis, Darmstädter Musikpreis, the New York Musicians Club Prize, the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer’s Award, the Bavarian Youth Prize for Composition (awarded by Zubin Mehta), the John Green Prize for Excellence in Music Composition, and the 1st Prize of the “New Note” International Composers Competition Croatia.

Recordings of several of Obermüller’s works have been released on CD including Jacqueline Leclair’s solo CD (New Focus Recordings, Music for English Horn Alone, FCR272), a record by harpsichordist Luca Quintavalle (Brilliant Classics 96476: Mousikē—the art of the muses), a CD with the Voices of the Pearl project (Volume 3), and a disk by Duo Harmonium d’art et Pianoforte (forthcoming on dreyer-gaido). Having been selected by the German Music Council to be a part of the Contemporary Music Edition, the first portrait CD of her music was released by WERGO in 2018 and a second CD is forthcoming on New Focus Recordings.

June in Buffalo 2025: Ming Tsao

We are happy to announce Ming Tsao as a senior faculty member at June in Buffalo 2025.

Dr. Tsao is the newly appointed Birge-Cary Chair in Music Composition in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo, and we are glad that he has agreed to join us as a senior faculty member.

For Ming Tsao, composition is an act of deep interrogation. His music dissects sound and syntax, pulling apart traditional musical structures to expose something raw, intricate, and startlingly new. Tsao brings this rigorously exploratory approach to both the concert hall and the classroom, offering composers an opportunity to engage with one of contemporary music’s most precise and philosophical minds.

Tsao’s work often reimagines the very foundations of musical expression—his compositions unfold with a microscopic attention to detail, where texture, articulation, and phrasing become the building blocks of a radical new syntax. Yet beneath this structural intensity lies a profound sensitivity to beauty, albeit one that resists easy sentimentality. He says:

Mine is a materialist music whose sound world lies outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, with the hopes of placing the listener in a space where one is required to rethink their personhood within a larger domain of life. Noise and the violence enacted upon my music through rhythm and meter produce a music whose very integrity is damaged and violated, signaling the opposition and resistance that certain lyrical procedures meet or defy. This opposition and resistance can open our listening to a different sense of musical expression, an expression that comprises sounds before they are fully recruited into the action of human agency.

Poetry and text are recurring touchstones in Tsao’s work, not just as sources of inspiration but as integral components of his compositional language. His upcoming large-scale opera, Mudan ting (The Peony Pavilion), is a re-working of the Chinese Ming dynasty Kunqu opera of the same name, which will have its world premiere at the National Theatre Mannheim in 2026. Tsao’s through-lines of poetry, text, temporal displacement of poetic materials, and history (musical or otherwise) combine in this two-hour work.

June in Buffalo 2025: David Sanford

David Sanford will be joining us for June in Buffalo 2025!

Few composers move as effortlessly between musical worlds as David Sanford. His work draws as much from jazz and big band traditions as it does from contemporary classical and experimental music, creating a sound that is bold, high-energy, and unapologetically genre-fluid. Whether writing for large ensembles, orchestras, or his powerhouse David Sanford Big Band (formerly the Pittsburgh Collective), Sanford thrives in spaces where stylistic boundaries blur.

Much of Sanford’s music pulses with rhythmic drive and a deep-rooted sense of groove, who embrace complexity with fire. Works like Black Noise and Seven Kings showcase his ability to fuse intricate orchestration with visceral, improvisation-inflected energy. His collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, JACK Quartet, and the Meridian Arts Ensemble reflect a composer equally at home in the concert hall and the jazz club.

V-Reel, with the Pittsburgh Collective

Sanford has received commissions from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Speculum Musicae, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, and the Barlow Endowment; his works have been performed by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under Kent Nagano, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra under Marin Alsop, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Chicago Symphony Chamber Players among others.

His honors include the Rome Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Radcliffe Institute, and he was the arranger for cellist Matt Haimovitz’s Grammy Award-nominated album Meeting of the Spirits. The title track of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s recording of the composer’s works, Black Noise, was named one of “The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2019” by the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/arts/music/best-classical-music.html).

He received degrees in theory and composition from the University of Northern Colorado, New England Conservatory, and Princeton University, and is currently Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College and the director of the David Sanford Big Band.

At June in Buffalo 2025, Sanford brings his singular voice as both a composer and mentor. His presence at the festival is an invitation to engage with a musical language that is electrifying, deeply considered, and always evolving. We look forward to his input at this year’s festival!

Sampler of Sanford's Recordings

June in Buffalo 2025: George Lewis

The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music is excited to welcome George Lewis as a senior faculty member at June in Buffalo 2025.

Few figures embody the restless spirit of experimental music quite like George Lewis. A towering presence in contemporary composition, interactive electronics, and improvisation, Lewis continually pushes at the boundaries of what music can be. His work spans orchestral writing, computer music, and spontaneous performance, all underpinned by a deep engagement with technology and its creative possibilities.

A longtime faculty member at Columbia University, Lewis has mentored generations of composers, many of whom have gone on to shape the landscape of new music themselves. His 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself is a landmark study of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), of which he has been a key figure since the 1970s. More recently, Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today (2023, Volke Verlages) “presents unique new perspectives on Afrodiasporic contemporary composers active between 1960 and the present… [engaging] with opera, orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and electroacoustic music, as well as sound art, conceptual art, and digital intermedia, revealing Afrodiasporic new music as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation that offers new subjects, histories, and identities.” For more on his contributions to music, see his MacArthur Foundation page here.

But Lewis is not just a historian of experimentalism—he is one of its most vital practitioners. Recent works such as Minds in Flux (2021), premiered at the BBC Proms, exemplify his continued fascination with real-time electronics, spatialized sound, and improvisatory structures. His collaborations with cutting-edge ensembles—from Ensemble Dal Niente to the International Contemporary Ensemble—reflect his ever-expanding sonic palette. We are excited to have him bring his multifaceted expertise to masterclasses and lecture this summer.!

The Recombinant Trilogy, on New Focus Recordings

Minds in Flux, BBC Proms

 

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!