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.

 

Yehudi Wyner's Piano Concerto "Chiavi in Mano" at June in Buffalo 2013

We’re enjoying having Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Yehudi Wyner on the Composition Faculty of June in Buffalo 2013, and looking forward to hearing his music this week. On Wednesday, June 5th, Talea Ensemble will give a concert featuring Wyner’s Refrain, and on Saturday, June 8th, SIGNAL's concert will feature Wyner’s Passage, which will be conducted by Brad Lubman, and feature soloists Irvine Arditti on violin and Ken Radnofsky on saxophone. Both concerts will be at 7:30 p.m. in Slee Hall.

Yehudi Wyner

The final concert of June in Buffalo 2013 will be on Sunday, June 9th, at 2:30 p.m. in Slee Hall, when the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will perform works by JiB Faculty composers that will conclude with Wyner’s Piano Concerto, Chiavi in Mano, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Our guest Geoffrey Burleson will join JoAnn Falletta and the BPO as the piano soloist on Chiavi in Mano – Burleson’s playing has been described as “vibrant” and “compelling”  by the New York Times, who also praised his “command, projection of rhapsodic qualities without loss of rhythmic vigor, and appropriate sense of spontaneity and fetching colors.”

A recent 55-minute audio interview with Yehudi Wyner, by Christopher Lyon, is available at the Huffington Post. For a little more information, we’ve excerpted a small bit from Wyner’s biography and reproduced it below, the complete bio can be found at the Milken Archive:

“For nearly a half century Yehudi Wyner has been recognized as one of America’s most gifted composers. Although born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he grew up in New York City. His father, Lazar Weiner (1897–1982), was a leading exponent of Yiddish high musical culture, both as a choral conductor and as a composer, and is now the acknowledged avatar of the Yiddish art song medium. Throughout his youth, Wyner was exposed to his parents’ Yiddishist intellectual milieu, and their home was frequented by literati and artists from the Yiddish cultural orbit. (His father had the spelling of his children’s surname changed—though not his own—to preclude a common mispronunciation.)

“By the age of four or five, no doubt inspired by the music he heard in that environment, Wyner began improvising short pieces that had an eastern European Jewish folk or Hassidic character. He started his formal musical life as a pianist, although he never studied with his father—who was himself a brilliant pianist. While a piano student of Loni Epstein at The Juilliard School, Wyner became increasingly attracted to composition, which he then studied at Yale with Richard Donovan and Paul Hindemith, and at Harvard with Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. After completing his undergraduate work, he spent a summer in residence at the Brandeis Arts Institute in Santa Susana, California, a division of the Brandeis Camp, where the music director was Max Helfman (1901–1963), one of the seminal figures in Jewish music in America. That program brought together college-age students as well as established Jewish—and especially Israeli—composers, in an effort to broaden the Jewish artistic horizons of young musicians. There, Wyner came into contact with some of the most creative and accomplished Israeli composers and other artists of that period, and he was introduced to new artistic possibilities inherent in modern Jewish cultural consciousness.”

Check out the video below of Yehudi Wyner's Quartet for Oboe and String Trio, performed by the Mimesis Ensemble at Fenway Park:

Link to this post here.

Talea Ensemble at June in Buffalo 2013!

We’re gearing up for June in Buffalo 2013 and preparing to host the renown Talea Ensemble for the festival, from June 3 – 9. They’ll be traveling here from New York City with conductor James Baker, and will be rehearsing and performing pieces by June in Buffalo student composers, and offering an evening concert of works by June in Buffalo Faculty composers.

Talea has been very active recently – just last year they released an exquisite album of music by Fausto Romitelli on John Zorn’s label, Tzadik, which they recorded at EMPAC. The CD features five very thoughtfully interpretted chamber ensemble pieces: Amok Koma (2001), Domeniche alla periferia dell”impero (2000), La sabbia del tempo (1991), Nell”alto dei giorni immobili (1990), and Blood on the Floor, Painting 1986 (2000). 

Talea Ensemble

Currently, the Talea Ensemble is preparing a concert of pieces by Austrian composer Beat Furrer, which they’ll be presenting at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City on May 14th. Two days later, they’ll give the U.S. premiere of Beat Furrer’s opera Fama, on both May 16th and 17th. More on the premiere here.

One thing we love about Talea is their indefatigable enthusiasm for the music of our time, and the tremendous energy they bring to contemporary American musical life. A bit from their mission statement below:

“In music, the term talea (literally, “cutting” in Latin) refers to collections of repeating, cycling rhythmic patterns. Most often, these patterns are associated with the ars nova period of Medieval music in which new techniques of musical composition were emerging.Talea has also been used in several other traditions including Indian classical music (tala in Sanskrit – a wonderful linguistic coincidence), and throughout the ages in Western music, from the composer Guillaume de Machaut in the 14th Century to Olivier Messiaen and Gérard Grisey in the 20th Century. This idea of a global, timeless, and cutting-edge musical practice, inventive in its construction and beautiful in its execution, is at the root of the Talea Ensemble’s artistic direction.

“The Talea Ensemble is committed to promoting new, groundbreaking music through innovative programming thereby communicating the distinctive voices of composers that deserve to be heard. By commissioning and programming these progressive works alongside the established literature of modern and contemporary repertoire, the ensemble creates a dialogue that challenges the boundaries of music and fosters a greater understanding of the works of today. Additionally, the Talea Ensemble wishes to support and advance familiarity with contemporary American works by bringing it to concert halls and venues not only in New York but also abroad. By developing an interactive relationship between the composers, performers and audience, the Talea Ensemble builds an environment of reciprocal inspiration that sparks the imagination of all.”

Below is a video excerpt of Talea offering a gorgeous interpretation of Helmut Lachenmann's Trio Fluido:

Link to this post here.

June in Buffalo 2013 call for scores announced!

June in Buffalo 2013 call for scores announced! June in Buffalo will be very special this year with the addition of the Performance Institute, which will begin on Thursday, May 30th, and then run concurrently with June in Buffalo from Monday, June 3 – Sunday, June 9th. This will be the first year ever where emerging contemporary music performers and ensembles will be studying, practicing, and workshopping alongside participant composers. We expect one of the most dynamic, collaborative, and compelling June in Buffalo Festivals ever this year, as young contemporary music performers and composers blend together and form relationships with not only faculty composers and performers, but each other as well. Full details on applying as an auditor or participant composer below: 

June in Buffalo

Presented by the Department of Music and The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music, June in Buffalo, a festival and conference dedicated to composers, will take place from June 3 -9, 2013 at the University at Buffalo. June in Buffalo offers an intensive schedule of seminars, lectures, workshops, professional presentations, participant forums and open rehearsals as well as afternoon and evening concerts open to the general public and critics. Each of the invited composers will have one of his/her pieces performed during the festival. Evening performances feature faculty composers, resident ensembles and soloists renowned internationally as interpreters of contemporary music.

Artistic Director

David Felder

Senior Faculty

David Felder

Augusta Read Thomas

Charles Wuorinen

Yehudi Wyner

Resident Ensembles

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

Ensemble Linea

JACK Quartet

SIGNAL

Slee Sinfonietta

Talea Ensemble

Talujon Percussion Ensemble

APPLICATION PROCEDURES

To apply to June in Buffalo, please send all materials by mail. Applications must include the following materials:

1. A résumé or curriculum vitae detailing your education, experience, and creative activity.

2. A letter of reference from someone acquainted with your current compositional activity.

3. A proposal (including score and brief description) requesting the performance of a recent work for

a) Percussion Quartet (or subset)

b) String Quartet (or subset)

c) flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, cello (or subset)

d) solo for any orchestral instrument

e) works with electronics will be considered

f) other instrumentations will be announced shortly

4. One or two scores that demonstrate your recent work and accompanying recordings, if available.

5. A $25 non-refundable processing fee. Checks or money orders should be made payable to June in Buffalo. Foreign applicants must pay by international money order in US currency. Do not send cash.

6. A SASE for the return of materials (optional) and an e-mail address at which you can be easily contacted.

If the performance of a selected work by a participating composer becomes impossible due to circumstances beyond the control of the June in Buffalo festival, every attempt will be made to arrange a substitution where possible.

To apply as an auditor, please send a résumé and the processing fee. Auditors attend all June in Buffalo events, but will not have a piece performed.

All application materials must be postmarked by

FEBRUARY 15, 2013.

Mail to:

June in Buffalo

220 Baird Hall

Music Department

University at Buffalo

Buffalo, NY 14260-4700

Fees

Tuition fee: $700

Auditing fee: $350

Housing

On-campus housing, 7 nights, single occupancy: $300. Additional: $30/night. No double occupancy discounts; no meals included.

For general information, contact J.T. Rinker

phone: (716) 645-0624

fax: (716) 645-3824

email: jtrinker@buffalo.edu

Link to this post here.

Busy summer for UB graduate composers!

Our composers had a very active summer participating at seminars, institutes, conferences, and festivals in the U.S. and all across Europe:

Jacob Gotlib was a selected as a participant composer for a two-week residency at the Wellesley Composers Conference in Wellesley, Massachusettes, where he studied closely with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Melinda Wagner and June in Buffalo veteran composer Eric Chasalow. His piece, Year Without Summer (Daumenkino), was performed by some of today’s expert musicians, including conductor and friend of the Center James Baker, as well as UB faculty clarinettist Jean Kopperud. You can listen to Year Without Summer (Daumenkino) here.

UB graduate composer Jacob Gotlib
photo by Megan Metté

Juan Colón-Hernández spent two weeks at the soundScape Festival in Maccagno, Italy, just south of the French/Swiss Alps, where his piece Hazy Transmutations for violin and piano was performed, coached by pianist and conductor Thomas Rosenkranz.

Dimitar Pentchev participated in this year’s June in Buffalo where his piece, 1:05, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano was performed.

Robert Phillips was selected to be one of twelve composers to spend two weeks at the Harvard University Summer Composition Institute, where his piece Shindō no su for flute, bass clarinet, glockenspiel, keyboard with laptop, violin, viola, and cello, was performed by the Talea Ensemble under the baton of Eduardo Leandro in Paine Hall at Harvard University. He was also invited be a panelist at the Harvard Colloquia during the final days of the Institute, where he discussed the topic, (Un)Original(ity), curated by Aaron Einbond, from the University of Huddersfield.

Nathan Heidelberger had perhaps the most active summer of all – he was chosen to be one of only six composers to spend a month at the Aspen Music Festival led by New York Philharmonic composer-in-residence Christopher Rouse and joined by longtime friend of the Center Augusta Read Thomas and visiting Pulitzer Prize winning composer Jennifer Higdon. Nathan’s piece, in flux / in flecks /influx / inflects, for alto flute, viola, and percussion, was performed by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, an elite group of student performers directed by Sydney Hodkinson. The festival also chose to workshop an orchestra piece of Nathan’s, titled Moves Through a Space, under guidance from conductor and Academy director Robert Spano. Nathan then continued on to the Cultivate Workshop at the Copland House, where his piece, Halve Time, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano was performed.

And the summer is not quite over yet! At the moment, Chun Ting Pang is currently in France participating as a selected composer at Fondation Royaumont with June in Buffalo veteran composer Brian Ferneyhough, and Diana Soh is just beginning her second year as an invited composer for the Cursus II at IRCAM.

Several other University at Buffalo musicians and performers were active this summer as well. UB graduate clarinetist, philosopher, and musicologist Christopher Culp attended the fresh inc. festival in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he worked with some of today’s top new music composers and musicians, and performed Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and Francis Poulenc’s Sextet. UB undergraduate flutist Jamie Sweringa spent two and a half weeks at the Orfeo Music Festival in Vipiteno, Italy, where she studied with flutist Elizabeth Goode and performed in several solo, chamber ensemble, and orchestra performances, and UB undergraduate trombonist Matt Stewart was able to attend both the Atlantic Brass Quintet Summer Seminar and the Summer Brass Institute.