Two of creative music’s most heralded luminaries, composer-pianist Vijay Iyer and composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith construct powerful, uncategorizable duets full of subtle emotion, mystery, and spiritual intensity. Their music reveals the improvisational magic of the duo, the expressive individuality of the participants, and the ways that they can, as Smith says, “merge as a single wave, or a single voice.”

Referring to Smith as his “hero, friend, and teacher,” Iyer played in the AACM icon’s Golden Quartet from 2005 through 2012. Their duo, first formed in the crucible of that band, received sweeping praise for their album A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016). Nine years later, with Smith in his eighties, the duo returned with their spellbinding 2025 release Defiant Life (ECM).

As Iyer writes in the liner notes to Defiant Life, “This recording session was shaped by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility.” Defiant Life was named one of the best albums of 2025 by various publishers, including The Wire, Stereogum, Magnet, The Boston Globe, and The Arts Fuse, with San Diego Union-Tribune calling it "one of the most contemplative, understated and moving albums of the year."

Join us in Evelyn's café from 6–9:30PM for snacks and a cash bar. 

IMA is electro-percussion collaboration of Amma Ateria (electronics) and Nava Dunkelman (percussion), who combine noise music, Japanese poetry, and spatialized sound into a visceral and immersive live performance. Through restraint and release, deep drones collide with metallic lightness and bursts of violence, producing expressionistic industrial intensities that move towards moments of unexpected serenity.

Working with extreme precision and dynamic range, IMA pushes silence and density driven to the brink of breakage, allowing fragility and impermanence to surface from within the overwhelming sonic force. Their music asks: What forms of beauty become possible in the aftermath of collapse?

Performed in the 39-channel ambisonic sound environment of EMPAC’s Studio 1, そして花びらはえ、散りゆく And The Petals Burst Into Flames... unfolds as a stark and vibrant meditation on surrender, destruction, and transformation—an attempt to regenerate beauty through the unstable catalysts of pleasure, noise, and dissolution. 

Join us in Evelyn's café from 7:30–9:30PM for snacks and a cash bar. 

The [Switch~ Ensemble], specialists in multimedia performance and electro-acoustic music, develop and rehearse commissioned works by composers Christopher Chandler, Julie Herndon, Igor Santos, and Jason Thorpe Buchanan. The world premiere performances at the conclusion of the residency utilize the advanced spatial audio and video capabilities of EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman.

We Will Not Be Composed is a multimedia performance created in collaboration with saxophonist and composer Stevie Manning, author and activist Soraya Chemaly, and new media artist Xuan to challenge gendered perceptions of anger in America. 

During the residency, Xuan will bring original visual art, including moving image media, projections and on-site installations tailored to the premiere's score and themes and the unique presentation capabilities of Studio 1, while Manning will be rehearsing along with the other members of the six-musician ensemble. Additionally, they will work with EMPAC's Wave Field Synthesis and ambisonic audio systems to situate the recorded voices throughout the venue and will record the score to allow the work to travel as an installation in the future.

We Will Not Be Composed is a multimedia performance created in collaboration with saxophonist and composer Stevie Manning, author and activist Soraya Chemaly, and projection artist Xuan to challenge gendered perceptions of anger in America. Audience members simultaneously experience a live performance of a musical score by Manning featuring ondes Martenot, projections of light and texture from Xuan, and recorded voices of women expressing their experiences with and ideas about anger in immersive spatial audio. Whether these expressions of anger are startling, familiar, or provoking, audience members discover how collective recognition and expression of anger in the face of abusive power and domination can become a catalyst for justice and change.  

Drawing from jazz, experimental improvised music, and chamber music, the instrumentation of We Will Not Be Composed features the recorded voices and a six-piece ensemble with Manning on alto saxophone, Jessica Ackerley on electric guitar, Ha-Yang Kim and rocío sánchez on cello, Devon Gates on double bass, and Suzanne Farrin on the ondes Martenot.

The experimental music group [Switch~ Ensemble] brings to life three new multimedia works, combining EMPAC’s capabilities for spatial audio and multi-channel video with the virtuosic bravura of the ensemble’s seven members. Renowned composers Igor Santos, Julie Herndon, Jason Thorpe Buchanan, and Christopher Chandler incorporate elements of live audio and video signal processing to create stunning and impactful worlds of sights and sounds, full of vibrant musical detail and dynamic visual tableaus.

Sound artist and composer Micah Silver is in residence in EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman to produce and create a new version of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’s 1971 landmark electronic music work Persépolis. Working with EMPAC’s stage technologies and audio teams, Silver introduces new dramaturgical elements to the piece specifically designed for the venue and for TOPOS Music Festival 2025 audiences.

Composer Sarah Davachi takes advantage of the acoustical properties of the EMPAC Concert Hall and Studio 2 to record her work, The Rose Dialogues and Interludes, scored for two violas, cello, organ, and electronics. The composition is a featured world premiere at the TOPOS Music Festival 2025.

For Liberation Meditations: A Call, electronic musicians and composers King Britt, Suzi Analogue, and Myles Ortiz-Green collaborate for an evening of music that is at turns ambient and driving. They draw from deep archives–historic speeches, interviews, fragments of collective memory–reframing and recomposing in performance as mantras grounded in the ethos of freedom. The result is an improvised, immersive, and spatial offering created especially for EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman and the TOPOS Music Festival 2025.

TOPOS presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by celebrated composer-performer Sarah Davachi. The Rose Dialogues, scored for two violas, cello, organ, and electronics, begins with the simplest of musical devices—the canon (or, which can colloquially be thought of as a round)—and spins an oceanic world of unexpected harmonies, haunting melodies, and formal surprises.

The topos of Davachi’s work is listening itself. Her music invites a deep attention, drawing us gently into the slow blossoming of her sonic landscapes. Within the veritable ocean of alternate tunings and temperaments, we are carried by waves of respite and repose, a darker pull that nudges us toward the unexpected.

Joined by musicians Eyvind Kang, Whitney Johnson (violas) and Lucy Railton (cello), Sarah Davachi’s piece moves slowly and with a precise ear for timbre and harmony. Its surprises feel hard-won, emerging from a rigor rooted in early Western compositional techniques: counterpoint, canon, heterophony, polyphony. And yet, her music is timeless, a dilated present that inches towards an uncertain yet harmonious future. A future that, in listening, seems to go on without end.

The premiere performance of Davachi’s The Rose Dialogues & Interludes at TOPOS is preceded by an onstage conversation with the composer.