![ASO's full orchestra on EMPAC's concert hall stage with a large audience.](/sites/default/files/styles/convert_to_webp/public/2023-05/aso_ch_2023_o.jpg.webp?itok=p7cgZ6fy)
American Music Festival 2023
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
Main Image: Albany Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall. Photo: Courtesy ASO.
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
Main Image: Albany Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall. Photo: Courtesy ASO.
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
Watch and listen as composer and professor Christopher Theofanidis works with talented composers on honing their craft as part of his weeklong AMF workshop Orchestrating for the 21st Century. Hear how it all comes together on Sunday night at First Draughts Reading Sessions.
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Hip-Hop with a love song set list spun by DJs from Collectiveffort.
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More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
An intimate performance by composer and violinist DBR (Daniel Bernard Roumain), hailed by The New York Times as “about as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets.”
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
DAVID ALAN MILLER, CONDUCTOR | REGINA CARTER, VIOLIN | MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH, SPEAKER
Adolphus Hailstork: Symphony No. 4, “Survive”
David Schiff: Selections from Four Sisters
Daniel Roumain & Marc Bamuthi Joseph: Forgiveness, Spoken Word Concerto for Orchestra (world premiere)
WHAT IS CONVERGENCE? The Albany Symphony, long known for celebrating the breadth of American culture through new music, continues its community-building work with Convergence, a three-year collaborative project through which the Symphony, Capital Region communities, and nationally acclaimed artistic partners join together in an exploration of three Black American art forms. Funded by the Carl E. Touhey Foundation, Convergence will build community-wide awareness of our contemporary world through artistic inquiry and musical creation.
More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.
DAVID ALAN MILLER, CONDUCTOR
Horacio Fernández: Unruly (world premiere)
Marie A. Douglas: The Candidate (world premiere)
Kyle Rivera: (new work) (world premiere)
Christian Quiñones: (new work) (world premiere)
Jack Frerer: TBA
Composer Patricia Alessandrini and violinist/violist Marco Fusi present two works at TIME:SPANS 2023 in New York City featuring the EMPAC Wave Field Synthesis Array. The program includes Luigi Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1988-89) and Proximity, distance by Alessandrini and Fusi. The latter is an improvisational exploration for violin, FeedBox, and the EMPAC Wave Field Synthesis Array that the artists developed while in residence at the center during the summer of 2022.
Main Image: Wave Field Synthesis Array at Time:Spans Festival, NYC August 2021.
Bring your own musical instrument! Join the EMPAC Research program for a hands-on workshop exploring Pauline Oliveros’ Expanded Instrument System (EIS) with introductions by Michael Century, Stephanie Loveless, and Jonas Braasch. Under continual development since 1965, the system is a series of computer-generated delays that process acoustic and vocal sounds, offering musicians, composers, and the curious ways to explore improvisations and compositions using sonic manipulation. We invite you to try it out with us in EMPAC Studio 1–Goodman.
Main Image: Pauline Oliveros performs with her accordion at the celebration of her 80th birthday in 2012. Photo: Kevin (Yiming) Chen/EMPAC.
DeForrest Brown Jr. will be in residence in Studio 1–Goodman with CCS Bard curators Katherine Adams, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Fellios, Abel González Fernández, and Sidney Pettice. Brown will work with Higher Order Ambisonics for a performance that explores how techno’s machine-like aspects connect to embodied dance and live music histories.
Main Image: Courtesy the artist.
Speakers that Speak To You is a newly-commissioned work by DeForrest Brown Jr., which traces the trajectory of techno’s machine-like aspects and its connection to embodied dance and live music histories. Considering the genre’s origins by activating the spatial qualities of sound, Brown extends his musical and theoretical practice through the advanced sonic infrastructure of EMPAC’s Studio 1—Goodman.
The project opens up to the implicit origins of techno that Brown traced in his book, Assembling a Black Counter-Culture (2021), wherein he has historicized techno as a genre rooted in a powerful political and cultural force that emerged within underground architectures and industrial spaces in Detroit. Brown's exposure to early Afrofuturist and jazz musicians, Black southern marching band compositions, and second-wave techno producers of the 1990s led to the development of his Black radical politics within the techno genre. The project will engage with recordings from the artist’s new album Techxodus, which operates as a musical successor to the ideas in his recent publication. Additionally, Brown plans to spend the next year developing tracks and performances around his notion of a “free-jazz”-inspired take on techno. With this new piece, Brown continues his research by reactivating cultural soundscapes and critically mapping the sounds of techno through the mode of a listening session.
DeForrest Brown Jr. is producing Speakers That Speak To You in residence at EMPAC with curators Katherine Adams, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Fellios, Abel González Fernández, Sidney Pettice, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
Main Image: Frantz Photography, Courtesy the Artist.
Frantz Photography, Courtesy the Artist.
Kamau Patton presents new and evolving sonic transmissions. Speaker Music (AKA DeForrest Brown Jr.) presents new music and a talk that follows the release of his book Assembling a Black Counter-Culture.