DAY OF IMAGINATION

2 pm: Set 1

Dylan Mattingly: Stranger Love, Act II and Act III (2015-2021)
world premiere (concert suite)
performed by Contemporaneous

5 pm: Set 2

Andrés Martínez de Velasco: Particles and Fields (2021)
world premiere, commissioned by Contemporaneous
music by Andrés Martínez de Velasco
visuals by Michael Angelo di Rosa
text by Alexander Blum
Ariadne Greif — soprano

Part 1: Automatism
Part 2: The Birth of Quantum Mechanics
Part 3: Particles and Fields

Kara-Lis Coverdale: Aftertouches (2015)
world premiere arrangement
music by Kara-Lis Coverdale
arr. by Dylan Mattingly and Zachary Ritter

Imgs /r
Touch Me & Die
Splash 144
X 4EWI
Ad_renaline
Icon /c
Arcane
Nu_chanic
Saps /h

8 pm: Set 3

Brian Petuch: Portrait and a Dream (2021)
world premiere, commissioned by Contemporaneous
Kendra Berentsen — Lee
Brian Giebler — Jackson
Ricardo Rivera — Hans

Brian Petuch — music and text
Ashley Tata — director
Magnus Pind — scenic and projection design
Adam J. Thompson — associate video design
Abigail Hoke-Brady — lighting design
Márion Talán de la Rosa — costume design
Zack O’Brien — sound designer
Steven Brenman — technical director
Dustin Z West — stage manager
Thomas Giles — assistant stage manager
Claudia Cangemi — video operator

CONTEMPORANEOUS

Fanny Wyrick-Flax — flute and piccolo
Stuart Breczinski — oboe
Madison Greenstone — clarinet
Daniel Kochersberger — saxophone
Nanci Belmont — bassoon
Dirk Wells — bassoon
Cameron West — horn
Evan Honse — trumpet
Kate Amrine — trumpet
Daniel Linden — trombone
Owen Caprell — bass trombone
Matt Evans — percussion
Adam Holmes — percussion
Robby Bowen — percussion
Paul Kerekes — piano
Isabelle O’Connell — keyboard
Will Healy — keyboard
Anna Bikales — harp
Colin Davin — guitar

Sabrina Tabby — violin
Finnegan Shanahan — violin
Josh Henderson — violin
Nikita Morozov — violin
Kate Dreyfuss — violin
Camilla Caldwell — violin
Chelsea Wimmer — viola
Amadi Azikiwe — viola
Michael Davis — viola
Amanda Gookin — cello
Julia Henderson — cello
Helen Newby — cello
Pat Swoboda — contrabass
Tristan Kasten-Krause — electric bass
David Bloom — conductor

* * *

DAY OF IMAGINATION PRODUCTION TEAM

David Bloom — producer
Steven Brenman — technical director
Claudia Cangemi — production intern
Max Cerci — electrician
Michael Angelo di Rosa — projections designer
Thomas Giles — assistant stage manager
Abigail Hoke-Brady — lighting designer
Dylan Mattingly — producer
Charles Mueller — audio recordist
Kya Naugle — production assistant
Zack O’Brien — sound designer
Magnus Pind — projections and scenic designer
Zachary Ritter — production manager
Roni Sipp — electrician
Márion Talán de la Rosa — costume designer
Ashley Tata — director, Portrait and a Dream
Adam J. Thompson — associate video designer
Dustin Z West — stage manager
Lucy Yao — communications coordinator

Special thanks to Bang on a Can, Beth Morrison Projects, Experiments in Opera, Max Cerci, Jim Rosenfield, Roni Sipp for invaluable help in making this day possible.

* * *

DAY OF IMAGINATION is an ode to idealism — a space for the presentation of the most thrilling, ambitious, wildest "dream projects" of musical artists from across the world. Curated through the "Contemporaneous: IMAGINATION" open call, which asks creators to share what work they'd most like to be making regardless of traditional constraints on scale and practicality, DAY OF IMAGINATION is an entire day full of these extraordinary artistic dreams.

This first DAY OF IMAGINATION was initially scheduled to coincide with and celebrate Contemporaneous's 10th anniversary, and while the pandemic pushed back its presentation by a year, we are overjoyed to celebrate with you now – in our eleventh year — the limitless capacity of imagination.

* * *

Contemporaneous is an ensemble of 23 musicians whose mission is to bring to life the most transformative music by living composers. Contemporaneous performs and promotes the most exciting work of living composers through innovative concerts, commissions, recordings, and educational programs.

Based in New York City and active throughout the United States, Contemporaneous has been presented by such institutions as Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, PROTOTYPE Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, MATA Festival, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and Bang on a Can and has worked with such artists as David Byrne, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Dawn Upshaw, and Julia Wolfe. Contemporaneous has premiered more than 150 works, specializing in new projects that take bold artistic risks. Contemporaneous champions the creation of large-scale works and “dream projects,” which composers might not otherwise find opportunities for realization due to their scale.

Contemporaneous leads participatory programs for public school students in the communities where the ensemble performs. These workshops are designed to instill a passion for new music and to convey the power of careful listening and meaningful expression through music. The ensemble has held residencies at such institutions as the City University of New York, the University of New Orleans, Williams College, and Bard College, where the group was founded in 2010.

Scored for 28 musicians (including three microtonal pianos), 8 singers, and 6 dancers with music by composer Dylan Mattingly and text by Thomas Bartscherer, Stranger Love is a grand celebration of life itself. It follows two lovers whose romance unfolds to the rhythm of the seasons. Set on a vast time-scale against the ever-expanding universe, it broadens in scope and frame over the course of three acts, moving from the personal to the archetypical to a vision of the divine — a love supreme. Stranger Love evokes the visceral thrill of a gospel revival, the ethereal calm of watching snow fall, the wonder of staring into the night sky. Contemporaneous presented Act I of Stranger Love in a concert performance on the PROTOTYPE Festival in 2018, and this will be the first performance of the music from Acts II and III. This performance is unstaged. Stranger Love will be presented in full in its world premiere production in Spring of 2023 in Los Angeles.

The structure of Stranger Love:

Structurally inspired by Plato’s Symposium, Stranger Love is divided into three acts, each one presenting a wider perspective than the last. The first act presents love in a human and personal frame, as in Alcibiades’ speech. The second act follows Aristophanes in depicting an archetypal account of human love. The final act is inspired by the vision of divine love—a love supreme—that Socrates attributes to the priestess Diotima.

The first act tells a story of two lovers whose encounter unfolds to the rhythm of the seasons. In springtime, they meet; in summer, their love flourishes; autumn and winter, they face threats from without and within; a second spring brings resignation and the chance for renewal. The visual design creates a series of tableaux, illuminating individual moments of the characters’ lives within the context of the broader seasonal cycle.

In the second act, the singers move into the instrumental ensemble, and the action shifts to three pairs of dancers who move inexorably slowly throughout the entire space towards each other, at last meeting in three different outcomes: a kiss, a collision, a passing-by. Music and visual design present a second vision of the passage of seasons.

In the third act, the entire space is dark except for a constellation of lights scattered throughout like stars. These lights move away from the center of the space at differing speeds, creating the illusion of depth and the feeling that the audience is traveling into the negative space. The music is a revelation of pure joy, the velocity of universal expansion. Stranger Love ends in ecstasy and pitch black.

This performance presents the second and third acts of Stranger Love in concert performance.

The creation of Stranger Love was the inspiration for Contemporaneous IMAGINATION. Composer and co-artistic director Dylan Mattingly writes: as I’ve worked these past nine years to bring my own dream project to life, I knew that there must be so many other artists in the world who share this kind of experience, who have ideas for artistic work of the utmost importance to them, which are just too bold or big or weird or plain countercultural to receive traditional support. I realized that Contemporaneous could offer artists a chance to pursue that work, to fill that gap in the model of how new work is produced, and to encourage artists to not back down from their wildest dreams.

Read more about Stranger Love at www.stranger.love

Dylan Mattingly:

Dylan Mattingly’s work is fundamentally ecstatic, committed to transformative experience. His music has been described as “gorgeous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” and “the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly, and “in the pantheon of contemporary American composers” (Prufrock’s Dilemma) and is often informed by his scholarship on Ancient Greek music and poetry. Mattingly is the executive and co-artistic director of the NY-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous. Among the ensembles and performers who have commissioned Mattingly’s music are the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. Mattingly’s in-development 6-hour multimedia opera, Stranger Love, has recently been presented on the PROTOTYPE Festival and the Bang on a Can Marathon and will be premiered in Spring 2023. Mattingly was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013 and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. 

Thomas Bartscherer:

Thomas Bartscherer works on the intersection of literature and philosophy in the ancient Greek and modern German traditions, focusing on tragic drama, aesthetics, and performance. He also writes on technology, new media, and contemporary art, and has published translations from German and French. He is co-editor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros Ancient and Modern with Shadi Bartsch and Switching Codes with Roderick Coover, both from the University of Chicago Press. He is a research associate on the Équipe Nietzsche at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (Paris) and has held research fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure, the University of Heidelberg, and the LMU in Munich. He has received fellowships from the DAAD, and from the Woodrow Wilson, Nef, and Earhart foundations. Bartscherer previously taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago and is currently the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College.

Particles and Fields is a hybrid exploration in sound, word, and image of the fantastical realities of quantum physics and the imaginative power of the figures who formed a new understanding of the universe. The performance follows an allegorical history of physics written by historian Alexander Blum, taking spectators from atomism to the birth of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. An animated painting created by visual artist Michael DiRosa unravels in time alongside a music composition written for the Contemporaneous ensemble by Andrés Martínez de Velasco. The composition unfolds in three chapters, evoking invisible worlds and microscopic events through its shape-shifting music at the same time that the projected painting weaves through a multiverse of tessellating light, color, and story. Through its entanglement of science and art, Particles and Fields seeks to illuminate the wonder of physics seldom experienced by non-physicists.

From the creators:

“With this work we hope to share our excitement for the history of physics and in particular 20th century physics with a wider audience. Our hope is that excitement, drama and even tragedy of ideas within physics might be conveyed to the audience, even if their precise meaning is not known.

The authors of this work want to thank Contemporaneous for their faith in our project and for their support throughout its realization. Without people like them, the art world would be lost, and this, along with many other works, simply would never have come into existence.”

Andrés Martínez de Velasco:

Andrés Martínez de Velasco (born in Mexico City, 1991) is a composer-physicist currently based in Amsterdam. He studied at the McGill University Conservatory and the Bard College Conservatory of Music, where he worked with Joan Tower and George Tsontakis. His recent work musically explores the connections between physical concepts and the history of physics, and music.

andres-composer.com

Michael Angelo di Rosa:

Michael DiRosa is a visual artist and educator working at the intersections of painting, climate & ecology, foodways, and cultural memory. After graduating from Bard College in 2015 with a dual degree in physics and painting, Michael taught in Hunan, China as a Princeton in Asia fellow and attended the Lijiang Studio artist residency. In his painting practice Michael works with bold colors and compositions dealing with cultural identity, autobiography, forces of nature, and migration. Each painting lives as a story matrix in which the migratory flow and cultural memory of his family pool into composition and gravity. Michael has worked at the Jacob Burns Film Center and Storm King Art Center in education and curation, developing art and nature-focused public offerings. His work has been exhibited at ArtsWestchester, the Garrison Art Center, The Church Troy, and Lijiang Studio.

michael-dirosa.tumblr.com

Alexander Blum:

Alexander has a PhD in theoretical particle physics from the University of Heidelberg (research at the MPI for Nuclear Physics, 2009). In 2010 he moved into the History of Science, and to the MPIWG, where he started out as a member of the Quantum History Project (until 2012). Since then he has been a Research Scholar at the MPIWG and coordinated the cooperative project with the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting Foundation from 2013–2014. He is closely associated with the Research Program on the History of the Max Planck Society (GMPG). Alexander has organized several smaller workshops at the MPIWG (and externally) bringing together physicists, historians, and philosophers to discuss the history and foundations of quantum gravity. He also co-organized the large conference at MPIWG/Harnack-Haus celebrating the centenary of general relativity (2015).

Alexander’s research interests lie in the history (and philosophy) of modern physics, lately with a strong emphasis on the postwar period. His current MPIWG research projects focus on the postwar developments of the two great revolutionary theories of the early twentieth century, general relativity, and quantum mechanics, with a special focus on attempts to combine the two. He is also currently completing (together with Dean Rickles of the University of Sydney) a commented sourcebook on the earliest attempts to bring together quantum theory and general relativity, which will be published in 2018. In 2017, he will begin teaching at the physics department of the FU Berlin, pursuing a novel approach of teaching advanced (Master’s level) physics classes with a strong focus on historical theory development.

Ariadne Greif:

ARIADNE GREIF, praised for her "luminous, expressive voice" (NYTimes), her "elastic and round high notes" (classiqueinfo), and her "mesmerizing stage presence" (East Anglian Daily Times), began her opera career as a ‘boy’ soprano in the Los Angeles area and at the LA Opera, eventually making an adult debut singing Lutoslawski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables with the American Symphony Orchestra. She starred in roles ranging from Therese/Tirésias in Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, singing a “thoroughly commanding and effortless” run at the Aldeburgh Festival, a "sassy" Adina in The Elixir of Love with the Orlando Philharmonic, to Sappho in Atthis by Georg Friedrich Haas, for which the New York Times noted her “searing top notes,” and “dusky depths,” calling it “a solo high-wire act for Ms. Greif,” “a vehicle for Ms. Greif’s raw, no-holds-barred performance,” “one of the most searingly painful and revealing operatic performances in recent times.”

Ariadne spent the summer of 2020 creating a new piece, called Bird Party, for the 2020 Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway, where it was premiered in September, alongside Dreams of Our Future, a piece by Sofia Jernberg, directed by Louise Beck, in which Ariadne appeared by video. Bird Party exists as a stand-alone film, by cinematographer Caroline Mariko Stucky, featuring a collection by designer St. Barite. Ariadne appeared in October on the Six Feet Apart series of The Sofia Home of B Street in a filmed concert of contemporary music for voice and electronics. She appeared again in Malena Dayen’s opera Exercises on the Presence of Odradek as part of the 2020 Vrystaat Festival, and created a character in a creative interactive live virtual adventure for the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. In 2021 she participated in initial workshops with Joseph C. Phillips Jr. on a new opera cycle called 1619, inspired by the 2019 New York Times series The 1619 Project and the 2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates The Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations”. In spring she premiered We Need To Talk by Caroline Shaw, a collaboration with the poet Anne Carson, director Maureen Towey, videographers Four/Ten Media, with Opera Philadelphia. A music video of Table Manners, written for Ariadne by Sheree Clement, featuring couture by St. Barite and cinematography by Caroline Mariko Stucky, premiered in June 2021, with Ariadne playing both roles. She made a cameo appearance backing up Jodie Landau at The Little Island in NYC, at Tina Landau and Friends: BYOB, and appeared in various pop up performances around New York with Amanda + James as part of their Summer Happenings Festival, singing music by Kaija Saariaho. She will be featured in the 2021 summer season of PS21 in Chatham, NY, and will perform with William Kentridge in the fall in his production of Ursonate at the Philharmonie Luxembourg.

A champion of new music since her teens, she has premiered over fifty large-scale pieces and a half-dozen new operas, which have included the role of Yaga the Witch in Matti Kovler’s Ami & Tami, where she played a villain for the first time, and a nameless main role in Gabrielle Herbst’s disturbing masterpiece BODILESS. Though the opera is hardly ‘new’ at a hundred years old, Ariadne sang the main female role, Lady Madeline, in the US premiere of Debussy’s unfinished opera La Chute de la Maison Usher in its most complete form, with the Opera Français de New York. 

www.ariadnegreifsoprano.com

Text:

This is a story of particles and fields. It is hard to imagine, nowadays, that there was once a time, at the dawn of science, when we did not yet face the intellectual abyss of having to reconcile the discrete and the continuous, the local and the global, the solid and the fluid, the one and the infinity, when everything was just little moving parts... 

Everything is little moving parts
Everything is little moving parts
I think therefore I am
René Descartes [pronounced so it rhymes] And everything is little moving parts 

Everything is little moving parts
Everything is little moving parts Maybe not our mindsBut certainly our hearts 

are made up of little moving parts 

Everything is little moving parts Everything is little moving parts There’s probably so many
That their number’s off the charts But everything is little moving parts 

Is light just little moving parts? Yes, it is
Is air just little moving parts? Why, of course 

Everything we see
And everything we don’t
Is nothing but little moving parts 

And in between those little moving parts Yes, in between those little moving parts There’s nothing
There’s nothing 

There’s nothingThere’s the voidSo there’s nothing but little moving parts 

What an harmonious, simple picture, this vision from the childhood of science, a world of dancing atoms. I imagine that this was in God’s mind when he created heaven and earth. But then, like a father telling his child a bedtime story, he starts including bizarre little plot elements to keep himself entertained: fish that deliver a stunning shock when you step on them, fossilized tree resin that you rub to make it lift scraps of paper, loaves of sugar emitting a soft glow when you break them apart, weird, somewhat pointless details, fanciful magic, the product of a tired mind trying to keep itself awake. The father thinks his child half-asleep, wants to push it over the edge with the sound of his voice, cares not about the coherence of his tale. Suddenly, the drowsy child asks a question. Dad, can I also make other stuff electric? The father concedes the point, hoping to placate his child, hoping that will be the end of it, hoping to get it over with and rest from all his work which he has made. But instead of being comforted, the child gets agitated, probes further, forcing the father into a tale far more elaborate than he had ever planned on. Question follows upon question: Dad, is this what lightning is made of? Dad, is this how a compass works? Dad, is this the same as light? The father inadvertently finds himself inventing a grand scheme, electric and magnetic fields, slithering and writing in the nooks and crannies of the void, inducting and displacing, eddies and vortices in a universal aether, but the wrong aether, not the one that makes you sleep, the one that makes you see, the glorious, all-pervading, light-bearing aether. The child is now wide awake, realizes that none of this fits into the story its father had started off with, exclaims: But Dad, if the aether is everywhere and the atoms are somewhere – something’s gotta give! And in his desperation the father cries out: Well, the atoms aren’t actually anywhere! And there was quantum mechanics. 

Only, that didn’t really solve anything, even if Uncle Nick wanted us to believe otherwise. Dirac knew this. I heard him speak once, Princeton was celebrating its two-hundredth birthday. The nervous tension of the quantum revolution and of the war had subsided, and one could start hoping for better days. 

Time, like an ever rolling stream, Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day. 

The model of the electron as a small sphere charged with electricity has proved very useful in a certain domain of problems. Beyond this domain it will not go. It seems now an unnecessary complication not to have fields all the way up to the electron’s centre, which would then appear as a point of singularity. In this way we are led to consider a point model for the electron. We are now faced with the difficulty that the field in the immediate neighborhood of the electron has an infinite energy. This difficulty has recently received much prominence in quantum mechanics (which uses a point model of the electron), where it appears as a divergence in the solution of the equations that describes the interaction of an electron with an electromagnetic field. One may think that this difficulty will be solved only by a better understanding of the structure of the electron according to quantum laws. However, it seems more reasonable to suppose that the electron is too simple a thing for the question of the laws governing its structure to arise, and thus quantum mechanics should not be needed for the solution of the difficulty. 

Professor.

Yes. 

I feel this is on the wrong track. I feel you are going backwards. It’s just not going to get anywhere. Really, your paper is highly technical, very technical, and this is a mixed audience. I have a feeling for the guys and gals in the audience, and I feel bad for all these people that won’t understand what in the hell is this about. Let me try and explain in the simplest possible language. The problem is, when we try to calculate all the way to the center of the electron, the equation blows up in our face. So, we have to stop the calculation when the distance to the center is very small - say ten to the minus thirty centimeters, billions and billions of times smaller than anything observable in experiment. Then we can play a shell game that is technically called renormalization. Professor Dirac, what do you think of these new developments? 

I might have thought that the new ideas were correct if they had not been so ugly, devoid of beauty, like a Schoenberg string quartet. 

I’d take it. An imperfect world described by an ugly theory. Particles, fields, and maybe even our minds grafted together haphazardly in a conceptual Frankenstein of cosmic proportions. But we would never believe it, would we? Not because we believe that meaning can only be found in beauty. I think we understand full well that meaning can reside in the defective, that an attempt at creating a perfect world can fail. But how would we ever be able to tell the failings of the creator from our failure to understand creation? And so we struggle on, to uncover an underlying plan so perfect we are sure we did not invent it ourselves. After all, one must try. 

Kara-Lis Coverdale's astounding electronic album Aftertouches is presented on this program in a world premiere acoustic arrangement for the musicians of Contemporaneous. Coverdale's album is an intricate and beautiful construction, a cathedral of sound, which she has built entirely electronically. Its ethereal sounds spring up and intertwine in strange and enchanting ways, like watching the plants in a garden grow in fast-forward. The otherworldly space Coverdale creates might suggest to an audience that this piece could never be performed on acoustic instruments... and in fact, Coverdale describes it as living within a "post-instrument world." But over the past two years, composers Dylan Mattingly and Zachary Ritter in consultation with Coverdale have diligently arranged every sound in the album for the musicians of Contemporaneous.

Coverdale writes:

“Aftertouches playfully exploits the systemic nature of a post-sacred and post-instrument world, continuing Kara-Lis Coverdale’s exploration of coded realism and virtual transfiguration. Through an optimistic lens, Aftertouches explores and celebrates the multiple voices of the machine. Synthetic instruments sourced from VSTs, sound banks, and personal archives are arranged into holograms of dreams once inspired by physical origin. Through digital superimposition processes, instrument profiles mutate and take on new forms of articulation. Crystalline organs support and prop plastic voices and insistent water flutes dance with metallically chromatic snake-like motifs in vignettes of compositional schizophrenia. Absurd and delightful fusions seething through temporal portholes are unexpectedly swiped left, enveloped by dense clouds of lament and remembrance.”

Kara-Lis Coverdale:

Driven by a patient devotion to sonic afterlife, memory, and material curiosity, Kara-Lis Coverdale’s dynamic work occupies new planes built upon a borderless understanding of electronic music with roots in several interlocking musical systems and languages. Coverdale’s work has been met with consistent critical acclaim. Her most recent recorded release, Grafts (Boomkat, 2017), is a set of three pieces in long form that highlight the composer’s distinct approach to digital-based ratio tuning. It has been described as an “arresting” “masterful work” of “uncompromisingly distinct,” “indescribable beauty.”  Coverdale’s recordings are incredibly considered and often understated, but her live shows can evoke the unpredictable, chaotic, eerie, dynamic, and confrontational; all for which she has earned a steady reputation as a festival favourite (The Guardian, The New York Times, RA, The Fader) as a highly dynamic and explorative artist, resistant to categorization and stasis. 

Read more about Coverdale on her website here.

Zachary Ritter (arranger):

Zachary James Ritter is a composer who wants to work with you. Driven by making music with his friends and making friends with his music, Ritter strives to create works that resonate with his audience through shared human experience. His music takes influence from electronica, minimalism, and traditional music of Ireland and America. His music often features layered textures with playfully unpredictable rhythms, as well as spare, raw musical landscapes which lend themselves to calm, meditative listening experiences. He likes to make music people want to listen to, music made in sincerity.

Ritter holds an MM in classical composition from Purchase Conservatory where he studied with Gregory Spears and Laura Kaminsky, and a BA in Music from Binghamton University where he studied composition with Daniel Thomas Davis and voice with Professor Mary Burgess. He has worked with ensembles including Choral Chameleon, The Cassatt Quartet, Fifth House Ensemble, Opera Elect, ModernMedieval, Contemporaneous, Momenta Quartet, and Yarn/Wire.

Ritter is currently a member of the Choral Chameleon (choralchameleon.com) volunteer chorus and the Angry Composers collective (angrycomposers.org), and the Melodica Drone and Bach Orchestra (mdbo.org). His upcoming projects include a new work for solo viola for Emily Hiemstra, and a new work commissioned by Nightingale Ensemble.

www.zacharyjamesritter.com

Dylan Mattingly (arranger): see bio above

The finale of the inaugural Day of Imagination is Portrait and a Dream. Brian Petuch’s Portrait and a Dream is a sequence of tone-poems inspired by works that span the breadth of Jackson Pollock’s life. The libretto - an assemblage of recordings of the voices of the people who knew Jackson - deconstructs the myth of Pollock by splintering narrative, intention and truth. The first-stroke-on-a-canvas production directed by Ashley Tata with designs by Magnus Pind, Abby Hoke-Brady and Márion Talán de la Rosa places the company in the present and considers whether it is possible to be an artist in the US anymore or whether the legacy of the mid-20th century art scene has led to a post-art society where the artist is a symbol and a successful artist is a commodity.

Brian Petuch:

Described as “narratively limitless... peaceful, violent, and transcendent.” (American Composers Forum), Brian Petuch's music inhabits extreme contrasts of reflection, celebration, and irreverence. He frequently incorporates electronics and other recorded sounds into live acoustic settings in order to expand the possibilities of the concert hall. His works have premiered at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, 911 Memorial at Liberty Park, EMPAC, Constellation, MASS MoCA, and Joyce Theatre, and featured by Albany Symphony, the New York Youth Symphony, andPlay, Bang on a Can, Exceptet, Contemporaneous, Latitude 49, and Bearthoven.

Petuch has been awarded a grant from the Jerome Fund for New Music, he’s been a finalist for the ASCAP Foundation’s Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, a guest composer for the Albany Symphony’s American Music Festival, and a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival at Mass MoCA. He earned an MM in Composition at Mannes School of Music where he studied with Mario Davidovsky.

www.brianpetuch.com

Ashley Tata:

Ashley Tata makes multi-media works of theater, contemporary opera, performance, cyberformance, live music and immersive experiences. These have been presented in venues and festivals throughout the US and internationally including Theatre for a New Audience, LA Opera, Austin Opera, The Miller Theater, National Sawdust, EMPAC, The Crossing the Line Festival, the Holland Festival, The Prelude Festival, The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, and the Fisher Center at Bard. Tata’s work has been called “fervently inventive,” by Ben Brantley in the New York Times, “extraordinarily powerful” by the LA Times and a notable production of the decade by Alex Ross in the New Yorker. Tata earned an MFA in directing at Columbia University and has taught, guest taught or been a guest artist at Harvard University, MIT, Marymount Manhattan College, Colgate College, Bard College and LIU Post and is currently on faculty at Mannes School of Music and the College of the Performing Arts at The New School. Member of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s inaugural residency cohort, the Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors’ Lab, recipient of a MAP Grant, Lotos Foundation's Emerging Artist Award in Arts and Sciences and a winner of the Robert L. B. Tobin Director/Designer grant. For more info including how to contact for future collaborations: www.tatatime.live
ig/twitter/twitch: @tatatime_

Magnus Pind:

Magnus Pind is an artist and designer based in Copenhagen.

Magnus works exclusively with found objects, which he changes into new forms and shapes using video projections, light and movement in space, in order to explore the technologies and systems that shape our daily lives.

Magnus’ performances and installations have been shown at Click Festival, MUTEK festival, Transmediale, Harvard University among others. Magnus’ video design has been shown at the Kennedy Center, Vienna State Opera, Royal Danish Theatre, La Monnaie Belgian National Opera, Lithuanian National Drama Theatre among many others. He has been nominated for the Reumert Prize and New York Innovative Theater Awards.

Magnus holds a BA from University of Copenhagen, and an MFA from Parsons School of Design.

magnuspind.com

Abigail Hoke-Brady:

Abigail Hoke-Brady is a Brooklyn based lighting designer (Munsee Lenape land) whose work centers primarily in opera, new plays and performance art. As a designer she is invested in and excited by creating containers (both corporeal and virtual) for the wildly shifting landscape of live performance. Some of her most valued collaborators in that exploration are Peiyi Wong, M. Florian Staab, Ashley Tata, Misha Chowdhury, and Kameron Neale.

Design projects since the seismic change of March 2020 include Baseera Khan’s episodic film project ‘By Faith’ (The Kitchen), the Zoom-based ‘Mad Forest’ directed by Ashley Tata (Bard College/Theatre for a New Audience), a live-streamed & archived release of the one-woman opera ‘Artemisia: Light and Shadow’ (ARTEK), a hybrid lighting-design / gaffer position for ‘The Cardboard Piano’ and ‘Life is a Dream’ (Juilliard School for Drama/Dancing Camera), and several streamed concerts & dance performances at National Sawdust.

Some of her other most valued design projects include ‘Bound’ (Fresh Squeezed Opera); ‘The Little Death vol 1’ (Prototype Festival); ‘The Last American Hammer’ and ‘FLORIDA’ (UrbanArias); 'To Be Sung’ (Centre for Contemporary Opera); ’Glory Denied' and ‘Three Decembers’ (Tri Cities Opera), ‘Silent Voices : Lovestate’ (Brooklyn Youth Chorus); ‘MukhAgni’ (Under the Radar/The Public Theater); and ‘The Tempest’ (Hunt’s Point Alliance for Children/The Public Theater); ‘Time:Spans Festival’ (Dimenna Center/Earle Brown Music Foundation - co-designer alongside Burke Brown).

Particularly exciting upcoming projects include scenic and lighting design for ‘BUST’ (Soho Repertory Theater) and lighting design for ‘Cosi fan Tutte’ (San Diego Opera).

Lighting Design Mentor : Williams College’s Senior Honors Projects (spring 2020)
Guest Lecturer/Artist : NYU’s Playwright’s Horizons Theater School (spring 2021)
Guest Lecturer : Drew University (spring 2021)
BA : Drew University 2011MFA : NYU 2016Member : USA 829.

Email : sahokebrady@gmail.com | Instagram : @hammockandhoney

www.hokebradydesigns.com

Márion Talán de la Rosa:

Born in Mexico City, Mexico, costume designer Márion Talán de la Rosa has nurtured her work by collaborating with artists and innovators of dance, drama, and opera for over the last two decades. She has been the wardrobe supervisor and designer at the Juilliard School for 15 years, and has designed at NYU Steinhardt School for approximately 13 years in collaboration with Joe Salvatore on plays and research-based performances including the Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL).

Her most recent project of note is the GRAMMY nominated Fire in My Mouth composed by Julia Wolfe and performed by The New York Philharmonic, The Crossing and the Young People’s Choir of NY. This highly acclaimed piece was inspired by the New York Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that took place on March 25, 1911 and was performed with a symbolic 146 women’s choir.

Other works include collaborations with choreographers Caleb Teicher, Sonya Tayeh and Bryan Arias and has had work featured in Fall for Dance at City Center, BAM Next Wave Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, American Dance Festival, The Joyce, The Gibney, The New Victory Theater, the DUMBO Light Festival, and WHITE WAVE Festival among others.

Márion is a proud member of United Scenic Artists Local 829

www.mariontalan.com

Adam J. Thompson:

Adam J. Thompson is a video and graphic designer working in in film, television, theatre, and digital narratives. He has worked previously as a creative director and a producer and is the Founding Artistic Director of The Deconstructive Theatre Project, a non-profit multimedia storytelling laboratory which he founded and led from 2006 - 2016.

His work as a multimedia performance director and as a video and projection designer has been produced and presented off-Broadway, off off-Broadway, regionally, and on tour with companies and at venues that include New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theater, Atlantic Theatre Company, Theatre for a New Audience, La Mama, Ars Nova, HERE, The Flea, American Theatre Wing, Terminal 5, Beth Morrison Projects, National Sawdust, Boston Lyric Opera, City Theatre, and Diversionary Theatre. He is an alumni of The Public Theater’s Devised Theatre Working Group and the HERE Artist Residency Program and is has collaborated with the multimedia performance collectives Big Art Group and The Builders Association. Adam is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation among others and he was an invited exhibitor and ambassador to the 2018 Beijing International Design Biennial.

Adam’s practice, while broad and ever-evolving, includes a strong interest in live cinema, interactive and responsive design environments, public history, and digital historic preservation. He is an Adjunct Instructor in Video & Media Design at Carnegie Mellon University, and has previously taught and lectured at the University of North Carolina, New York University, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. He holds a BA in directing and dramaturgy from Emerson College and an MFA in Video & Media Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Adam’s work has been called “a multimedia fantasia” (Time Out New York) and praised for “masterfully…illuminating the utter complexity and subjectivity of our own consciousness” (ArtLab), and for being “so purposeful, unique, [and] innovatively reflective on the future of the performing arts” (Letters from the Mezzanine).

Adam’s graphic prop designs for film, television, and theatre can be viewed here.

He is a member of IATSE USA 829.

www.adamjacobthompson.com

Kendra Berentsen:

"Resplendent with ripe vocal coloration and seemingly effortless power..." (Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle) posseses a "burnished amber tone and dynamic command," "A silvery soprano tone and faultless diction..." (San Francisco Chronicle), singing “effortlessly in the stratosphere" (San Francisco Classical Voice),  Ms. Berentsen returned to the Merola Opera Program last summer at San Francisco Opera Center in 2018 singing Leïla in Les Pêcheurs de Perles in the Schwabacher Summer Concert under the baton of Kathleen Kelly, will cover Anne Trulove in The Rake’s Progress, and will sing Massenet’s Thaïs in the Merola Grand Finale under the baton of Dean Williamson.  Additionally, the Shoshana Foundation awarded Ms. Berentsen the prestigious Richard F. Gold Career Grant for Merola in 2018.    At Merola in 2017, she was featured in The Schwabacher Summer Concert as Baby Doe in Ballad of Baby Doe under the baton of Anne Manson and covered Serpina in La Serva Padrona.  She also sang Marie in La Fille du Regiment for the Merola Grand Finale under the baton of Anthony Walker in the War Memorial Opera House. 

Kendra's most recent credits in New York City have been Adele in Die Fledermaus, Frasquita in Carmen, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, Juliette in Romeo et Juliette, and Zerlina in Don Giovanni.  Kendra has been a soloist with New York Repertory Orchestra and the Astoria Symphony. A native of Portland, Oregon Kendra received her Bachelor’s and Master’s of Music from Eastman School of Music.  While at Eastman, Eastman Opera Theater featured Kendra in principal roles as Carolina Il Matrimonio Segreto, Flora in Turn of the Screw, Herz in The Impresario, Kost in Cabaret, and Manon in the 2010 Opera Gala. 

Kendra has also participated in Joan Dornemann’s International Vocal Arts Institute in Montréal and Blacksburg, VA.  She is a student of David Jones, Marlena Malas, and Deborah Birnbaum and her coaches include Kamal Khan, Steven Blier, Stephen Wadsworth, Yelena Kurdina, Valery Ryvkin, Chuck Hudson, and David Holkeboer.

www.kendraberentsen.com

Brian Giebler:

Praised for his “lovely tone and deep expressivity” by The New York Times, GRAMMY® nominated American tenor Brian Giebler is consistently gaining attention for his vocal “shine and clarity” (Opera News). Whether performing Handel’s Semele with Harry Bicket and The English Concert or Stravinsky’s Threni with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra, “Brian Giebler use[s] his high-placed tenor with great skill” (Opera Magazine).  

Brian Giebler’s début solo album, a lad’s love on Bridge Records (July 2020), earned him his first GRAMMY® nomination for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album after charting on Billboard’s Traditional Classical chart. It has earned high praise from Gramophone, Opera News (Critic’s Choice), as well as being lauded for“the beauty, sweetness, and youthful sheen of Brian Giebler’s extremely fine tenor [which] is ideally suited for this collection of English songs” (San Francisco Classical Voice).

Due to the uncertainty of the global COVID-19 pandemic, solo appearances with the Johnstown Symphony (Handel's Messiah), Berkshire Choral Festival (Mozart’s Requiem), Bach Virtuosi Festival, TENET (Apollo in Monterverdi’s Orfeo, Messiah, and solos in Les Plaisirs de Versailles), Washington Bach Consort (Bach’s Lutheran Mass and Handel’s Nisi Dominus), Apollo’s Fire, Clarion Music Society, Santa Fe Pro Musica (Uriel in Haydn’s Creation) and Manhattan Concert Productions (Carnegie Hall) were all cancelled. 

During the 2019/20 season, Brian Giebler took the stage as Adam in Julian Wachner and Cerise Jacob’s REV 23 (directer James Darrah; conductor Daniela Candillari) at the prestigious Prototype Festival in NYC, graced the stage of Carnegie Hall singing Handel’s Messiah with the Oratorio Society of New York (a piece he frequents, including performances with the Naples Philharmonic), and filled Washington’s National Cathedral singing Haydn’s Harmoniemesse with the Cathedral Choral Society and Washington Bach Consort Orchestra. In notable return engagements, Brian sang Monteverdi love duets on Valentine’s Day with GRAMMY®-winning orchestra Apollo’s Fire.

In previous seasons, Brian Giebler sang Apollo in Handel's Semele with The English Concert and The Clarion Choir in an international tour under esteemed conductor Harry Bicket, including performances at the Theatre des Champs-Elysées (Paris), the Barbican (London), and the Perelman Stage of New York’s Carnegie Hall. He joined the Grand Rapids Symphony, Musica Sacra (Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall), Baltimore Choral Arts, and the Mark Morris Dance Group at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival for his solo débuts. On stage, Brian Giebler took on the comedic role of Arnalta in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea with Boston Baroque, joining a star-studded cast including Anthony Roth Costanzo and Amanda Forsythe. He sang and recorded the role of Iff the Water Genie in Wuorinen's Haroun and the Sea of Stories with Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which is projected to release in 2020. He made his début with Boston Early Music Festival in Bremen, Germany, singing Chœur des Plaisirs in Charpentier’s Les Plaisirs, and Bacchus and Chœur des Fontaines in de Lalande’s Les Fontaines in concert and recording (the former earning a 2020 GRAMMY® Nomination for Best Opera Recording).

Brian Giebler’s other notable appearances have included the Cleveland Orchestra under Franz Welser-Möst (singing Stravinsky's Threni), multiple performances of Handel's Messiah (including the Virginia Symphony Orchestra and Musica Sacra at Carnegie Hall), Bach St. Matthew Passion Evangelist with Music at Trinity Wall Street and True Concord Artists, Mozart Requiem at Carnegie Hall (Manhattan Concert Productions), Bach Cantatas with Handel & Haydn Society (Jordan Hall), and the American Classical Orchestra (Mozart Große Messe in c-Moll at Lincoln Center). He made his stage début with Charlottesville Opera as Jack in Sondheim’s Into the Woods, where he was lauded for “his spotless tenor vocals [that were] a highlight of the production” (BroadwayWorld), and created the title role in Anathema: The Turing Opera at National Sawdust, by William Antoniou.  

Brian Giebler’s earlier successes included a 2nd place win (Stanley C. Meyerson Award) in the Lyndon Woodside Oratorio-Solo Competition at Carnegie Hall, the Richard Chambless People's Choice Award at the 2018 American Traditions Competition, and 3rd place (Honorable Mention) in the 2016 Biennial Bach Vocal Competition sponsored by the American Bach Society. Brian Giebler is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he earned his Master’s degree in Vocal Performance. He is also an alumnus of the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, holds a Bachelor’s degree in Vocal Performance from the Eastman School of Music, and was a Young Artist with the Aspen Opera Theater Center, Oregon Bach Festival, and Carmel Bach Festival.

www.briangiebler.com

Ricardo Rivera:

In the spring of 2015, baritone Ricardo Rivera — who was a semi-finalist in the Met Opera National Council Auditions — made his debut at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, and San Diego Opera in the world premiere of El pasado nunca se termina, directed by Broadway and opera director Leonard Foglia, in the leading role of Acalán which he performed in 2019 with Ft. Worth Opera.

In 2021, Ricardo performed with National Chorale in a special YouTube performance of Carmina Burana which can be seen here; in Beth Morrison Project's Next Gen opera composer competition in works by Jacobin-Acosta and Nourbakhsh who advanced to the semi-finals of this competition; with Cristina Fontanelli in her annual Cristina Fontanelli and friends concert in the Hamptons; and in the music-theater work SWELL presented live and online through HERE in NYC. 

During the 2019/2020 season, Ricardo performed Schaunard in La bohème with Sarasota Opera; the Baritone solos in Carmina Burana with National Chorale in David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center; Escamillo in a concert version of Carmen with New York City Opera; and Lt. Gordon in Silent Night with Arizona Opera.

Highlight performances of mostly leading and some feature roles from recent seasons include performances as: Hérode in Hérodiade with Washington Concert Opera with Michael Fabiano and Joyce El-Khoury; Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor and as Lt. Audebert in Kevin Puts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night with Opera San José; Escamillo in Carmen with Musica Viva Hong Kong and Heartbeat Opera; Schaunard in La bohème with Musica Viva Hong Kong; El payador in María de Buenos Aires with Des Moines Metro Opera; and Germont in La traviata with the Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra.

Operatic performance highlights of past seasons include: Orsini in Rienzi and Mathieu in Andrea Chenier with the Opera Orchestra of NY in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall; Moralès and Escamillo (cover) in Stephen Wadsworth's new production of Carmen, Thomas Martin and the Hotel Managers in the world premiere of Theodore Morrison's Oscar, and Germont (cover) in La traviata at Santa Fe Opera; Marcello in La bohème and Escamillo in Carmen with El Paso Opera; Sharpless in Madama Butterfly with the Opera Company of Middlebury; Thomas Martin and the Hotel Managers in Oscar with Opera Philadelphia; Le chat in L’enfant et les sortilèges and Spinelloccio in Gianni Schicchi at the Castleton Festival with the late conductor Lorin Maazel; Moralès in Carmen and Fiorello/L'Ufficiale in Il barbiere di Siviglia with Opera North; Ashby in La fanciulla del West with Knoxville Opera; and the baritone soloist in both Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Fauré’s Requiem with the Pioneer Valley Symphony.

Concert performance highlights include his Alice Tully Hall debut in an Eve Queler and Friends Concert with Eve Queler at the piano and his Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center debut in the Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation Gala with Eve Queler conducting the Opera Orchestra of NY. Concert performance highlights of standard repertoire include the baritone solos in: Ein deutsches Requiem with both The New York Choral Society and The Westchester Chorale Society; Carmina Burana with Monmouth Civic Chorus; and Bach’s “Coffee Cantata” at the White Mountains Music Festival.

Ricardo is a graduate of Mannes College the New School for Music where his B.M. M.M. and PDPL were conferred. As a Mannes Opera Young Artist, he performed the title role in Don Giovanni, Ford in Falstaff, Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte, and Aeneas in Dido and Aeneas. At Mannes, he was mentored by Met Opera conductor and Music Director at The Glimmerglass Festival, Joseph Colaneri, and the great, late American mezzo-soprano Regina Resnik.

Ricardo trained and performed for two summers at IFCP - International Festival for Contemporary Performance where he coached with Susan Narucki and Donatienne Michel-Dansac and performed works by Stockhausen, Xenakis, Aperghis, and Cage.

Ricardo was an apprentice singer with Santa Fe Opera, a young artist with Opera North, and an Eva and Marc Stern Fellow at SongFest where he coached with Martin Katz, Graham Johnson, and composer Lori Laitman on her music. As an apprentice artist at Chautauqua Opera, he covered Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor; performed the Sergeant and covered Lescaut in Manon Lescaut; and performed in two concerts with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.

In a review of Ricardo’s performance in Sophia Gubaidulina's Perception with multi-Grammy Award–winning ensembles eighth blackbird and the Pacifica Quartet, the Chicago Tribune declared him "amazingly precise of musical and verbal gesture." In continuation of his commitment to the vitality of contemporary music, Ricardo performed Steven Stucky's Four poems of A.R. Ammons with the FLUX Quartet, the world premiere of Reinaldo Moya's Soliquio en las olas with the Arts Symphony Orchestra, and the world premiere of Aaron Dai's Con furia with the Chelsea Symphony. 21st-century operatic roles which have been composed for and have been performed by Ricardo include leading roles in Robert Cuckson's A Night of Pity and Horace: a Portrait, Christopher Park's Phaedra and Hippolytus, Alexander Berezowsky's The Nine Billion Names of God, and Andrew McManus's Killing the Goat.    

Ricardo won 1st Prize in the Eastern Region of the 2012 Met Opera National Council Auditions (MONC) which led him to the semi-finals of that competition. He received two awards upon graduating from Mannes College: the Richard F. Gold Career Grant in 2008 and the Michael Sisca Memorial Opera Award in 2012.  He was awarded 3rd Prize in the Gerda Lissner Competition, a Career Grant from the Licia Albanese-Puccini Competition, 1st and Audience Prizes in the NY Lyric Opera Competition, and Encouragement Awards from the Opera Index, Career Bridges, and Connecticut Opera Guild Competitions.

ricardoriverabaritone.com

David Bloom is a conductor equally at home in opera, new music, and orchestral repertoire, noted alike for his “rockstar energy” (Urban Milwaukee) and “graceful sensitivity” (I Care If You Listen). He is founding Co-Artistic Director of Contemporaneous, a 23-member New York-based ensemble which he has led in performances lauded as “ferocious and focused” (The New York Times). Also Co-Artistic Director of Present Music, he brings “breathtaking and inspired programming” (Shepherd Express) to Milwaukee’s long-running new music ensemble. Bloom dedicates his work to collaborating with artists and communities to inspire creativity, empathy, and inclusiveness.

He has conducted over 300 world premieres in such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, MoMA, and Park Avenue Armory, working with such artists as the Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Crossing, David Byrne, Helga Davis, Kronos Quartet, Isabel Leonard, Courtney Love, NOW Ensemble, and Dawn Upshaw and composers Donnacha Dennehy, Du Yun, Michael Gordon, Judd Greenstein, Nathalie Joachim, David Lang, Tania León, and Julia Wolfe. Upcoming highlights include performances at Disney Concert Hall and debuts with Jacaranda and Eurasia Consort.

Especially active as an opera conductor, Bloom has premiered and toured productions for Opera Omaha, Tri-Cities Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, PROTOTYPE Festival, the American Opera Project, and Experiments in Opera, among others. He has recorded for Sony Masterworks, Cantaloupe, New Amsterdam, Innova, New Focus, among others, and is co-host of the podcast Imagination Radio. He serves on the faculty at New York University and is artistic advisor of activist orchestra The Dream Unfinished.

davidbloomconductor.com