GENEALOGY

Masane Sessay
Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Jali Bakary Konteh
world premiere arrangement (arr. Zachary Ritter)

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Jelanka
Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Jali Bakary Konteh
world premiere arrangement (arr. Dylan Mattingly)

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Moses in Nederland – world premiere, co-commissioned by Contemporaneous and the Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund
Michael Kropf
Sabrina Tabby — solo violin

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INTERMISSION

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Genealogy – world premiere
music by Dylan Mattingly
words by Thomas Bartscherer
Terrance McKnight — narrator

for Mark Strand, in memoriam

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The Continuous Life
music by Eve Beglarian
poem by Mark Strand
world premiere arrangement (arr. David Bloom)
Terrance McKnight — narrator

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CELEBRATORY AFTERPARTY

Yoshi Weinberg — flute
Stuart Breczinski — oboe
Madison Greenstone — clarinet
Daniel Kochersberger — saxophone
Joshua Hodge — bassoon
Cameron West — horn
Evan Honse — trumpet
Daniel Linden — trombone
Matt Evans — percussion
JC Clancy — percussion
Paul Kerekes — piano
Violetta Norrie — harp
Brendon Randall-Myers — guitar

Josh Henderson — violin
Lauren Cauley Kalal — violin
Alex Shiozaki — violin
Giancarlo Latta — violin
Sarah Goldfeather — violin
Pauline Kim Harris — violin
Sarah Haines — viola
Chelsea Wimmer — viola
Noah Koh — cello
Issei Herr — cello
Pat Swoboda — contrabass
Tristan Kasten-Krause — contrabass
David Bloom — conductor

Sabrina Tabby — solo violin
Terrance McKnight — solo voice

Sunjay Jarayam – conducting fellow
Maxim Dybal-Denysenko – conducting fellow
Jackie Andreson – conducting fellow
Adrienne Sherrod – conducting fellow

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David Bloom — Co-Artistic Director
Daniel Santiago Castellanos — Audience Coordinator
Thomas Giles — Development and Finance Manager
Dylan Mattingly — Executive and Co-Artistic Director
Vicki Leona Nguyen — Communications and Project Coordinator
Zachary Ritter — Production Manager

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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.

Violinist Sabrina Tabby, from Philadelphia, developed a fondness for chamber music at a very young age that has carried her through her life as a musician. At the Bard College Conservatory of Music, Sabrina performed across four continents, as concertmaster of and soloist with the Conservatory Orchestra, in chamber music, as well as in various baroque and new music ensembles. It was there that Sabrina became a founding member of the NYC-based new music ensemble, Contemporaneous, prominently featured on the Innova Recordings album “Stream of Stars: Music of Dylan Mattingly.” At Northwestern University, Sabrina was recognized for her fine playing both as a soloist and as a chamber musician, the recipient of numerous scholarships, awards, and competitions. She continues to travel the world to play music of all styles, recently making her solo debut in Paraguay with the Orquesta Sinfonica del Congreso Nacional de Paraguay, and performing as a member of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra. With her string quartet ATLYS, founded in 2016, Sabrina arranges and performs throughout the country a unique repertoire of the crossover genre. Their latest single, an arrangement of Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” surpassed 1,000,000 streams within weeks of its release.

Radio host, commentator, curator, writer, author, and pianist Terrance McKnight serves humanity and music by “bringing everyone’s culture to the table, by not putting one above the other, but rather by ensuring a big enough table with a place for all.”

McKnight is the weekday evening host for WQXR, New York’s only all-classical music station. His various roles as commentator, curator, and writer go hand in hand as represented by writing, producing, and hosting audio documentaries on Langston Hughes, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hazel Scott, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Florence Beatrice Price, Leonard Bernstein and Harry Belafonte for WQXR. Another of his radio shows for WQXR, All Ears with Terrance McKnight, a series about musical discovery, was honored with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award. In association with the exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective in 2019 at Museum of Modern Arts, Terrance curated a series of concerts and audio tours. He has hosted concerts for Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, and the Finals and Celebratory Weekend of the Spring 2021 American Pianists Association Competition in Indianapolis. His is the voice of recent media campaigns for Carnegie Hall and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Terrance McKnight is the author of “Concert Black,” anticipating a 2022 release by Abrams Press. 2022 also initiates a 3-year commitment as a member of the Artistic Council, with Claire Chase and conductor Robert Spano, for The Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida. Terrance serves on the board of MacDowell and is the Artistic Advisor for the Harlem Chamber Players. He has participated on panels for Chamber Music America, the Mellon Foundation, American Opera Projects, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, ASCAP and the New York State Council on the Arts. It is Terrance McKnight’s commentary that introduces the liner notes for an upcoming release of Three Ife Songs by Phillip Glass, featuring singer Angelique Kidjo, Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz.

Genealogy features the world premiere of two songs (Jelanka and Sissay) by Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Jali Bakary Konteh, in new arrangements for Contemporaneous created by composers Dylan Mattingly and Zachary Ritter in collaboration with Jobarteh and Konteh. Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Jali Bakary Konteh are Gambian griots and bearers of the Mandinka oral tradition — and the grandsons of the legendary jali Alhaji Bai Konte, who was greatly responsible for sharing the kora with a broad audience in the USA in the 1970s. In 2019, Contemporaneous arranged and performed a song of Alhaji Bai Konte’s, the video of which was discovered by Jobarteh and Konteh — sensing a unique connection between Contemporaneous and theirs and their grandfather’s music, the griots reached out to the ensemble, and a collaboration was born. This performance marks the introduction to a larger multi-year collaborative project between Jobarteh, Konteh, and Contemporaneous to bring their music, carrying the oral tradition of Mandinka culture, to the US. This project will culminate with a large-scale presentation entirely devoted to their work in Autumn 2023. The Mandinka griot kora tradition has been passed down through generations as musical and oral history for hundreds of years, and Pa Bobo Jobarteh and Jali Bakary Konte are current bearers of that cultural legacy.

Biography

Pa Bobo Jobarteh: As oral historians, Mandinka Griots connect contemporary life with the past through song and story. By speaking out, they preserve civil balance, tradition and morality. After two decades of dictatorial rule, Pa Bobo's song "Peace, Love and Unity" reminded people that they were not alone in their silent yearning. With a price on his head, Pa Bobo fled to Senegal. After the people elected a new leader, the former ruler tried to stay in office. Seeing the people were united against him, he left without violence. Pa Bobo came home a national hero. Pa Bobo established his Mandinka music school, where he and other Griots teach kora, balafon, drums, kontingo and more.

Moses in Nederland is a nineteen-minute piece for violin soloist and orchestra. The piece is named for my great-grandfather Moses Schenkein, who as a European Jew living in Holland, was forced to lead his family on a dangerous and miraculous journey of escape from the horrors of the Holocaust. He was also an amateur violinist and composer, and left behind a folder of short melodic compositions. These works include melodic settings of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry, violin music, and a number of short tangos. Some of the melodies contained within the folder are arranged for larger forces by the composer Wilhelm Rettich, a prominent German-Jewish composer who immigrated to Holland after the Nazis came into power in Germany.

As a composer and violinist myself, I’ve always felt a special kinship with my great-grandfather Moses; each movement of the concerto focuses on one of his melodies found in the aforementioned folder of compositions that my family inherited.

The first movement is an elaboration upon Schenkein’s melodic setting of poet Hayim Bialik’s “A Faithful Tear.” This poem, written in Hebrew, describes a single “faithful” tear, carried in the “secret” of the author’s heart. Translating this poem, I was intrigued by and drawn to the mystery of what it might have represented for my great-grandfather. In this movement of my piece, my relationship with that mystery is enacted in a structural way: Schenkein’s melody is never presented in full within the movement. Instead, it darts in and out of focus in fragments that are never entirely resolved. I also engage with the harmony of Rettich’s arrangement, building a harmonic framework out of its opening chords.

The concerto’s second movement is a theme-and-variation on a Schenkein melody entitled “Elegy.” This melody is a setting of a Yiddish poem of the same name by Avrom Reyzen. In contrast to the first movement of the concerto, this movement quotes Schenkein’s music directly before devolving back into an echo of the concerto’s first movement.

The third movement of the work does not directly utilize music written by Schenkein. Instead, it serves as a reflection on the title of one of his tangos: “Hollandia.” Schenkein had moved to Holland as a young man to escape the religious strictures of his sofer father in Krakow, Poland. In this movement, I imagine a young and optimistic Schenkein who is excited to adopt a new city as his own. Although Schenkein passed away long before I was born, the sense I get from family stories is that he loved Holland very much, in spite of the circumstances in which he was forced to flee it. After living in Israel following the war, Schenkein became one of the relatively few Jews to actually return to Europe; he moved back to Holland.

— Michael Kropf

Biography

Michael Kropf is a Michigan-based composer whose work deals with hidden emotions and evocative places. He has collaborated with Marin Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the Ann Arbor Symphony, the Apple Hill String Quartet, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. His music has been described as "a brilliant, rapid fire stretch of perpetual motion," by the SF Chronicle's Joshua Kosman. Recent project include a violin sonata for violinist Matt Albert and pianist Forrest Howell. He is currently writing a violin concerto for Sabrina Tabby and Contemporaneous.

Michael is also an active music teacher, pianist, violinist, and conductor. He has taught classes at the University of Michigan, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College and the Academy of Art. He serves as an academic dean and faculty member at the Walden School Young Musicians Young Musician's Program in New Hampshire.

He earned his doctoral degree in composition at The University of Michigan in 2022, where he studied with Kristin Kuster and Evan Chambers. He received his Master’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory in 2016, where he studied with Evan Chambers. He has also received private study in composition from John Adams.

His work has received recognition from insitutions including ASCAP, The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the The Music Teacher’s National Association.

With music by Dylan Mattingly and words by Thomas Bartscherer, Genealogy imagines a history that unfolds not as a series of famous dates and momentous events, but as an unfathomably vast and diverse sequence of human experiences, discrete moments of perception and encounter that make up every moment of every day. Genealogy recounts a lineage of generations, with vignettes from the everyday lives of individuals stretching from the mythological ancestors of Odysseus to the 20th century. The music is a meditation, drawing on the limitless variation of the oceanic rhythm of Homer’s Odyssey. Every line of music (following the dactylic hexameter of Book V of The Odyssey) sees only itself, searching at all moments for only the most beautiful next chord — yet through that constant yearning for the smallest and most personal perfection, the music evolves, picking up the tiniest mutations in each momentary vision of what is most beautiful, as each moment finds a place in the ever-changing journey of history — a story that is only revealed to us in retrospect.

Genealogy is both a standalone work, and a segment excerpted from a much larger work-in-development, entitled History of Life, scheduled to premiere in Spring 2024. Vast in scope, vivid in detail, at once ancient ritual, modern discovery, communal gathering, and ecstatic revelation — History of Life is an evening of music and story that imagines an unbroken tradition of ancient Greek epic, as though it had been passed down through time from the world of Homer to the present day, perpetually evolving, incorporating new stories and new means of expression with each new generation.

In the center of the performance is Iarla Ó Lionáird (The Gloaming), a singer in the Irish tradition of sean-nós, who takes on the role of the Homeric bard, leading the audience through a musical tapestry that weaves together three distinct narratives — Odysseus returning home, Charles Darwin embarking on the voyage on the HMS Beagle, and a young girl discovering the world on the islands of Cabo Verde in the 1830s — into the immense fabric of the greatest of all epics, the history of life itself, in all its baffling superabundance, teeming diversity, and terrible beauty.

Ó Lionáird is joined by eleven musicians, a rag-tag band that includes two hurdy-gurdies, two re-tuned upright pianos, a celtic harp, toy piano, strings, and percussion. An ensemble of six performers shares the space with the audience as a group of listeners who know the music as though they had heard it all their lives, sometimes humming along or breaking into dance. History of Life draws on the original rhythms and language of ancient Greek epic (including singing in Homer’s Greek), the mesmerizing power of sean-nós singing, and the strange familiarity of folk traditions both real and imagined, to create a sound that is altogether new. The evening comprises three acts, with two intermissions. A shared meal, prepared on site, is served between Acts I and II.

Minimalist in form and maximalist in content, by turns ecstatic and meditative, majestic and tender, the performance has the feel of an age-old ritual once again being enacted and of a tale just now being told for the first time.

Biography

Dylan Mattingly is a composer and creator of musical work which seeks to offer ecstatic, transformative experience and provide an opportunity to alter the way we see our world and place within it. Many of Mattingly’s projects exist on a massive scale, the results of a dedication to the pursuit of bringing to life the most meaningful projects in the wild reaches of imagination — wherever that path leads — and building a path for the realization of these dreamworks from the ground up, often across many years. This practice has been informed by the decade-long process of creating, developing, and bringing to life Stranger Love, an ecstatic 6-hour durational opera, which offers a grand celebration of being alive. Stranger Love will see its premiere on May 20, 2023 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, commissioned by the LA Phil and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. At the heart of all of Mattingly’s work is a commitment to joy, and to what Hannah Arendt refers to as amor mundi — an ever-renewing quest to find the capacity to love the world, in the complex totality of its experience.

Mattingly's 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). Additionally, Mattingly is the Executive and Co-artistic Director of the NYC-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous. With Contemporaneous, much of his work has focused on creating an opportunity for other composers and musical creators to follow their own wildest dreams, dedicating the resources of the organization to the creation of large-scale new work and allowing artists a path to create the work they most want to create, regardless of scale and conventional practical constraints.

Mattingly’s music has been commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Ojai Music Festival, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, the Del Sol String Quartet, Sarah Cahill, Kathleen Supové, the Albany Symphony, Contemporaneous, ZOFO Duet, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. 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. Mattingly holds a B.A. in Classics from Bard College, a B.M. in Music Composition from the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music. Mattingly lives in Berkeley, CA with his partner Hannah and dog Oly.

Thomas Bartscherer works in the humanities and the arts. His works for performance include the opera Stranger Love, created with composer Dylan Mattingly, which will premiere at the LA Phil on 20 May 2022; Long After Hesiod, a text written for and performed with Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 3: Gaia; and narration for Dylan Mattingly’s composition The Bakkhai. Current scholarly projects include the forthcoming critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s final work, The Life of the Mind and When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, an edited volume forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He is co-editor of Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern and Switching Codes: Thinking Through Technology in the Humanities and the Arts, both published by the University of Chicago Press. He has studied at the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the University of Chicago (PhD) and has held fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the University of Heidelberg, and the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Since 2017, he has been Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. He and Mattingly are currently developing on an evening-length performance titled History of Life.

The Continuous Life (2000) was commissioned as part of a project called Continental Harmony to celebrate the turn of the millennium. Written for the Houston-based Orchestra X, the piece was supposed to celebrate Houston and incorporate electronics and interactivity.

I chose to set a poem by Mark Strand that is about the opposite of celebrating a particular moment in time:

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? Oh parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

The original orchestration is spoken word, full orchestra, and a sound mix of recordings of daily life in Houston. At the end, multiple live acoustic guitar players are invited to join in, playing from their places in the audience.

The piece can also be done by sixteen electric guitars plus pre-recorded sound. That version can be heard at September 2nd in my ongoing project, A Book of Days.

In 2016, the New York ensemble Contemporaneous performed a new version of the piece for eight players and pre-recorded sound. If you are interested in performing the piece with an ensemble of at least eight people, please get in touch with me and we’ll figure out how to make that happen.

In the meantime, you can visit the very first web pages I ever made, (with lots of help from Cory Arcangel), where I put lots of stories and examples about how I made the piece. I’ve left the pages pretty much how they appeared in 2000, so you can revel in the millennial flavor ;-).

—Eve Beglarian

Biography

According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” A 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” she has also been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.”

Beglarian’s current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and writer/director Mallory Catlett about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece for twenty-four double basses in a grove of trees, and a song cycle setting texts by and about mid-20th-century women for the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times)

In 2009, “Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity. [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration.” (New York Times)

Beglarian’s chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, loadbang, Newspeak, the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble and individual performers including Maya Beiser, Lara Downes, Lucy Dhegrae, and Thomas Feng.

Highlights of Beglarian’s work in music theater includes music for Mabou Mines’ Obie-winning Dollhouse, Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, Choephorai, and Shalom Shanghai, all directed by Lee Breuer; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater’s production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng.

She has collaborated with choreographers including Ann Carlson, Robert LaFosse, Victoria Marks, Susan Marshall, David Neumann, Take Ueyama, and Megan Williams, and with visual and video artists including Cory Arcangel, Anne Bray, Vittoria Chierici, Barbara Hammer, Kevork Mourad, Shirin Neshat, Matt Petty, Bradley Wester, and Judson Wright.

Performance projects include Brim, Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera.

Recordings of Eve’s music are available on ECM, Koch, New World, Canteloupe, Innova, Naxos, Kill Rock Stars, CDBaby, and Bandcamp.