Tuesday, April 11, 2017 | 8:00 pm
Roulette | 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
Tickets $15-20 online; $20-25 at door | Purchase

Saturday, April 15, 2017 | 8:00 pm
Murray's Tivoli | 73 Broadway, Tivoli, NY
Tickets $20 at door | Free for students

Contemporaneous presents Transcendental Geometry, a performance project that will explore new music written with non-traditional tunings from around the world.

Most of the music we hear in the United States is created in “equal-temperament,” the system of tuning used by the modern piano. But much of the music of the broader world uses entirely different pitches. Contemporaneous’s commitment to alternate tunings is particularly rare for a large ensemble. Not often do audiences have the opportunity to hear radically new, precise, and beautiful harmonies created by so many musicians.

By commissioning and performing new works using non-Western tunings, Contemporaneous seeks to expand our vision for what music can be, down to the very notes themselves.

Contemporaneous has commissioned three composers for this project, each approaching tuning from a different vantage point:

• Kyle Gann, whose writings on American microtonality are the seminal works in the genre.
• Shawn Jaeger, whose music intricately explores the beautiful precisions and imprecisions in rhythm and tuning in Appalachian hymnody.
• Kristofer Svensson, whose music draws on both the tuning traditions of his native Sweden as well as his own stunning and whimsical invention.

The evening will also feature the world premiere of the revised version of Katherine Balch’s New Geometry — a transcendent work which passes from microtonal intricacy to vast splendor.