The performance will be followed by a community gathering and celebration in Roulette.
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ABOUT
Songs at Night is an intimate evening of musical transfiguration, centered around the world premiere of a large-scale new song cycle by composer Lila Meretzky drawing on the poems of Yiddish-language poet Anna Margolin. The main work on the concert is a world premiere of a commissioned expanded version of Lila Meretzky’s “Four Songs at Night.” Performed by Contemporaneous. The work will also feature singers Lucy Dhegrae and Milena Gligić.
The program will also feature Shelley Washington’s A Kind of Lung and Dylan Mattingly’s The History of Life in Reverse. Washington’s A Kind of Lung can simply be described as an expression of an experience that we all share - breathing together - and was written for a diverse ensemble of instruments.
Mattingly’s “A History of Life in Reverse” is a standalone scene drawn from the upcoming project History of Life, an evening of music and story that imagines the Homeric oral tradition which created the Odyssey as though it had been passed down continuously from parents to children for the last 2700 years, evolving throughout and informed by human history, picking up new stories and sounds with every new generation. The full work is planned to premiere in 2025, and is being created in collaboration between Mattingly and writer/classicist Thomas Bartscherer.
A live stream will be available free of charge at 8 pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
Click the link to watch below:
Program
A Kind of Lung – Shelley Washington
A History of Life in Reverse – Dylan Mattingly
world premiere, co-commissioned by Contemporaneous and the Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund; with music drawn from upcoming project History of Life
— INTERMISSION —
Songs at Night – Lila Meretzky
world premiere
About Lila Meretzky
Lila Meretzky is a composer, educator, and visual artist born and raised in New York City. She works primarily in chamber, vocal, electronic, and electroacoustic mediums, as well as in music for dance, film, and installation. Her work is often concerned with (the warping of) memory and language, and subjective experiences of time. Lila’s music has been programmed and commissioned by leading ensembles and institutions, including Contemporaneous, TAK Ensemble, the MATA Festival, Sandbox Percussion, Unheard-of//Ensemble, icarus Quartet, and percussionist Ji Hye Jung. Lila is a current composer-in-residence with the Cincinnati-based new music collective New Downbeat. She has created music for the dance companies New Dialect, X-Contemporary Dance, and the Nashville Ballet. Her film work includes scoring the 2022 documentary A Climate of Anxiety. As a critic, her writings have been published on the arts blog ArtsNash and she has been featured on the radio at WXNA Nashville. As an educator, she is on the faculty of the Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire, and previously taught at the Yale School of Music’s Music in Schools Initiative, and W.O. Smith Music School in Nashville, Tennessee. She has also taught music technology and composition in the Yale College Department of Music. Lila has attended such festivals as the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and Bang on a Can Summer Festival. At Bang on a Can, her works were performed as part of the first LOUD Weekend at Mass MoCA in July 2021. Her other pursuits include performing with the choral ensemble C4, and making noise on her laptop and accordion.
Paper collage is her primary visual medium, and her work has been featured in Off Latch Press’ inaugural Off Latch Zine.
Lila is a graduate of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, where she co-founded a new music concert series called A Humming Under My Feet. She also holds Master of Music and Master of Musical Arts degrees in composition from the Yale School of Music.
This performance is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
