NOW Ensemble

Thursday, September 28, 7:30 pm

Thursday, May 31, 7:30 pm

NOW Ensemble brings its "experimental, chamber-music miracles" (Rebecca Epstein, L.A. City Beat) to Gallerie Icosahedron, filling the gallery with new music by this generation's brightest young composers. The September concert will feature the premiere of Michael Jackson, a new work by William Britelle that explores the recent, bizarre history of Michael Jackson. In addition, the band will perform works by acclaimed, up-and-coming young composers such as Judd Greenstein, Nico Muhly, Mark Dancigers, and Patrick Burke.

In May, NOW will present the world premiere of three new works, by acclaimed composers Missy Mazzoli (Magic With Everyday Objects), David Crowell (sCrAmBle sUiT), and Judd Greenstein (To the Royal Mountain). The concert will also include New York premieres of works by Gregory Spears and David Kant, as well as NOW Ensemble standards by Matt McBane and NOW members Mark Dancigers and Judd Greenstein.

Click Here to Listen to Sound Clips:
Folk Music (by Judd Greenstein)
Hanging There (by Mark Dancigers)

NOW Ensemble

http://nowensemble.com

Formed as a means of facilitating communication and shared music-making between composers and performers, NOW Ensemble is a dynamic new music group that is dedicated to the presentation of works by emerging composers. With its unique instrumentation ofÊflute, clarinet, electric guitar, double bass, and piano, NOW Ensemble gives chamber music a new sound and a new vitality for the next generation of musicians, composers, and listeners. For repertoire, the group relies on the creation of new music for the ensemble, making composers and composition an integrated part of every performance.

Based in New York City, NOW Ensemble has performed at a variety of concert halls, art galleries, and clubs around the city, including Merkin Concert Hall, BAM Cafe, the Knitting Factory, the Tenri Cultural Institute, Galapagos Art Space, the Juilliard School, VIM: TriBeCa, Williamsburg's DuBuQuE Concert Series, and the Look & Listen Festival in Chelsea's Robert Miller Gallery. This year, NOW has established an ongoing relationship with Gallerie Icosahedron, in TriBeCa, as well as performing at the Wave Hill Cultural Center in the Bronx, and being featured on the world famous 2007 Bang on a Can Marathon at the World Financial Center.

Reaching outside of New York, NOW Ensemble has established a program of University residencies, visiting Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and other colleges around the country. In the Fall of 2005, NOW Ensemble toured the Northeast as part of Free Speech Zone (fszproductions.com), a tour of politically-themed, provocative new music that reached audiences in New York, Boston and New Haven. In the Spring of 2006, NOW Ensemble was the featured visiting group at the Carlsbad Music Festival (carlsbadmusicfestival.org) in Carlsbad, California, the concluding show in a tour of Southern California that included two shows in Los Angeles and a visit to CalArts. NOW has an ongoing relationship with the Crane Arts Center in Philadelphia, PA, as well as the Firehouse 12 studio in New Haven, CT. With these performances in New York and around the United States, NOW Ensemble has brought new music to the attention of the public as an essential and crucial part of our developing culture, engaging young audiences and non-musicians, as well as regular concertgoers, with a new vision for contemporary chamber music.

NOW Ensemble is a registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit in the State of New York.

"As to the performances, to say that they were completely masterly (and, in some cases masterful) technically and wonderfully powerful and expressive would be to slander them by using faint praise. It was the kind of playing which was so concentrated and focused that it could melt through steel." -Rodney Lister, Tempo

"Folk Music...is one of the freshest pieces I've heard so far this year." - Alex Ross, The New Yorker, on Judd Greenstein's work for NOW Ensemble

"NOW Ensemble...works experimental, chamber-music miracles with its wide array of instruments and fertile relationship with emerging composers." - Rebecca Epstein, LA City Beat

"This is a new voice lifting in the context of a smaller world, suggesting the shape of the sounds that will define art music in the early part of this new century." - Ed Montgomery, Context Studios