CFA Faculty

BU Center for New Music announces 2023-2024 season, featuring Hans Thomalla, Elizabeth Ogonek, and Ming Tsao Residencies

The Center for New Music collaborates with Boston’s Sound Icon and the Mivos Quartet to offer a view of the current landscape of musical creation, featuring three of today’s most dynamic composers

Pictured [clockwise from top left] Sound Icon, Mivos Quartet, Ming Tsao, Elizabeth Ogonek, Hans Thomalla

BOSTON, MA – For over a decade, the BU Center for New Music (CNM), at Boston University College of Fine Arts (CFA) School of Music has been a potent force for new music. This season, the CNM has invited three extraordinary composers representing vastly different aesthetic worlds to Boston University as visiting artists: Hans Thomalla, Elizabeth Ogonek, and Ming Tsao. CNM is collaborating with Boston’s Sound Icon and the Mivos Quartet to offer a view of the current landscape of musical creation.

Hans Thomalla

Hans Thomalla is a German American composer living in Chicago and Berlin. Thomalla’s work has particularly focused on the stage. He has written three operas and is currently composing a new work of music theater Dark Fall – for the Nationaltheater Mannheim. Thomalla is Professor of Music Composition at Northwestern University where he co-founded the Institute for New Music. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, the Composer Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Elizabeth Ogonek

Elizabeth Ogonek’s music has been described as “shimmering,” “dramatic” and “painstakingly crafted” by the Chicago Tribune. In 2015, Ogonek was appointed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as the Mead Composer-in-Residence, a position which she held alongside Samuel Adams until 2018. Ogonek has also worked closely with the London Symphony Orchestra for whom she has written two orchestral works: as though birds and Sleep & Unremembrance. Both pieces were premiered under the direction of François-Xavier Roth at the Barbican Centre. In early 2020, the LSO gave the European premiere of All These Lighted Things while the Toronto Symphony Orchestra gave the Canadian premiere of as though birds. Recent notable chamber and solo projects include two works for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, a work for Ensemble 360, a solo piano work, Orpheus Suite, commissioned by the Music Academy of the West and a Fromm Foundation commissioned work, where are we now, for pianist Xak Bjerken, percussion quartet and male vocal sextet on a text by Paul Griffiths.

Ming Tsao

Ming Tsao writes music with a sensuality that arises out of a focus on the inherent qualities of sound – what the composer calls its “materiality” – coupled to an extreme formal rigour and a highly precise, finely-crafted compositional style. In the foreground of his music is a contemporary conception of musical lyricism, which is fractured, multi-faceted and problematised to reflect the modern experience. Many of Ming Tsao’s works are the result of a critical and deep-thinking examination of the Western classical tradition as well as his serious engagement with Chinese traditional music. Ming Tsao has composed works for ensembles including the Arditti Quartet, ELISION Ensemble, ensemble ascolta, ensemble recherche, Ensemble KNM Berlin and Ensemble SurPlus and has had premieres at the Darmstadter Ferienkürse, Donaueschinger Musiktage, MaerzMusik Berlin, Wien Modern and the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. He was born in Berkeley, California. His father emigrated from China and his mother’s parents emigrated from Austria. He studied violin and viola before travelling to Suzhou, China, to study with the renowned Guqin (Chinese zither) performer Wu Zhao-ji. He studied composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston and Ethnomusicology at Columbia University in New York before studies in Logic, Philosophy and Mathematics. Returning to composition, he gained a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego under Chaya Czernowin as well as studying privately with Brian Ferneyhough. He was Professor of Composition at Göteborg University and Visiting Professor of Composition at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021 for music composition.

Each of these composers will come to the Center for New Music for a residency where they will be featured in a concert, offer composition lectures and work with BU’s Students. The Thomalla and Ogonek residencies will feature Boston’s own Sound Icon Ensemble led by Jeffrey Means, and the Tsao residency will feature a concert from the New York-based Mivos Quartet. Sound Icon and Mivos will also work with BU students and Mivos will perform a concert of student works.

“The world of contemporary composition has become so vast and multi-faceted. This year we have decided to embrace that range and bring in three very different composers who can help us showcase the range and depth of contemporary creation,” says Joshua Fineberg, director of the BU Center for New Music and professor of music, composition and music theory in BU School of Music.

BU Center for New Music’s 2023 – 2024 Season

SCHEDULE OF SPECIAL EVENTS

Composer in Residence Hans Thomalla with Sound Icon conducted by Jeffrey Means

November 16 – 18, 2023

• Thursday, November 16 (5-7pm) – Hans Thomalla discusses his work • BU Electronic Music Studio (room B38) 855 Commonwealth Ave.
• Friday, November 17 (5-7pm) – Hans Thomalla Composition Masterclass • BU Electronic Music Studio (room B38) 855 Commonwealth Ave.
• Saturday, November 18 – free concert (8pm) • CFA Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave.
  • Hans Thomalla’s Harmoniemusik [1] (2020-2021)
  • Chaya Czernowin’s Fast Darkness III (2022)
  • James Tenney’s Having never written a note for percussion (1971)
  • Gérard Grisey’s Périodes (1974)

Composer in Residence Elizabeth Ogonek with Sound Icon Conducted by Jeffrey Means

November 30 – December 2, 2023

• Thursday, November 30 (5-7pm) – Elizabeth Ogonek discusses her work • BU Electronic Music Studio (room B38) 855 Commonwealth Ave.
• Friday, December 1 (5-7pm) – Elizabeth Ogonek composition Masterclass • BU Electronic Music Studio (room B38) 855 Commonwealth Ave.
• Saturday, December 2 – free concert (8pm) • CFA Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave.
  • Elizabeth Ogonek Orpheus Suite (2018)
  • Gérard Grisey Stèle (1995)
  • Alvin Lucier Opera with Objects (1997)
  • Kaija Saariaho from the grammar of dreams (1988)
  • Joshua Fineberg <<autant de libertés que l’esprit prend avec la nature>> (2021-2022)
  • Erin Gee Mouthpieces 32 (2018)

Composer in Residence Ming Tsao with the Mivos Quartet

February 1 – 3, 2024

• Thursday, February 1 (5-7pm) – Ming Tsao discusses his work • BU Electronic Music Studio (room B38) 855 Commonwealth Ave.
• Friday, February 2 (5-7pm) – Ming Tsao Composition Masterclass • BU Electronic Music Studio (room B38) 855 Commonwealth Ave.
• Saturday, February 3 (8pm) – Concert featuring works by Ming Tsao, Raven Chacon, Hans Thomalla, and Chikako Morishita • CFA Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave. • free admission

SCHEDULE OF CONCERTS

Sound Icon featuring the work of Hans Thomalla

November 18, 2023 • 8pm

CFA Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave.

Boston’s own Sound Icon led by Jeffrey Means Ensemble offers a beautiful proposal for where we came from and where we are going to. Featuring two seminal exploratory works of the 1970’s by two of the era’s most brilliant artists, followed by two works written within the last couple of years. These works show how far and how individually composers have gone down those paths opened up by composers like Grisey and Tenney. Free admission

• James Tenney’s Having never written a note for percussion (1971)
• Gérard Grisey’s Périodes (1974)
• Hans Thomalla’s Harmoniemusik [1] (2020-2021)
• Chaya Czernowin’s Fast Darkness III (2022)

Sound Icon featuring the work of Elizabeth Ogonek

December 2, 2023 • 8pm

CFA Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave.

For the second Sound Icon concert we will stay with the large aesthetic perspective, but this time focused on perception and dreams. Jeffrey Means will lead a concert that moves from Grisey’s devastating ritualistic Stèle through recently deceased Kaija Saariaho’s grammar of dreams to Ogonek’s Orpheus Suite to Fineberg’s 2022 meditation on perception and ending with the new language of sounds being made by Erin Gee in her Mouthpiece compositions. Free admission

• Gérard Grisey Stèle (1995)
• Alvin Lucier Opera with Objects (1997)
• Kaija Saariaho from the grammar of dreams (1988)
• Elizabeth Ogonek Orpheus Suite (2018)
• Joshua Fineberg <<autant de libertés que l’esprit prend avec la nature>> (2021-2022)
• Erin Gee Mouthpieces 32 (2018)

Mivos Quartet featuring the work of Ming Tsao

February 3, 2024 • 8pm

CFA Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave.

The renowned Mivos String Quartet will present an exciting mix of recent music from composers of vastly different horizons and aesthetics. The concert will feature some of the most exciting composers working today.

• Ming Tsao Pathology of Syntax (2010)
• Elizabeth Ogonek Running at Still Life (2013)
• Raven Chacon The Journey of the Horizontal People (2016)
• Chikako Morishita Doll Time (2019)
  • Mivos Quartet
  • Olivia De Prato, violin
  • Maya Bennardo, violin
  • Victor Lowrie Tafoya, viola
  • Louise McMonagle, cello

Sound Icon reads and records works by BU student composers for large ensemble

November 10 and 12, 2023 (7 – 10pm)

BU College of Fine Arts Concert Hall, 855 Commonwealth Ave.

The Mivos Quartet reads and records works by BU student composers for String Quartet

February 4, 2024 • 10am – 5pm

BU College of Fine Arts Electronic Music Studio, 855 Commonwealth Ave. Rm B-38

Find more details at bu.edu/cfa/newmusic.