On Tuesday, April 3rd at 7:30 pm the Quince Ensemble will be performing along with a special appearance by LJ White who is a lecturer in composition at Washington University's Department Of Music. Visit HERE for the event details on Facebook. The concert will be held at the Pillsbury Theatre, 560 Music Center. Continue on for all of the details and for more on the artists below.
560 Trinity Ave
St. Louis, MO 63130
Co-sponsored by KWUR, 90.3 FM
With the precision and flexibility of modern chamber musicians, Quince Ensemble specializes in experimental repertoire that is changing the paradigm of contemporary vocal music. Quince continually pushes the boundaries of traditional vocal ensemble literature. This performance will feature a work by WashU Lecturer in Composition LJ White in addition to works by Kaija Saariaho, David Reminick, Laura Steenberge and more.
"Judging by the evidence here, Quince Ensemble is the Anonymous 4 of new music. They have a clear mission (in this case, commissioning, performing, and advocating new and experimental work), superb blend, great versatility, and a general fearlessness of approach."
- Joshua Rosenblum, Opera News
*Contains explicit language and graphic depictions of violence towards women*
TICKETS available HERE or call
Edison Box Office at (314) 935-6543
$15 - General Admission
$12 - Seniors/WU Faculty & Staff
$10 - Youth and Students
Washington University students are free with ID.
Special Announcement Regarding Parking:
As as result of the construction of a new shared parking 560/COCA parking garage, the 560 Music Center parking lot will be closed until June 1, 2018.
- Quince Ensemble: (Chicago, IL)
Genre: Contemporary Classical
http://www.quince-ensemble.com
Google Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble: https://g.co/kgs/JFXTHz
- LJ White: Contemporary Classical, Composer
Genre:
Google LJ White: https://g.co/kgs/SYjvoC
ABOUT QUINCE
Singing with the precision and flexibility of modern chamber musicians, Quince Ensemble is changing the paradigm of contemporary vocal music. Described as "the Anonymous 4 of new music" by Opera News, Quince continually pushes the boundaries of vocal ensemble literature.
As dedicated advocates of new music, Quince regularly commissions new works, providing wider exposure for the music of living composers. They recently received a Chamber Music America award to commission a new song cycle by Chicago-based composer, LJ White, and will be releasing their 3rd studio album, Motherland, on New Focus Recordings in Spring 2018.
In 2016, Quince was featured on the KODY Festival Lublin, Poland in collaboration with David Lang and Beth Morrison Projects. They have also appeared on the Outpost Concert Series, the Philip Glass: Music with Friends concert at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Alia Musica, and the SONiC Festival in New York. During the 2017-18 season, they will collaborate with Third Angle New Music, Philadelphia's Bowerbird, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, Lawrence University, Cornish University, Tigue, Man Forever, and Tenth Intervention.
Comprised of vocalists Liz Pearse (soprano), Kayleigh Butcher (mezzo soprano), Amanda DeBoer Bartlett (soprano), and Carrie Henneman Shaw (soprano), Quince thrives on unique musical challenges and genre-bending contemporary repertoire.
LJ White's music serves ideals of direct, focused and socially relevant expression, assimilating an unrestricted array of influences through unpredictable-yet-contagious rhythms, strange and evocative sonorities, self-evident gestures, and apposite forms. He has worked with some of the most exciting players in contemporary music, including Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble SIGNAL, Ensemble Dal Niente, the JACK Quartet, the Spektral Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Volti, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, the Talea Ensemble, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
White’s current and upcoming projects include new works for the La Jolla Symphony Orchestra conducted by Steven Schick, violist Ammie Brod, saxophonist Noa Even in collaboration with video artist Jason Charney, Northwestern University’s Bienen Contemporary and Early Vocal Ensemble conducted by Donald Nally, and the Pushback Duo, comprised of bassoonist Ben-Roidl Ward and soprano Alexandra Smither, as well as a commission from Third Angle Ensemble to create new works based on Elliot Smith’s songs in collaboration with the Sleeping Giant Composers Collective and Hand2Mouth Theatre Company. He recently completed a 26-minute song cycle for three sopranos and mezzo-soprano with live electronic processing, The Best Place for This, commissioned by the Quince Vocal Ensemble with support from a Chamber Music America grant. The work, which combines poetry by nine different contemporary poets along the lines of a search for one’s ideal geographic, social, relational, or emotional place, was premiered in Cambridge, MA, in November and will be brought to New York City and St. Louis in the coming months.
White's string quartet Zin zin zin zin was recorded by the Spektral Quartet on their album Chambers, released by Chicago's up-and-coming new record label Parlour Tapes+ in October 2013 to wide critical acclaim. Zin zin zin zin, which elaborates a fragment from a song by the Roots and considers aural characteristics of group speech and rap, has been called "a tour-de-force of quartet writing" by New Music Box and “a terrific satire on the inflections that give language meaning” by the Washington Post. The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, respectively, praised the entire album as "a vital primer to a bumper crop of talented young Chicago composers" and "a mind-blowing array of new sonic explorations by Chicago composers, and the Chicago Reader included the album in its column "Our Favorite Music of 2013", commenting, "I'm especially fond of LJ White's Zin zin zin zin." The Spektral Quartet has performed the piece extensively in concerts across the world, including on the 2015 Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Concert Hall, where it was hailed by the New York Times as a "confident miniature, rich in implications,” and on the 2016 Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago, where I Care if You Listen observed, “the music goes off like a firework, a raucous and wonderfully noisy affair.”
White’s recent choral work, Digression on Number 1, 1948, was developed over a yearlong residency with Volti, the renowned new music choir based in San Francisco, and premiered by the group in May 2015. The piece sets Frank O'Hara's poetry inspired by the titular Jackson Pollock painting, assembling a variegated fabric of sung vocals, speech, whispers, laughter, sighs, and speech-song shapes that derive from Pollock's methods and the painting's contours. The poem chronicles O’Hara’s experience as a viewer of the painting as a MoMA employee in New York, and White’s setting creates a broader depiction of a struggling O’Hara finding solace in the work of his recently deceased close friend, in addition to encapsulating the transcendent expenditure of energy and material found in the painting itself. The San Francisco Classical Voice called Digression on Number 1, 1948 “an evocative form of sonic architecture”, the San Francisco Examiner hailed it as “a fascinating approach to ‘art about art’”, and the music blog A Beast In A Jungle stated, “White’s imaginative vocal score features laughter, whispers, asides, and moments that sound like outtakes of hymns, creating a polyphony resembling bubbles rising within water which burst and then disappear once they reach the surface… White’s music is delightful and inventive.”
White’s chamber work Wilder Shores, commissioned by Third Angle Ensemble and premiered in June 2015 at the Bang on a Can Marathon in New York, is a setting of poetry by poets Matthew and Michael Dickman for violin, cello, and two narrators. The piece, following a structure divergent from but inspired by the poem it sets, features a rich succession and interplay of images, which are introduced and brought back, creating an inscrutable sense of familiarity, and chopped up and blended into a progressively finer mix. The work’s musical ideas, as they are stated, recalled, fused, and fragmented, create a collectively fraught, shape-shifting texture. The piece has been praised as “intriguingly swoopy and spiky” by New York Music Daily and "a highly colorful score that seemed to incorporate about every way of getting sound out of a violin and cello anyone has ever imagined” by Oregon Artswatch, whose review stated, "White made the most distinctive musical statement of the night.”
White has won the Craig and Janet Swan Prize, the Margaret Blackburn Composition Competition, an Emil and Ruth Beyer Award from the National Federation of Music Clubs, the Dolce Suono Ensemble Young Composer Competition, the North American Saxophone Alliance Composition Competition, and the American Prize. He has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Banff Arts Centre, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and his work has been featured at a long list of high-profile festivals, including the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, CULTIVATE at Copland House, and the Composers Conference at Wellesley College. White received his doctorate degree from Northwestern University in September and is a professor of music theory and composition at Washington University in St. Louis.
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