Admission: $15 (Free for NCF students, faculty, & staff)
Join us for a Pre-concert talk at 7:30 p.m.
Free Artist Conversation Date TBD. Follow the link below for updates.
Photo Credits: John Rogers (Sorey), Alexander Devora (Curtis)
NMNC NewFest presents two bright stars of the contemporary music world, composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey and violinist Jennifer Curtis, whose recent set of duo recordings Invisible Ritual offers a compelling, novel, and extraordinary listening journey. The music of Invisible Ritual is improvised, and simultaneously both Sorey and Curtis bring a compositional sensibility to each piece of music, ranging across a vast stylistic territory that touches on fiddling and folkloric traditions, gestures and expressions from contemporary music, and moments of unique and unrepeatable resonance.
Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey (b. 1980) is celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery and memorization of highly complex scores, and an extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work. He has performed nationally and internationally with his own ensembles, as well as artists such as John Zorn, Vijay Iyer, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, Marilyn Crispell, George Lewis, Claire Chase, Steve Lehman, Jason Moran, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, and Myra Melford, among many others.
Jennifer Curtis navigates with personality and truth in every piece she performs. Jennifer is a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and founder of the group Tres Americas Ensemble. She has appeared as a soloist with the Simon Bolivar Orchestra in Venezuela and the Knights Chamber Orchestra; performed in Romania in honor of George Enescu; given world premieres at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York; collaborated with composer John Adams at the Library of Congress; and appeared at El Festival de las Artes Esénias in Peru and festivals worldwide. An educator with a focus on music as humanitarian aid, Jennifer has also collaborated with musical shaman of the Andes, improvised for live radio from the interior of the Amazon jungle, and taught and collaborated with Kurdish refugees in Turkey. Jennifer joins the Haw River Ballroom’s Culture Mill in Saxapahaw, North Carolina as artist in residence this spring, and will teach a course on the art of interpretation at Duke University next year. She plays on a 1777 Vincenzo Panormo.