The evening is titled Aural Explorations: Farrin, Fure, and Messaien. It features world premieres by Suzanne Farrin and Ashley Fure. These works were created using long-distance collaborative tools (Farrin) and for audience participation (Fure) specifically for this concert. The evening includes ‘lobby’ chats with the composers and musical collaborators and newly released documentary footage about Farrin and her long-time collaboration with ICE. The evening is presented free-of-charge but advance ticketing is required. Eventbrite RSVP
In addition to the world premieres, Suzanne Farrin performs a movement from Olivier Messiaen’s searing 1941 work Quatuor pour la fin du temps, arranged for the ondes Martenot (an early electronic cousin of the theremin).
Farrin is a composer who explores the interior worlds of instruments and the visceral potentialities of sound. Her music has been performed by some of the great musicians of today on stages across Europe, North and South America.
Earlier works have concentrated on establishing an intensity and personal language through careful study of solo instruments along with the interpretive personalities that come with them. Those works include pieces for solo strings (corpo di terra, for cello; Time is a Cage for violin and uscirmi di braccia, for viola and piano or bass drum). Though they have now been played by many interpreters, they were expressly written for people close to the composer (Julia Lichten, cello; Cal Wiersma, violin and Antoine Tamestit and Markus Hadulla, viola and piano). That intimacy is a productive space for Farrin: it is as if exploring the very personal habits, sounds, and physicality of each brings her closer to a more universal expressivity.
This search for transcendence has more recently been applied to vocal music. In dolce la morte, she felt she was expressing the inherent conflicts, contractions and corporal strife that exists in the great master’s love poetry. The piece is her own, but the “mask” of Michelangelo provided a productive mouthpiece from which she could project her own sound world. The work was commissioned by and received its world premiere at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ICE was the collaborating ensemble for this work which was directed by Doug Fitch.
Suzanne Farrin’s music has been featured at venues and festivals including The BBC Proms (with the JACK Quartet), The LA Phil (with Sō Percussion), The Gothenburg Art Biennial, Mostly Mozart, Matrix, Alpenklassik, Music in Würzburg, BAM NextWave, Theaterforum (Germany), Town Hall Seattle, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Symphony Space, Wigmore Hall, Centro de Artes de la Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina) and, in her home city of New York, Carnegie Hall, The Stone, Spectrum, Subculture, Miller Theater, Merkin Hall, Wave Hill, Lincoln Center, the Park Avenue Armory, and Joe’s Pub, among many others.
The ondes Martenot was created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in France in the 1920s as a response to the simultaneous destruction and technological advances of WWI. Her life as an interpreter on the instrument has taken her to venues such as the Abrons Arts Center in NYC, Centro de Artes in Buenos Aires as well as television, where she was featured in an episode directed by Roman Coppola on the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle. She is featured as a performer in Chicuarotes, directed by Gael García Bernal, which is currently in theaters throughout Mexico and was premiered at Cannes, as well as the Iranian film Sade Ma’bar (Blockage) directed by Mohsen Gharaie, which won the best film in the New Currents section of the Busan International Film Festival.
Suzanne Farrin is the Frayda B. Lindemann Professor of Music and Chair at Hunter College and a member of the faculty at The CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches composition. She holds a doctorate from Yale University. Corpo di Terra(New Focus Recordings) is her debut album and Dolce la morte (Tundra), her second release, came out in November 2018. Her work may also be heard on VAI, Signum Classics and Albany Records labels. She was the 2017 Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize winner in Composition and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition.
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