About the Series
PAIRINGS is a four-concert series of contemporary classical music produced by the Tank and curator Adam Mirza. Concerts will take place at the Tank on each Tuesday night in November at 7PM. Each concert will feature a young composer "paired" with an established composer, both chosen and presented by a NYC-based new music ensemble. Following each performance, there will be a short panel discussion with the featured young composer to consider the various musical interactions in play.
The participating ensembles are: the JACK Quartet, Wet Ink, Red Light New Music, and AMP. The ensembles were chosen for their artistic excellence, performance history and organic participation in the developing New York new music scene. These are ensembles that place tremendous faith in the music they present, even as they are unhesitating in their willingness to take risks and explore composers and music not widely represented or well-known in the US.
Thus there is a 'second level' of pairing that contextualizes the apparent focal point of 'composer' (or 'composers') : the organic collaboration between composer and independent new music ensemble as a living cultural ecosystem, within which the individual composer(s) may articulate distinctly personal aesthetic ideals, but without which such ideals would lack real substance.
The "substance" of this series will invoke several of the musical-cultural sub-plots which twist through the various incarnations of "new music", here with an emphasis on the avant-garde and experimental traditions of the US and Europe. Three of the ensembles pair young American composers with two seminal figures of post-war European modernism and one recent European artist. Electronic element—especially the interaction of electronic and "live" music—are developed in several works. More broadly, the compositions and composers in this series exhibit adaptations to artistic, scientific and social patterns from outside of the realm of traditional classical music.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and an award by Meet the Composers.