The DiMenna Center
450 West 37th StreetNovember 1, 2025 at the DiMenna Center, Vienna-based Mivos string quartet will join Ekmeles for the world premiere of a new work by Evan Johnson commissioned by Chamber Music America, a world premiere by Taylor Brook, and works by Nick Dunston and Petros Leivadas.
Evan Johnson's O Maria both continues and expands upon the composer's idiosyncratic musical language. Characterized by an extreme interiority and ritualistic focus, and building on echoes and fragments of earlier music, this half-hour work will treat the combined four strings and six singers as separate entities with no overall conductor. Through novel notational means, the ten musicians are divided into three groups: the six singers, the upper three strings, and the cello soloist. Each are quasi-independent from one another, creating an intense yet freely interwoven chamber music.
The premiere of Taylor Brook's Stray Birds, also for string quartet and voices, will mark the composer's eighth work written for Jeffrey Gavett since 2011. Brook's previous works for Gavett have been characterized by an adventurous approach to tuning, and the invention of hypothetical musical traditions. The work, building on 14 years of collaboration, will set pseudo-Proto-Indo-European translations of poems by Rabindranath Tagore, as well as excerpts of Olaf Stapledon's science fiction classic Last and First Men.
Alongside these collaborations with Mivos Quartet, Ekmeles will perform two works for voices alone. The first is Petros Leivadas's Cuál es su Ardor, heard here in its US premiere. The work texts by Cavafy and St. Augustine, and makes use of fragments of Guillaume de Machaut’s 14th century masterpiece Messe de Nostre Dame. Cavafy's poems, translated into Spanish and German, both have to do with the ancient past, describing loving inscriptions on tombstones. Nick Dunston's Mothership on the other hand, looks to the future. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis, Dunston creates an Afrofuturist vision with the six voices of the ensemble joined into a science fiction hivemind.
Sat, Nov 1, 2025 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
The DiMenna Center
450 West 37th Street
Ekmeles is a vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of new and rarely-heard works, and gems of the historical avant garde. They have a special focus on microtonal works, and have been praised for their “extraordinary sense of pitch” by the New York Times. They are the recipients of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation’s 2023 Ensemble Prize, the first American group to receive the honor.
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