2024-2025 New Music Series
Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion featuring Ringdown
Friday, October 18, 2024 • 7:30 p.m. • Lawrence Memorial Chapel
Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting, with composer Caroline Shaw and singer/songwriter Danni Lee
For 20 years and counting, Sō Percussion has redefined chamber music for the 21st century through an “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” (The New Yorker). They are celebrated by audiences and presenters for a dazzling range of work: for live performances in which “telepathic powers of communication” (New York Times) bring to life the vibrant percussion repertoire; for an extravagant array of collaborations in classical music, pop, indie rock, contemporary dance, and theater; and for their work in education and community, creating opportunities and platforms for music that explore the immense possibility of art in our time.
Sō continues its collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, with a new collection of songs. These new songs will be featured alongside music from 2020’s Grammy Award-winning song cycle Narrow Sea, and the co-composed album of songs Let the Soil Play its Simple Part.
This event is part of the Performing Arts Series.
Lawrence University New Music Ensemble presents 9 World Premieres
Flute & Trombone Ensembles
Millennium Composers Initiative
Friday, November 1, 2024 • 8 p.m. • Lawrence Memorial Chapel
Free admission
Lawrence University Flute and Trombone Ensembles collaborate with LU alumnus, Isaac Mayhew ’17 and the Millennium Composers Initiative for an evening of new music that combines two unlikely instrument pairs into one voice.
Kenji Bunch, violist and composer
Thursday, February 27, 2025 • 8 p.m. • Harper Hall
Free admission
Kenji Bunch writes music that looks for commonalities between musical styles, for understandings that transcend cultural or generational barriers, and for empathic connections with his listeners. Drawing on vernacular musical traditions, an interest in highlighting historical injustices and inaccuracies, and techniques from his classical training, Bunch creates music with a unique personal vocabulary that appeals to performers, audience, and critics alike. With his work frequently performed worldwide and recorded numerous times, Bunch considers his current mission the search for and celebration of shared emotional truths about the human experience from the profound to the absurd, to help facilitate connection and healing through entertainment, vulnerability, humor, and joy. Bunch is widely recognized for performing his own groundbreaking works for viola. He currently serves as Artistic Director of the new music group Fear No Music and is deeply committed to music education in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.
LuNuMu performs music of Kenji Bunch
Sunday, March 2, 2025 • 7:30 p.m. • Harper Hall
Free admission
The Lawrence University New Music Ensemble performs Ralph’s Old Records, Summer Hours, and Alpha Dog by composer Kenji Bunch.
Wet Ink Ensemble presents Second Nature by Eric Wubbels
Sunday, March 9, 2025 • 7:30 p.m. • Harper Hall
Free admission
written for and performed by the Wet Ink Ensemble
Erin Lesser, flutes
Ian Antonio, percussion
Eric Wubbels, keyboards
Second Nature is a new concert-length music and video work from composer/performer and Wet Ink Ensemble Co-Director Eric Wubbels, an artist who “brings meticulous poise to his experimentalism,” and whose music, “with references to many traditions, sounds like nothing by any other composer” (The New York Times).
Written for and developed in long-term collaboration with Wet Ink Ensemble members Erin Lesser and Ian Antonio, Second Nature is an extended meditation on cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, drawing on ancient, contemporary, and futurist perspectives, instruments, and technologies.
Taking as its genre-ancestor Morton Feldman’s late trios for flute, piano, percussion, the piece then pivots in a radically different direction, finding meaning and complexity in the particularly loaded contemporary intersection of nature, culture, and technology.
Over the course of more than 70 minutes, Second Nature brings together musical scenarios of the most extreme variety and diversity into a stunningly original synthesis. Movements for traditional instrumental combinations (flute, vibraphone, piano) segue directly into music for computer-controlled cymbals and 3-D printed ultrasonic flute, and passages for analog synthesizer and inside-piano technique are accompanied by homemade (and in one case, home-grown) wind and percussion instruments made from plant, rock, and animal bone materials. Video interludes of the trio performing outdoors at specifically chosen geographical and seasonal locations extend the conceptual and symbolic reach of the piece beyond the concert hall and back into the natural world itself.
Roomful of Teeth
Friday, April 4, 2025 • 7:30 p.m. • Lawrence Memorial Chapel
Roomful of Teeth is a two-time GRAMMY Award-winning ensemble dedicated to the performance of new works for eight amplified voices. Through collaboration, commissioning, and new technologies, they seek to reimagine the Expressive potential of the human voice.
Their latest album, Rough Magic (New Amsterdam Records, 2023) was captured using groundbreaking recording techniques and innovative spatial technology. Roomful of Teeth was recognized at the 66th GRAMMY Awards in 2024, winning Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for Rough Magic, and composer William Brittelle’s work Psychedelics, which appears on the album, was nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
This event is part of the Performing Arts Series.
Alarm Will Sound and Roomful of Teeth are just a few of the amazing New Music Series guests who have shared their music with the Lawrence community.