Five Boroughs Music Festival Co-Presents CHAMBERQUEER 2023: WE REFRACT, June 9- 11

New York City's Five Boroughs Music Festival (5BMF), co-presents ChamberQUEER 2023: We Refract, a three-borough tour of the collective's acclaimed annual Pride Month celebration on Friday, June 9, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. at Littlefield in Brooklyn; Saturday, June 10, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. at Red Eye NY in Manhattan; and Sunday, June 11, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. at Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor on Staten Island.

The groundbreaking ensemble, concert producer, and advocacy group ChamberQUEER performs a quilted collection of newly composed works written by the members of the ensemble for flute, violin, cello, guitar, harp, mrudangam, percussion, and voice. Pieces written by a dream team of composers, improvisers, and performers including Jules Biber, Aviva Jaye, Alexis C. Lamb, Brian Mummert, Rajna Swaminathan, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Yoshi Weinberg are linked in concert by improvisations to create a continuous and unified concert-length world premiere.

ChamberQUEER 2023: We Refract meditates on questions that strike at the heart of the ensemble's commitment to building queer communities: How does navigating a life outside of heteronormativity impact one's relationships? How does it shape understanding of one's own identity? And how can music express and communicate these experiences? To respond to these questions, these seven artists have crafted a musical experience blossoming from queer collectivity. This celebration of Pride Month gives new voice to queer musical icons past and present, honors the power of music created in the room, and provides space for the audience to help weave a sonic tapestry of queer community.

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Concert Information
ChamberQUEER 2023: We Refract
Friday, June 9, 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Littlefield | 635 Sackett St | Brooklyn, NY 11217
Tickets: $25, sliding scale
Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chamberqueer-2023-we-refract-tickets-627228456197

Saturday, June 10, 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Red Eye NY | 355 W 41st St | New York, NY 10036
Tickets: $25, sliding scale
Link: https://www.redeyetickets.com/chamberqueer-2023-we-refract/

Sunday, June 11, 2023 at 3:00 p.m.
Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor | 1000 Richmond Terrace, Building C | Staten Island, NY 10301
Tickets: $25, sliding scale
Link: https://5bmf.org/events/chamberqueer/

Program to include:
New compositions from seven ChamberQUEER composers, performers, and improvisers

Artists:
Jules Biber
Aviva Jaye
Alexis C. Lamb
Brian Mummert
Rajna Swaminathan
Darian Donovan Thomas
Yoshi Weinberg

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature and administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.

Aviva Jaye (she/they) is a performing artist and composer primarily creating music, wielding voice, keys, harp, guitar and ukulele. She often combines acoustic and electronic elements to unlock a portal for listeners to venture, exploring the dimensions of empathy, self-awareness, social justice and futurism. Her interdisciplinary work includes theater, dance, paper arts & poetry. In addition to solo work, Aviva is a band member performing with Arthur Moon, Dessa, Echo Bloom & Raia Was. As a youth advocate, she has co-created with students as Program Associate with Brooklyn Youth Chorus and as a teaching artist with Marquis Studios and The Wooster Group in New York's city schools.

Alexis C. Lamb (b. 1993) is a composer, percussionist, and educator whose work seeks to highlight our natural, historical, and societal relationships. Much of her work incorporates storytelling, process over product, and listening and responding to our surroundings. Her recent commissions and collaborations include Third Coast Percussion, Albany (NY) Symphony, Aizuri Quartet, and Opera Omaha. She is a doctoral candidate in composition at the University of Michigan and has previously earned degrees from the Yale School of Music and NorthernIllinois University. For more information about Alexis, please visit her website at www.alexislamb.com

Yoshi Weinberg (they/them) is a New York City based flutist, harpist, and composer. Lauded for their "sublime tone" and "creative interpretation and technical virtuosity" (I Care If You Listen), Yoshi is a dedicated performer of contemporary and experimental works, and has performed as a soloist across North America and Europe including at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, Roulette Intermedium (NYC) the Fitzgerald Theater (St. Paul, MN), the Ordway Center (St. Paul, MN), Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), Mahaiwe Theater (Great Barrington, MA), Orchestra Hall (Minneapolis, MN), Gesellschaftshaus (Magdeburg, Germany), Fondation des Etats-Unis (Paris, France), among many others. They currently are Artistic Director of InfraSound, and founding member and flutist for Apply Triangle. Yoshi is currently studying their DMA in Flute Performance at CUNY Graduate Center, studying with Robert Dick. They received their MM in Contemporary Performance from Manhattan School of Music, and their BM in Flute Performance from Saint Olaf College.

Rajna Swaminathan is an acclaimed mridangam artist, vocalist, composer, and scholar. Described as "a vital new voice" (Pop Matters), her orientation as an improviser-composer blossomed through a search for resonance and fluidity among musical forms and aesthetic worlds. Since 2013, she has led the ensemble RAJAS, which has been a prominent medium for her expansive, boundary-breaking compositions. Rajna holds a PhD in Music (Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry) from Harvard University, and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Music (Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology) at UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts.

Darian Donovan Thomas is a Brooklyn based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and interdisciplinary artist. He is interested in combining genres into a singular vocabulary that can express ideas about intersectionality (of medium and identity). Necessarily, he is interested in redacting all barriers to entry that have existed at the gates of any genre - this vocabulary of multiplicity will be intersectional, and therefore all-inclusive. He has received a Bachelors in Music Composition from The University of the Incarnate Word, and was a 2018 New Amsterdam Composer Lab Fellow, 2018 SoSI Composer Fellow, and 2019 Banglewood Composition Fellow. He is currently touring with Moses Sumney and Balùn.

Brian Mummert sings, conducts, arranges, and composes music spanning eras and genres, all in the service of harnessing musical narrative as a mode for deepening mutual understanding. He is the founding artistic director of The New Consort, a nationally-acclaimed vocal ensemble dedicated to exploring the roles musical ritual and community play in our lives; and a co-founder The Red Ribbon Revue, a World AIDS Day concert featuring HIV+ performers celebrating the legacy of artists lost to AIDS. Read more at www.brianmummert.com

Jules Biber is a cellist, educator and musical curator based in Brooklyn, NY. An accomplished chamber musician and soloist, Jules' versatility in early, standard and modern repertoire, as well as non-classical styles, makes her sought-after for a variety of high-profile concerts and recording projects, and her deep commitment to inclusive community has made her one of the city's progressive curators of classical music spaces. Read more at www.julesbiber.com

ChamberQUEER highlights LGBTQ+ voices in contemporary and historical music and reimagines the classical concert experience as a radically inclusive gathering space and musical community for the 21st century. We interrogate and experiment with, or "queer," European art music's presumed necessities and existing norms: by crafting new narratives from the canon, democratizing performance etiquette and dress, and shattering the performer-audience binary, we create a fresh and inviting environment for a new generation of music lovers.

Founded in 2018 by a quartet of performers, conductors, and creators - Jules Biber (cello), Danielle Buonaiuto (soprano), Brian Mummert (baritone), and Andrew Yee (cello) - ChamberQUEER is anchored by its annual Pride festival, traditionally staged in Brooklyn. Each June, we highlight LGBTQ+ artists both past and present, and create spaces for building queer community. The festival has been commended by The New Yorker and listed by The New York Times as a 2022 "Best of Pride" event. During COVID lockdown in 2020, we hosted ChamberQUEERantine, a free-to-access, sixteen-day online event that provided a platform for original work from over 50 queer musicians.

ChamberQUEER regularly hosts concerts and community events, from reading parties to networking opportunities, throughout the year. During COVID, we focused on online and outdoor events, holding space for the community throughout the pandemic with Zoom happy hours, Instagram Live interviews with queer composers, educational webinars, and Zoom concerts in partnership with LGBTQ+ service organizations. Under the ChamberQUEER Presents... banner, we co-produce events that amplify the work of queer artists.

ChamberQUEER functions as a community promoter, helping to contract and support queer musicians nationwide, and as an advocacy group, engaging in residencies at educational institutions and building a free, online resource library for like-minded presenting institutions and performing ensembles. We have worked with Luna Lab, a composition program for young composers of marginalized genders; collaborated with the Canton Symphony Orchestra's Orchestrating Change programs; and presented at the national conference of Chamber Music America. ChamberQUEER concerts have been presented by National Sawdust; WQXR at the Greene Space; Death of Classical at Green-Wood Cemetery; Brooklyn Pride; Boulanger Initiative; and premiere New York brass quartet The Westerlies. Our founders and members have represented the organization as ambassadors at chamber music festivals, podcasts, public radio broadcasts, and residencies across the country.

Since 2007, Five Boroughs Music Festival (5BMF) has brought virtuosic chamber music performances of the highest caliber to every borough of NYC, cultivating new audiences for the genre and encouraging music lovers to look beyond Manhattan for outstanding performances. Lauded as "imaginative" by The New York Times, "enterprising" by The New Yorker, and "vital" by WQXR's Operavore blog, 5BMF's commitment to musical outreach and diverse programming has distinguished it as a standout presence in the New York City arts community from its earliest days.

5BMF's artist roster of over 500 individual performers and ensembles is comprised of talented emerging artists and distinguished musicians alike, representing a diverse range of musical genres and styles. Its venues are just as eclectic, and have included performing arts spaces, cultural centers, and historic New York City landmarks such as Federal Hall, Pregones Theater, Flushing Town Hall, King Manor Museum, Brooklyn Historical Society, the Alice Austen House, and the Staten Island Museum, to name merely a few.

As champions of new music, 5BMF has commissioned over 70 composers and presented world premieres of their works all across New York City, most notably the borough-wide tours of its quinquennial commissioning project, the Five Borough Songbook Volumes I, II and III. 5BMF's outreach initiatives continue to expand every year, and have included program-related interactive lectures and discussions, public masterclasses with world renowned performing artists, and free public programming. Learn more at www.5bmf.org.

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