CONTACT the New York Philharmonic's New-Music Series Returns this January

CONTACT!, the Philharmonic's new-music series, will return on Monday, January 8, 2018, with a concert at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The program of chamber works performed by New York Philharmonic musicians will feature Ashley Fure's Therefore I Was (2012), Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Ró (2013), Sarah Kirkland Snider's Thread and Fray(2016), and the New York Premieres of Du Yun's Tattooed in Snow, for String Quartet (2015) and Fernanda Aoki Navarro's Parthenogenesis (2012). Esa-Pekka Salonen - who is in the third and final year of his tenure as The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic - is continuing his advisory role on CONTACT! in the 2017-18 season. A second CONTACT! concert will take place at National Sawdust on Monday, April 2, 2018; program details will be announced at a later date.

Princeton-based composer Sarah Kirkland Snider says that Thread and Fray - her trio for bass clarinet, marimba, and viola composed in 2006 for members of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble - "weaves a single melody through an increasingly fragmented musical landscape, occasionally splintering into subsidiary streams of thought." Ms. Snider draws upon a variety of influences to create works of immersive storytelling. The winner of Detroit Symphony Orchestra's 2014 Elaine Lebenbom Award, she has had orchestral works commissioned and performed by the San Francisco, Detroit, Indianapolis, and North Carolina symphony orchestras, as well as the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, American Composers Orchestra, and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. She is the co-founder and co-artistic director of Brooklyn-based non-profit New Amsterdam Records.

American composer and installation artist Ashley Fure composed her 2012 work Therefore I Was for cello, piano, and percussion inspired by her grandmother's battle with advanced Parkinson's disease. The composer writes that her grandmother "lived inside a radical disassociation, a gap between intention and execution so extreme that the simplest of actions required inordinate effort. This sense of disassociation pervades Therefore I Was. ... The music repels between two aesthetic poles: one pulling the instruments towards stillness; the other anchoring their gestures to an anxious, aggressive ground." Commissioned by the Alice and Harry Eiler Foundation on Ms. Fure's receipt of the 2010 Jezek Prize, the work was premiered by Talea Ensemble. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Ashley Fure has received honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rome Prize in Music Composition, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, and Fulbright Fellowship to France. Ms. Fure's Bound to the Bow received its World Premiere in Young Americans during the 2016 NY PHIL BIENNIAL, performed by the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra, led by Christopher Rountree.

Shanghai-born Du Yun's 2015 Tattooed in Snow, for String Quartet builds on her work with both visual and spoken-word artists and, as she describes, "explores the temporary and fragile crystallization of art in nature and in space, often formed by the repetition of a small idea or process over a long period of time. The four players of the quartet form the four pillars of a musical space, and as a chant begins to move among them, it layers, repeats, and takes shape in the manner of a sculpture in sand or snow." Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera Angel's Bone, Du Yun is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performance artist based in New York City whose music exists at an artistic crossroads of orchestral, chamber music, theater, opera, orchestral, cabaret, storytelling, pop music, visual arts, and noise.

Parthenogenesis - Brazilian composer Fernanda Aoki Navarro's 2012 piece for clarinet, trombone, piano, and cello -explores three main ideas: non-development, "democratic distribution," and corporeality. She writes: "I created materials that didn't need any 'fertilization' (hence the title), materials that contained, in their first occurrence, all their characteristics already developed, avoiding the 'evolutionary aspects' of traditional developmental procedures in music composition." Ms. Navarro continues: "In terms of micro-structure, my guiding motivation was the corporeality of the performers: I was interested in the physical movements necessary for the performers to play certain sounds, considering the specificity of their instruments, and how the physical movements could create a sonic and affective impact in the audience." Parthenogenesis was composed for the 2012 April in Santa Cruz Contemporary Music Festival and premiered by the ensemble gnarwhallaby. Ms. Navarro is currently based in San Diego, California, where she is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-San Diego. She creates acoustic and electroacoustic music, as well as performance art and multimedia installations.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir's 2013 work Ró (which means "tranquility" in Icelandic) is scored for an ensemble of bass flute, bass clarinet, piano, percussion, and string quartet. It was written for the Icelandic CAPUT Ensemble and first performed in China, at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music. Ms. Thorvaldsdottir - named the Philharmonic's Kravis Emerging Composer in 2015 - creates music from large sonic structures that often reveal the presence of an array of sustained sound materials, expressing the influence her imaginative listening to landscapes and nature has on her art. She was awarded the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize in 2012 for her piece Dreaming. The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence Esa-Pekka Salonen will conduct the World Premiere-New York Philharmonic Commission of a new work by Ms. Thorvaldsdottir, commissioned as part of the honor, in April 2018. The Philharmonic gave the New York Premiere of Ms. Thorvaldsdottir's Aeriality in May 2017, led by then Music Director Alan Gilbert.

CONTACT! highlights the works of both emerging and established contemporary composers, performed by smaller ensembles of Philharmonic musicians in intimate venues outside the Lincoln Center campus. Since its inception in the 2009-10 season by then Music Director Alan Gilbert, CONTACT! has presented 23 World Premieres, including Matthias Pintscher's songs from Solomon's garden, Sean Shepherd's These Particular Circumstances, Carter's Three Controversies and a Conversation, and Dai Fujikura's Infinite String. As The Marie-Josée Kravis Composer-in-Residence, 2015-18, Esa-Pekka Salonen advises on CONTACT! programming.

Located in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the non-profit National Sawdust is a dynamic home for artists and new music of all kinds. It is a place for exploration and discovery - where emerging and established artists can share their music with serious music fans and casual listeners alike. In a city teeming with venues, National Sawdust is a singular space founded with an expansive vision: to provide composers and musicians across genres with a setting in which they can flourish, and a place where they are given unprecedented support and critical resources essential to create, and then share, their work. A diversity of world-class artists, arts organizations, and institutions are collaborating with National Sawdust's CEO and Artistic Director, the composer Paola Prestini, as curators. In addition to hosting rehearsals, performances, recordings, and broadcasts in state-of-the art facilities, National Sawdust commissions new works and arranges workshops and residencies. It aims to be a resource not only for the community of musicians, but also for audiences in search of remarkable musical experiences at accessible ticket prices. For the local community, National Sawdust creates progressive public programs and educational initiatives. Other offerings include talks, publications, and mentorship programs for composers and musicians, and for related fields. Designed by Brooklyn's Bureau V, National Sawdust is constructed within the existing shell of a century-old sawdust factory, preserving the authenticity of Williamsburg's industrial past while providing a refined and intimate setting for the exploration of new music. At the venue's core is a flexible chamber hall, acoustically designed by renowned engineering firm Arup to provide the highest-quality experience of both unamplified and amplified music.

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