Tribeca New Music Presents POLITICS AND PREMIERES, February 19

Tribeca New Music presents POLITICS and PREMIERES featuring six new works, including the world premiere of LOSER: The Wit and Wisdom of Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States of America, a five-part musical portrait written for five instruments and voice by composer Arthur Gottschalk, and sung by baritone Timothy Jones.

The premieres continue with Mariners, Small Spaces, and Coaster by ShoutHouse founder composer/pianist Will Healy along with Good For You, and Trio for Violin and Two Cellos by former State Theatre of NJ artist-in-residence composer/violinist George Meyer.

• LOSER: The Wit and Wisdom of Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States of America is a sextet for five instruments and voice sung by baritone Timothy Jones. The work, which addresses issues of misogyny, racism, and tyranny, was commissioned by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and written by composer Arthur Gottschalk using public domain quotations by Donald Trump. Gottschalk describes the work as "delicious irony," with the words of a would-be autocrat sung by a suave and urbane African American gentleman. The premiere was scheduled for July 2022, but was canceled after a performer tested positive for COVID-19. Despite the work's controversial nature, Gottschalk believes it necessary to reflect the time in which we live and to prevent similar political monstrosities from happening again.

Arthur Gottschalk A man whose music is described as "infectious, loud, and fun" (Gramophone Magazine) and "fascinatingly strange" (BBC Music Magazine), award-winning composer Arthur Gottschalk is Professor of Music Composition at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music. He received the Gold Medal and Record of the Year in Music Composition from the Global Music Awards for his Requiem: For the Living, and was honored with a prestigious Bogliasco Fellowship, as well as the First Prize of the Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Originale of Corciano, Italy for his Concerto for Violin and Symphonic Winds.

Timothy Jones (bass-baritone) enjoys a reputation as a charismatic presence on operatic and concert stages throughout the United States, Europe and South America. His performance of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts's Einstein on Mercer Street is featured on PNME's recent recording Against the Emptiness. The Boston Globe hailed his voice as "stentorian and honeyed" and The Chicago Tribune called his "complete connection with the text extraordinary."

• Small Spaces (New York premiere) was written for a quartet for flute, violin, viola, and vibraphone) by Will Healy. "Small Spaces was written in the small space of my Brooklyn apartment in the winter of 2021. It was drawn from a short piano recording I made two years ago in the equally cozy confines of an apartment on the Upper West Side. Sometimes, the inspiration for a piece comes from a phrase, story, concept, or the timbres of a group of instruments playing together. With this piece, however, the initial seed of an idea came to me shortly after receiving the commission, long before the COVID-19 pandemic delayed all concerts and activities. I improvised the opening ostinato on the piano, with its irregular, bouncing rhythm, and recorded it as a message to my future self to be developed into this piece. I carried this one-minute recording around with me on my phone through four apartments, two relationships, and countless other musical projects, while my life and the world around me transformed dramatically. Looking back at that initial recording feels like a time capsule, and it inspired a very different piece in this current moment than it would have in 2019." --WH

• Mariners (New York premiere) by Will Healy is written for clarinet, violin, and piano. "I began writing Mariners in a small town in Italy, where I was doing my best to write nothing at all. I had been composing continuously for a few months through the cold, dark New York winter, and had been looking forward to a vacation. I was playing Chopin at the piano in my room at the Bogliasco Foundation, near the city of Genoa, and was struck by the beauty of the setting. The doors were open to the ocean and azure blue stretched far into the horizon. I began improvising some simple textures, imitating the layers of melody and harmony in Chopin's preludes. Back in Brooklyn, where I could hear the foghorns from the harbor miles away reverberating through my apartment, I thought about that setting often. That is where the piece was completed. It was premiered in Door County, Wisconsin, at the Midsummer's Music Festival in July 2022." --WH

• George Meyer (World premiere) will perform his Trio for Two Violins and Cello, drawing from his classical and bluegrass training under his father, five-time Grammy Award-winning bassist and composer Edgar Meyer. The Trio uses a wonderful instrumentation too little used since the time of Bach, combining Indian classical music, the energy of bluegrass improvisation, and his own unique fiddle music background. The last movement features a rhythmic bowing idea inspired by the virtuosic playing of the great Swedish band Väsen.

• Coaster and Good for You (two World premieres), for piano and violin, continue an on-going collaboration between pianist/composer Will Healy (Coaster) and violinist/composer George Meyer (Good for You). Intricate and sophisticated rhythmic flavor is drawn from jazz, newgrass color, and improvisation, which sets the tone for these engaging works.

Will Healy is a composer and pianist based in New York. Noted for his "lushly bluesy" sound and "adroitly blended... textures" (The New York Times), he is the artistic director of ShoutHouse, a collective of hip-hop, jazz, and classical musicians. He is a recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, the W.K. Rose Fellowship, a JFund commission from the American Composers Forum, and prizes in the Juilliard and Kaleidoscope Orchestra Composition Competitions. Healy's work has appeared at The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, The Apollo, on the NY Philharmonic's Biennial series, on "New Sounds" with John Schaefer (WNYC) and "Making Music" (WBAI), and more.

Violinist/composer George Meyer has performed his own compositions in a variety of settings, including Chamber Music Northwest, Bravo! Vail, the Savannah Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Telluride and RockyGrass Bluegrass Festivals, the Charles Ives Concert Series, the Rome Chamber Music Festival, and the Kyoto International Festival. He has appeared in performance with his father, Edgar Meyer, and with Mike Marshall, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Fred Sherry, and Paul Neubauer. Born in Nashville, he holds degrees from Harvard College and the Juilliard School.

TNM is a not-for-profit organization that presents and performs a bold new art music, infused with American pop culture, written by contemporary composers. Its core stable of professional musicians (the Tribeca Monsters) and guest artists engage the public with compelling performances that stimulate and inspire, offering new and recent works with passion and integrity. The goal is to forge new links between musicians and a growing audience of adventurous music lovers through concerts, commissions, competitions, educational initiatives, dialogue, and its annual Tribeca New Music Festival.

POLITICS and PREMIERES is made possible in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.