American Composers Orchestra Announces Two Carnegie Hall Performances During 2018 - 2019 Season

American Composers Orchestra (ACO) announces two performances presented by Carnegie Hall in Zankel Hall during the 2018-2019 season. In 2018-2019, under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel, Music Director George Manahan, and President Edward Yim, ACO continues its commitment to the creation, performance, preservation, and promotion of music by American composers, with programming that reflects the infinite ways American orchestral music illustrates geographic, stylistic, gender, and racial diversity. ACO's concerts at Carnegie Hall include premieres by 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun, by composer and Imani Winds flutist Valerie Coleman, and by Alex Temple, a composer who integrates love for pop culture and the Western classical tradition. Additional 2018-2019 performances and activities will be announced in March 2018.

"ACO is honored and excited to continue giving voice to today's American composers, both emerging and established," said ACO President Edward Yim. "In particular, that our premieres shine a light on issues of female empowerment, the global refugee crisis, and powerful musical storytelling is at the heart of our mission to embrace the relevance of today's creative artists to the issues of today."

ACO's concert at Zankel Hall on November 2, 2018 features the world premiere of Valerie Coleman's Phenomenal Women, inspired by Maya Angelou's poem and book, Phenomenal Woman. The concerto for wind quintet and orchestra will be performed by the Imani Winds with ACO, with each member featured in a solo interlude influenced by a different phenomenal woman - activist Malala Yousefai (oboe serenade), Brazilian Olympic Gold medalist Rafaela Silva (clarinet in choro style), athlete Serena Williams (bassoon virtuoso cadenza), Michelle Obama (flute with urban/jazz elements) and Hillary Clinton (horn fanfare). The concert also features the world premiere of Alex Temple's Three Principles of Noir with singer Meaghan Burke, a piece with a time-traveling science fiction narrative centered around a Chicago historian who travels back in time to the 1893 World's Fair. This is ACO's second commission from Alex Temple. The orchestra premiered her Liebeslied in 2011 during the opening concert of its SONiC festival that year. Joan Tower's Chamber Dance, written in 2006 for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, completes the program. Chamber Dance treats the orchestra like a chamber music ensemble, and weaves together solos, duos, and other combinations of instrumentalists, creating, as Tower puts it, "an ensemble that has to 'dance' well together."

On April 11, 2019 at Zankel Hall, ACO will give the U.S. premiere of Du Yun's Where We Lost Our Shadows, a new multidisciplinary work for orchestra, film, and vocalists, co-commissioned by ACO, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Southbank Centre, and Cal Performances. This is ACO's second commission from Du Yun, who created her piece Slow Portraits during ACO's coLABoratory research and development program in 2013. Du Yun is composing Where We Lost Our Shadows in response to film captured by Ramallah-based Palestinian visual artist Khaled Jarrar, which documents the refugee crisis in Europe. The piece will be performed by ACO with singer Helga Davis, Pakistani Qawwali singer Ali Sethi, and percussionist Shayna Dunkleman, with visuals by Jarrar. The concert also includes Gloria Coates' Symphony No. 1, "Music on Open Strings," from 1973, and Morton Feldman's 1980 work Turfan Fragments, inspired by a series of fragments of knotted carpets from the third and sixth centuries which were discovered in the Silk Road region.