THE NEW YORK NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE ANNOUNCES
COMPOSER RECIPIENTS OF THE
2020 SOCIALLY DISTANT MICRO-COMMISSIONS
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JULY 2020: NYNME has launched a special new initiative to creatively collaborate with composers during this time of social distancing. The call for proposals is an opportunity to challenge composers to create musical concepts outside the traditional concert performance experience. The search attracted a diverse and talented pool of 97 applicants! NYNME is honored to announce the inaugural recipients: Oren Boneh; Flannery Cunningham; Nathan Shields and Edward RosenBerg III, along with two emerging composer mentorships awarded to Tyson Davis and Ben Zervigón.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
The inaugural Micro Commissions Call for Proposals is a national search for American composers with adventurous appetites for creating new audio/video work in a non-traditional performance setting as NYNME’s socially distant members remotely record select works. Each of the four selected composers will receive a $500 commissioning fee. Each of the two Emerging Composer Mentorship recipients will receive a $250 commissioning fee along with close collaboration with the Ensemble to enrich the experience and provide invaluable feedback for their music careers. All commissioned works will be remotely recorded and released by NYNME in autumn 2020.
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
Oren Boneh is a composer based in Paris who writes music characterized by its energy and dynamism. Its foundation is made up of vastly contrasting characters, ranging from abrasive and mechanical to humorous and supple. The music plays with listener expectations of the characters’ behaviors in order to create unpredictability and friction. Oren’s music has been performed by ensembles such as Vertixe Sonora, Alarm Will Sound, Quatuor Tana, Ensemble Meitar, Proton Bern, the Divertimento Ensemble, Ensemble Reconsil, and Architek Percussion. A Germany Fulbright Scholar, Oren won first prize in the 2017 Salvatore Martirano Competition and has been selected in numerous competitions such as the ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, the Franco Donatoni International Competition, the Loadbang Commission Competition, and Protonwerk No. 8. Oren has also been a composer fellow at the Missouri International Composers Festival, Cultivate at the Copland House,
DRAFTJS_BLOCK_KEY:9iahrSoundstreams, Tzlil Meudcan, CEME, Festival Mixtur, UC Davis Revision/s, and at the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Visby International Centre for Composers and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Oren completed the IRCAM Cursus and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley where he works with Franck Bedrossian and Edmund Campion.
Flannery Cunningham is a composer and musicologist fascinated by vocal expression, text, and auditory perception. She aims to write music that surprises and delights. Her work has been performed at festivals such as Aspen, June in Buffalo, TCML, SPLICE, and Copland House’s CULTIVATE and by performers such as International Contemporary Ensemble, TAK, and Music from Copland House. Her current (COVID-paused) projects include commissions for National Sawdust as a winner of the Hildegard Competition, PRISM Quartet, Musiqa Houston, and a new quartet with electronics for Sō Percussion. In vocal writing, Flannery often writes her own texts and finds crafting words and music to be tightly intertwined processes. She is attracted to the very old and very new; she has presented on 14th-century master (and fellow poet-composer) Guillaume de Machaut at the International Medieval Congress and has performed at the International Computer Music Conference. Flannery writes for both acoustic ensembles and for players with real-time electronics, always striving to foreground the musicality of the human performer. She holds a BA from Princeton University, an MA from University College Cork as a Mitchell Scholar, an MA from Stony Brook University, and is currently a PhD candidate in composition and musicology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Edward RosenBerg III is a composer/performer residing in Brooklyn, N.Y. He studied saxophone at the Eastman School of Music and holds a PhD in Composition from Stony Brook University. As a saxophonist, Ed has worked with a variety of groups including Anti-Social Music, Bang-On-A-Can’s Asphalt Orchestra, Fireworks Ensemble, Talking Band, Amy Lynn & The Honey Men, Ensemble Signal, Liz Roche Dance Company and the Bottlenote Music Collective in Dublin. He has also worked as a music director, multi-instrumentalist and conductor with Oklahoma! on Broadway and the Mettawee River Theater Company. Ed is a founding member of the instrumental prog-jazz-metal group, Jerseyband. The group has recorded 7 albums and played throughout the U.S. and Europe. Additionally, Ed makes children's music with his sister in The Green Orbs, and is a member of the trio Kilter which released its debut album AXIOM in 2020. His works have been performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Anti-Social Music and the Tokyo Brass Arts Orchestra, among others. In recent years he has been commissioned by Google, ~NOIS Saxophone Quartet, and Double Standard. His chamber-opera, Healing, premiered in 2019.
Nathan Shields's music has been praised for its “elusive luminance” (Washington Post). The New York Times's Anthony Tommasini called Commedia, at Tanglewood's 2019 Festival of Contemporary Music, “the affecting work on the program...alternately kinetic and reflective.” His works have been commissioned by Tanglewood, the Mendelssohn-Orchesterakademie of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Fromm Foundation, JACK Quartet, BMI, Concert Artists' Guild, and Greenwood Music Camp, and by soloists Bridget Kibbey, Jay Campbell, and Michael Brown, with additional performances by the Jupiter String Quartet, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, Mendelssohn Academy Orchestra, New Fromm Players, Charlottesville Symphony, Chamber Music Northwest, Andrew Hsu, Metropolis Ensemble, Music from Copland House, Decoda, and the Horszowski Trio, among others. He has received the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Aaron Copland Award, Presser Music Award, and BMI and ASCAP awards, and fellowships from Tanglewood, Yaddo, Copland House CULTIVATE Institute, Juilliard and more. Nathan received his doctorate from the Juilliard School, and has taught at Juilliard and St. Olaf College. He is associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Tyson Davis began composing at the age of eight years old. He entered the University of North Carolina School of the Arts as a high school freshman, studying with Lawrence Dillon. He has taken advantage of numerous opportunities at the school, writing for Eighth Blackbird, the Attacca String Quartet, UNCSA Cantata Singers and the UNCSA Symphony Orchestra. In the summers, he has attended Interlochen Summer Music Camp, where he had works for chorus and percussion ensemble premiered and earned the Fine Arts Award, and Curtis Summerfest, where he worked with David Ludwig. Recently, Tyson worked with National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (NYO-USA) and Antonio Pappano to premiere his work, Delicate Tension, a piece that was commissioned by the American Embassy in Berlin for the 30th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The work was performed in Berlin, Edinburgh, and Hamburg. Since then, Tyson has started as an undergraduate at The Juilliard School where he continues his studies in composition and is a recipient of the Jerome L. Green Fellowship. His work Delicate Tension recently won the 68th BMI Student Composer Awards as well as the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards.
Born in 2000 in New Orleans, LA, Ben K. Zervigón began composing at a young age. Often dealing with the challenges facing the Gulf Coast due to climate change and industrialization, his work seeks to create a soundscape which reflects the interplay between heavy industry and ancient, sickly nature. This Southeast Louisiana landscape seeps into his work through of ten massive architectural processes against intensely emotional and intuitive feeling- like water moving through an inundated oil refinery or a child standing on a Mississippi floodwall built in the 1930s (such as Venice, Norco, & Destrehan, LA and the Bonnet Carré Spillway). His output includes works for piano, retuned piano, instrumental solos, chamber works and electronic music. He currently has the privilege of studying under and playing the music of Michael Hersch at Peabody Conservatory. Previously, he studied under Yotam Haber at the University of New Orleans while at Benjamin Franklin High School. Recent collaborations include a setting of poet Nicole Cooley’s Breach to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Katrina, and multimedia projects with photographer Luca Hoffmann. His work with the New York New Music Ensemble is his first appearance in the national new music scene. Ben’s scores can be found on IMSLP.
SUPPORT: The New York New Music Ensemble Micro Commissions are made possible with generous grants by The Amphion Foundation and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
If you would like to support NYNME's Micro Commissions program, please contact
Patricia Leonard at nynme1976@gmail.com