perfect lovers (2021)
Ella Kaale
Jan Berry Baker, metronome Stuart Gerber & Jeremy Muller, percussion
I developed the concept for perfect lovers after discovering the 1991 artwork of the same name by Félix González-Torres. “Perfect Lovers” uses two identical battery-powered clocks, displayed on a wall next to each other, initially set to the same time. The clocks will naturally fall out of sync or may stop entirely. The artwork was conceived shortly after González-Torres’ partner was diagnosed with AIDS, using commonplace objects such as clocks to visually demonstrate the unforgiving flow of time. When discussing the piece, González-Torres stated, “Time is something that scares me. . . or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.” In my piece, two performers, playing any two of the same instrument, represent the two clocks. A third party is controlling the metronome to which player 2 is listening, and slowly fluctuating it over time so player 2 falls out of sync with player 1. This third party represents the uncontrollable force of time that tears the two lovers, or clocks, apart.
– Ella Kaale
Ella Kaale (b. 2003) is a composer and cellist based in Los Angeles whose work uses collage, deconstruction, and extreme contrasts in its search for immersion and catharsis. She loves to tinker with acoustic sound colors and is never afraid to make an instrument buzz differently than it was intended. She likens her creative processes to weaving tapestries or following treasure maps, digging for found musical objects and folk histories. The resulting pieces are synthesized as a patchwork of cultural references and a unique atlas of sound. Ella is frequently inspired by the natural world and how humans interact with it, particularly in deserts and oceans. Ella attended the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music’s Conductors/Composers Workshop, wherein her work “Bubble-Net” was premiered in back-to-back performances by rising conductors Andrew J. Kim and Yun Cao. In Hear Now Music Festival’s 13th Season, Ella’s orchestral work “seawall blvd” was performed by the UCLA Philharmonia at Schoenberg Hall. “seawall blvd” was premiered by the USC Thornton Symphony on the New Music for Orchestra concert, conducted by Donald Crockett at USC’s Bovard Auditorium. Her 4-hand prepared piano piece “baby mine” was recently featured on Score Follower. She is an alumna of Hidden Valley Music Seminars Emerging Composers Intensive, the Norfolk New Music Workshop, Composing in the Wilderness—Denali National Park, New Music on the Point, the New York Youth Symphony Composition Program, Carnegie Hall’s NYO-USA Composer Apprenticeship, MATA Jr. Festival, and the Curtis Institute of Music Young Artist Summer Program. Ella’s music has been performed by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, USC Thornton Symphony, UCLA Philharmonia, the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, the Living Earth Show, TAK Ensemble, Norfolk Contemporary Ensemble, CORVUS, Hub New Music, Pacific Chamber Orchestra, the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, the New York Youth Symphony Jazz Ensemble, the Bergamot Quartet, Schroeder Umansky Duo, Perpetuum Duo, and flautist Mimi Stillman. Her honors include the Sadye J. Moss Endowed Musical Composition Prize, the Presser Undergraduate Scholar Award, a YoungArts merit Award, a Luna Composition Lab Honorable Mention, and the Texas Music Scholar Award. As a Teaching Artist for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) Meet the Music program, Ella teaches composition in Los Angeles classrooms and mentored musicians from the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, resulting in a premiere performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Kaale recently graduated with a B.M. in Composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where she was named a Presser Scholar, Outstanding Graduate in Composition, and twice Most Valuable Player in Composition. Her pedagogues include Alex Berko, Christopher Trapani, Ted Hearne, Andrew Norman, and Donald Crockett. She is continuing her studies at USC with a fully-funded M.M. and Aural Skills Teaching Assistantship. When not composing, Ella can be found exploring California tide pools, watching Jeopardy!, or playing frisbee with her corgi, Laika. A fun fact about Ella is that she has visited 25 U.S. National Parks and hopes to see all of them someday. Ella’s last name is pronounced “Kah-lee”. She proudly hails from Galveston County, Texas.
arcana minor (2021)
Ilana Waniuk
Jan Berry Baker, saxophone Erika Tazawa, piano Stuart Gerber, percussion
Originally written for pianist, composer and improviser Shi-An Costello in 2021, arcana minor developed from my interest in modular graphic notation, improvisation and performer agency. I have a longstanding fascination with musical scores as configurable cards and used the lens of Tarot to explore this concept. In tarot card reading, the cards of the Minor Arcana are used to suggest subtleties, details and practical aspects of our day-to-day lives. My version consists of 9 digital score 'cards' that can be configured in any order. Performers are invited to incorporate everyday objects, speech and movement into their collective improvisation and have complete freedom to create a performance ‘blueprint’ by determining which modules/cards they would like to use, the order in which they will be combined, and the total duration.
– Ilana Waniuk
Ilana Waniuk is a violinist, creator and curator with interests ranging from improvisation to visual arts. Along with pianist Cheryl Duvall, Ilana is a founding member and co-artistic director of Tkarón:to (Toronto) - based contemporary music ensemble Thin Edge New Music Collective, and Balancing on the Edge, a multidisciplinary production company merging contemporary music and circus arts. TENMC was the 2020 winner of the Canadian League of Composers/Canadian Music Centre Friends of Canadian Music award and has commissioned over 80 chamber works since its inception in 2011. She is also a founding member of California-based in^set, a flexible trio with Teresa Díaz de Cossio (flute) and David Aguila (trumpet) dedicated to improvisation and experimentation. Ilana was a winner of the 2014 Orford String Quartet Award and can be heard on several recent recordings including Thin Edge New Music Collective’s Juno nominated ‘Dark Flower’ (Redshift Records, 2023). She has performed on concert stages across the U.S., Canada, Italy, Argentina, Poland, Japan, Germany, Greece, Iceland and Mexico. Ilana has toured Cape Breton and Ontario with the Bicycle Opera Project as well as performed at contemporary music festivals including High Desert Soundings, MOXsonic, The California Festival, SoundOn, Suoni per Il Popolo and Open Ears. Her creative work explores various configurations of digital and analog materials, often merging graphic notation and improvisation with fixed and live projections. Most recently, Ilana collaborated with composer Akari Komura on ‘Notes of Care’, contributing live visuals and violin for a sound film presented by Music For Your Inbox (2025). Ilana’s scores have been performed by ensembles such as in^set, Duo Lingua, TRAMAS Collective, Acorn Projects and Missing Piece. Ilana received her Doctorate in Contemporary Music Performance from the University of California, San Diego where her research explored cross-modal perception in collaborative audiovisual performance.
Improvisation on a Poem by Augusto de Campos (2012)
João Pedro Oliveira
Jan Berry Baker, saxophone Tim Fitzgerlad, clarinet Stuart Gerber, percussion Amy Petrongelli, soprano Serena Scibelli, violin Erika Tazawa, piano
Improvisation on a Poem by Augusto de Campos was composed for open instrumentation, using a poem of Augusto de Campos. The sounds of the poem mutate in the sounds of the instrumental part, in an attempt to unite themselves in a single moment. – João Pedro Oliveira
Composer João Pedro Oliveira holds the Corwin Endowed Chair in Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He studied organ performance, composition, and architecture in Lisbon, and completed a Ph.D. in Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His work spans opera, orchestral and chamber music, electroacoustic music, and experimental video. He has received more than 70 international prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, the Bourges Magisterium Prize, and the Giga-Hertz Special Award, among others. His music is performed worldwide. Oliveira has taught at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. His publications include several journal articles and a book on 20th-century music theory.
Music for 18 Musicians (1976)
Steve Reich
Piano: Laura Gordy (Chamber Cartel), Choo Choo Hu (ensemble vim), Erika Tazawa (Bent Frequency), Amy O’Dell (smol ensemble) Percussion: Stuart Gerber (Bent Frequency), Justin Greene (smol ensemble), Caleb Herron (Chamber Cartel), Jeremy Muller (Bent Frequency), Victor Pons (smol ensemble), Dominic Ryder (Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective), Paul Stevens (smol ensemble), Bryan Wysocki (Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective). Strings: Serena Scibelli–violin (Bent Frequency), Laura Usiskin–cello (ensemble vim) Clarinets: Tim Fitzgerald (Bent Frequency), Ariana Warren (Chamber Cartel) Voices: Avery Britt (Bent Frequency), Amy Petrongelli (Bent Frequency), Audrey Vazquesz (Bent Frequency), Abigail Weller (Bent Frequency) Sound Engineer: Cole Hankins
Music for 18 Musicians is approximately 55 minutes long. The first sketches were made for it in May 1974 and it was completed in March 1976. Although its steady pulse and rhythmic energy relate to many of my earlier works, its instrumentation, structure and harmony are new. As to instrumentation, Music for 18 Musicians is new in the number and distribution of instruments: violin, cello, 2 clarinets doubling bass clarinet, 4 women’s voices, 4 pianos, 3 marimbas, 2 xylophones and metallophone (vibraphone with no motor). All instruments are acoustical. The use of electronics is limited to microphones for voices and some of the instruments. There is more harmonic movement in the first 5 minutes of Music for 18 Musicians than in any other complete work of mine to date. Though the movement from chord to chord is often just a re-voicing, inversion or relative minor or major of a previous chord, usually staying within the key signature of three shapes at all times, nevertheless, within these limits harmonic movement plays a more important role in this piece than in any other I have written. Rhythmically, there are two basically different kinds of time occurring simultaneously in Music for 18 Musicians. The first is that of a regular rhythmic pulse in the pianos and mallet instruments that continues throughout the piece. The second is the rhythm of the human breath in the voices and wind instruments. The entire opening and closing sections plus part of all sections in between contain pulses by the voice and winds. They take a full breath and sing or play pulses of particular notes for as long as their breath will comfortably sustain them. The breath is the measure of the duration of their pulsing. This combination of one breath after another gradually washing up like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and mallet instruments is something I have not heard before and would like to investigate further. The structure of Music for 18 Musicians is based on a cycle of eleven chords played at the very beginning of the piece and repeated at the end. All the instruments and voices play or sing the pulsating notes with each chord. Instruments like the strings which to not have to breath nevertheless follow the rise and fall of the breath by following the breathing patterns of the bass clarinet. Each chord is held for the duration of two breaths, and the next chord is gradually introduced, and so on, until all eleven are played and the ensemble returns to the first chord. The first pulsing chord is then maintained by two pianos and two marimbas. While this pulsing chord is held for about five minutes a small piece is constructed on it. When this piece is completed there is a sudden change to the second chord, and a second small piece or section is constructed. This means that each chord that might have taken fifteen or twenty seconds to play in the opening section is then stretched out as the basic pulsing melody for a five minute piece very much as a single note in a cantus firmus, or chant melody of a 12th century Organum by Perotin might be stretched out for several minutes as the harmonic center for a section of the Organum. The opening eleven chord cycle of Music for 18 Musicians is a kind of pulsing cantus for the entire piece. On each pulsing chord one or, on the third chord, two small pieces are built. These pieces or sections are basically either in form of an arch (ABCDCBA), or in the form of a musical process, like that of substituting beats for rests, working itself out from beginning to end. Elements appearing in one section will appear in another but surrounded by different harmony and instrumentation. For instance the pulse in pianos and marimbas in sections 1 and 2 changes to marimbas and xylophones in section 3A, and to xylophones and maracas in sections 6 and 7. The low piano pulsing harmonies of section 3A reappear in section 6 supporting a different melody played by different instruments. The process of building up a canon, or phase relation, between two xylophones and two pianos which first occurs in section 2, occurs again in section 9 but building up to another overall pattern in a different harmonic context. The relationship between the different sections is thus best understood in terms of resemblances between members of a family. Certain characteristics will be shared, but others will be unique. Changes from one section to the next, as well as changes within each section are cued by the metallophone (vibraphone with no motor) whose patterns are played once only to call for movements to the next bar, much as in Balinese Gamelan a drummer will audibly call for changes of pattern in West African Music. This is in contrast to the visual nods of the head used in earlier pieces of mine to call for changes and in contrast also to the general Western practice of having a non-performing conductor for large ensembles. Audible cures become part of the music and allow the musicians to keep listening.
–Steve Reich
Steve Reich has been called “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), and “among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times). Starting in the 1960s, his pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, Different Trains, and many others helped shift the aesthetic center of musical composition worldwide away from extreme complexity and toward rethinking pulsation and tonal attraction in new ways. He continues to influence younger generations of composers and mainstream musicians and artists around the world. Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, and an album of his percussion works have all earned GRAMMY Awards. He received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Madrid, the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and the Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and awarded honorary doctorates by the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School in New York, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest, among others. One of the most frequently choreographed composers, several noted choreographers have created dances to his music, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jiří Kylián, Jerome Robbins, Justin Peck, Wayne McGregor, Benjamin Millepied, and Christopher Wheeldon. Recent works by Reich include Jacob’s Ladder (2023) for voices and large ensemble, Traveler’s Prayer (2020) for voices and large ensemble, Reich/Richter (2019) for large ensemble with or without film, and Music for Ensemble and Orchestra (2018). Reich’s documentary video opera works—The Cave and Three Tales, created in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—opened new directions for music theater and have been performed on four continents. His work Quartet, for percussionist Colin Currie, sold out two consecutive concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London shortly after tens of thousands at the Glastonbury Festival heard Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) perform Electric Counterpoint, followed by the London Sinfonietta performing his Music for 18 Musicians. “There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history, and Steve Reich is one of them” (The Guardian).
Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective
The Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective is a constellation of composers and performers passionate about the contemporary music we love. Through high-quality concerts of eclectic music in unique venues throughout the Metro Atlanta area, our goal is to promote Atlanta as a nationally-recognized center for excellence in New Music. The Collective recognizes that there is an opportunity to promote the city’s incredibly talented living composers and musicians on the national level, and we want our shows to change the way audiences perceive and interact with New Music on the local level. At its core, the Collective believes that New Music is about artistically expressing curiosity through sound and that this curiosity is open to everyone.
Bent Frequency
Founded in 2003, Atlanta-based Bent Frequency brings the avant-garde to life through adventurous and socially conscious programming, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and community engagement. One of BF’s primary goals is championing the work of historically underrepresented composers - music by women, composers of color, and LGBTQIA+. Hailed as “one of the brightest new music ensembles on the scene today” by Gramophone magazine, BF engages an eclectic mix of the most adventurous and impassioned players.
BF has partnered with internationally acclaimed ensembles, dance groups, and visual artists in creating unique productions ranging from traditional concerts to fully staged operatic works, to concerts on the ATL streetcar, to a band of 111 bicycle-mounted, community performers. BF’s programming, educational outreach, and community events aim to be inclusive of the diverse and dynamic communities they are a part of.
BF is ensemble in residence at Georgia State University and run by Co-Artistic Directors Jan Berry Baker and Stuart Gerber.
Chamber Cartel
Chamber Cartel has been hailed as “contemporary classical heavyweights” and “the darlings of Atlanta’s [New Music] scene” by the Goat Farm Arts Center. Chamber Cartel employs a flexible instrumentation and has performed over seventy concerts of unique programming since 2012 including many commissioned works. The Cartel has collaborated with artists such as Bent Frequency, nobrow collective, Margot Rood, A/B Duo, Stephanie Aston, Peter Ferry, Stacey Mastrian, CORE Performance Company, Lotte Betts-Dean, and Transient Canvas. Chamber Cartel has been fortunate enough to bring seminal pieces of the contemporary music repertoire to Atlanta audiences such as Le Marteau sans Maître, Tongues, The Brightest Form of Absence, For Philip Guston, Vexations, Pleiades and many others. Our eclectic repertoire includes up and coming composers as well as established giants in the field of contemporary classical music such as John Luther Adams, Morton Feldman, Carolyn Chen, Mauricio Kagel, George Crumb, and Iannis Xenakis. The Cartel has produced three studio albums and two EPs. Interiors with composer Adam Scott Neal, The Shape Distance by Marc Yeats, A Million Acres of Sky by Connor Way, So Small Against the Stars by Nickitas Demos and ...But I'm Doing It Anyway by Aaron Jay Myers.
ensemble vim
Founded in Atlanta in 2019, ensemble vim (very interesting music) is an all women-run contemporary chamber music collective dedicated to the performance of music by living composers and to collaborations with artists who have strong ties to the southeastern US. Since its founding, vim has commissioned over a dozen new works, several of which will be featured on their upcoming debut album, “Our Common Humanity.” The inaugural cycle of vim’s multidisciplinary initiative, spark, was hailed by EarRelevant as “epic and historical, powerfully showcasing the aesthetics of a different generation and their personal attitudes towards contemporary concerns and creative co-existence.” Vim has performed throughout Georgia, Florida, and Alabama in venues including but not limited to the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the Hertz Stage at the Alliance Theatre, MOCA GA, MODA (the Museum of Design-Atlanta), and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, where they have been ensemble-in-residence since 2022. They have also offered outreach events and educational workshops at autism centers, refugee centers, and numerous primary/secondary/tertiary schools throughout the South. (For more info, visit ensemblevim.org, follow us @ensemblevim, and join us for our free season finale concert 7:30pm May 4, 2026 at the Goat Farm in West Midtown!)
smol ensemble
smol ensemble is a consort of toy pianists and percussionists with a particular interest in the curiosities and delights of new music. Established in 2019, smol ensemble made their debut at the 2019 SoundNow Festival, Atlanta's Contemporary Music Festival. Comprised of Justin Greene, Olivia Kieffer, Amy O'Dell, Monica Pearce, Victor Pons, and Paul Stevens, the ensemble focuses on works that explore playful timbral sonorities, open endedness, improvisatory elements, and everything toy piano-related. In addition to regularly performing compositions by the ensemble members, smol ensemble has commissioned works by Erin Demastes (VA), Nickitas Demos (GA), Michael Kurth (GA), Stefanie Lubkowski (MA), and Tony Marasco (MI).