Georg Friedrich Haas [left] and Mollena Lee Williams-Haas [right] after a HYENA concert. Photo by Markus Sepperer

Music

The season includes acclaimed composer Georg Friedrich Haas as resident composer

Plus, masterclasses led by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun and Grammy-nominated composer Missy Mazzoli (CFA’02, BUTI’98), Argento Chamber Concert at BU College of Fine Arts, and ICA Boston event featuring Sound Icon and Mollena Williams-Haas.

The Boston University Center for New Music at BU College of Fine Arts School of Music is proud to present its 2022-2023 season, which includes an extraordinary lineup of residencies, concerts, a film screening, and more.

For over a decade, the BU Center for New Music has bridged the gap between cutting-edge artists and Boston University music students. Students spend two to three weeks with the season’s resident composer, learning about the artist’s works, presenting their own music to these major artists, and forming long-lasting connections. This year, BU students will be engaging with dynamic artists from the contemporary music world, including acclaimed composer Georg Friedrich Haas as the resident composer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun and Grammy-nominated composer Missy Mazzoli (CFA’02, BUTI’98) for two shorter residencies.

This season also brings New York-based musical ensemble Argento Chamber Ensemble to the BU College of Fine Arts’ recently renovated Concert Hall for a performance in November; a screening of the documentary The Artist and The Pervert that documents the marriage dynamic between Haas and his wife, renowned sex-educator, writer, and storyteller Mollena Lee Williams-Haas; and HYENA at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston where Williams-Haas narrates her journey to sobriety, as Boston’s local ensemble Sound Icon performs alongside. The score is by Haas.

The season is also a special one as it’s part of BU School of Music’s 150^th anniversary, a year-long celebration commemorating years of music-making. For more on the 150^th anniversary, visit https://www.bu.edu/cfa/bumusic150/

BU Center for New Music’s 2022-2023 Season

COMPOSER RESIDENCIES

GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS, Composer in Residence

November 2-5, 2022 • February 21-25, 2023 • March 13-17, 2023

Each year, the BU Center for New Music hosts a major figure from the world of contemporary music for an extended residency. This season celebrates Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, considered one of the major European composers of his generation. His music synthesizes in a highly original way the Austrian tradition of grand orchestral statement with forward-looking interests in harmonic color and microtonal tuning that stem from both French spectralism and a strand of American experimentalism. The result is an exploratory, uncompromising music that appeals to a diverse range of people, from avant-garde composers for its microtonal investigations to casual listeners for its spacious forms and euphonious harmony. Haas has received numerous national and international prizes, including the Kompositionspreis of the SWR Symphony Orchestra (2010) for limited approximations and the Grand Austrian State Prize for Music (2007), the country’s highest artistic honor.

Haas will be in residence and on the BU campus three times during the 2022-2023 academic year. His first visit is from November 2-5, 2022. His second visit is from February 21-25, 2023. In addition to masterclasses, lessons, and forum presentations, his second visit also includes a screening of the film The Artist and The Pervert, with a discussion following the viewing of the film. The event, taking place on Thursday, February 23, 2023, is co-hosted by BU Arts Initiative and the location will be announced later.

Also, during this visit is HYENA at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. HYENA is a concerto for orchestra and narrator, featuring a remarkable score by Haas to accompany the autobiographical story told by his American wife, the writer and storyteller Mollena Lee Williams-Haas. She was an alcoholic for years and wrote a searing story about her long journey to sobriety. In the performance, Williams-Haas reads her story, as the music reinforces her narrative’s hallucinatory qualities. HYENA will be performed by Boston’s own Sound Icon Ensemble led by Jeffrey Means. This performance of HYENA on Friday, February 24, 2023, is a coproduction of the BU Center for New Music and the ICA/Boston.

Haas returns for his third visit from March 13-17, 2023, for a public presentation at BU Center for New Music’s Composer’s Forum on Tuesday, March 14, 2023, from 9:30-10:45am.

MISSY MAZZOLI (CFA’02, BUTI’98), Three-Day Composer Residency

October 24-26, 2022 Delayed until Spring 2023. The exact dates are forthcoming.

Described by Time Out New York as “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart,” Missy Mazzoli is one of America’s preeminent composers. Mazzoli is the Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, pianist Emanuel Ax, Opera Philadelphia, Scottish Opera, LA Opera, Cincinnati Opera, New York City Opera, Chicago Fringe Opera, the Detroit Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, JACK Quartet, cellist Maya Beiser, violinist Jennifer Koh, pianist Kathleen Supové, Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, the Sydney Symphony and many others.

Mazzoli and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Ellen Reid started the Luna Composition Lab, in collaboration with the Kaufman Music Center in New York, to give teenage female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers a head start. Mazzoli also makes it her practice to advocate for better representation for women, publicly when needed.

DU YUN, Three-Day Composer Residency

December 5-7, 2022

Born and raised in Shanghai, China and currently based in New York City, Du Yun is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, who works at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, musical theater, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise.

Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone, won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 2017. In 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow; and in 2019 she was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category. She has been hailed by the New York Times as a groundbreaking artist, was listed by the Washington Post as one of their Top 35 female composers and selected by Rolling Stone Italia in their decade review as one of the composers who defined the 2010s.

CONCERTS/GENERAL PUBLIC EVENTS

Argento Chamber Ensemble

• Friday, November 4, 2022, 8pm
• CFA Concert Hall at 855 Commonwealth Avenue
• Haas portrait concert featuring: ATTHIS for soprano and 8 instruments, tria ex uno for sextet, and …fließend… for 9 instruments
• Free, open to the BU community and public

Film screening of The Artist and the Pervert (in collaboration with BU Arts Initiative)

• Thursday, February 23, 2023, Time and Location to be announced later
• Discussion to follow film
• Free, open to the BU community and public

HYENA concert at ICA Boston

• Boston-based Sound Icon and Mollena Lee Williams-Haas perform
• Friday, February 24, 2023, 8pm
• $15 for members or BU students
• $25 for general admission
• For tickets: https://www.icaboston.org/events/hyena

STUDENT PERFORMANCE OPPORTUNITIES

BU Center for New Music provides music students with opportunities to work on music with contemporary music groups based in or out of Boston, allowing them to learn different contemporary techniques beyond the classroom. This season Sound Icon will be performing a public concert of BU student works.

Sound Icon Concert of Student Works

• Saturday, February 18, 2023, 8pm

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