By Mabel Pais

The New Jersey Symphony (njsymphony.org) invites you to its free outdoor concerts in Newark, Jersey City, Toms River, South Amboy and Red Bank and a performance at the Giralda Music and Arts Festival in Madison.

The family-friendly program features John Williams’ Theme from ‘Jurassic Park,’ selections from Leonard Bernstein’s ‘West Side Story,’ William Grant Still’s ‘Festive Overture’ and more.

For the first time this season, the New Jersey Symphony will perform in Liberty State Park in Jersey City and Raritan Bay Waterfront Park in South Amboy. The Symphony will also return to Marine Park in Red Bank, as well as Ocean County College in Toms River and Essex County Branch Brook concert in Newark. The Essex County Branch Brook Park concert includes fireworks.

The Chamber Players of the New Jersey Symphony are scheduled to perform a series of chamber music concerts at Hamilton Park in Jersey City. These concerts are free of charge and will feature a variety of repertoire, including a celebration of the best of Bollywood‘s Hindi-language film genre and an exhilarating program curated by the orchestra’s Resident Artistic Catalyst, Daniel Bernard Roumain.

Free concerts take place:

Sunday, June 25, 6 pm at the Giralda Farms, Giralda Music and Arts Festival, Madison

Tuesday, June 27, 8 pm at Ocean County College in Toms River

Wednesday, June 28, 7:30 pm at Raritan Bay Waterfront Park in South Amboy

Friday, June 30, 7:30 pm at Essex County Branch Brook Park in Newark (includes fireworks!)

Saturday, July 1, 8 pm at Marine Park in Red Bank

Sunday, July 2, 7:30 pm at Liberty State Park in Jersey City

Free Chamber Series at Hamilton Park in Jersey City

Thursday, July 13, 7 pm: Sounds of the Summer with Nimbus Dance

Thursday, July 27, 7 pm: The Music of Bollywood with Kulture Kool

Thursday, August 10, 7 pm: A Summer Evening with DBR

Clarinetist Timothy Lien, winner of the New Jersey Symphony Youth Orchestra’s 2023 Henry Lewis Concerto Competition, joins the Symphony for the first movement of Ludwig Spohr’s Clarinet Concerto In C Minor, Op.26. for the Giralda Farms, Branch Brook Park, Marine Park and Liberty State Park concerts. José Luis Domínguez, the New Jersey Symphony Youth Orchestra Artistic Director, conducts.

UPDATES

For more information, updates, and changes owing to weather conditions, visit njsymphony.org/summer.

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WINNING COMPOSERS GET FEEDBACK  FROM CONE INSTITUTE, NJ SYMPHONY AND OTHERS

By Mabel Pais

The New Jersey Symphony (njsymphony.org) announces the composers for the ninth Edward T. Cone Composition Institute. The 2023 Institute will take place from Sunday, July 9 to Saturday, July 15 in Newark, culminating in a performance of the composers’ works on Saturday, July 15, 2023. This year’s winning composers include Tom Morrison with his work ‘Messages in the Ground,’ Kory Reeder with his work ‘Walls of Brocade Fields,’ Sam Wu with his work ‘Hydrosphere’ and Yangfan Xu with her work ‘Bya.’

The four composers will hear their music rehearsed and performed by the Symphony and participate in in-depth feedback sessions with Institute Director Steven Mackey, guest conductor Case Scaglione, New Jersey Symphony musicians and industry leaders.

The Symphony and Maestro Case Scaglione will present the participants’ works along with the final movement, ‘Sphere,’ from Steven Mackey’s ‘Concerto for Curved Space’ in concert at NJPAC’s Victoria Theater in Newark on Saturday, July 15 at 8 pm.

The Edward T. Cone Institute Experience

By the conclusion of the Institute’s comprehensive experience, participants will have gained invaluable musical and practical feedback about composing for orchestra. They will also have participated in critical discussions about best practices for getting contemporary classical music funded, published and performed.

The New Jersey Symphony Edward T. Cone Composition Institute grew out of musical score-reading sessions the Symphony has held with Princeton University graduate students biennially for more than a decade. The Institute celebrates its namesake Edward T. Cone’s legacy as both a composer and a Princeton University professor. This is a collaboration between the New Jersey Symphony and Princeton University Department of Music. Learn more at njsymphony.org/institute.

Winning Composers

Tom Morrison

Tom Morrison is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. Morrison is a graduate of The Juilliard School (MM); also a graduate of the University of Montana (BM) in Missoula where he cultivated his love for nature and the environment. He holds an MFA and Ph.D. from Princeton University, where he will be a Post Graduate Researcher in the fall 2023 semester. He won the 2016 Thailand International Composition Festival Competition and first place in the 2021 Symphonia Caritas Competition for first-generation college students. His work can be found at tom-morrison.com.

Composer’s Program Note: ‘Messages in the Ground’

‘Messages in the Ground’ is inspired by Richard Power’s novel ‘The Overstory’ and the complex nature of trees and humanity’s complex relationship with them. The work is a meditation on the nature of trees and how they communicate with each other. The governing structural idea is simple: the piece begins at the higher end of the orchestra’s register and ends at the lower end—it goes from the leaves to the roots.

Kory Reeder

Kory Reeder is an American composer and performer whose music draws inspiration from the visual arts and political theory.

Reeder is from Nebraska and currently resides in Texas where he is an active performer. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and a Master of Music from Bowling Green State University. Learn more at koryreeder.com.

Composer’s Program Note: ‘Walls of Brocade Fields’

In Lincoln, Nebraska, there is the International Quilt Museum and while walking through, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of duality: the richly decorated and ornate patterns combine with the somewhat nostalgic quality that can come with the medium. I’m particularly drawn to flowers and brocade fabrics; the fields of intricately designed flowers lining the walls and filling your vision. This piece is full of overlapping, repeated patterns laid across each other, at times interacting and sometimes more exposed. There are moments in the piece where sounds are encompassing and warm, wrapping the listener in a blanket of sound, others are sparse, open and nearly still. The overlapping tones and phrases create subtle, perhaps fleeting cadences and nearly tonal reminisces, but underneath all this harmonic wrapping is a unifying pulse that connects the material and keeps the threads together.

Sam Wu

Sam Wu’s music deals with the beauty in blurred boundaries. Many of his works center around architecture, urban planning, climate science and the search for exoplanets that harbor life.

Besides receiving numerous awards and recognitions, Wu has also won an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, First Prize at the Washington International Competition, Harvard’s Robert Levin Prize and Juilliard’s Palmer Dixon Prize.

From Melbourne, Australia, Sam holds degrees from Harvard University and The Juilliard School, and is currently a DMA candidate in composition at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. His teachers include Tan Dun, Anthony Brandt, Pierre Jalbert, Chaya Czernowin and Richard Beaudoin. Learn more at samwumusic.com.

Composer’s Program Note: Hydrosphere

‘Hydrosphere’ is inspired by the water cycle—a macroscopic, planetary process that shapes oceans and continents.

Water is the source of life as we know it; its eternal cycle nourishes generations across the aeons. Despite its ubiquity, water is precious—we must protect Gaia’s lifeblood.

Yangfan Xu

Yangfan Xu is a Chinese-born US-based composer who comes from a musical family in Lanzhou, Gansu province. Xu was the winner of the Society for New Music’s 2021 Israel/Pellman Award. She won the 2021 New Juilliard Ensemble (NJE) Composition Competition, and her commissioned work Fantastic Creatures of the Mountains and Seas premiered at the Lincoln Center in a concert by NJE in 2022.

Xu received a bachelor’s degree in composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music studying with Mason Bates. Before her undergraduate studies, she studied musicology at the high school affiliated with the Central Conservatory of Music in China. Xu earned her master’s degree in composition at The Juilliard School, studying under Robert Beaser. She is a current DMA candidate at the New England Conservatory of Music studying under studio teacher Kati Agócs. Learn more at yangfanxu.com.

Composer’s Program Note: Bya

“Bya”(བྱ) is from the Tibetan language. It means “birds.” The piece is inspired by my trip to Tibet in 2016. When the pandemic first broke out, the city was put on lockdown, and I started to have recurring dreams about my trip to Tibet. It is the most wonderful land I have ever seen; Tibet is said to be the closest place to heaven on earth. When I saw it with my own eyes, I couldn’t agree more. The landscape is so stunning that it feels like a place that is unreal. Yamdrok Lake was the name of the lake I visited. There’s a bird island in the middle of the lake where you can see hundreds of different kinds of birds—it was magnificent and mind-blowing.

Bya’s opening section is about the general shock I felt when I first arrived in Tibet. The middle slow section, where you can hear the trumpet’s extended technique imitating a bird’s call, depicts the bird’s island and the Yamdrok Lake. The final section of the piece is about a Tibetan tradition known as the sky funeral. When people die, their bodies are placed on top of a temple and the birds eat them. I find the ritual very special to me because it represents an eternal bond between humans and nature.

Steven Mackey

Bright in coloring, ecstatic in inventiveness, lively and profound, Steven Mackey’s music spins the tendrils of his improvisatory riffs into large-scale works of grooving, dramatic coherence.

As a teenager growing up in Northern California obsessed with blues-rock guitar, Mackey was in search of the “right wrong notes,” those heart-wrenching moments that imbue the music with new, unexpected momentum. Today, his pieces play with that tension of being inside or outside of the harmony and flow forward shimmering with prismatic detail.

Today, Steven Mackey writes for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance and opera—commissioned by the greatest orchestras around the world. He has served as professor of music at Princeton University for the past 35 years, and in fall 2022, he joined the composition faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. He has won several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. He continues to explore an ever-widening world of timbres befitting a complex, 21st-century culture, while always striving to make music that unites the head and heart, that is visceral, that gets us moving. Learn more at stevenmackey.com.

Case Scaglione

Case Scaglione is currently in his fifth season as a Chief Conductor of the Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn in Germany and in his fourth season as a Music Director of Orchestre national d’Île de France. He has previously served as Associate Conductor with the New York Philharmonic and as Music Director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra of Los Angeles. Case was the driving force behind the artistic growth and diversification of the organization, founding their educational outreach initiative ‘360° Music.’

Previously in North America, Case successfully collaborated with the New York Philharmonic and the Houston, Dallas, Detroit, San Diego and Baltimore symphony orchestras. In Asia, he has led concerts with the China Philharmonic Orchestra as well as the Shanghai and Guangzhou symphony orchestras, in addition to regular returns to the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

Case enjoys close relationships with many of the world’s leading soloists, including Joshua Bell, Yulianna Avdeeva, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Behzod Abduraimov and Khatia Buniatishvili. Case has been mentored by some of the most prominent conductors on the world stage today, including Alan Gilbert, Jaap van Zweden and David Zinman. Learn more at casescaglione.com.

SAFETY MEASURES

All New Jersey Symphony performances follow safety measures in partnership with the venues and based on the guidance provided by the CDC and the State of New Jersey.

TICKETS & INFORMATION

For more information about the New Jersey Symphony, visit njsymphony.org or email information@njsymphony.org.

Tickets are available for purchase by calling 1.800.ALLEGRO (255.3476) or at njsymphony.org.

New Jersey Symphony

The Emmy and Grammy Award-winning New Jersey Symphony, celebrating its Centennial Season in 2022–23, is redefining what it means to be a nationally leading, relevant orchestra in the 21st century.

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(Mabel Pais writes on The Arts and Entertainment, Social Issues, Health & Wellness, Education, Cuisine, Spirituality, and Business)