Learning, Fast and Slow
SUN, SEPT 29, 2024, 3pm
The Theater at the
Rubin Museum of Art
150 W 17th Street, NYC
Kamala Sankaram: “Listen,” 2020
LJ White: “Music Library Love Song,” 2024
LJ White: “Shuffled Notes from ‘a Guide to Drag Kinging,'” 2018
Karim Al-Zand: “Two Songs,” 2021
Theo Chandler: “As Days Repeat,” 2023
Theo Chandler: “Canyon Song,” 2023
Iván Enrique Rodriguez: “Mamá María” 2020
Timo Andres: “On My Fortieth Birthday,” 2021 (World Premiere)
Kamala Sankaram: “A Certain Age,” 2022
Curator Nathaniel LaNasa on the concert — When I was ten, I knew exactly who I was. When I was twenty, I had all the answers. When I turned thirty… I thought at least I had the right questions? The more I experience the world, the more I discover I have no idea. In programming this recital, I wanted to explore time’s passing and life lessons that come only in their own time. Kamala Sankaram’s meditations on aging, Theo Chandler’s explorations of repetition, and a birthday song premiere by Timo Andres join two occasions of queer discovery by LJ White. These songs celebrate flux, flashes of inspiration, moments of instruction: twinkles in which I am no longer who I was, but am not yet who I will be.
Single tickets $25; general admission. Student tickets $10
A Space to Make
SUN, NOV 3, 2024, 3pm
The Theater at the
Rubin Museum of Art
150 W 17th Street, NYC
Robin Steitz and Gregory Feldmann return to the series in November, performing Hannah Kendall’s Rosalind (2020) for soprano, baritone, piano; Soprano Theo Hayes rounds at the cast with Nathaniel LaNasa at the keyboard, performing songs by Iván Rodriguez, Isabella Gellis, and Joseph Rubinstein.
The Program
Joseph Rubinstein: “Uncoil,” 2023
Iván Rodriguez: “Mother of Exiles,” 2020 (World Premiere)
Isabella Gellis: “Montreal Songs,” 2021
Hannah Kendall: “Rosalind,” 2020
Additional songs to be announced
Iván Rodriguez wrote “Mother of Exiles,” a towering rhapsody on Emma Lazaruz’s “The New Colossus,” for Gregory Feldmann’s and my investigation of monuments and landmarks in music. Matthew Ricketts wrote “Everything is New,” a story song about a young person falling in love with music, for our project celebrating neighborhood institutions. These songs trace ways we create our spaces and ways they create us. Exploring overlapping spaces, Isabella Gellis’s exquisite settings of three folk songs from different cultures in Montreal give that city a sensitive musical portrait, and Hannah Kendall, with poetry by Sabrina Mahfouz, shows Shakespeare’s heroine Rosalind carving out a place for an identity chosen, not bestowed. — Curator Nathaniel LaNasa
Single tickets $25; general admission. Student tickets $10
Subscribe HERE to the two-concert series for 20% off the single ticket price! Seating for the NYFOS Next series is general admission. No physical tickets will be used for this program; attendees’ names will be on a list at the door. Walk-up ticket buyers welcome!
NYFOS Next is New York Festival of Song’s “invaluable contemporary-music series” (The New Yorker). With an emphasis on spontaneity, novelty, and collaboration, NYFOS Next offers a forum for song composers to share their work, and gives audiences an intimate encounter with the creative process, as new songs are presented in an informal setting. Composers or performers are invited to curate and host their own programs, showcasing their own work and the works of their peers, students or mentors. Past curators include Mark Adamo, Clarice Assad, Mark Campbell, Christopher Cerrone, Mohammed Fairouz, Gregory Feldmann, Gabriela Lena Frank, Kyle Jarrow (with Lauren Worsham), Gabriel Kahane, Laura Kaminsky, Laura Karpman & Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, Carla Kilhstedt, Phil Kline, Lowell Liebermann, David T. Little, Harold Meltzer, Paul Moravec, John Musto, Russell Platt, Kevin Puts, Bright Sheng, and Joseph Thalken. NYFOS welcomes Nathaniel LaNasa as the curator of the 24-25 NYFOS Next mini-series.