Asheville Symphony Orchestra and BMCM+AC Present
The Music of John Cage, Lou Harrison, Arnold Schoenberg, and Amy Williams
Tuesday, October 21, 2025 at 7 pm
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street, Asheville, NC}
TICKETS – $15 General Admission / $10 for BMCM+AC members + Students w/ID
On Tuesday, October 21 at 7 pm, the Asheville Symphony Orchestra, in partnership with Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, will present a chamber concert featuring the music of John Cage, Lou Harrison, Arnold Schoenberg, and Amy Williams. The program highlights music that reshaped 20th century sound and celebrates the experimental spirit of Black Mountain College. This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Points in Space: Performance at Black Mountain College, on view at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (September 5, 2025 – January 10, 2026).
About the program:
The evening begins with pianist and composer Amy Williams performing excerpts from John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. Written between 1946 and 1948, this cycle of twenty short pieces uses bolts, screws, and other objects inserted into the strings of a piano to create shimmering, bell-like sounds. Cage was influenced at the time by Indian philosophy and the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, which shaped the meditative and balanced character of the music. First performed at Black Mountain College in 1948, Sonatas and Interludes is now considered one of Cage’s most important works.
The Asheville Symphony String Quartet, featuring Brian Allen, Karen Pommerich, Kara Poorbaugh, and Franklin Keel, will perform Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 1 in D minor, Op. 7. Written in 1904–05, this expansive, single-movement work lasts nearly 50 minutes and traces an emotional journey from late romantic lyricism toward the boundaries of modernism. It is one of Schoenberg’s most groundbreaking early compositions, showing the first signs of the new harmonic language that would later define him as the father of twelve-tone music.
The program concludes with the Asheville Symphony Percussion Quartet, featuring Todd Mueller, Matthew Richmond, Nathan Tingler, and Brian Tinkel, performing Amy Williams’s Dream Landscape alongside Double Music by John Cage and Lou Harrison. Dream Landscape evokes shifting sonic textures, and Double Music, composed jointly by Cage and Harrison in 1941, is a playful and inventive work for four percussionists. The evening will feature guest soloist and composer Amy Williams performing alongside the musicians from the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. The program reflects the collaborative spirit that both composers carried into their years at Black Mountain College.
This concert resonates with the history of the 1944 Summer Music Institute at Black Mountain College. That gathering brought together many of Schoenberg’s closest colleagues, including Edward Steuermann, Ernst Krenek, and Roger Sessions, and marked the largest celebration of Schoenberg’s music in America at the time. Sessions later described it as “the most important thing that has ever happened in musical education in America.”
Photo of Amy Williams by Rob Davidson
The “fresh, daring and incisive” (Fanfare) compositions of Amy Williams have been presented by leading international performers, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Bent Frequency, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, Junction Trio, Orpheus, pianist Ursula Oppens, soprano Tony Arnold and bassist Robert Black. Her pieces appear on the Albany, Parma, Blue Griffin, Centaur and New Focus labels. As a member of the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo, she has performed throughout Europe and the Americas and recorded six critically-acclaimed CDs for Wergo (works of Nancarrow, Stravinsky, Varèse/Feldman and Kurtág), as well as appearing on the Neos and Albany labels.
Ms. Williams has been awarded a Howard Foundation Fellowship, Fromm Music Foundation Commission, Guggenheim Fellowship, Koussevitsky Music Foundation Commission, two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship to Ireland, a MacDowell fellowship and the 2024 Henri Lazarof International Commission Prize. Ms. Williams holds a Ph.D. in composition from the University at Buffalo, where she also received her Master’s degree in piano performance. She has taught at Bennington College and Northwestern University and is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Pittsburgh. She is Artistic Director of the New Music On The Point Festival in Vermont.