TICKETS – $15 General Admission / $10 BMCM+AC members + Students w/ID
The program includes Tunnel Visions, Beeferman’s sprawling four-movement duo written for Griffin. Jumping off from their shared work in Beeferman’s avant-jazz Other Life Forms quartet, the piece is a harrowing and rhythmically rigorous journey through microtonal, cinematic landscapes. The program also includes Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life (3). Feldman was instrumental in the development of indeterminacy in music, a groundbreaking concept associated with the experimental New York School of composers, including John Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and David Tudor.
Composer and pianist/organist Gordon Beeferman, “a wide-eyed polymath who masterfully toes the lines of myriad genres” (Brooklyn Rail), has created and performed innovative opera, chamber and orchestral music, avant-jazz, and numerous collaborations with choreographers, writers, and other artists in New York and internationally. His music has been performed by the ensembles such as New York City Opera, Albany Symphony, Momenta Quartet, American Brass Quintet, eighth blackbird, California EAR Unit, Collage, and Talea Ensemble, and remarkable soloists like sopranos Sharon Harms and Alice Teyssier, bassoonist Peter Kolkay, pianist Steve Beck, and violinist/vocalist Eden MacAdam-Somer.
His chamber opera The Rat Land, written with librettist Charlotte Jackson, was praised as “complex and daringly modern…gritty, fidgety and intriguing” by The New York Times. Scenes from their second collaboration, The Enchanted Organ: A Porn Opera have been performed to sold-out downtown theater and nightclub audiences. They are working on their third opera, The Ninth Floor, with support from the MAP Fund.
A bandleader as well as composer, Beeferman has led his own ensembles, including the septet Music for an Imaginary Band, the quartet Other Life Forms, and a quintet of Hamburg-based musicians on tour in Germany. Current groups include his Organ Trio (with Kate Gentile, drums, and Anders Nilsson, guitar), and Zero Gravity, a poly-stylistic song project. Beeferman has performed with numerous improvisers, ensembles, singers, and theatrical productions at venues from the Coney Island Museum to the Berlin Festspielhaus, with a range of musicians including avant-garde vocal legend Shelley Hirsch, playwright/performance artist Taylor Mac, and the Philip Glass Ensemble. His ongoing collaborations include concerts with singer-songwriter Carol Lipnik, and a new duet with dancer Susan Hefner.
Well-regarded for his compositions, Beeferman has received commissioning grants from the Fromm Foundation, Concert Artists Guild, and the BMI Foundation, among others. He has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Copland House, and Ucross, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. His recordings are available on a host of labels including Summit, Minor Amusements, Different Track, Innova, Generate, Clang, and OutNow.
Stephanie Griffin
Stephanie Griffin is an innovative violist and composer with a unique and eclectic musical vision. Born in Canada and based in New York City, her musical adventures have taken her to Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, England, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Mexico and Mongolia. From large concert halls to the sand dunes of the Gobi desert, she has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in classical, contemporary and improvisational contexts. As a soloist, she has worked closely with numerous composers, among them Salvatore Sciarrino; Tristan Murail; Tony Prabowo; Kee Yong Chong; Ursula Mamlok; Matthew Greenbaum; and Arthur Kampela.
A founding member of the Momenta Quartet, she has given over 200 chamber concerts at such esteemed venues as the Library of Congress and the National Gallery in Washington, DC and led residencies at major American institutes of higher education, among them Cornell and New York Universities and the Eastman School of Music. Ms. Griffin performs regularly with the New York contemporary music institution, Continuum, now in its 50th year, and has given American premieres of major works by leading European composers, among them Georg Friedrich Haas and Michael Jarrell, as a member of the Argento Chamber Ensemble. From 1998 through 2002, she was Executive Director of the contemporary music series at Galapagos Art and Performance Space.
As a composer, Stephanie is the recipient of the prestigious 2017 Emerging Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship from the Jerome Foundation, and the 2016 composition fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. As an improviser, Stephanie was a 2014 fellow at Music Omi, and is a member of Carl Maguire’s Floriculture, Gordon Beeferman’s Other Life Forms, Hans Tammen’s Third Eye Orchestra, Adam Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra and the composer/improviser collective the Brooklyn Infinity Orchestra. She worked closely with the late Butch Morris from 2001 until shortly before his death in 2013, and was the only non-Indonesian member of Tony Prabowo’s New Jakarta Ensemble, creating avant-garde compositions alongside traditional musicians from Sumatra.
Ms. Griffin serves as principal violist of the Princeton Symphony, and is the Executive Director of Associated Chamber Music Players (ACMP). She studied viola with William Gordon in Vancouver, Paul DeClerck in Brussels and Wayne Brooks at Rice University in Houston, and holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from The Juilliard School where she studied with Juilliard Quartet violist Samuel Rhodes. Stephanie’s varied viola sounds can be heard on a diverse array of classical, new music, jazz and world music labels, among them Tzadik, Innova, Naxos, Aeon, Centaur, Aksara, Firehouse 12, and New World, Albany, and Aeon records.