The Mizzou faculty collective ZouM will showcase new music from six living composers with performances next weekend in Columbia and St. Louis.
They’ll play at 7:30 p.m. Friday, September 8 at Whitmore Recital Hall on the MU campus, then travel to St. Louis for a concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, September 9 at Washington University’s 560 Music Center.
Admission to the concert in Columbia is $5 for the general public, free to Mizzou students, staff and faculty with ID. The St. Louis concert is free and open to the public.
In all, fifteen Mizzou faculty members (plus one guest composer/performer) will take part in the concerts, which will feature two world premieres commissioned with support from the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation and the Mizzou New Music Initiative.
The program for the two concerts will include:
* “Portrait Sequence (Blanching Out),” a 2012 work by Mizzou New Music Initiative managing director Jacob Gotlib that will be performed by percussionists Abby Rehard and Megan Arns.
* “Dejate Caer,” written in 2012 by MNMI’s new post-doctoral fellow Carolina Heredia, and performed by violinist Julie Rosenfeld with pre-recorded electronics by Heredia.
* “Southern Harmony,” composed in 2014 by Jacob Bancks and performed by mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley and pianist Neil Minturn.
* “Winter Haiku,” composed in 2016 by Dennis Leclaire specifically for the Esterhazy String Quartet, which includes Julie Rosenfeld, Eva Szekely (violin), Leslie Perna (viola), and Eli Lara (cello).
* “Tantrums,” a new work by Asha Srinivasan, who was a resident composer at the 2012 Mizzou International Composers Festival (MICF). The piece was commissioned and will be given its world premiere by MU faculty duo DRAX, featuring Leo Saguiguit on baritone saxophone and Megan Arns on percussion, with the composer on electronics.
Christopher Stark
* “Monday, Midnight,” a new work commissioned from Christopher Stark, who’s an assistant professor of composition at Washington University and was a resident composer at the 2015 MICF.
The world premiere will be performed by an ensemble including Rosenfeld, Lara, Minturn, and Arns, plus Steven Tharp (tenor), Kristine Poulsen (alto flute), and Wesley Warnhoff (clarinet), conducted by Mizzou professor of composition and MNMI artistic director Stefan Freund.
ZouM is a collective of Mizzou faculty members formed in the spring of 2015 to present contemporary chamber music.
After only two seasons, ZouM already has enlisted the talents of more than 25 faculty performers, composers, and academics from the University of Missouri School of Music to present innovative programs that promote contemporary chamber works by living composers.
Recent projects have featured works by Jennifer Higdon, Gabriel Prokofiev, and Dennis DeSantis, and by Mizzou composers Stefan Freund, Trey Makler, Jacob Gotlib, and Carolina Heredia.