St. Peter's Chelsea
346 West 20th StreetSaturday, January 25th, at 7:30PM at Saint Peter’s Church, Chelsea, Ekmeles performs DADA NONO & REJOICE, a program exploring the limits of microtonal pitch space.
The world premiere of Wolfgang von Schweinitz's Plainsound Motet for Ekmeles: ‘DADA NONO & REJOICE’ represents a significant milestone in microtonal writing for voices. The composer, co-inventor of the most widely used notation for microtones, explores entirely new regions of pitch space in this work, pushing both himself and the ensemble into the unknown. He sets a text of his own devising, built from fragments of Hebrew and German words, praising God, and punningly invoking the names of important aesthetic forebears.
Other works from Ekmeles's repertoire explore microtones in a variety of ways. James Weeks's Primo Libro builds a speculative history out of 16th century Italian music theoretical texts, which themselves looked back to ancient Greek music. The work explores an octave cut into 31 equal parts, using texts from Arcadelt's first book of madrigals. Taylor Brook's Motorman Sextet sets nostalgic episodes from David Ohle's cult novel Motorman using a variety of tunings. Overtone structures on A predominate, and historical keyboard tunings frame quotations from Buxtehude.
Finally our own soprano Charlotte Mundy has created a work in SWEET FLAG! where the non-traditional score is itself an artwork. Separate in-ear audio instructions for each singer are paired with large elaborate hand-made necklaces which guide the performers, all this in lieu of any written instructions. Like the non-traditional and ecstatic text of Schweinitz’s work, these necklaces evoke a kind of personal and hand-made approach to a religious tradition in their structural echo of the Rosary.
Sat, Jan 25, 2025 7:30 PM - 9:10 PM
St. Peter's Chelsea
346 West 20th Street
Ekmeles is a vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of new and rarely-heard works, and gems of the historical avant garde. They have a special focus on microtonal works, and have been praised for their “extraordinary sense of pitch” by the New York Times. They are the recipients of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation’s 2023 Ensemble Prize, the first American group to receive the honor.
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