Chamber Music by Missy Mazzoli and Sarah Kirkland Snider October 5, 2010

New Amsterdam Records and Manhattan New Music Project are proud to co-present a double-feature performance of the music of composers Missy Mazzoli and Sarah Kirkland Snider. The concert will take place at Galapagos Art Space on October 5 and will feature members of ACME, Janus trio, MIVOS Quartet and MaNi. The music, which will be performed by varying-sized combinations of brass, strings, woodwinds, percussion, and female vocals, will feature three New York City premieres, including Snider’s “Shiner” and “The Reserved, The Reticent” – a solo cello piece to be performed by Clarice Jensen of ACME – as well as Mazzoli’s “Death Valley Junction” – a string quartet to be performed by the MIVOS Quartet.

Snider and Mazzoli have already proven themselves luminaries of the New York music scene and beyond. Mazzoli, hailed as one of the “most consistently inventive and surprising composers now working in New York” by the New York Times, has garnered attention as bandleader of the electro-chamber outfit Victoire as well as for her chamber compositions, which have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, and the Minnesota Orchestra. Snider, also a composer of ambitious and ethereal chamber music, has been noted to possess “an enviable knack for crafting moody, strikingly beautiful works” (Time Out New York). Her latest work, Penelope, is an hourlong, epic song cycle written for vocalist Shara Worden of indie band My Brightest Diamond and chamber orchestra Signal. With Mazzoli releasing a full-length Victoire album in September and Snider releasing a studio recording of Penelope in October, the concert will present a collection of recent chamber works from neither album which promise to further reveal the breadth of these composers’ formidable abilities.

Of her compositions, Mazzoli says, “like most of my music, these pieces are really about transporting the listener to a dreamy and unfamiliar but very specific place.” Snider’s pieces inhabit a similar realm of lush but uneasy beauty, a world she perfected in her large-scale opus Penelope. But unlike the latter work, these shorter pieces are more “classically inspired” in nature, containing fewer of the pop music and songwriting references evident in much of her latest work.

This performance program is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.