In dialogue with the theme of ChamberQUEER’s June festival, “climate,” Siren Songs highlights the ocean as a liminal site of decentered queer agency – a fundamentally remote, primordial environment where complex life began and continues to flourish beyond the arbitrary categories of sex and sexuality. Initially a concept by Jeremy Martin exploring sea animals – clownfish, sea horses, coral, barnacles – who exhibit same-sex, intersex, and even “gender” fluid behaviors, Siren Songs grew into both a celebration of the ocean as an ancient site and source of queerness both actual and fantastical (unless you believe in merpeople), and an examination of the many ways queer liberation and environmental activism interconnect.

Both the LGBTQ+ community and the natural environment are under existential attack by the same extractive fascist/capitalist system that seeks to categorize, control, consume, and ultimately stamp out all fluid, whimsical, idiosyncratic, potently authentic, or radically empowered forms of individual and collective expression and existence. As a defiant form of protest, Siren Songs affirms that queerness has been embedded in nature for millions of years and that nature can serve as a blueprint for revolution – for freedom – against the hegemonic forces destroying our planet and our humanity. That caring deeply for nature is the first step towards preserving its fragile, life-sustaining beauty. We hope that Siren Songs goes beyond inspiring awareness and leads to action and stewardship of both our local ecosystems and queer communities.

Thank you so much to all of Siren Songs’ visionary collaborators, to ChamberQUEER for making this possible, and to community partner Genspace, a Brooklyn-based community biolab providing an inclusive platform for innovation in biotechnology, genomics, and more.

– Aqueeressence Duo (Daniel Schreiner and Yoshi Weinberg)

InfraSound presents "Crippled Symmetry," a concert celebration of the centennial year of American composer Morton Feldman. Born on January 12th, 1926, Morton Feldman was a major figure in the development of the experimental New York school of composers. His music is characterized by sonic stasis, fragile repetition, and placid unwavering textures that unfold over long spans of time.  

Join the InfraSound ensemble in a performance of his seminal trio Crippled Symmetry for flutes, percussion, and piano.

This performance will take place at 7:30 pm on April 11th, 2026 at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (3 W 65th St).

Program:

Morton Feldman:
Only (1947) for solo voice

Crippled Symmetry (1983) for flutes, percussion, and piano/celesta

Performed by the InfraSound Ensemble:

Luke Paulino, voice

Yoshi Weinberg, flute/bass flute

J Clancy, percussion

Daniel Schreiner, piano/celesta

InfraSound presents "Landscapes of Silence," a concert and recital at the boundaries of the perception of sound and silence. Since John Cage's seminal silent work 4'33", composers have explored how silence, breath, and sound can activate a space and how performers and audiences interactions effect the perception of sounds. Featuring world premieres and compositions by Wandelweiser composer Eva-Marie Houben, this meditative concert experience explores the fragility of sound, the "nearly nothing," and the quasi-silent.

SATURDAY, 2/21 @ 7:30 pm, the InfraSound Ensemble will premiere Houben's tableau musical along with other works in a chamber music concert. 

SUNDAY, 2/22 @ 3:00 pm join composer, organist, and pianist Eva-Marie Houben for a discussion and organ/piano recital of her music. 

This two-part concert series will take placeat Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (3 W 65th St). 

Winner of the 2024 Musical Fund Society Career Advancement Award, Anika Kildegaard is quickly distinguishing herself as one of the most promising American vocalists specializing in new music and concert repertoire. Fresh off her Carnegie Hall and Boston Symphony Orchestra debuts, this frequent member of the award winning vocal ensemble The Crossing debuts with PCMS in a recital that highlights selections from three song cycles that grapple with the intensity of love and loss in the human experience.

Dørumsgaard: Con amores la mi madre
Messiaen: Harawi (Sel.)
Debussy: Ariettes Oubliées (Sel.)
GL Frank: Cuatro Canciones Andinas (Sel.)

Sounds Fun! is a presentation of the most energetic collection of music being written for today’s world – including a sprinkle of musical absurdism with Andrew Hamilton’s “Music for People Who Like Art”, a touch of noise with Alex Paxton’s “shrimp BIT babyface”, an eclectic splash of world premiere arrangements, and so much more. This evening offers a crucial space for communal and artistic joy, allowing us to focus on the experiences we treasure most in life. It is a celebration of the wildest — and simply most fun — music you’ve never heard!

Pieces I performed in:

shrimp BIT babyface – Alex Paxton

Coast (from Hoodoo Zephyr) – John Adams, arr. Caleb Burhans

My Buick – Louis Cole, arr. Vicki Leona Nguyen*

Jori – Les Filles de Illighadad, arr. Zachary James Ritter*

Machaut-a-Go-Go – Eve Beglarian

Winter Astral – Beverly Glenn-Copeland, arr. David Bloom*

Music for People Who Like Art – Andrew Hamilton

Join pianist, composer, and visual artist Daniel Schreiner for a dynamic program of 20th-21st century repertoire investigating the intersection of resonance and rhythm at the piano. From Claude Debussy's Feux d'artifice (1913) to Yoshi Weinberg's The Lifespan of Beets (2024), the concert's featured works evoke restless textures and constantly transforming compositional forms that walk the line between predictable regularity and idiosyncratic caprice.

With partly-composed, partly-improvised interludes by Schreiner connecting these pieces, the concert attempts to present a single, continuous abstract narrative mirrored by a newly-created 8-panel painting/graphic score that will be projected alongside the music.

"Fundamental Energy" posits the following questions: what is the boundary between the mechanical and the organic in our current reality? Is mechanization ever really perfectly regular, and do the seemingly irrational processes of the natural world conceal a different kind of logic? What can this teach us about how we understand "order" vs. "chaos," and what happens if we embrace that which we can't predict or control?

InfraSound presents “Somewhere Only We Know,” a continuation of our annual InfraPop series with 17 world premiere arrangements of songs by folk, indie, pop, and rock artists in memory of those we have lost. Come as you are and join our community as we sing and play about relationships, grief, loss, memory, mortality, and healing. All are welcome.

Featuring Marisa Tornello and Luke Paulino with the InfraPop Orchestra with special guest artist Natti Vogel.

Performing songs by Keane, First Aid Kit, 4 Non Blondes, Björk, Owen Pallett, Haley Heynderickx, FKA Twigs, Joanna Newsom, Kate Bush, Anaïs Mitchell, Billie Holiday, CocoRosie, SOPHIE, Sam Amidon, Sinéad O'Connor, Sufjan Stevens, and more!

Kaatsbaan Cultural Park’s 2024 Festival & Contemporaneous present an early look at Act 1 of an upcoming work entitled History of Life by composer Dylan Mattingly and writer Thomas Bartscherer. A new epic, History of Life is a wild, enthralling 6-hour musical event — a folk revival, a rock concert, a communal feast, and a meditation on all that has lived and all that has died in this world. More than just a performance, History of Life is a celebration — like a wedding or a wake — that bears witness to the vast, beautiful, violent, manyvoiced history of life on Earth. The performance at Kaatsbaan Festival 2024 will feature vocalist Isaiah Robinson.

Dancing to the Music of You is a multidisciplinary collaboration between a team of queer NYC-based artists and organizations including InfraSound, ChamberQUEER, sculptor Jeremy Martin, sound designer Alex Gray, and lighting designer Madeline Whitesell. It will be a synthesis of gallery exhibition, sound-art installation, and musical performance taking place on May 3rd, 2024 at The Lesbian, Gay, Bixsexual, and Transgender Community Center (The Center).

This project explores the concept of the queer body: what it means to live and work as a queer artist, how we conceptualize queerness through fashion, posture, and movement, and how we build community around our shared experience of queer embodiment. The collaborating artists will examine these themes through sculpture, lighting and sound design, and musical composition. 

Sculptor Jeremy Martin will install his JUSTAPOSE series at The Center, creating two new sculptures for this iteration. JUSTAPOSE is a set of ambiguous paper sculptures inspired by exaggerated fashion silhouettes, exploring ways humans pose in public spaces to feel seen, or upset conformity through their appearance and actions. JUSTAPOSE investigates how these liminal, paper objects mirror Martin’s own experience as a queer person of color through their ability to shape-shift or code-switch depending on the societal dictates of the environments they occupy. Martin will photograph participating artists’ poses, inspired by conversations about how they perform appearance and actions in society daily, which will form the basis for the new sculptures.

In collaboration with Martin, composer Alex Gray will devise an interactive sound installation to co-exist with the sculptures, which will be manipulated live, based on the movement of audience and artists throughout the space. Lighting design by Madeline Whitesell will leverage her synaesthesia to translate the visual-sonic world of the performances in real time.

World premieres by composers Sam Kaseta and Alex Gray will be performed alongside curated works from ChamberQUEER and InfraSound, activating the space at 8:00 pm. The evening will conclude with the whole complement of artists in an improvisation upon the sculptures, soundscape, and lights culminating in a celebratory synthesis of artistic mediums.

As NYC's premiere avant-pop cover band, InfraSound’s InfraPop! Orchestra fuses popular music with the exceptional skills of NYC’s emerging musicians. With the mesmerizing voices of Ri Tornello and Luke Paulino accompanied by winds, strings, harp, piano, and drums, we curate a mosaic of covers and arrangements from iconic artists such as Britney Spears, Björk, Joanna Newsom, Owen Pallett, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, and more. Melded with experimental improvisation, InfraPop! is a celebration of popular music through InfraSound’s signature queer contemporary style.

Watch my performance on the March 16, 2024 livestreamed recording below (begins 4:47:17):

My program:

Songs at Night is an intimate evening of musical transfiguration, centered around the world premiere of a large-scale new song cycle by composer Lila Meretzky drawing on the poems of Yiddish-language poet Anna Margolin. The main work on the concert is a world premiere of a commissioned expanded version of Lila Meretzky’s “Four Songs at Night.” Performed by Contemporaneous. The work will also feature singers Lucy Dhegrae and Milena Gligić.

The program will also feature Shelley Washington’s A Kind of Lung and Dylan Mattingly’s The History of Life in Reverse. Washington’s A Kind of Lung can simply be described as an expression of an experience that we all share - breathing together - and was written for a diverse ensemble of instruments.

Mattingly’s “A History of Life in Reverse” is a standalone scene drawn from the upcoming project History of Life, an evening of music and story that imagines the Homeric oral tradition which created the Odyssey as though it had been passed down continuously from parents to children for the last 2700 years, evolving throughout and informed by human history, picking up new stories and sounds with every new generation. The full work is planned to premiere in 2025, and is being created in collaboration between Mattingly and writer/classicist Thomas Bartscherer.

BlackBox Ensemble’s 2024 Festival begins with a program of works by new and frequent BlackBox collaborators, featuring an expanded roster of the BlackBox Ensemble in full force.

• Paul Novak: Somatic Interludes (World Premiere)

• Bobby Ge: Pupil of Light

• Jessica Meyer: The dappled light just beyond her skin…

• Baldwin Giang: butterfly, posthumously

• Yaz Lancaster: Gender Envy

Stick around after our festival opening concert for a late night electroacoustic show featuring solo and chamber performances by members of the BlackBox Ensemble!

• Brittany J. Green: Thread and Pull

• Nina Shekhar: Vocalise

• Kaija Saariaho: Cendres

• Lucy McKnight: fated joy

InfraSound is excited to welcome you to our 2023-24 season opener “Portals Between Worlds,” an immersive concert experience that explores how musical compositions can act as a portal between a composer’s internal environment and an audience. Works include Nico Muhly’s riveting and energetic “doublespeak,” the world premiere of a new piccolo trio by Paul Novak called “Ornithology of Desire,” Yaz Lancaster’s enigmatic “yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the next day,” Rajna Swaminathan’s “fleet/hold,” Mario Diaz de Leon’s transcendental “Portals Before Dawn,” and a new arrangement of Sinnead O’Connor’s sorrowful and powerful rock ballad “Troy.”

Produced and curated by violist/composer Cindy Lan - premiered Darian Donovan Thomas’ viola sonata.

Aqueeressence (flutist Yoshi Weinberg and pianist Daniel Schreiner) presents their debut recital “Finite Things” at the beautiful Elebash Recital Hall at CUNY Graduate Center on Friday, October 6th, 7:30 PM! Free and open to the public, this concert presents new music exploring the unconventional possibilities for grieving, healing, and empowerment through fragmented, wordless expression. Featuring the world premiere of Brian Simalchik’s “Finite Things” and Camila Agosto’s “Just Enough to Breath” as well as Amy Williams’ “First Lines” and Nina Shekhar’s “Vocalise”

6 hours long, scored for 28 musicians (including three microtonal pianos), 8 singers, and 6 dancers with music by composer Dylan Mattingly and text by Thomas Bartscherer, Stranger Love is a grand celebration of being alive. It follows two lovers whose romance unfolds to the rhythm of the seasons. Set on a vast time-scale against the ever-expanding universe, it broadens in scope and frame over the course of three acts, moving from the personal to the archetypal to a vision of the divine — a love supreme. Stranger Love evokes the visceral thrill of a gospel revival, the ethereal calm of watching snow fall, the wonder of staring into the night sky. Stranger Love reaches for the impossible. Breathtaking in scale, with burning intensity, the music dances from moments of manic energy to stretches of unearthly serenity. At six hours long, Stranger Love is deliberately countercultural. Stranger Love offers an epic celebration that embraces complexity and abstraction and aspires to total joy. Neither denying the world as it is, nor imprisoned by it, Stranger Love envisions the world we might hope to inhabit.

The creative production team for Stranger Love features Lileana Blain-Cruz as director, Matt Saunders as set designer, Chris Emile as choreographer, Hannah Wasileski as projection designer, Yi Zhao as lighting designer, and Kaye Voyce as costume designer. Contemporaneous performed a concert version of Act I of Stranger Love on the PROTOTYPE Festival in 2018, concert versions of Act II and Act III on Day of Imagination in 2021. May 20, 2023 will see the world premiere of the full production after 11 years of development, produced by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and featuring Contemporaneous as the performing ensemble at Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

Location TBA!

What did Alice find when she went down the rabbit hole? What did the Evil Queen see when she asked “Mirror, Mirror on the wall?” What will you discover in this journey through childhood stories, fantasy, and the dark depths of imagination? 

InfraSound presents Mirror | rorriM as an investigation of childhood fairytales and fantasy. This concert features the world premiere of Austin Philemon’s immersive electronic monodrama “Curiouser and Curiouser” based on Lewis Carroll’s well-known fairytale “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Familiar and foreign characters show themselves and attempt to guide Alice as she explores and discovers an electronic wonderland built by Philemon. Using motion tracking technology, the soundscape changes based on the actions and decisions of Alice, and that of Alice’s object of curiosity: The White Rabbit. This performance will also feature compositions by composers similarly fascinated by fairytales, including Unsuk Chin’s Advice from a Caterpillar, Susan Botti’s The Jabberwockey, Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror), Yoshi Weinberg’s Some people are flowers, Xingzimin Pan’s Kaidan, and Kaija Saariaho’s From the Grammar of Dreams.

Brooklyn Comedy Collective presents

HUM

A workshop by Julie Piñero

At 10 years old, Julie became consumed with the question ‘what will happen next?’. When she couldn’t find an answer in her uncertain world, her body gave her one: a hum. But when her hum was diagnosed as mild Tourette’s syndrome, medication took it away. She was left with a question, no answer, and a quest to find something – or someone – to reunite her with that mysterious good feeling.

“Hum” explores the complicated role of shame in treating mental illness, and the humor that exists at the intersection of clinical neurodivergence and everyday anxiety. Rather than getting rid of our tics, what if we imagine a world where tic-ing wasn’t wrong?

Featuring and opening stand-up performance by Ali Levin and Daniel Schreiner accompanying on piano

Come help me celebrate my first full-length music release! Wash off the stress of the week and immerse yourself in wintry womb piano sounds!

Featuring an ambient opening set by Tyler Neidermeyer and a complete performance of ‘stillrise.’

This performance investigates the combination of spoken text with sound, featuring Samuel Beckett’s short radio play, “Words and Music,” with music composed by Morton Feldman. The program explores composition as composition and sets the characters named “Words” and “Music” against each other, highlighting how each generates meaning in different ways. Additionally, this program will include a performance of Brittany J. Green’s “R_upture” and a new work by artistic director Yoshi Weinberg, setting part of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” InfraSound will be joined by theatre/opera director Madeleine Whitesell.

Can’t wait to share the stage with Vishnu R, who I met last year at OneBeat Virtual residency. Come join us for this Indian Classical and Jazz fusion show!

https://rockwoodmusichall.com/event/vishnu-r-strings-beyond-borders/

I am so excited for the opportunity to return to Paris and perform at the Fondation des États-Unis after a two-year hiatus. All the pieces on this program draw inspiration from one (or more) of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. While living a more confined existence during the pandemic, I took refuge in learning solo piano repertoire that describes the vastness of the natural world and its processes, recalls faraway places, and represents an escape from the limits of human perspective and imagination. The order I present these pieces is designed to tell a story with no defined narrative – simply relinquishing the illusion of control over nature and going with the current. — Daniel Schreiner

Program

Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924)
Barcarolle No. 3 in G-flat Major, Op. 42

Amy Williams (1969)
Falling

Luciano Leite Barbosa (1982)
Chords II, III, and VIII (a tribute to Joan Mitchell)
World premiere, written for Daniel Schreiner (2021)

Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924)
Barcarolle No. 7 in D minor, Op. 90

Amy Williams (1969)
Brigid’s Flame

Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924)
Barcarolle No. 8 in D-flat Major, Op. 96

Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992)
Le Traquet Rieur from Catalogues d’Oiseaux, Livre VII

Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924)
Barcarolle No. 10 in A minor, Op. 104, No. 2

Sato Matsui (1991)
Oiseau Lunaire
Oiseau Solaire

Responsible for “changing the face of opera” (The Wall Street Journal), BMP: NEXT GEN returns for the final round of its second cycle, as Beth Morrison Projects’ leaders set out to discover the next generation of boundary-pushing composers. Chosen from a group of ten finalists during Round 1 in 2021 for their “haunting” (Christopher Koelsch, President & CEO at LA Opera) and “stunningly beautiful” (Pulitzer Prize winning composer, Du Yun) work, composers Elizabeth Gartman and Niloufar Nourbakhsh return with their BMP commissioned 30-minute vocal-theatre works, It is a Comfort to Know and Threshold of Brightnessrespectively. Following the concert, one of the composers will receive a commission for the development and world premiere of a full-length opera. The winner will be announced immediately following the concert on June 24.

More info: https://bethmorrisonprojects.org/current-season/new-york/bmp-next-gen-2022-round-2/

Lavender Nights is a celebration of queer history and culture through the art of cabaret and art song. This production will be a musical tour of pivotal moments in cabaret’s history, experienced through a queer lens.

Lavender Nights opens with songs from 1920’s Berlin during the height of the Weimar Republic’s queer revolution including selections from Kurt Weil’s “Three Penny Opera,” Mischa Spoliansky’s “Its All a Swindle” and “The Lavender Song,” and more! Transitioning to 1950s Paris, the audience will hear love songs of Le Chat Noir including “Padam Padam” by Edith Piaf, “Je te veux” by Erik Satie, and “On n’oublie rien” by Jacques Brel. An intimate ending with just voices and piano, we reflect on our current socio-political climate with 19th-century English art songs by Charles Ives, Margaret Bonds, and Ethyl Smith.

With a fresh, young cast of talented singers and a vivacious pit band, this 90-minute show will be an extravagant, emotional, and moving piece of music theater. For one night only, you won’t want to miss it!

For more info and to purchase tickets visit:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/infrasound-presents-lavender-nights-tickets-327693830067

Join us for a concert of newly composed electronic and acoustic music featuring composers Zachery Meier, Christine Burke, Ramin Roshandel, Lilac Atassi, and Erin Rogers!

WHEN: Saturday, February 12, 2022 from 7-8 PM ET

WHERE: Burke Recital Hall at The Eisner Center for the Performing Arts, Denison University, Granville, OH

Funding for this concert generously provided by New Music on the Point. Check out their website: https://pointcp.com/new-music-on-the-point/

This event is free and open to the public. ADVANCE TICKETS REQUIRED. For COVID guidelines and ticket information, please visit denison.edu/events/arts

https://www.eventbrite.com/.../the-department-of-music...

Can't wait to see you there!