Saturday, August 23
A private concert for friends, volunteers, and supporters of PS21
4:30 pm doors
5 pm concert
6 pm dinner & discussion
PS21 is thrilled to invite our volunteers and supporters to join us on stage for an intimate performance of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and 2017 MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey’s major new piano work, For Julius Eastman, performed by trailblazing pianist Sarah Rothenberg.
Sorey and Rothenberg’s deep musical relationship grew out of their work together on the DACAMERA-Rothko Chapel commission of Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), and it was during their performances at New York’s Park Avenue Armory that Sorey first conceived of this piece. The intensity and hyper-sensitivity of Sorey’s music corresponds to Rothenberg’s pianism, and this expansive new solo work probes emotional depths and upends our sense of time.
In advance of recording this work, Rothenberg will perform with the audience seated on stage, surrounding the piano, followed by dinner and discussion with the artist.
We hope you will join us for this intimate and powerful presentation of a work by one of the most original musical voices of our time. For those who experienced Julius Eastman’s work in July, when Black Box Ensemble performed Femenine in collaboration with Kyle Marshall Choreography, as well as Buddha and Joy Boy, this will be an especially resonant performance.
After the performance, please stick around for dinner, grilled and served by the PS21 staff, in appreciation of you.
Spots are limited, so please RSVP to confirm your attendance.
There are sections of For Julius Eastman which feel deeply haunted by voices of the past, by the painful layers of history we do not see. Buried stories wordlessly find their voice: this is music that bears witness to centuries. At times, in just one note we can hear the fragility of a human life.
“Her virtuosic and flawless technique is fully given to every nuance and breath in the score, as if she is one with the music—a vessel for the healing sounds of Sorey’s composition.” –Glasstire, Houston
Photo of Sarah Rothenberg by John Carrithers
SARAH ROTHENBERG, PIANIST
Sarah Rothenberg is recognized internationally as a pianist of “power and introspection” (The New York Times) and “a prolific and creative thinker” (The Wall Street Journal). A “trailblazer” (Boston Globe) in innovative programming, Rothenberg has a unique career as pianist, writer, producer, and creator of interdisciplinary performances linking music to literature, visual art and ideas. She is Artistic Director of DACAMERA, internationally recognized as a vanguard model of a multi-genre music institution for performance, community engagement, and arts advocacy; and was previously co-founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival in New York.
Rothenberg has performed at Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Great Performers at Lincoln Center (New York), Barbican Centre and Covent Garden (London), Cité de la musique (Paris), The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), Ravenna Festival (Italy), Gilmore Piano Festival, 92nd Street Y, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Library of Congress, Van Cliburn Foundation, The Getty Museum, Ojai Festival and concert series across the United States. Recent world premieres include solo piano works composed for her by Vijay Iyer and 2024 Pultizer Prize-winner Tyshawn Sorey, as well as Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) at Rothko Chapel, commissioned by DACAMERA, named by The New York Times and The New Yorker as one of the top ten classical performances of 2022, and followed by performances at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in a staging by director Peter Sellars. Highlights in 2024-2025 include performances in Lisbon, Brussels and Paris with cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton of D’est en musique, created with filmmaker Chantal Akerman; Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas performed at Rothko Chapel; and solo performances in Los Angeles, Houston, New York, Washington, and the Big Ears Festival.
Original productions conceived, directed and performed by Sarah Rothenberg include A Proust Sonata, which received its New York premiere in 2018; In the Garden of Dreams, fin-de-siècle Vienna in music, art, ideas; The Blue Rider: Kandinsky and Music, in conjunction with the Guggenheim Kandinsky retrospective 2009; and Chopin in Paris: Epigraph for a Condemned Book (Baudelaire-Delacroix-Chopin). Her film, The Departing Landscape, a COVID-era memorial featuring Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari, received national attention in its 2020-21 streaming premiere. Moondrunk, a staging of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, inaugurated Lincoln Center’s New Visions series in 1999, following five consecutive seasons of her Music and the Literary Imagination series at Great Performers.
Sarah Rothenberg’s scholarly research has resulted in her U.S. premiere performances and award-winning recordings of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr; Rediscovering the Russian Avant-Garde: Lourié, Mosolov and Roslavetz; and Shadows and Fragments: Piano Works of Brahms and Schoenberg. She is featured in the new British film documentary, Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn (2023). Additional acclaimed recordings include Messiaen Visions de l’Amen (with Marilyn Nonken), and DACAMERA’s Rothko Chapel: Satie, Cage and Feldman on ECM, as well as works of Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter, Shulamit Ran, George Perle, Tobias Picker, Joan Tower and George Tsontakis, in collaboration with the composers. This season will see the release of works of Iyer, Sorey, Feldman and Beethoven.
Rothenberg’s writings appear in leading literary, art and musical publications, including The Musical Quarterly, Brick, Nexus, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, The Threepenny Review, PN Review (UK), Perspectives in New Music; and the books The Crisis of Criticism; Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings and Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil. She has been a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, and held visiting residencies at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at University of Houston, Rice University, Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Curtis Institute of Music. She currently teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate Program in Writing.
Sarah Rothenberg studied at The Juilliard School with Herbert Stessin and at The Curtis Institute of Music with Seymour Lipkin and Mieczeslaw Horszowski. She studied the music of Olivier Messiaen in Paris with the composer’s wife, Yvonne Loriod. Sarah Rothenberg received the Medal of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government. She lives in Houston and New York.
TYSHAWN SOREY, COMPOSER
2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey is celebrated for his extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work, while also offering incomparable virtuosity, and effortless mastery of highly complex scores. He has performed globally with his own ensembles, as well as alongside industry titans including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, King Britt, Claire Chase, Roscoe Mitchell, and Steve Lehman, among many others.
As a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow, the bar is set high for Sorey’s continued evolution and success. His composition Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) was honored as a Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music, and has been recorded with the Houston Chamber Choir and DaCamera for release in 2024. Adding to his reputation as a multi-faceted talent, Downbeat Magazine recognized Sorey with its 2023 Critics Poll Award as a Rising Star Producer, while frequently placing him near the top of its Composer and Drum Set performance lists. Other recent accolades include the Fromm Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, and the Koussevitzsky Prize.
Sorey has composed works for the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, soprano Julia Bullock, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, cellist Seth Parker Woods, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, pianist Awadagin Pratt and vocal group Roomful of Teeth, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, as well as for countless collaborative performers. His music has been performed in notable venues such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Hollywood Bowl, the 92nd Street Y, Park Avenue Armory, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Lucerne Festival, and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. His compositions are published by Edition Peters.
Sorey joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020, where he maintains a vigorous touring schedule in addition to his academic duties. He was selected as a Peabody Resident at Johns Hopkins University for Fall 2023, and has taught and lectured on composition and improvisation at an impressive assortment of institutions, including: Columbia University, Harvard University, Darmstadter Ferienkurse, Wesleyan University, The New England Conservatory, University of Michigan, The Banff Centre, Berklee College of Music, Mills College, University of Chicago, and The Danish Rhythmic Conservatory.
In spring 2023, Sorey debuted a musical collaboration with percussion ensemble Yarn/Wire titled “Be Holding,” a multimedia adaptation of the book-length poem by Ross Gay about the beauty and cultural significance of Julius Erving’s momentous sky hook dunk during the 1980 NBA Finals. The production included performances by professional wordsmiths Yolanda Wisher and David A. Gaines, along with students from Girard College, and was featured in the New York Times. In the future, Sorey plans to continue pushing boundaries, extending cultural norms, and reformulating public perceptions of modern Black/Afrodiasporic creative practice through the breadth and depth of his works.
Photo by John Rogers
