Program: Sarah Rothenberg, pianist

A Note from Sarah Rothenberg 

In working with the composer Tyshawn Sorey as both a commissioner and performer of his majestic Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), a work for solo instrumentalists, baritone and choir composed for the 50th anniversary of Rothko Chapel in Houston (a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist, prior to the composer winning the Pultizer in 2024), I experienced his musical language evolving in expressive range and drama into new territory. With the major new piano work, For Julius Eastman, Tyshawn Sorey takes his compositional development to the next level, and it is one of the great honors of my musical life to have this piece written for me.  The title commemorates the iconoclastic composer and pianist Julius Eastman, and Sorey specifically speaks of inspiration from Eastman’s brilliant improvisatory performance in Zurich in 1980, captured in recording.  The world Eastman inhabited was not yet ready for him.   For Julius Eastman is a personal testament to Sorey’s admiration for this daring and uncompromising creator.  

Tyshawn Sorey has been noted for inheriting the musical legacy of the avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, who, in the 1960’s and 70’s, inspired by the paintings of the abstract expressionists and the music of Satie and Cage, sought to create “static music.”  Music as still as a painting.  A half century later, Sorey’s uncanny ear brings this aesthetic into our own era, transforming it with his intensity, deep personal history, and large structural time sense.   Ravishing harmonies, otherworldly timbres.  Stretching over time, Sorey’s 45-minute piano work creates a universe of hyper-sensitivity; recurring memories float in and out of our consciousness.   Expressive single lines are filled with nuance and intention, often sustained over long resonances that are as important as the initial sounds.  Remember Morton Feldman’s wise caution:  the sound is not the attack, the sound is what comes after… But rather than float continuously in celestial suspended time,  Sorey’s For Julius Eastman slowly pulls us into a strong dramatic narrative.  Structural sections, like chapters, are separated by silences.  As the piece progresses, we descend deeper and deeper into time, large time, yet human time; not the eons of planets and celestial bodies, but the long stretch of history that is ours.  We enter a huge canvas that we explore from within.  Fragments reappear as though strangely emerging from our own unconscious.  And whereas in Feldman’s music we seem to hover in a world of gentle contemplation, a liminal space between life and what comes after, Sorey’s music, exploring a vast range of chasms and peaks, remains ever tied to human experience.  And ever tied to that part of it that defies expression in words.  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.

  Copyright Sarah Rothenberg 2025

SARAH ROTHENBERG, PIANIST 

Sarah Rothenberg has a unique career as pianist, writer, producer, and creator of interdisciplinary performances linking music to literature, visual art and ideas. Committed to creating new audiences for classical music and jazz, and a firm believer in the accessibility of great music of all genres, Sarah Rothenberg is recognized internationally as a pianist of “power and introspection” (The New York Times), a “trailblazer” (Boston Globe) in innovative programming, and “a prolific and creative thinker” (The Wall Street Journal). She is Artistic Director of DACAMERA in Houston, 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.

A pianist of “heart, intellect and fabulous technical resources” (Fanfare), she has performed at Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Great Performers at Lincoln Center (New York), Barbican Centre (London), The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), 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 Vijay Iyer’s solo piano work, “For My Father;” written for Rothenberg, and Tyshawn Sorey’s MONOCHROMATIC LIGHT (AFTERLIFE), which was named by The New York Times and The New Yorker as one of the top ten classical performances of 2022, and was followed by 11 performances at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in a staging by director Peter Sellars with art of Julie Mehretu. 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– upcoming in September in New York; Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas performed at Rothko Chapel; and performances in Los Angeles, New York, Washington and Houston of a major new piano work, For Julius Eastman, composed for Sarah by 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey.

Original productions conceived, directed and performed by Sarah Rothenberg include A Proust Sonata, which received its New York premiere to critical acclaim in 2018; In the Garden of Dreams, fin-de-siècle Vienna in music, art, ideas; The Blue Rider: Kandinsky and Music, originally commissioned and produced by Works & Process at The Guggenheim and Columbia University’s Miller Theater; and Chopin in Paris: Epigraph for a Condemned Book (Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven; University Musical Society, Ann Arbor; Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Champaign-Urbana). 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 (“entrancing”- Alex Ross of The New Yorker). Sarah Rothenberg’s Music and the Literary Imagination series, created for DACAMERA and inspired by the writings of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Baudelaire, and Anna Akhmatova was presented by Great Performers at Lincoln Center for five consecutive seasons.

Moondrunk, a staging of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, inaugurated Lincoln Center’s New Visions series in 1999. She appeared as soloist in over 75 performances of choreographer/director Martha Clarke’s Cheri at New York’s off-Broadway Signature Theatre, Ravenna Festival, Kennedy Center, and London’s Royal Opera House. Her lectures and performances on art and music include The Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum (New York), Museum of Fine Arts Houston and The Menil Collection.

Sarah Rothenberg’s scholarly research has resulted in her U.S. premiere performances and recordings of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr (Independent Record Companies Award for Best Solo Classical Recording 1996); Rediscovering the Russian Avant-Garde: Lourié, Mosolov and Roslavetz (GM); 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.

Sarah Rothenberg’s writings appear in 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 (ed. Berger/New Press); Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings (Parrish Art Museum); Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil (White/Menil Collection) and the Moody Center’s recent Artists and the Rothko Chapel.

Sarah Rothenberg is currently on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate Program in Writing. Formerly chair of the music department at Bard College, Sarah Rothenberg has taught at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, been a Senior Fellow at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, and visiting artist-in-residence at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at University of Houston and Banff Centre for the Arts.

Sarah Rothenberg’s early training was at The Juilliard School with Herbert Stessin. After graduating from The Curtis Institute of Music, where her teachers were Seymour Lipkin and Mieczeslaw Horszowski, she studied the music of Olivier Messiaen in Paris with the composer’s wife, Yvonne Loriod. Sarah Rothenberg is a recipient of the Medal of Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government.

TYSHAWN SOREY, COMPOSER

“Sorey’s music is experiential. It’s lived in; it’s an experience.” – Peter Sellars

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey 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.

The bar is set high for Sorey’s continued evolution and success. He was named the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music winner for his composition Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith), after being recognized as a 2023 Pulitzer Finalist for Monochromatic Light (Afterlife). Previously, Sorey roared onto the international landscape as a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow. 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 annually placing him near the top of its Composer and Drum Set performance lists. Other recent accolades include the Pew Fellowship, 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, Brooklyn Rider, A Far Cry, cellists Seth Parker Woods and Matt Haimovitz, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, pianist Awadagin Pratt and vocal group Roomful of Teeth, pianist Sarah Rothenberg, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, as well as for countless others. His music has been performed in notable venues such as the Library of Congress, 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 The multi-instrumentalist and composer Tyshawn Sorey has spent two decades expanding the borders of jazz and fortifying its connections to contemporary classical music.” – Martin Johnson, Wall Street Journal

Musiktage, Lucerne Festival, and 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. Sorey’s trio (featuring pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Harish Raghavan) is currently touring with Sandbox Percussion Ensemble, performing a newly commissioned piece in honor of the Max Roach Centennial titled Cogitations. 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

“For Julius Eastman”was supported by an anonymous donor in honor of composer Tyshawn Sorey and pianist Sarah Rothenberg, for whom this work was written. It was premiered in LA in February 2025

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