Olmsted 200 in Rochester

This weekend we head back to our Rochester, NY roots to perform our Lungs of the City: Olmsted’s Parks in Music program at our beloved Highland Park. Presented by the Highland Park Conservancy, we will perform our Frederick Law Olmsted-inspired program at the Highland Park Bowl at 6 PM on Sunday, August 7.

The Conservancy is sponsoring a whole afternoon of family-friendly events, with more available at their Eventbrite link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/celebrate-frederick-law-olmsteds-200th-birthday-concert-food-games-tickets-344904678177

We look forward to seeing our Rochester friends in beautiful Highland Park!

New Album Announcement: Coming July 22!

We are thrilled to announce that our second album, Duos and Trios, will be released on New Focus Recordings on July 22!

This album collects several of our recent commissions written for a portion of our larger septet: two flute, clarinet, and cello trios and two flute and cello duos. We can’t wait to share these incredible new works by Aaron Travers, David Clay Mettens, David Liptak, and Margaret Brouwer. Each of these works responds to nature in a different way and explores a variety of familiar and extraordinarily unfamiliar timbres and techniques to showcase these instruments in creative and unexpected ways.

We’ll be sharing more updates here and on our social media as we get closer to the release date. Thanks as always for following along with our adventures!

Beautiful album cover artwork by our friend Henry Fording Eddins!

Lungs of the City: Olmsted's Parks in Music

In May we will travel to New York City to present a new program, Lungs of the City: Olmsted’s Parks in Music. We are thrilled to be part of this collaborative program celebrating the 200th birthday of famed landscape architect and park and garden designer Frederick Law Olmsted. Like millions of other in the US and beyond, we feel a deep appreciation for and a strong connection to the work of Olmsted, whose legacy continues to live on in a multitude of spaces across the country.

Lungs of the City is a collaboration with Landscape Music, Juventas New Music Ensemble, and Michigan Technological University Department of Visual and Performing Arts. Composers from the Landscape Music collective, directed by Nell Shaw Cohen, have written new works inspired by Olmsted sites, and American Wild Ensemble, alongside performers from Juventas and Michigan Tech, will premiere these works in a variety of locations over the course of 2022. This project is a Celebration Partner of Olmsted 200, the official nationwide celebration of the Olmsted bicentennial led by the National Association of Olmsted Parks.

We will be performing this thoughtful and wonderfully colorful program in NYC at two Olmsted sites, Fort Tryon Park on May 27 and Prospect Park on May 28. We invite you to check out our Lungs of the City page here on our website and follow along as we provide updates on our social media feeds.

Water Music: January 21 Livestream

This week we’re in Michigan’s snowy UP to premiere a collection of Great Lakes-inspired music at Michigan Tech’s New Music Weekend! At the invitation of composer Libby Meyer, we have traveled north to premiere new works by Libby, Griffin Candey, Yotam Haber, and Evan Williams, each of whom has a special connection to the Great Lakes region. We’re also thrilled to be performing works by wilderness composer Stephen Lias and working with composition and sound design students while we’re here.

If the UP is a bit too far to get to this week (!), you can click HERE to tune into our concert via livestream from the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts. Our performance is Friday, January 21, at 7:30 PM ET.

We are excited to experience a dose of true winter this week and can’t wait to share this colorful and imaginative new music with you. Hope to see you online!

Clockwise from top left: Libby Meyer, Griffin Candey, Evan Williams, Yotam Haber

Missouri Music at 200: Summer Tour and Fall Performances

As we dive into autumn, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on our summer Missouri Music at 200 tour and share some upcoming events.

At the end of July, our American Wild Ensemble gathered at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, to rehearse, record, and perform a new program, Missouri Music at 200, created in honor of the 2021 bicentennial of Missouri statehood. After a few intense days of learning the music and recording with the awesome duo of Christopher and Jeremy McDonald (Christopher Andrew Studios), we headed out on tour of the state for five live, outdoor performances of music by Stefan Freund, Barbara Harbach, Marcus Lewis, Michael Murray, Christopher Stark, and Ingrid Stölzel. We also shared poetry by poets Karen Craigo, Glenn North, and Alice Azure, as well as commentary from our creative and organizational collaborators.

AWE with composer Ingrid Stölzel after recording her new work, Where the Sun of Freedom Shines

We performed at the Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit, the Brush Creek Amphitheater at the Bruce R. Watkins Center in Kansas City, the Botanical Garden in Springfield, Wildcat Glades Park in Joplin, and Peace Park in Columbia - with an additional virtual performance with the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis. For each event, we worked with incredible community partners and are grateful for their enthusiasm and support of this collaborative statewide program. We are also grateful for the support of the Missouri Arts Council, Missouri Humanities Council, Missouri State University, and numerous individual donors who helped us make this project happen. Most of all it was a joy to share music inspired by a specific place and milestone with Missourians, creating opportunities to make connections, find points for reflection, and start new conversations about the rich and complex history - and future - of this state. This is at the core of our vision for Music in the American Wild.

Performing at the Shaw Nature Reserve, Gray Summit, MO

Over the course of the fall, we will be sharing our video recordings of each of our commissioned pieces on Facebook and our YouTube channel. We look forward to sharing this wonderful and varied program with you!

Two more upcoming opportunities to enjoy our Missouri music include:

-On Sunday, October 3 at 11:00 AM CT, selections from our Missouri Music at 200 program will be shared on the Classical KC radio show “Sound Currents,” hosted by Sascha Groschang and Laurel Parks, with brief commentary from our directors and composer Ingrid Stölzel.

-On Thursday, November 11 at 7:00 PM CT we will perform our Missouri Music at 200 program live at The World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis. Information and tickets are available HERE.

Check out our cute tees!

We are currently working on some exciting new projects, in development for premieres in early 2022, and look forward to sharing our progress on these new undertakings. Thank you for continuing to follow along with our adventures!

PS. We have a few Missouri bluebird t-shirts remaining, with beautiful artwork designed by illustrator Il Sung Na. Check out our SHOP to snag an adorable t-shirt before they’re gone!

Missouri Bicentennial Logo Release

Today we are very excited to unveil our new logo for our Missouri Music at 200 program! This beautiful bluebird and dogwood illustration was designed and created by Il Sung Na, an incredible, award-winning illustrator and an instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute.

This illustration represents the state bird and the state tree of Missouri. We’re looking forward to sharing it as part of our upcoming Missouri bicentennial program that will include six new works, poetry, and historic and cultural context. Please check out our Missouri Music at 200 page for more information on the project and upcoming performances!

A Whole Bunch of AWE-some Events

It’s been a busy spring season for our American Wild Ensemble team, and we thought we’d share some of our latest happenings and upcoming events with you.

We recently participated in a panel with University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) on Alternative Venues in the Visual and Performing Arts and had the opportunity to connect with fellow panelists Shelter in Place Gallery, Orange Grove Dance, and The Acme Corporation - so much interesting, moving, and inspiring work to check out!

Our performance of Chris Chandler’s Audubon Sketches at the 2021 Earth Day Art Model Telematic Festival is now archived on the festival site and available to view anytime. (You can find us in the April 22, 2021, 5:47 AM ET slot!) We’re looking forward to the next time we’re able to perform Chris’s beautiful music live and outdoors, but in the meantime we had a blast recording it in a virtual space and hope you enjoy it, too.

Composer Ingrid Stölzel’s wonderful Livid Loneliness of Fear, which we premiered in December as part of our American Aviatrix program, is slated to be performed on both the National Association of Composers USA 2021 Virtual Festival and the Society of Composers 2021 Online National Conference. The NACUSA event is coming up on Sunday, April 25!

On Monday, April 26, we’ll be taking part in a workshop with Missouri Humanities about how organizations can incorporate land acknowledgment language into their programming. We are so grateful to be invited to take part in this learning opportunity with MO Humanities’ Native American Heritage Program and are looking forward to sharing what we learn as we develop future programming.

We have some really exciting events coming up for the summer, which we’ll be sharing more about soon. Outdoor performances, recordings, commissions, conferences, and workshops are all on the horizon, and we’re looking forward to connecting with audiences and collaborators in physical and virtual spaces over the next few months!

Audubon Sketches Online

While this pandemic year continues to pose a challenge to live events, we are thrilled to share Chris Chandler’s Audubon Sketches in an upcoming virtual Earth Day performance on the Earth Day Art Model Telematic Festival!

A few weeks ago we all logged on to make a remote recording of this wonderfully meditative music. Previous performances of Audubon Sketches have taken place outdoors or in other unconventional locations that encourage listeners to interact with the spaces around them. So how did we translate that kind of experience to a virtual space? Well, it only took:
-Zoom
-Sonobus
-Quicktime
-Field recordings of birds and wind
-16 rocks
-2 tree branches
-3 melodicas
-A battery of auxiliary instruments (some even homemade!)
-And 8 cheerful and creative musicians!

It was a joy to connect and make music with this amazing team, even in a virtual space. Of course we look forward to the next time we’re all together in person, but in the meantime we’re excited to share this beautiful music with you very soon!

Introducing Missouri Music at 200

We are pleased to introduce our next full ensemble event: Missouri Music at 200! August 2021 marks the bicentennial of Missouri statehood, and our new program reflects on Missouri history and culture in honor of this significant occasion.

This summer our team will gather in Missouri for a variety of live and virtual performances in partnership with organizations around the state including the Missouri History Museum, The State Historical Society of Missouri, and many more. The program is shaping up to be wonderfully collaborative: not only do we have six incredible composers on board, but we are partnering with poets, historians, cultural practitioners, and community leaders to create a program that will encourage audiences to reflect on the past, honor the present, and look toward the future of Missouri.

We are very happy to share that our Missouri Music at 200 project has been endorsed by Missouri 2021, an initiative of The State Historical Society of Missouri and its Center for Missouri Studies.

For more information and updates, check out our Missouri Music at 200 page.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

What a year it’s been for all of us! We first want to give a huge thank you for continuing to support and follow the work that we do through Music in the American Wild. We were very fortunate this year to complete the first of our two major projects just before the lockdown began - and to complete the second through the creativity, flexibility, and determination of an amazing team!

If you missed either of these events, our Hawaii tour or our American Aviatrix program, we hope you’ll head over to our PROJECTS and MEDIA pages to learn a little bit more about them. You’ll find beautiful, relaxing footage from our time in Hawaii, as well as inspiring words and music from our American Aviatrix performance.

Like everyone, we’re looking forward to brighter days ahead next year. We are thrilled about the projects we have on the horizon, starting with a celebration of the Missouri bicentennial in summer 2021. This touring program will include six new commissions by incredible composers, as well as contributions from Missouri poets, historians, and cultural practitioners, aiming to honor and reflect on a wide array of topics in Missouri history and culture. You can stay up-to-date with this exciting project on our Missouri 2021 page.

We’re also beginning a commissioning project of new music inspired by the Great Lakes, and our first round of commissions will arrive in summer 2021, for touring performances beginning in the 2021-2022 season. Our Great Lakes directly impact millions of American lives and livelihoods, and we are thrilled to celebrate this important and inspiring region with music by composers who are connected with these lakes in a variety of ways.

Thank you again for all your support and encouragement throughout this difficult year. If you would like to support us in any upcoming projects, we are happy to accept tax-deductible donations through our fiscal sponsor Fractured Atlas or chat with you further about our plans. We’re looking forward to sharing more adventures with you and sending our best wishes for the year ahead!

American Aviatrix - Streaming December 10

After delays due to COVID-19 and weather, we are very much looking forward to sharing our American Aviatrix program online starting December 10! The program includes brand new works by Ingrid Stölzel and Carolina Heredia, inspired by pioneering women aviators Amelia Earhart and Bessie Coleman, as well as an Elizabeth Cady Stanton-inspired work by Caroline Mallonee.

The event, including the recorded performances and a live conversation between composers and performers involved in the project, will premiere December 10 at 7 PM on our Facebook and YouTube channels. Please see our EVENTS page for the links. We hope you’ll join us online!

We are very grateful to Mid-America Arts Alliance for their support of this project, to the University of Missouri School of Music and Mizzou New Music for their creativity and flexibility in making this event possible, and finally to Libby Hanssen and Kansas City’s NPR station, KCUR 89.3, for this wonderful article about our American Aviatrix project. We hope you’ll take a read here!

ICIYL Video Premiere

We’re excited to share some new footage from our February Hawai'i adventure, featured as the latest video premiere on the I Care If You Listen blog. This stunning footage, captured by filmmaker Jorge Arzac, is filled with memorable performances from our trip and features the rugged and breathtaking beauty of the islands we experienced on tour. These awe-inspiring vistas are paired with composer Takuma Itoh’s Adaptation Variations, a colorful and moving work inspired by the adaptive radiation of Hawaiian honeycreepers. We are grateful to Chamber Music America for supporting this work and setting us on the path for our Hawai'i project, one we will never forget!

Head over to ICIYL and enjoy a quick trip to beautiful Hawai'i!!

American Aviatrix - October 18!

Back in the spring, our American Aviatrix tour of Kansas and Missouri was postponed due to COVID-19. Luckily, we have found a safe and wonderful way to perform our program outdoors at University of Missouri in just a few weeks!

We’ll present new works by Carolina Heredia and Ingrid Stölzel at a drive-in outdoor concert outside the Sinquefield Music Center on the University of Missouri campus on October 18, and the concert will additionally be broadcast online on October 19. We are so grateful to the University of Missouri for taking a creative approach to make this performance possible! And thank you to Mid-America Arts Alliance for supporting the creative work of this wonderful team of musicians!

For more information, head over to our EVENTS page. The event is free, but registration is required. Tickets are available at Eventbrite.

This event was cancelled due to weather. Our American Aviatrix streaming program will be released on December 10 online. We hope you’ll tune in to the premiere!

Composer Carolina Heredia

Composer Ingrid Stölzel

Hawaiʻi Video Release!

We are thrilled to share this video recounting our time in Hawaiʻi, featuring stunning footage, beautiful music, and interviews with our team that take you behind the scenes to the heart of the project! Thank you to our composers, performers, partners, and supporters for bringing this project to life, and to Jorge Arzac for so wonderfully capturing the spirit of our time in Hawaiʻi!

Looking Ahead

During this season of cancellations and uncertainty as to how live music will move forward in the near future, we’ve been planning some projects for 2021 that we’ll be sharing more about in the coming months. One of these endeavors is a celebration of the state of Missouri’s bicentennial, which officially takes place August 10, 2021, and we’re excited to share some early news about what this project entails.

Over the course of the next year, we are commissioning several composers whose lives and work are connected to Missouri to write new pieces inspired by the state’s geography, history, and musical traditions. We’ll perform these works on a statewide tour in late summer 2021. We are thrilled with our roster of composers for this project, and you can learn more about them on our +PROJECTS page.

Every town, city, state, and region has its own varied identity, and we are looking forward to honoring this bicentennial by celebrating the unique history and heritage of Missouri. Missouri has always been a crossroads in our country, both geographically and ideologically, and we aim to honor this complex history with a program that includes a variety of voices, perspectives, and traditions.

Our American Aviatrix project, originally scheduled for April 2020 but postponed due to COVID-19, will be coming to life in a re-imagined way this fall with a collection of streamed recordings. We look forward to sharing these great new pieces with you soon!

Hawaii Recap: Part 3

After our adventures on the Big Island, we returned to Oahu for a final few days of concerts and school visits. We had a wonderful time working with students and performing at ‘Iolani School, Punahou School, and Kailua Intermediate School and are grateful to the faculty and staff who made these visits possible and made us feel so welcome!

One of the many highlights of our trip was our final performance of the tour at Lyon Arboretum. What an incredible place! We really connected with the staff and the mission of research and conservation at Lyon on our preliminary visit last summer and were especially excited to return for this performance - and what a magical way to end our time in Hawaii, performing in a beautiful setting for a lovely and engaged audience under soaring tropical birds!

Among our busy concert schedule, we did find a few moments to explore the beauty of Oahu. One of our favorite experiences was hiking out to Ka’ena Point to see the Laysan albatrosses, which inspired Takuma Itoh’s Laysan Dances. It was so fun to watch these magnificent creatures and catch a glimpse of their courtship rituals that featured in Takuma’s music!

We had the best time in Hawaii. It’s always a thrill to perform in beautiful and unusual places, but what made this project so special was the collaboration between our composers, our performers, and our audiences. Performing music in Hawaii that was inspired by Hawaii and written by composers who live and work in Hawaii made for a meaningful connection with our audiences, and it was a particular joy to connect with students around Oahu and the Big Island and amplify our message of conservation through this wonderful music.

Mahalo nui loa to all our Hawaiian partners!

Music in the American Wild Album Updates

Happy National Park Week! While we’re all staying home and sheltering in place this year, our American Wild Ensemble team is taking part in the celebration the best way we know how: by sharing beautiful videos of national park footage from our 2018 album, Music in the American Wild.

We have made these videos publicly available on YouTube, and you can tune in to travel through some of the most beautiful places in the country without leaving home! You’ll spot scenes from Mount Rainier, Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, Olympic, Mammoth Cave, North Cascades, and San Juan Island (and a few other non-park locations!), all filmed and created by the amazing Jorge Arzac. And you’ll hear a wonderful variety of colorful music by composers Aaron Travers, Chris Chandler, Tonia Ko, Daniel Pesca, Kevin Ernste, and Aristea Mellos, set right in the scenery in which it was originally performed!

Here’s the playlist of videos. Enjoy!

These videos accompany Disc 1 of our 2018 album. To hear the entire album - both discs - head on over to our Bandcamp page and continue to celebrate National Park Week with more music inspired by our national parks!

Hawaii Recap: Part 2

After a few days in Honolulu, we headed to the Big Island to perform at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park! At the park we played an evening concert on their After Dark in the Park series and had the opportunity to connect with a wonderful audience from around the island. We also performed several short afternoon concerts around the visitor center and had a great time meeting park visitors and working with the wonderful National Park Service staff.

We also spent a little time in Hilo performing at Waiākea Intermediate and High Schools and loved working with the students! It was really special to connect with recent University of Hawaii-Manōa grads teaching in these programs (thanks also to the Waiākea Schools for lending us percussion instruments!!) and to share music with such passionate and engaged students.

While we were on the Big Island, we took a day to explore all we could of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park and the island itself! We hiked to green sand beaches, spotted whales off the coast, checked out some beautiful waterfalls and forests, and enjoyed the otherworldly scenery of the national park’s lava fields and craters. What an amazing place!

Hawaii Recap: Part 1

It’s about time we shared some updates from our recent Hawaii adventures! We had the best time performing, working with students, and exploring Oahu and the Big Island. Mahalo nunui to all who made this project possible, including our Hawaiian partners and audiences, Chamber Music America, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Missouri State University, and individual donors!

We began our trip in Honolulu, where we worked with our commissioned composers Takuma Itoh, Michael-Thomas Foumai, and Byron Yasui and presented their music and works by Tonia Ko in a concert at University of Hawaii-Manōa. Presenting music that was written by composers in Hawaii, inspired by Hawaiian topics, and performed in Hawaii made for a really special Hawaiian premiere. Thank you to our composers who joined us on stage to speak so passionately and eloquently about their music and connection to this amazing place.

While in Honolulu we also performed for and spoke about our project with university music students and Hawaii Public Radio, worked with percussion students at Niu Valley Middle School, and took a quick break for a Diamond Head hike and some beach time!

We’ll continue to share posts and photos here over the coming weeks, but in the meantime check out our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds for more media!

Aloha, Hawaii!

Tomorrow we head to Hawaii for 10 days of rehearsals, performances, education events…. and hopefully a moment of downtime to enjoy all that Hawaii has to offer! After months of planning, we are so ready to take on this adventure and share some awesome new music with all of you.

We hope you’ll follow along with our Hawaiian adventures over the next few weeks. We’ll share updates along the way on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, so please connect with us online - or in person if you happen to be in Hawaii! You can find more information about our trip in our Hawaii 2020 section, as well as a listing of individual events on our Events page.

In the meantime, we hope you’re enjoying our beautiful new artwork by the amazing Brendan Wenzel, featuring Hawaiian birds including the ‘apapane, the i’iwi, the amakihi, and the Laysan albatross. (You can catch more of it on our social media feeds.)

As we make our final preparations, we’ll leave you with an excerpt from one of our new Hawaii pieces, Adaptation Variations by Takuma Itoh. Takuma’s piece was commissioned with a grant from Chamber Music America, and it is both extremely beautiful and a joy to play. Here’s the main theme and a taste of the variations!

Mahalo to all who have helped us throughout this preparation process. See you in Hawaii!