NOW Ensemble
Indie / Classical / Experimental
New York, NY
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About
Formed as a means of facilitating communication and shared music-making between composers and performers, NOW Ensemble is a dynamic new music group that is dedicated to the presentation of works by emerging composers. With its unique instrumentation of flute, clarinet, electric guitar, double bass, and piano, NOW Ensemble gives chamber music a new sound and a new vitality for the next generation of musicians, composers, and listeners. For repertoire, the group relies on the creation of new music for the ensemble, making composers and composition an integrated part of every performance.
Based in New York City, NOW Ensemble has performed at a variety of concert halls, art galleries, and clubs around the city, including Merkin Concert Hall, BAM Café, the Knitting Factory, the Tenri Cultural Institute, Galapagos Art Space, the Juilliard School, VIM: TriBeCa, Williamsburg's DuBuQuE Concert Series, and the Look & Listen Festival in Chelsea's Robert Miller Gallery. This year, NOW has established an ongoing relationship with Gallerie Icosahedron, in TriBeCa, as well as performing at the Wave Hill Cultural Center in the Bronx, and being featured on the world famous 2007 Bang on a Can Marathon at the World Financial Center.
Reaching outside of New York, NOW Ensemble has established a program of University residencies, visiting Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and other colleges around the country. In the Fall of 2005, NOW Ensemble toured the Northeast as part of Free Speech Zone (fszproductions.com), a tour of politically-themed, provocative new music that reached audiences in New York, Boston and New Haven. In the Spring of 2006, NOW Ensemble was the featured visiting group at the Carlsbad Music Festival (carlsbadmusicfestival.org) in Carlsbad, California, the concluding show in a tour of Southern California that included two shows in Los Angeles and a visit to CalArts. NOW has an ongoing relationship with the Crane Arts Center in Philadelphia, PA, as well as the Firehouse 12 studio in New Haven, CT. With these performances in New York and around the United States, NOW Ensemble has brought new music to the attention of the public as an essential and crucial part of our developing culture, engaging young audiences and non-musicians, as well as regular concertgoers, with a new vision for contemporary chamber music.
NOW Ensemble is a registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit in the State of New York.
"NOW Ensemble, offered highly attractive, unabashedly rock-influenced works by Mark Dancigers, Missy Mazzoli and Judd Greenstein." - Steve Smith, The New York Times, "Breaking the Barriers of Music in a New York Marathon", June 5, 2007
"[Steve] Reich changed music, and he also changed how music relates to society. In the face of early incomprehension he took a do-it-yourself approach to getting his work before the public....With his namesake ensemble, Reich performed in galleries, clubs, and wherever else he felt welcome. The effects of this paradigm shift can be seen on any day of the week in New York, as composer-led ensembles proliferate. Bang on a Can is the longtime leader, and the NOW Ensemble is a deft young group gaining attention....Post-Reich, composers are evolving into a more mobile, adaptable species." - Alex Ross, The New Yorker, "Celebrating Steve Reich", Nov. 13, 2006
"As to the performances, to say that they were completely masterly (and, in some cases masterful) technically and wonderfully powerful and expressive would be to slander them by using faint praise. It was the kind of playing which was so concentrated and focused that it could melt through steel." -Rodney Lister, Tempo
"Folk Music...is one of the freshest pieces I've heard so far this year." - Alex Ross, The New Yorker, June 29, 2005, on Judd Greenstein's work for NOW Ensemble
"NOW Ensemble...works experimental, chamber-music miracles with its wide array of instruments and fertile relationship with emerging composers." - Rebecca Epstein, LA City Beat
"This is a new voice lifting in the context of a smaller world, suggesting the shape of the sounds that will define art music in the early part of this new century." - Ed Montgomery, Context Studios
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Jun 26, 2007
Thanks for checking out our page!
Thanks for checking out our page here at Virb. We're using this space as an online press kit, while we work on our new website that's due to be launched this Fall. In the meantime, this site should give you a sense of what NOW Ensemble is all about - what we've done, …
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