New York New Music Festival
Thursday November 19th, 7:00pm and 9:30pm; Friday November 20 7:00pm and 9:30pm; Saturday November 21, 3pm and 7pm, 2026
Duo della Luna
Susan Botti (she/her) - voice
Airi Yoshioka (she/her) - violin
Unheard-of Ensemble
Ford Fourqurean, Clarinet
Sofiya Levchenko, Violin
Iva Casian Lakos, Cello
Sixth Degree Sextet
Madeline Hocking, violin
Andrea Abel, flute
Clara Cho, cello
Jonathan Collazo, percussion
Gabe Henkin, clarinet
Infrasound
Madeline Hocking, violin
Kyle Stalsberg, viola
Kathryn Vetter, clarinet
Elizabeth Kate Hall-Keough, cello
Daniel Schreiner, piano
McKenzie Squires, percussion
J Clancy, percussion
Brian Ellis, composer
Confluss
Amber Evans, soprano/viola
Samuel Zagnit, double bass/voice
Ordinary Places
Nicole Brancato, Piano
Evan Jagels, Bass
The New York New Music Festival is an annual festival created to celebrate the Contemporary Classical Music community in NYC. This inaugural year of the festival presents 6 concerts by 6 ensembles that are based in and actively contribute to the cultural fabric of music in New York City.
Duo della Luna (Susan Botti and Airi Yoshioka) performs eclectic contemporary chamber music in an unusual combination of voice and violin. The duo’s wide-ranging repertoire includes newly commissioned works (including undiscovered voices), re-imagined existing works, and diverse folk music arrangements.
Unheard-of performs trios by David Bird, Meg Okura, Max Eidinoff, and Ben Wallace, exploring sounds in between worlds from the fantastical to sonic memory and imagined futures. The program opens with Meg Okura’s Phantasmagoria described as a musical odyssey into a world more surreal than even the most fantastical dream. David Bird’s Hysteresis blends electronics, video, and expansive sonic textures that weave through time. Max Eidinoff’s Converging on a Critical Band expands the trio into a processed meta instrument. Ben Wallace’s Crash Out ends the program with persistent 90s rave and a fever dream.
Sixth Degree Sextet is an NYC-based new music ensemble formed by Andrea Abel (flute), Gabriel Henkin (clarinet), Madeline Hocking (violin), Clara Cho (cello), Nacho Ojeda (piano), and Jonathan Collazo (percussion). Hailing from six different countries and united by a shared artistic vision, the ensemble takes its name from the concept of Six Degrees of Separation - the idea that any two people can be connected through a chain of mutual relationships. This program brings that idea of connection into three very different works, each offering its own perspective on relationships between people, places, and ideas. Anuj Bhutani’s Flight Path draws on the composer’s fascination with birds and their migratory journeys, imagining how a shared destination can still allow for an entirely individual path. Erich Barganier’s 91 Hours examines the complicated nature of intimacy, exploring how closeness can exist alongside trauma and how the two can become difficult to separate. Samantha Wolfe’s A Rose Is a Rose Is a Ruse: A Bachelor’s Tale brings the conventions of reality television into the concert hall, complete with romance, declarations of love, and the inevitable - and often hilarious - complications that follow.
InfraSound presents “Music for Audiences,” a concert experience that invites YOU the audience into the musical praxis of listening and performing. Featuring compositions by Wandelweiser composer Eva-Marie Houben and composer, creative coder, and community builder Brian Ellis, this evening will present an opportunity for audiences to engage in experimental chamber music through active listening, improvisation, and performance (no instruments required).
For the first half of the concert, the InfraSound ensemble performs works premiered by us in 2026 by Eva-Marie Houben that explore the liminal spaces between sound and silence. These works encourage audience members to engage with their listening environment in a way that heightens the aural experience of the music.
The second half will present world premieres by Brian Ellis from his series “Music for Audiences” which is a practice of musiking that cannot be performed WITHOUT an audience. With the help of the InfraSound ensemble, Brian will lead the audience and performers in several compositions that encourage music-making driven by mutual trust, support, friendship, and community.
Amber Evans, soprano and Sam Zagnit, double bass are confluss – two musicians dedicated to commission and perform new works for the melding timbres of voice and double bass. Convergence is a key part of the duo’s mission, committed to not only expanding the repertoire of their “unconventional” ensemble, but to perform works multiple times, outside of their premiers, codifying performance practice. As a versatile ensemble, both members are well-versed in all styles of music, focusing on the new and unusual, and dabbling between theatre, performance art, and concert music. Evans and Zagnit frequently collaborate with each other outside of the duo in BlackBox ensemble. Recent engagements include concerts at the Roerich Museum on the Upper West Side as part of the Graphic Content Festival, curated by Steven Long, and a spotlight concert at the Tank. Currently based in New York City, the duo has performed in multiple venues around New York, including Spectrum, Merkin Hall at Lincoln Center, the CUNY Graduate Center, and a residency at Manhattan School of Music facilitated by Reiko Fueting. In summer 2023, the duo was the ensemble-in-residence at New Music On The Point on Lake Dunmore, Vermont. Their most recent album release can be found on Bandcamp.
Confluss is excited to showcase a broad range of musical styles and influences, including recent premieres by old and new collaborators, and works by Zagnit himself. This program highlights the unique and introspective nature of the ensemble, diving into deep blended and overlapping textures of the voice and double bass.
Ordinary Places finds pianist Nicole Brancato and bassist Evan Jagels improvising in dialogue with field recordings of everyday locations, treating them as the third member of their trio. Together, they explore the fluid boundary between music and the ordinary sounds of daily life, revealing the familiar cycles and spaces of our shared humanity as truly extraordinary. Through eight distinct soundworlds captured across NY state, the duo draws inspiration from wind chimes, a car, a coffee shop, the subway, a kitchen, rain, a motorcycle, and a window in spring, turning the sounds of ordinary days into a shared musical language. The album's creation was supported in part by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).