New music ensemble Sequitur to present song cycles

Acclaimed new music ensemble Sequitur, based in New York City, will continue its ninth season with a look at three adventurous song cycles Tuesday, March 29, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall. On the program will be Eric Moe's "Tri-Stan" and cycles by Harold Meltzer and Cornell's own Roberto Sierra. Sequitur will perform again, reading works composed by Cornell graduate students, Wednesday, March 30, at 9:30 a.m. in Barnes Hall.

Moe describes "Tri-Stan" as a "sit-trag-concert monodrama" and notes that it was written specifically with Sequitur's mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger in mind. The work consists of texts from David Foster Wallace's "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" (from his short fiction collection, Brief interviews with hideous men), and makes additional use of super-title text-video projections, developed by Suzie Silver.

Sierra is a professor of composition at Cornell and is considered to be one of the leading American composers of his generation. Of his song cycle "Cancionero Sefardí," he writes, "The sheer beauty and the poignant melodic structures in the music from the Sephardic tradition has captivated me since I heard the first Ladino song. In 'Cancionero Sefardí' I didn't want to do a mere 'arrangement,' but to rather recreate these melodies within my own musical language."

Rounding out the program is "Exiles" by Meltzer, who is co-artistic director of Sequitur, currently living in Italy as the Samuel Barber Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. "Exiles" consists of settings of two different poems, both titled "Exile" by Hart Crane and Conrad Aiken. The term "exile" holds different meanings for the two poets, notes Meltzer: "These settings of poems ... reflect a sun and moon of loneliness. Exile, for Aiken, is the absence of lifeblood, a denuded and bleached landscape. For Crane, it is intimacy denied, nocturnal, cold and bright."

The ensemble Sequitur has attracted a new audience for contemporary music by exploring its most promising interactions with other arts. Sequitur plays in concert halls but also performs in theaters and in cabaret spaces, staging works with theater directors and with choreographers, bringing modernism to The Knitting Factory and minimalism to Merkin Concert Hall. Since its first concert in 1997, Sequitur has premiered more than 30 works by such American composers as Tania Leòn, Frederic Rzewski, Martin Bresnick, David Rakowski, Anne LeBaron, David Del Tredici, Eve Beglarian, Lewis Spratlan, David Lang and Randall Woolf.