Ensemble X, a faculty performing group from two Ithaca campuses, will have its inaugural performance Sunday, Nov. 2, at 3 p.m., in Barnes Hall.
Under the leadership of artistic director Steven Stucky, Cornell professor of music, Ensemble X will present the music of the 20th century, particularly the last decade.
Ensemble X comprises music faculty from Ithaca College -- Wendy Herbener Mehne, Richard Faria, Gordon Stout, Ellen Jewett, Elizabeth Simkin -- and Cornell -- Judith Kellock, Mark Davis Scatterday, Edward Murray, Xak Bjerken, David Borden and Stucky.
The Nov. 2 program will feature five works, all but one composed in the 1990s:
Salute, written by Stucky for eight performers, was penned in September 1997 for the ensemble's inaugural concert. The composer calls it "a celebratory firework, short but splashy, offered as a small tribute to the talent and dedication of the members of the ensemble." Stucky is widely recognized as one of the leading American composers of his generation, having commissioned works for the symphony orchestras of Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Minnesota and Los Angeles. He currently serves as new music adviser for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Statues, a set of five miniatures scored for solo piano, was written in 1992 by Chris Theofanidis as a reaction to the death of a friend. The Dallas native has had his works performed by such orchestras as the National Symphony, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the California Symphony and the Fort Worth Symphony. He currently teaches composition at the University of Houston.
Counterpoise was one of the last works composed by Jacob Druckman before his death in 1996. The piece was written for the soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Druckman, one of the most prominent of contemporary American composers, produced a substantial catalog of orchestral, chamber, and vocal music, and did considerable work in electronic media. He won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize in music for Windows, his first work for large orchestra. At the time of his death, Druckman was a professor of music composition at Yale University.
Counterpoise will be performed by soprano Susan Narucki, whose discography includes works on seven labels, including Richard Einhorn's oratorio Voices of Light with Anonymous Four for Sony. She will debut this season with the Pittsburgh Symphony in Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 and with the Colorado Symphony in Einhorn's Voices of Light.
Narucki also will perform Kaija Saariaho's From the Grammar of Dreams during the Nov. 2 concert, with Cornell soprano Judith Kellock.
The final work of Ensemble X's premiere concert will be John Adams' Gnarly Buttons. Adams, a former composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Symphony, is best known for his opera Nixon in China, which premiered in 1987 by the Houston Grand Opera in a staging by Peter Sellars.