Friday, October 4, 2024
BlackBox Ensemble

An acclaimed young collective of contemporary music performers, including USC  cellist Jordan Bartow, BlackBox Ensemble plays a diverse program including works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inti figgis-vizueta, Tristan Murail, the Beatles/Luciano Berio, and USC alumnus Baljinder Sekhon (world premiere). Also featuring USC’s superb soprano faculty Ashley Emerson in her series debut.

Friday, November 15, 2024
Exposed Wiring

Get behind the scenes and under the hood of masterworks and new classics that utilize technology, from amplification to video to electronics, in vital ways. With USC’s Orange Road string quartet, playing George Crumb’s Black Angels;  dynamic guitarist Dan Lippel (International Contemporary Ensemble)in Fang Man’s Ambush from Ten Sides; USC composer-performers David Kirkland Garner and Greg Stuart, performing Garner’s Short Stories;  The Collective, premiering a new work by DMA composer Austin Engelhardt; and featuring the world premiere of Reginald Bain’s Lift Up Your Eyes, for chorus led by Alicia W. Walker, projected images from the Webb space telescope, and electronic sound.

Friday, January 31, 2025
earspace plays Abrahamsen

The fragile, crystalline sound world of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen's Schnee (“Snow”) must be heard in person to appreciate this work’s bewitching beauty – as pure as the driven snow. Schnee, well on its way to achieving iconic status as an early-21st-century masterpiece, will be given its Columbia premiere by the extraordinary earspace, a group of ten exemplary young artists including USC flute graduate Philip Snyder. The work will be introduced in an interactive presentation by USC professor and public music theory pioneer J. Daniel Jenkins.

Saturday, March 29, 2025
John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit

A multitude of percussionists (or as close as we can get!) help close the School of Music’s 100th anniversary season outdoors on the USC Horseshoe. Adams’ monumental Inuksuit, intended to be performed and experienced outdoors, creates an enormous sonic landscape, both intimate and overpowering, that is unique to each performance and performance site. In Inuksuit, inspired and shaped by the stone sentinels constructed over centuries by the Inuit people as waypoints in the expanse of the Arctic, the listener is free to shape their own experience: audience members may bring a blanket, a lawn chair, or wander throughout the performance area. Co-produced by Boston-based percussionist Maria Finkelmeier, professor Scott Herring and the USC percussion studio, and Southern Exposure.