PRISM Quartet to Premiere The Waves by JacobTV

Sun, Jun 2 - Mon, Jun 3  2019

Settlement Music School - New York Consulate Region

_A_ new work by Dutch composer Jacob TV will be premiered by the PRISM Quartet on June 2 and 3. The PRISM Quartet presents a program of world premieres, featuring new works by Nina C. Young, Emily Cooley, Francesca Hellerman, and Jacob TV. The program also includes the East Coast premiere of Christopher Biggs‘s Surfaces and Essences, the title track of an upcoming PRISM album on XAS Records. Join them June 2, 8:00 PM at Settlement Music School, Mary Louise Curtis Branch, located at 416 Queen Street in Philadelphia; and also June 3, 8:00 PM at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church, located at 120 W. 69th St. in New York City. Tickets are $17-22 ($3 more at the door).

About The Waves

Dutch ‘avant pop’ composer Jacob TV describes The Waves as a composition “inspired by the timeless poetry of the 13th century Japanese monk Dōgen. I intended to write music about temporality and impermanence, and I realized that sound is a good metaphor for that, because sound is a vibration which appears out of nothing and disappears right after. I am fascinated by the indifferent beauty of the swelling and fading of a single sound.” The press have called TV the ‘Andy Warhol of new music,’ a composer of ultra-tonal, mellifluous music well know for his boombox repertoire, works for live instruments with a grooving sound track based on speech melody.

Read more about the entire program on the website of the PRISM Quartet.

About JacobTV

Dutch ‘avant pop’ composer JacobTV (Jacob Ter Veldhuis, 1951) started as a rock musician and studied composition and electronic music at the Groningen Conservatoire. He was awarded the Composition Prize of the Netherlands in 1980 and became a full time composer who soon made a name for himself with melodious compositions, straight from the heart and with great effect. ‘I pepper my music with sugar,’ he says.

The press called him the ‘Andy Warhol of new music’ and his ‘coming-out’ as a composer of ultra-tonal, mellifluous music reached its climax with the video oratorio Paradiso, based on Dante’s Divina Commedia.

JacobTV’s so called boombox repertoire, works for live instruments with a grooving sound track based on speech melody, became internationally popular. With about a 1000 performances worldwide per year, he is one of the most performed European composers. JacobTV is still an outlaw in the established modern classical music scene, and was accused of ‘musical terrorism’. According to the Wall Street Journal some of his his work ‘makes many a hip-hop artist look sedate’. In 2007 a 3 day JacobTV festival took place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. His never ending reality opera THE NEWS is constantly updated and various editions were performed in Chicago, Rome, Amsterdam, Hamburg, New York.

JacobTV © MAYUMI

About the PRISM Quartet

Intriguing programs of great beauty and breadth have distinguished the PRISM Quartet as one of America’s foremost chamber ensembles. “A bold ensemble that set the standard for contemporary-classical saxophone quartets” (The New York Times), PRISM has performed in Carnegie Hall on the Making Music Series, in Alice Tully Hall with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and throughout Latin America, China, and Russia under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and USArtists International. PRISM has also been presented to critical acclaim as soloists with the Detroit Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra, and conducted residencies at the nation’s leading conservatories, including the Curtis Institute of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory. Two-time recipients of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, PRISM has commissioned nearly 300 works, many by internationally celebrated composers, including Pulitzer Prize-winners Julia Wolfe, William Bolcom, Jennifer Higdon, Zhou Long, and Bernard Rands; MacArthur “Genius” Award recipients Tyshawn Sorey, Bright Sheng, and Miguel Zenón; and United States Artists Fellow Susie Ibarra. PRISM’s discography includes releases on Albany, BMOP/Sound, ECM, innova, Koch, Naxos, New Dynamic, New Focus, and its own label, XAS Records. The Fifth Century, PRISM’s ECM recording with The Crossing under Donald Nally, was awarded a 2018 Grammy for Best Choral Performance. In 2016, PRISM was named by its alma mater, the University of Michigan, as the first recipient of the Christopher Kendall Award in recognition of its work in “collaboration, entrepreneurship, and community engagement.” The PRISM Quartet performs exclusively on Selmer saxophones.

© Ara Howrani