Thousandth Orange begins with a very simple 4-chord progression. Nothing fancy. Nothing extravagant. Just something quite beautiful and everyday, that is enjoyed and loved and consumed and forgotten. Something you’ve probably heard before, in a pop song or a music theory class. While considering my love of Brahms’ piano quartets and my memory of playing them—and more generally how our memories of beloved music evolve over time—I began thinking about the history of still-life paintings. Those bowls of fruit we see framed in museums—sort of lovely and banal, at first glance, but then richer when considered in the long story of humans painting things that they see, over and over and over again. There’s a reason that Van Gogh painted those vases of sunflowers again and again, or Caravaggio his fruit. Maybe after the tenth, or the hundredth, or the thousandth time one paints, or looks at, or eats, an orange (or plays a simple cadential figure), it is just as beautiful as the first time. There is still more to see and to hear and to love. More angles reveal themselves—more perspectives and corners and stories, more understanding—more appreciation of something that most would consider unremarkable. Thousandth Orange is about these tiny oblique revelations that time’s filter can open up in a musical memory. The title also suggests a thousand different shades of the color orange, or the image of a thousand oranges, or perhaps a thousand ways of looking at an orange. 

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Shaw is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, an honorary doctorate from Yale, four Grammys, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has written and produced for iconic artists and ensembles across the musical spectrum, including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Tiler Peck, Nas, Kanye West, the LA Phil, the NY Phil, and others. Recent tv/film/stage scoring projects include “Leonardo Da Vinci” (Ken Burns/PBS), “Julie Keeps Quiet (Leonardo Van Dijl), “Fleishman is in Trouble” (FX/Hulu), “The Sky Is Everywhere” (Josephine Decker/A24), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), “The Crucible” (Lyndsey Turner/National Theatre), “Partita” (Justin Peck/NYC Ballet), “Moby Dick” (Wu Tsang), and “LIFE” (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust). Current touring projects include shows with Sō Percussion, Ringdown, Attacca Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, Graveyards & Gardens, Gabriel Kahane, and Kamus Quartet. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

Inspired by the work of American Pulitzer-nominated war photographer Chris Hondros, who captured images of children in wars around the world, the Children of Conflict series is a collection of my own sonic portraits based off of Hondros’ intimately revealing photography with hopes to continue the storytelling and dialogue his work prompts. “A Boy and a Makeshift Toy” is a portrait of a young boy playing in an abandoned train station, full of Albanian refugees, waiting to be taken to another camp. During an 11-week bombing campaign in 1999, Serbians displaced more than 800,000 Albanians out of Kosovo.

Kouyoumdjian is a composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations. As a first-generation Armenian-American with family ​directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, she uses a sonic palette that draws on her heritage, interest in music as documentary, and background in experimental composition to progressively blend the old with the new. A strong believer in freedom of speech and the arts as an amplifier of expression, her compositional work often integrates recorded testimonies with resilient individuals, field recordings of place, and aims to invite empathy by humanizing complex experiences around social and political conflict.

She has received commissions for such organizations as the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beth Morrison Projects, Bang on a Can, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, American Composers Forum, Roomful of Teeth, Experiments in Opera, and Helen Simoneau Danse, among others. Her work has been performed internationally at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, MoMA, MASS MoCA, Barbican Centre, BAM, Millennium Park, Prototype Festival, New York Philharmonic Biennial, Cabrillo Festival, and Big Ears Festival. Her music has been described as “eloquently scripted” and “emotionally wracking” by the New York Times and as “politically fearless” and “the most harrowing moments on stage at any New York performance” by New York Music Daily.

Kouyoumdjian holds a D.M.A and M.A. in Composition from Columbia University, an M.A. in Scoring for Film and Multimedia from New York University, and a B.A. in Music Composition from University of California San Diego. Previous teaching positions include Columbia University, Brooklyn College, and The New School. She is a co-founder of New Music Gathering and is published by Schott’s PSNY.

This is a companion work to my chamber works Choref (2022) and Bloodsnow (2021). All three of these works explore my experiences in Alaska. While the first two pieces deal with violence and fear, this piece is my exploration of space, solitude, and loss. The title refers to a glacier in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, which I had the privilege to see, hear, and touch before it disappears.

Yotam Haber was born in Holland and grew up in Israel, Nigeria, and the American Midwest. He is a recipient of a 2022 commission from Chamber Music America, the winner of the 2022 Third Annual Henri Lazarof International Commission Prize, the winner of the 2021 Benjamin Hadley Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2020 Azrieli Music Prize, a 2017 Koussevitzky Commission for the Library of Congress, a 2013 Fromm Music Foundation commission, a 2013 NYFA award, the 2008 Rome Prize and a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

He has received grants and fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, the MAP Fund, New Music USA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation, Yaddo, Bogliasco, MacDowell, the Hermitage, ASCAP, the Copland House, Aspen Music Festival and Tanglewood.

Recent commissions include a percussion concerto for SANDBOX Percussion (for 2026), Commotio Cordis for PRISM Quartet and David Krakauer, works for Talea Ensemble, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Argento New Music Project, Kronos Quartet and Carnegie Hall, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor; an evening-length oratorio for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, CalARTS@REDCAT/Disney Hall (Los Angeles); New York-based Contemporaneous, Gabriel Kahane, and Alarm Will Sound; the 2015 New York Philharmonic CONTACT! Series; the Venice Biennale (2012 & 2014); Bang on a Can Summer Festival; Neuvocalsolisten Stuttgart and ensemble l’arsenale; FLUX Quartet, JACK Quartet, Cantori New York, the Tel Aviv-based Meitar Ensemble, the Israeli Chamber Players, and the Berlin-based Quartet New Generation. Recent major projects include New Water Music, an interactive work (2017) for the Louisiana Philharmonic and community musicians performed from boats and barges along the waterways of New Orleans; They Say You Are My Disaster (Koussevitzky Commission for the Library of Congress, 2019) for voice and ensemble premiered by Argento Ensemble in 2021; and Estro Poetico-armonico III (2020) for mezzo-soprano, electronics, and sinfonietta for Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne.

Tyshawn Sorey’s For Anton Vishio was commissioned by the 92nd Street Y for the McGill/McHale Trio—brothers Anthony and Demarre McGill (clarinet and flute, respectively) and Michael McHale (piano)—who gave the world premiere at the Y on December 19, 2019. Sorey considers Anton Vishio, his professor at William Paterson University, “a kindred spirit—not only through his curiosity and celebration of new music that was and remains very important to me and my work, but also through his uncanny ability to connect music of the past with what is happening now. He remains a dear friend, and this piece is dedicated to him.” Vishio also introduced the composer to the music of Morton Feldman, a transforming encounter whose mark on Sorey is audible in the slow, soft, meditative dissonances and static textures of the piece: all 18 minutes of this single-movement work are marked ppp, 22-24 BPM, and non vibrato, and while the pulse should be so slow and gentle as to be inaudible to the listener, the score demands absolute precision through complex rhythms.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey has performed globally with his own ensembles, as well as alongside industry titans including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, King Britt, Claire Chase, Roscoe Mitchell, and Steve Lehman, among many others.

Sorey has composed works for the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, soprano Julia Bullock, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, Brooklyn Rider, A Far Cry, cellists Seth Parker Woods and Matt Haimovitz, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, pianist Awadagin Pratt and vocal group Roomful of Teeth, pianist Sarah Rothenberg, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, as well as for countless others. His music has been performed in notable venues such as the Library of Congress, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Hollywood Bowl, the 92nd Street Y, Park Avenue Armory, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Lucerne Festival, and Lincoln Center. His compositions are published by Edition Peters.

Sorey joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020, where he maintains a vigorous touring schedule in addition to his academic duties.

The initial inspiration for this piece came from the light-filled patterns of Frank Lloyd Wright’s art glass windows, which he termed “light screens.” These light screens line the walls of his prairie style homes in long horizontal bands. The window panels feature simple shapes like the square and the rhombus in repetitious designs, and there is often a lively dynamic of asymmetry between areas of intense geometric activity and expanses of largely empty space.

Norman, a composer, educator, and music advocate, has established himself as a significant voice in American classical music. His work draws on an eclectic mix of sounds and performance practices, and his music casts a wide sonic and conceptual net in order to explore, reflect, challenge and address the experiences of our own time. He is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in music whose work has been championed by eminent conductors such as John Adams, Marin Alsop, Gustavo Dudamel, Simon Rattle and David Robertson.

He has served as composer in residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Opera Philadelphia, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Utah Symphony. He was Carnegie Hall’s Debs Composer’s Chair for the 2020-2021 season.

Among his many honors, Norman has won the Rome Prize (2006), the Berlin Prize (2009), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), Musical America’s Composer of the Year (2017) and the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition (2017). His orchestral work Sustain earned Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic a GRAMMY Award for their Deutsche Grammophon recording.