Ethos presents NewSound Festival of concerts, recitals and more

The 16th annual NewSound Festival will take center stage at Fredonia this spring. Hosted by the Ethos New Music Society, the festival will focus on contemporary performances and hold nine events featuring performers and composers including three Student Composer Concerts and six special guests: A/B Duo, Decho Ensemble, Acropolis Quintet, Jonathan Newman, Roomful of Teeth and Jennifer Higdon.

The first guest, A/B Duo, will perform Friday, Feb. 12 at 8 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall (see separate article). NewSound will also present three Student Composer Concerts featuring Fredonia composers and performers, slated for Monday, Feb. 15, Wednesday, March 2, and Wednesday, April 6. All Student Composer Concerts take place at 8 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall and are free and open to the public.

Decho Ensemble	Jonathan Newman

Hailed as a “winning combination in every way!” the Decho Ensemble will perform on Wednesday, Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall. The ensemble was founded in 2011 by Fredonia alumni saxophonists Sarah Marchitelli, ‘11, and Jacob Swanson, ‘12, and includes current graduate saxophonists Nicholas Childs and Jared Yackiw. The group will be performing works of new music written for saxophone duo and quartet, including works by Eric Moe, Dimitri Terzakis, Dr. Rob Deemer and more. Admission is free and all music enthusiasts are invited to attend.

Mr. Swanson and Ms. Marchitelli share their passion for music, the saxophone and collaboration with their students. Marchitelli serves on faculty at Fredonia and is the Director of Instruction at Infinity Visual and Performing Arts in Jamestown. Swanson teaches instrumental music for the Gowanda Central School District, the New Horizons Band of Western New York and Jamestown Community College. Both Marchitelli and Swanson maintain private studios at Infinity Visual and Performing Arts where they founded and co-direct the Infinity Saxophone Ensemble. Mr. Childs serves as a Teaching Assistant for the Saxophone Studio at Fredonia and Mr. Yackiw is the president of the Ethos New Music Society at Fredonia.

The Acropolis Quintet will perform a free concert on Friday, Feb. 26 at 8 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall. It became the first ever reed quintet to win the Fischoff Gold Medal in 2014. The quintet has released two studio albums to critical acclaim and commissioned more than 25 reed quintet works to date. The group includes saxophonist Matt Landry, Clarinetist Kari Dion, oboist Tim Gocklin, bassoonist Ryan Reynolds and bass clarinetist Andrew Koeppe.

Jonathan Newman composes music rich with rhythmic drive and intricate sophistication, incorporating styles of pop, blues, jazz, folk, and funk into otherwise classical models. He received the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and holds degrees from Boston University's School for the Arts and The Juilliard School. His pieces have been performed across the U.S. and in England. The Fredonia Wind Symphony will give a free concert featuring two of Mr. Newman’s works on Feb. 29 at 8 p.m. in King Concert Hall, and there will also be a free chamber concert including works of Newman’s on March 1 at 8 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall.

Roomful of Teeth is a GRAMMY-winning vocal project dedicated to mining the expressive potential of the human voice. Through study with masters from singing traditions the world over, the eight-voice ensemble continually expands its vocabulary of singing techniques and, through an ongoing commissioning process, forges a new repertoire without borders. Roomful of Teeth will also give a concert on Tuesday, March 15 at 8 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall. Admission is $8 for students and $12 for the general public, and tickets will be available at the Fredonia Ticket Office in the Williams Center starting the second week of February. As part of its residency, Roomful of Teeth will also give a free lecture on Monday, March 14 at 7 p.m. in the multipurpose room in the Williams Center.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Higdon is one of America’s most acclaimed and most frequently performed living composers. Hailed by the Washington Post as "a savvy, sensitive composer with a keen ear, an innate sense of form and a generous dash of pure esprit," her works are enjoyed by audiences at several hundred performances a year and on over sixty CDs. Higdon received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto, and her Percussion Concerto won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition the same year. Dr. Higdon currently holds the Milton L. Rock Chair in Composition Studies at The Curtis Institute of Music, where she has inspired a generation of young composers and musicians. On Saturday, April 23 at 8 p.m. in King Concert Hall there will be a Fredonia College Symphony concert featuring music by Higdon. On Monday, April 25 at 8 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall, there will be concert of chamber music including pieces of Higdon’s. Both concerts are free and the public is invited to attend.

The Ethos New Music Society is a student organization committed to presenting music of the 20th and 21st century and is made possible by the Fredonia Student Association. For more information, contact Ethos New Music Society’s President, Jared Yackiw, at yack2799@fredonia.edu.