Seattle Modern Orchestra

We heard sports were trending... ⚽😎

Throwback to rehearsal for our performance last October with Flicker Duo, featuring Cristina Valdes on piano!

💿 Support your favorite home team's recording project, against/Time: https://bit.ly/SMOAgainstTime

📄 COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Huck Hodge

Tracking is complete for our recording of Huck Hodge's percussion concerto, The Shape of the Wind, the Shadow of Time!

Hodge is a professor and chair of the composition program at the University of Washington School of Music , and a longtime SMO collaborator.

"I am especially excited to have written a concerto for SMO’s resident percussionist, Bonnie Whiting. In my piece, the soloist acts as something of a high-priestess in a sequence of imaginary rituals set in an arid post-apocalyptic world in which small pockets of humanity gather together in temples of garbage.

Along with the standard orchestral instruments, the ensemble plays some very environmentally unfriendly found objects — bowed styrofoam, plastic bags, blown glass and plastic bottles — together with an assemblage of 80s tape cassette players and other discarded technology, in what might be described as a sort of post-industrial rain ceremony."

💿 Support our album, against/Time: https://bit.ly/SMOAgainstTime

📸 (1) Amy Vangergon; (2–4) Michelle Cheng

📄 COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Wang Lu

Wang Lu's music synthesizes urban environmental sounds, linguistic contour, traditional Chinese music, and freely improvised traditions. Our upcoming album, against/Time, features her 2023 Barlow Prize-winning work and SMO commission: The Nothing Man and Other Tales. Soprano Maria Mannisto lends her voice to Lu's settings of Gianni Rodari’s classic stories, The Telephone Tales.

"In [The Telephone Tales], regardless of where the traveling salesman Mr. Bianchi goes, he always gets to a pay phone to call his daughter and read her a bedtime story. These tales form a bond between father and daughter with their fascinating mix of natural and supernatural worlds, allowing tremendous space for me as a composer to imagine accompanying music with abstract and kaleidoscopic narratives." — Wang Lu

💕💿 Support the album with your contribution today: https://bit.ly/SMOAgainstTime

Greetings from the recording studio at ! Rehearsal and tracking are underway for our upcoming album, against/Time 🕰️👀

🫶 Support the recording project with your gift today: https://bit.ly/SMOAgainstTime

A week from today, we start tracking our new album: against/Time! 🎧🎚️

Since our founding in 2010, we have premiered over 47 works, and we are thrilled to extend our reach internationally with our first album of commissioned pieces.

With music by Wang Lu, Huck Hodge, and our founding director Jérémy Jolley, the album features some of SMO’s largest instrumentations, showcasing years of close collaboration. NYC-based label New Focus Recordings will launch the project, and we will track the album with Grammy-nominated engineer Andrew Munsey at the University of Washington School of Music’s new in-house recording studio.

🫶 Support the project with your gift today: https://bit.ly/SMOAgainstTime

📸: Amy Vandergon

Looking for some weird, wacky and wonderful fashion inspo for our 1986 prom on Saturday? Check out these totally tubular threads 👀💃👔

📆 May 2, 6pm Contemporary Dance Center. Be there or be square! 😎

Tickets @ seattlemodernorchestra.org

In 1986, Melody Sumner, Kathleen Burch, and Michael Sumner created a dinner party in an art book, filled with conversations and text scores from avant-garde luminaries of the time: The guests go in to supper.

To celebrate the book's 40th anniversary, SMO presents two nights of interactive music, poetry, prose, and dance at Whim W'Him Seattle Contemporary Dance Center on May 1 & 2, curated by Sarah Kolat.

🍄 NIGHT 1: Friday, May 1
The ensemble presents John Cage's long-form poem, Mushrooms et variationes, with a new dance by James Kirby Rogers alongside Cage's Music for Seven (by Six). This fusion honors Cage's historic partnership with Merce Cunningham, and Seattle’s role in bringing the two visionary artists together.

🪩 NIGHT 2: Saturday, May 2
The supper party turns into a prom inspired by The guests go in to supper and the spirit of 1986. Expect bites and beverages, a sneak peek at next season, musical presentations, a wallflower room with games, and, of course, a dance floor. Come dressed for the occasion, however you define it. Weird, wonderful, formal, awkward, glamorous, conceptual, prom-adjacent: all are welcome.

Tickets: https://bit.ly/411PVYr

This Wednesday, April 8, pianist Aaron Wonson will step in to make his SMO debut with Ligeti's Piano Concerto, replacing Cristina Valdés who has withdrawn from the performance due to an injury. Aaron has deep experience with the concerto, and we are delighted that we can still bring this rarely-performed work to our community.

Currently based in Boston, Aaron has collaborated with composers Phillip Cashian, Lei Liang, Elizabeth Ogonek, and conductors David Dzubay and Timothy Weiss. Recent recording projects include an arrangement of Bela Bartok’s first violin sonata for piano and alto saxophone and a jazz trio album.

Don’t miss this unforgettable evening encompassing Ligeti’s groundbreaking work alongside new and recent pieces from the University of Washington School of Music composition department.

🎟️: https://bit.ly/4dNyMJq

On April 8, SMO presents “the new normal” by University of Washington composition faculty member William Dougherty at Meany Hall. “the new normal” is a response to the summer of 2016. Responding to widespread xenophobia, violence, and racism, the piece uses collage to connect samples from six different musical sources. These include a recording made by 20th-century ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax of Black prisoners at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, Monteverdi’s “Ahi troppo, ahi troppo e duro,” and sounds drawn from police radio recordings connected to mass shootings and the killings of unarmed Black Americans.

“What’s striking to me about revisiting the piece ten years later is how little distance I feel from the conditions that shaped it. When I wrote it in 2016, it felt like a response to a particularly intense and unsettling moment…What may have initially been a reactive gesture now feels, to me, more like a document of listening: to the past, to mediated sound, and to the overlapping social realities embedded in those materials.” — William Dougherty

🎟️: https://bit.ly/4dNyMJq