Event Description

Rockefeller Carillon New Music Festival

Friday May 25 | 5–8 pm
Saturday May 26 | 10 am–12:45 pm, 2 :30–5:15 pm

A two-day festival of new music for the carillon featuring twelve world premières, including music for carillon and electronics and carillon and other instruments. The Friday evening program includes a reception at 5:30 pm with the artists, composers, and creators of the festival, with a showcase recital at 6:30 pm. The Saturday program includes eight short recitals, interspersed with presentations in diverse formats about the music, the composers, and the world of new music for carillon. Free, with light refreshments throughout the event.

Commissioned by Rockefeller Chapel for the Carillon New Music Festival:
Augusta Read Thomas Ripple Effects
Laura Steenberge Red Shift
Emily Cooley Siciliana
and works by Yvette Janine Jackson, Geert D’hollander, and Renske Vrolijk

And featuring the premières of music written by Postdoctoral Fellow Aaron Helgeson and current University of Chicago students for the festival: PhD candidates Maria Kaoutzani, Allison Yun-Fei Jiang, and Rodrigo Bussad, graduate student Kevin Kay, and undergraduate Joshua Kaufman.

Performed by:
Joey Brink  University Carillonneur
Ellen Dickinson  Yale University
Frans Haagen  Amersfoort Carillon School, The Netherlands
Tiffany Ng  University of Michigan
Students of the University of Chicago Guild of Carillonneurs

Augusta Read Thomas writes of Ripple Effects that it is inspired by the way that one person or event can cause a series of other events to happen. It is written in honor of Elizabeth Davenport for her ten years of leadership at Rockefeller as innovator, visionary, and arts devotee: “The title Ripple Effects hopefully captures the potency and influence of Elizabeth’s magnificent lifeforce, efforts, leadership, and positive energy. . . . Music’s eternal quality is its capacity for change, transformation, and renewal. My own works are organic and, at every level, concerned with transformations and connections. The carefully sculpted musical materials of Ripple Effects are agile and energized, and their flexibility allows a way to braid harmonic, rhythmic, and contrapuntal elements that are constantly transformed—at times whimsical and light, at times poignant, at times layered and reverberating.”