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Formed as a means of facilitating communication and shared music-making between composers and performers, NOW Ensemble is a dynamic new music group that is dedicated to the presentation of works by emerging composers. With its unique instrumentation of flute, clarinet, electric guitar, double bass, and piano, NOW Ensemble gives chamber music a new sound and a new vitality for the next generation of musicians, composers, and listeners. For repertoire, the group relies on the creation of new music for the ensemble, making composers and composition an integrated part of every performance.

Based in New York City, NOW Ensemble has performed at Merkin Concert Hall, the Tenri Cultural Institute, the Juilliard School, Williamsburg's DuBuQuE Concert Series, and the Look & Listen Festival in Chelsea's Robert Miller Gallery. Recent New York performances include evening shows at The Knitting Factory and Galapagos Art Space in Manhattan and Brooklyn as part of Free Speech Zone (fszproductions.com), a tour of politically-themed, provocative new music that reached audiences in New York, Boston and New Haven. This Spring, NOW Ensemble was the featured visiting group at the Carlsbad Music Festival (carlsbadmusicfestival.org) in Carlsbad, California, a performance that concluded a tour of Southern California that included two shows in Los Angeles and a visit to CalArts. In June, NOW staged a one-night "takeover" of the Crane Arts Center in Philadelphia, PA, filling the raw warehouse space with music. Next season, NOW Ensemble begins a program of University residencies, visiting Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and other colleges around the country. With these performances in New York and around the United States, NOW Ensemble has brought new music to the attention of the public as an essential and crucial part of our developing culture, engaging young audiences and non-musicians, as well as regular concertgoers, with a new vision for contemporary chamber music.

NOW Ensemble consists of five performers (one of whom is also a composer) and two other composers: Alexandra Sopp (flute), Sara Phillips (clarinet), Mark Dancigers (electric guitar and composer), Michael Mizrahi (piano), Peter Rosenfeld (contrabass), Judd Greenstein (composer) and Patrick Burke (composer).

 

Press:

"As to the performances, to say that they were completely masterly (and, in some cases masterful) technically and wonderfully powerful and expressive would be to slander them by using faint praise. It was the kind of playing which was so concentrated and focused that it could melt through steel."

-Rodney Lister, Tempo

"NOW Ensemble....works experimental, chamber music miracles with its wide array of instruments and fertile relationship with emerging composers."

-Rebecca Epstein, L.A. City Beat

"This is a new voice lifting in the context of a smaller world, suggesting the shape of the sounds that will define art music in the early part of this new century."

-Ed Montgomery, Context Studios