Dear NYCC,

This Saturday at 7PM, pianist Edward Forstman is performing two of my compositions as well as music by Zosha di Castri, Michael Coleman, Holland Hopson, Mark Lackey, and William Price (who some of you met at the Sunderman Wind Quintet concert last season). See full description below. Please forward to others who may be interested.

Monroe Golden

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BAMA + DUX

Saturday, September 7th at 7PM

Spectrum

70 Flushing Avenue, Garage A, Brooklyn, New York 11205

Admission at door: $15 / $10 students

Edward Forstman explores contemporary music as a solo pianist and collaborator. For this solo show at Spectrum, Forstman is presenting piano music of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance (BAMA), which has for almost 25 years provided a platform for the exploration of the musical avant garde in the Deep South. He is presenting their music alongside Zosha Di Castri's DUX, a violent portrait of the political tensions during the 2016 election, as a reflection on the resistance of the arts to the wider culture and his most recent memories of living in Alabama in 2017.

For the past 5 years, BAMA has held the Birmingham New Music Festival, a one-of-a-kind event for the region. In recognition of the value they offer to their community, Forstman strives to bring their music to a wider audience with this concert program.

Active in contemporary opera, he performed for dell’Arte Opera Ensemble on the premiere of Whitney George’s opera Princess Maleine, and worked with conductor Harold Rosenbaum and the New York Virtuoso Singers to bring Andrea Clearfield’s opera Mila, Great Sorcerer to the stage of Beth Morrison’s Prototype Festival. Forstman also participated in the Birmingham Art Music Alliance’s presentation with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, where he premiered Holland Hopson’s Slow Light from the Farthest Star.

Currently, he is working on a workshop by the Manhattan School of Music's Contemporary Opera Ensemble of Julian Wachner's opera Revelation 23.

About the BAMA works: Monroe Golden's 81 uses a series of nine partials (the last being the 81st) as material for 9 linked episodes of 9 bars each, fancifully relating back to the original series. Starscapes by Mark Lackey is a grandly neo-Romantic fantasy. Michael Coleman's Chaconne is inspired by the style of incidental music, creating a glassy surface over a repeating harmonic progression. William Price's Petit Scherzo combines virtuosity with humor in a twisted two-part invention. Incongruity by Monroe Golden augments the equal temperament of the piano with a fixed-media track in extended just intonation for a concertino together that percolates towards its conclusion. Slow Light from the Farthest Star is a beautiful exploration of a chord progression via MaxMSP.