Seattle Modern Orchestra’s 17th season features three concerts of vibrant, cutting-edge music from the 20th and 21st centuries centering sound and place.  On November 9, the group returns to the Meany Center at the University of Washington for 90/100: STUART DEMPSTER, WILLIAM O. SMITH, AND WEST COAST EXPERIMENTALISM. A reimagined version of the composer/performer duo’s historic concerts, soloists C. Neil Parsons (bass trombone) and Rachel Yoder (clarinets) join SMO on music by Smith, Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, and a world premiere created for SMO by Yoder. In February, SMO showcases works by Gabriella Smith, Marcos Balter, and John Luther Adams, plus a world premiere by Andrew Waggoner in REFLECTING: WATER AND LIGHT. Waggoner’s new work, Lovely, Lost is a love letter to Seattle and New Orleans: cities wrestling with their relationship to the water that surrounds them. SMO’s season closes with SOLO TRAVELS/DIASPORIC JOURNEYS on May 29th at Tagney Jones Hall. Dai Fujikura’s Wayfinder Concerto (feat. Erin Wight, viola) and Baldwin Giang’s Pipa Boy (feat. the composer himself on pipa) trace elements of movement and migration. Qiujiang Levi Lu’s Tri asks performers to respond to their environments in new ways while moving together toward shared goals as their senses become restricted.

In addition to these three concerts, we are thrilled to announce that we are extending our reach to wider national and international music communities by recording our first album of commissioned pieces. We are in the midst of this project throughout Season 17. With music by Wang Lu, Huck Hodge, and our founding director Jérémy Jolley, the album features some of SMO’s largest instrumentations, and highlights pieces developed over years of close collaboration. New Focus Recordings, a NYC-based independent music label specializing in contemporary concert music, will launch the project, and we will track the album with Grammy-nominated engineer Andrew Munsey at the University of Washington’s new in-house recording studio. These selections represent the essence of SMO’s creative and curatorial ethos. Bringing these works to the international stage with New Focus will expand our reach beyond the Pacific Northwest while continuing to demonstrate SMO’s unique point of difference in the field of contemporary music.

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