What’s Next? Ensemble Celebrates Work by Los Angeles Composers

On Saturday night (June 21), the What’s Next? Ensemble stages its sixth annual Los Angeles Composers Project (LACP), a concert celebrating the music of LA-based composers. Hosted by Art Share-LA, located in Downtown LA, the performances showcase composers from a range of aesthetic and compositional camps—including two CalArtians.

Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts David Rosenboom, along with recent alum Joshua Carro (Music MFA 13), have compositions on the program. The concert will also include the music of Grammy-nominated composer Jefferson Friedman and experimental jazz flutist, improviser and 2011 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts winner Nicole Mitchell. The program is rounded out by the work of local composers Ian Dicke, Isaac Schankler, Bryan Curt Kostors and Julia Adolphe.

Since 2009, the works of more than 60 composers have been performed at the LACP concert series by What’s Next? Ensemble, contributing to the vibrant Los Angeles music scene by presenting concerts of both world-renowned living composers and budding local talent in venues throughout LA.

Rosenboom’s piece on the program, Shiftless Drifters (2012), is a duet for two instruments capable of making continuous glides in pitch. The piece “is a play of interactions between two performers involving opposition, delay, synchrony, following/shadowing, sampling/parsing, random replay, anticipation, punctuation and free response.” Read more about the piece on Rosenboom’s site.

Carro’s piece, to grasp is to uncontrollably drop, was written while he attended CalArts. A recording of the minimal, ambient work for clarinet, piano and computer with Ableton Live software can be streamed here.