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A note from the Artistic Directors:
Fueled by many cups of coffee and lots of bagels, pianist Sara Laimon, conductor David Amado and I turned our discussions of new music into the creation of Sequitur late in 1996. We wanted to find a new home for contemporary music in New York. It would have a new audience, made from adventurous people who went to downtown theater and modern dance performances - people who loved seeing boundaries crossed among artistic disciplines.
Sometimes these people shied away from new music because it wasn't adventurous enough, because it didn't cross these boundaries. Our goals were clear from Sequitur's debut at Merkin Concert Hall in February 1997, with American premieres of Fredric Rzewski's Jefferson, a setting of The Declaration of Independence, and David Lang's Music for Gracious Living, a semi-staged work for actor and string quartet, as well as performances of Luciano Berio's Opus Number Zoo, for talking wind players, and works by Tan Dun and Shirish Korde. We wanted to speak directly to the audience, literally rather than figuratively. We wanted to identify new and fascinating music of all styles, from all parts of the world.
By our second season we were bringing dancers and actors regularly onto the concert stage and ventured out of the concert hall into the theater. Our theater director, Ron Bashford, directed the first fully staged performance of Samuel Beckett's Words and Music, with Morton Feldman's score played live; the other half of the bill was Men Children Only, for three actors and string quartet, with music by Harold Meltzer. Soon after that, David Amado left Sequitur to join the conducting staff of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Sara Laimon became managing director, Ron Bashford became our resident theater director, and Paul Hostetter took over the conducting.
Our third season, 1998-99, defined us as an ensemble. That fall we gave our debut at Miller Theatre in a concert of music by George Crumb, including Ancient Voices of Children and Black Angels. Our theater experience paid off. All our performances were directed and lighted; Ken Smith of Time Out New York previewed the concert, hailing us as the "perfect ensemble" to play theatrical works like Crumb's. It began a long association with Miller Theatre, which has since presented us in portrait concerts of George Rochberg with David Del Tredici, Luciano Berio with Giorgio Battistelli, and György Kurtág.
That winter, in January 1999, was also the first of our cabaret projects, a cabaret evening at The Knitting Factory called Songs of Sex and Solitude. We mixed American premieres of songs by Judith Weir, Harrison Birtwistle and Thomas Adès with cabaret songs of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler with six commissioned songs by people like Lew Spratlan and Dave Soldier. Justin Davidson from Newsday saw what we were up to: "There was something brilliantly devious about sneaking Eisler's implacably political songs, all of them on texts by Bertolt Brecht, into an evening nominally devoted to private desires. Whether Harold Meltzer, the artistic director of the two-year old contemporary music group Sequitur, was making the point that the personal is political or that social yearnings can be as intense as sexual desires, the concert was a potent cocktail of sultriness and socialism." This was the beginning of our series of cabarets, which included a sold-out run at Joe's Pub in February 2000 called Money, with commissioned songs by 11 composers including David Del Tredici, Tania León and David Lang. Upcoming cabaret evenings will be devoted to Power and Protest.
In the spring of 1999, we played at the Kaye Playhouse, reaffirming our commitment to younger American composers, with six works by people all over the creative map, including Scott Johnson's Cold War Suite, for string quartet and the taped voice of I. F. Stone, Bun-Ching Lam's Bittersweet Music and Lee Hyla's Lives of the Saints, Part I. The concert led us into the world of music and technology, which we continued in the spring of 2001 with groundbreaking works by Randall Woolf and Mathew Rosenblum.
Since that third season we have kept on growing and crossing boundaries. We made our debut at Lincoln Center in May 2002, and in 2003 our first recordings will hit the market. In 2004 we will mount fully staged operas, beginning with the American premiere of Judith Weir's chamber version of Blond Eckbert.
Sequitur started with passionate discussions and now, in our seventh season, we can say that we've been able to successfully transform that passion into action. Sequitur is the state of new music in New York today.
-Harold Meltzer
Co-artistic Director & Composer
-Sara Laimon
Co-artistic Director & Piano
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