Music on the Edge kicks off its 2012–13 season with New York’s highly acclaimed contemporary music ensemble, Sequitur. The concert takes place at the University of Pittsburgh’s Bellefield Hall Auditorium on Sunday, November 18 at 7 p.m. Paul Hostetter will conduct the ensemble in a program that features mezzo soprano Mary Nessinger in Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, Amy Williams’ Cineshape 5, Mathew Rosenblum’s Maggies, Eric Moe’s Strenuous Pleasures, and Variations on a Summer’s Day by Sequitur co-founder Harold Meltzer.

Multiple shocks transformed Ken Ueno's life.  The shock of an injury transformed him from a West Point Cadet into a composer.  The shock of hearing Bartok and Stravinsky made him into a composer, but it was the shock of hearing Jimi Hendrix's music that made him into a musician. Related to post-Hendrixian values, Ken composes "person-specific" music with frequency-based harmonies analyzed from the specific performance possibilities of the performers with whom he collaborates.

The late music of Morton Feldman: A symposium

November 4, 2011
Presented by Pitt's Department of Music and its contemporary chamber music series, Music on the Edge
Funded by the Arts and Sciences Faculty Research and Scholarship Program.
Organized by Amy Williams, Assistant Professor of Composition/Theory

“…the virtuosity was nothing short of jaw-dropping…” —The Miami Herald

Music on the Edge concludes its 2011–12 season with the internationally renowned and critically acclaimed Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo performing a tribute concert to Hungarian composer György Kurtág. The duo comprises pianist Helena Bugallo and composer/ pianist Amy Williams, who is also a Pitt faculty composer.

The Firebird Ensemble presents Curtis Hughes's Danger Garden (2006), Lee Hyla's My Life on the Plains (2010), and two works by Eric Moe: Frozen Hours Melt Melodiously into the Past (2009) and Meanwhile Back at the Ranch (2011).

“Firebird flies…” —The Boston Globe

Co-presented with The Andy Warhol Museum

The JACK Quartet premieres Pitt faculty composer Amy Williams’ new string quartet, Richter Textures.

"Mind-blowingly good...” —The Los Angeles Times

Co-presented with The Andy Warhol Museum

Music on the Edge and the Andy Warhol Museum will co-present the League of the Unsound Sound (LotUS for short) on Saturday, January 14 at the Warhol Museum Theater. The concert will feature Two Hands for viola and percussion by LotUS co-director Ken Ueno, Sofia Gubaidulina's masterful trio Quasi Hoquetus, and two world premieres: Pittsburgh composer Mathew Rosenblum’s Two Harmonies for viola, percussion and piano, and LotUS co-director David Smooke’s Topographies: transit/dis(solve) for bassoon and piano. Rosenblum's Two Harmonies will be performed together with Not Only, a video by Andrew Zientek (who also commissioned the music).

The works of Morton Feldman occupy a vital place in the American experimental tradition, not just within the music world.  Feldman was very often inspired by non-musical sources, including Persian rugs, abstract expressionist paintings by Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, and texts of Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.