Nova - Latin for new - also refers to a star that has a sudden increase in brightness and then returns to its original state. Music, like a nova, exhibits periods of bright innovation, but also always returns to borrow from its roots. The Memoria Nova Ensemble seeks to find these moments of bright innovation and showcase them in dialogue with each other and their historical roots via creative program curation.
By programming less frequently performed works from across the spectrum of musical history, we encourage the listener to form a new memory of musical history, one that does not center on a structured narrative that leads from one masterpiece in the canon to the next, but rather on an exploration of musical styles which continuously cycles between bursts of newness and a return to a more familiar state.
MEMORIA NOVA
ENSEMBLE
Shanna Pranaitis | flutes
Andrew Rosenblum | piano, harpsichord
©Karjaka Studios, Aleks Karjaka
Current Touring Program
The Space Traversed
The Space Traversed explores ideas of music as a means of reaching across great expanses of time to confront forbidden issues of a particular present moment, while also paying homage and expanding upon the work of others, new and ancient.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Selections from Bilitis (1897/1914) 7'
Tristan Murail (1947): Le fou à pattes bleues (1990) 9’
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): selections from petites esquisses d'oiseaux for solo piano (1985) 7'
Kaija Saariaho (1952): Laconsime de l’aile (1982) 8’
Salvatore Sciarrino (1947): d’un faune (1980) 10’
Charles Koechlin (1867-1950): Sonata for flute and piano, Op. 52 (1911-13) 13’
Edison Denisov (1929-1996): Sonata for flute and piano (1960) 10’
Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): Le Merle Noir (1950) 6'
(Total length: 70’ plus 15 min pause; the program and order is subject to change)