June 20, 2024, 8P Festival Concert III 

National Opera Center
330 7th Ave 7th Floor, New York, NY 10001
8PM

*Free Admission

Program

Alberto Carretero (Spain): Unearthed Ziggurat (2024, world premiere)
Laura Brackney (USA): Radiance (2023)
Itzá García: new work (2024, world premiere)
Sepehr Pirasteh: new work (2024, world premiere)

About the composers

Alberto Carretero (Seville – Spain 1985) is a composer, researcher and professor of Composition at the Higher Music Conservatory of Seville. He has a multifaceted background in Composition, Musicology, Computer Engineering and Journalism, with an Extraordinary Doctorate Award for his thesis “The process of Musical Composition through bio-inspired techniques of Artificial Intelligence: research from the musical creation”. Winner of numerous international awards, his music has been performed in venues such as the Pompidou Center in Paris, Carnegie Hall and MISE-EN Festival in New York, Wien Modern Festival, Sibelius Academy Helsinki, Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid, Museo Reina Sofía, Teatro de la Maestranza or Espacio Turina in Seville by groups such as Klangforum, Musikfabrik, Recherche, Intercontemporain, PHACE, Helsinki Chamber Choir, Mise-en,  Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla, Orquesta Bética, SWR Orchestra Stuttgart, Taller Sonoro, Zahir, Ocnos, etc. He has collaborated in numerous interdisciplinary projects with instrumental and electronic music, highlighting his scenic projects of video-opera Renacer, large-format opera La Bella Susona and future chamber opera Poeta en Nueva York.

Website: http://albertocarretero.com/


Laura Brackney is a composer, sound artist, and educator based in San Marcos, Texas. She views composing as a form of sonic gardening, cultivating each work’s interrelationships and sounds as ecosystemic material. Recently, her practice is most concerned with exploring timbral, textural, and temporal extremes and liminalities. She currently teaches as a Lecturer at Texas State University.

Her work has been commissioned by the Mayo Clinic, the Arizona Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, the Bullock Texas State History Museum, the Portland Youth Philharmonic, and the Texas Flute Society, among others. Laura’s work has been performed at MATA Festival, the Subtropics Festival, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the New Media Art and Sound Summit. In 2020, her string quartet Desertification won 1st Prize in the Mykytyn Distinguished Composition Award, and in 2021-2022, she served as the Composer-in-Residence for the Arizona State University Wind Ensemble. In addition to traditional concert music, she has created music for theater, film, fixed media, and bicycle installations.

Laura earned her Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition at Arizona State University in 2022.

Website: https://laurabrackney.com/


Itzá García (b.1993, México) is a composer with a creative focus on the relationship between time and togetherness in musical settings that involve interactions with technology.

Her music has been performed by ensembles such as Ensemble Musikfabrik, JACK Quartet, the Center for Experimentation and Production of Contemporary Music (CEPROMUSIC) ensemble, Pink Noise Ensemble, 2e2m Ensemble, among others.

She has received prizes and distinctions such as the CONACYT Grant for Graduate Studies in Mexico 2018, the 2021 Early Provost’s Research Grant of the Graduate Center CUNY, the Atlantic Center for the Arts Residence program, the ICST Artist Residency from the Zurich University of the Arts, and the Art Science Connect Fellowship for co-organizing the “innovation-sound- technology” series.

Itzá is currently based in New York City, pursuing a Ph.D. degree in composition at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Website: https://soundcloud.com/itza-garcia


Sepehr Pirasteh is a composer, conductor, and performer born in Shiraz, Iran. His compositions draw on Persian classical and folk as well as contemporary classical music vocabularies to express his concerns and fears about the political and social realities of the world we are living in. Sepehr’s works have been performed by ensembles such as Argus String Quartet, PRISM saxophone quartet, Pushback Ensemble, Unheard-of Ensemble, Orquestra Criança Cidadã, Hole in the Floor, fivebyfive, and members of the Fifth House Ensemble. He has been commissioned by Susan Horvath Chamber Music, ENA chamber opera ensemble, Philadelphia Student Composers Project, Detroit Composers’ Project, YInMn project, Pushback Collective, Fresh Inc. Festival, Yara Ensemble, Central Michigan University’s (CMU) Percussion Ensemble, and the CMU Saxophone Ensemble. His music has been performed in Argentina, Brazil, Iran and the United States. Sepehr has also been a fellow in festivals and residencies such as Harvard University’s Fromm Foundation Fellowship (Composers Conference), CCI Initiative, and Fresh Inc Festival.

Website: https://www.sepehrpirasteh.com/