Longy School of Music

Tue Oct 20 · 7:30pm

Longy at Regattabar | Point of Contact

Longy School of Music · Regattabar at the Charles Hotel · One Bennett Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

Longy faculty and student musicians play a programme without announcing what it is: no titles and no composers until each piece has finished. The premise, as Longy puts it, is that first contact shapes how a work is received; in a gallery you see the art before reading the label, and here you hear the music before learning what it was.

Mon Nov 2 · 7:00pm

Catherine Weinfield-Zell | Faculty Debut Recital with Wind Quintet

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · Longy School of Music · 27 Garden St · Cambridge · Cambridge

Catherine Weinfield-Zell builds her Longy faculty debut, with a wind quintet, entirely from living composers: Valerie Coleman's Tzigane, Oscar Navarro's Juego de Ladrones and Paquito D'Rivera's Aires Tropicales, which bring Cuban dance rhythms, Roma-inflected writing and the sweep of a film score to the woodwind quintet. Longy frames the program as a picture of how the form has changed in recent years.

Fri Nov 6 · 7:00pm

Castle of our Skins | FIRE!!: A Celebration of Radical Black Expression

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

Castle of our Skins takes the 1926 literary magazine Fire!! as its starting point, in an evening that is part concert, part conversation and part salon, with musicians, writers and audience in one room. The group frames it around Black artists who have expanded the boundaries of form.

Sat Nov 7 · 7:00pm

New Gallery Concert Series | Charmed and Strange Crossings

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

The New Gallery Concert Series, which sets new music beside new visual art and brings its makers into the room, opens its 27th season with work by the visual artist Audrey Goldstein. The title borrows charm and strange, two of the six types of quark, which never stand alone in nature; the evening’s themes run from motherhood and grief to shadows, time and prayer.

Fri Dec 18 – Sat Dec 19 · 7pm

Fall Production | Francesco Cavalli "Il Giasone"

by Francesco Cavalli

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

Fri Dec 18 / Sat Dec 19 · 7pm

Longy's fall production is Cavalli's Il Giasone of 1649, a tragicomic opera loosely drawn from the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, and among the most performed operas of the seventeenth century. Cavalli was Monteverdi's pupil and later his successor at St Mark's in Venice.

Fri Feb 5 · 7:00pm

Palaver Strings | (R)evolution: Revelation

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

Palaver Strings is a musician-led ensemble from Portland, Maine, where the players share the artistic and administrative leadership between them. This programme features Liz Knowles, and the group's stated aims run to engaging new audiences, addressing social justice and amplifying underrepresented voices.

Mon Feb 22 · 7:00pm

Niloufar Nourbakhsh & Ensemble Decipher: Tactile Transmissions

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · Longy School of Music · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · MA · Cambridge

Niloufar Nourbakhsh and her colleagues in Ensemble Decipher play instruments built from things never meant to be instruments, in a programme about transmission. Rhizome Music feeds live drums through vintage radios back into acoustic instruments, Stone Dreams makes motion-sensor stones the instrument, Marti Epstein's new work pairs toy pianos with altered cassette tape, and Erin Rogers's Telegraph passes nonsense text between players. Ensemble members Nourbakhsh, Bohigian and Cosgrove contribute works too.

Sun Feb 28 · 3:00pm

Collage New Music | Doubles

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

Collage New Music builds a programme out of pairs: spatialized instrumental duos, opposing gestures, and works drawn from childhood objects, online communication and social change. Blues and bluegrass run through it alongside contemporary classical writing, and student performers join. Two sextets for full ensemble close.

Fri Mar 5 · 7:00pm

La Voce Totale | Vocal Studies Department

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

Singers from Longy’s Vocal Studies Department join Orchestra I.S. for arias, duets and trios spanning cultures and eras, billed as “four centuries of voice in a single evening.” Admission is free, with registration requested in advance.

Fri Apr 2 · 7:00pm

inn.wien | Gessner-Schocken Concert Series

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

inn.wien, a collective of young, classically trained string players from Innsbruck and Vienna founded in 2020, plays the Gessner-Schocken Concert Series, endowed through a legacy gift from Ruth Gessner-Schocken, a longtime Longy faculty member and supporter. The ensemble performs in flexible line-ups, with a repertoire running from Mendelssohn’s Octet and Schubert’s String Quintet to world premieres.

Sat May 8 · 7:00pm

Vox Exchange | Longy Students with Lorelei Ensemble and Beth Willer

Longy School of Music · Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall · 27 Garden Street · Cambridge · Cambridge

Longy's Vox Exchange Ensemble, led by the Lorelei soprano and Longy faculty member Corrine Byrne, sings alongside members of Lorelei Ensemble under the conductor Beth Willer. The programme is music written for women's voices; Lorelei is a Boston group built largely around new commissions for that scoring.