Performances + Events
Performance Opportunities: Contemporary Musical Arts Small Ensembles
The Contemporary Musical Arts Department offers a variety of ensembles open to all NEC students by audition and on a space-available basis.
The expansive repertoire performed by these ensembles explores composition and improvisation through American and world music traditions ranging from classical to punk. Ensemble offerings vary each year depending on the specific composition of the department. Non-majors should sign up to audition during orientation.
CMA Ensembles
Endless Opportunities
From Afro-Cuban to Indian classical traditions, NEC students can immerse themselves in a rich tapestry of musical styles through CMA ensembles, fostering a truly global perspective on improvisation and performance.
Explore the Ensembles
This ensemble performs music written by composers working today, primarily from the jazz tradition, who have proposed new models for integrating improvisation and composition, and who embrace new ideas about structure, groove and texture. Repertoire will range from completely notated music to open forms, and from complicated rhythms to ambient soundscapes.
The Mark Zaleski Ensemble offers students a space to explore CMA from the ground up: songwriting, recomposing, improvising, playing by ear, arranging, working as a band, trying new styles (or maybe even new instruments) and much more.
This ensemble prepares performance versions of John Zorn’s classic composition, COBRA. Often called a “game piece,” it is a composition, a framework for performance, and a set of rules that organize a group of musicians into a community of sound. Rather than a conductor, COBRA is led by a “prompter” who facilitates communication within the ensemble, requiring both intense focus/adherence to the rules as well as a high degree of freedom and choice given to all members of the group.
In the Chorino Ensemble led by Amir Milstein, you will have the chance to explore Chorinho, often regarded as the “Cultural DNA” of Brazilian music. It contains elements from different cultures and musical traditions which have influenced Brazilian music over the centuries. African rhythms, Eastern European dances and Western Classical music forms have evolved into a virtuosic yet lyrical music style, played throughout the Cafes of Rio de Janeiro in the late 19th century to today’s concert halls and jazz festivals worldwide.
Led by Anthony Coleman, the Early Jazz Ensemble explores the vocabulary that formed the basis for music that has been the backbone of so much of American and world culture over the last hundred years and yet is relatively little understood. The Ensemble particularly focuses on rhythm and gestural concepts that were prevalent between the late teens and mid-1930s. The idea of the collective ensemble is key. Specific to the CMA version of this group, Coleman focuses to some degree on what has been called the “Avant-garde” of early jazz.
Led by Farayi Malek, this is an acapella ensemble that will study and perform arrangements and compositions by Malek, students in the ensemble, and contemporary writers such as Kerry Marsh and Caroline Shaw. The group will study genres including (but not limited to) African American Spirituals, Contemporary Classical, Jazz, and Pop, with the goal of examining and celebrating the unique and vast capabilities of the human voice.
Led by Balla Kouyaté, Mandé Music Ensemble is an introduction to West African history and culture through the music.
In this ensemble, meeting only in the fall semester, students will work with renowned Irish fiddler Liz Knowles to learn tunes from the tradition, explore stylistic nuances, improvisation, and arrangement ideas.
This ensemble offers an introduction to Persian Music traditions.
Led by Steve Netsky, this ensemble offers a framework for songwriters to work on creating original songs drawing on a variety of contemporary genres. You do not need to have written songs before, but you should have some experience playing and singing songs by others.
Led by Lautaro Mantilla, this ensemble is an introduction to the diverse repertoire of underground music of the 1970s and 1980s. This music was created in opposition to mainstream culture and often contributed as a medium to bring about a radical awareness of any form of discrimination and used as a platform for political and social protest. By arranging and recomposing music from Dead Kennedys, Frank Zappa, Black Flag, and The flat duo Jets, among many others, students gain knowledge of different compositional and improvisational approaches and explore what Bertolt Brecht may or may not have been loosely quoted as saying, “Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
Led by Eden MacAdam-Somer, this interdepartmental ensemble explores the boundaries between composition, improvisation, and international music traditions through written and aural paths. Past projects have included engaging with works by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Ran Blake, Charles Ives, Gustav Mahler, Pauline Oliveros, Scott Joplin, Bach, and Lully, as well as traditional folk music, workshopping student compositions/concepts, and performing new works by students, faculty, and other contemporary artists.
Led by Akram Haddad, this ensemble provides an introduction to repertoire from many international musical traditions, with a focus on aural learning, developing a solid groove, working out ensemble arrangements, and learning how to accompany and solo in different styles.
A new ensemble offered by faculty member Nedelka Prescod exploring Afro-Latin musical traditions.
