String Theories: New Music for String Instruments
Produced by Frederick Experimental Music Association
Frederick YMCA Arts Center
115 East Church Street
This series is made possible by the generous support of The Delaplaine Foundation and Plamondon Hospitality Group
Doors 7:00 pm/Artists Conversation 7:30/Concert 8:00
Tickets for each concert: $20
Saturday, February 22
Jason Kao Hwang, violin, and Sun Li, pipa
Before coming to the US in the early 2000s, pipa player Sun Li was a member of the Central Song and Dance Ensemble of Beijing, performing traditional Chinese music internationally. Since 2002, she has performed with the New York-based Music from China, garnering acclaim for her “virtuosic and colorful” music by The New York Times. She has been a soloist with several US orchestras, performed with Jason Kao Hwang at new music festivals throughout North America, and given recitals at Lincoln Center, the Staunton Music Festival, and other prestigious classical music festivals.
Saturday, March 29
Terry Jenoure, violin, and Angelica Sanchez, piano
Terry Jenoure is a polymath, a violinist, a vocalist, a visual artist working in a variety of media, a scholar documenting African American performing artists in academia, and an educator specializing in diversifying arts education in public schools. A member of the ensemble that recorded John Carter’s epochal Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music in the 1980s, Dr. Jenoure’s own music frequently draws upon the life experiences of her parents and grandparents, a family with Jamaican and Puerto Rican roots. Over the years, the duo with Angelica Sanchez has become central to Jenoure’s music.
A pianist last heard in Frederick as part of FEMA’s Pianoscapes series, Angelica Sanchez has collaborated with iconic figures like Wadada Leo Smith and Paul Motian, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey. Her music has been recognized in national and international media outlets like National Public Radio, The New York Times, and Chicago Tribune. She was also the 2008 recipient of a French/American Chamber Music America grant, the 2011 and 2024 Rockefeller Brothers Pocantico artist residency, and the 2022 Civitella Fellowship in Italy.
Saturday, April 19
Jacqueline Kerrod, harp, and Joe Morris, guitar
South African harpist Jacqueline Kerrod has performed with everyone from Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton to Rufus Wainwright and Jane Birkin. She has premiered more than a dozen works written for her by South African composers. In her solo music, Kerrod has made innovative use of electronics. Her CD with cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, Simple Ways Such Self, documents their 2023 performance as part of FEMA’s IF: Improvisers Forum series, presented at the Frederick YMCA Arts Center.
Joe Morris is one of the more innovative guitarists to emerge in the past 40 years, integrating African, Asian, and Eastern European influences into a singular vocabulary. Appearing on nearly 200 recordings playing guitar or double bass, Morris has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music since 2000. He is the author of Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music, published in 2012.
