Nico Muhly (b. 1981) is an American composer and sought-after collaborator whose influences range from American minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition. The recipient of commissions from the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and others, he has written more than 80 works for the concert stage. Muhly is a frequent collaborator with choreographer Benjamin Millepied and, as an arranger, has paired with Sufjan Stevens, Anohni and the Johnsons, and others. His work for stage and screen includes music for the Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie and scores for films including the Academy Award–winning The Reader. Born in Vermont, Muhly studied composition at The Juilliard School before working as an editor and conductor for Philip Glass.

Muhly’s sextet, Balance Problems (2013) was commissioned by Linda and Stuart Nelson for yMusic and is the title track on the ensemble’s 2014 recording, which was produced by Son Lux (Ryan Lott). He’s shared that the title comes from the challenge of writing a piece for yMusic’s unique makeup of instruments, especially one that is “very fast and very busy, in which every instrument is clear, and in which all of their lines are distinct.”

The music of Balance Problems is minimalist, characterized by repetitive figures that create a pulsating backdrop of shifting timbres and textures. Layered overtop of this propulsive foundation are various melodic and rhythmic motives as well as sound effects; cello and trumpet sing soaring melodies. Later, a contrasting episode features the acoustic guitar carrying the motoric line, as flute and clarinet play sustained tones. The others soon join in to fill out the delicate texture and the hypnotic music eventually leads to an ethereal passage. With a grinding dissonance, the violin jumpstarts the “motor” again, and the instruments generate new strata of sounds. Suddenly, a mighty snap on the cello triggers a burst of energy and the ensemble drives forward to the finish.

Mark Dancigers (b. 1981) is a composer of music for chamber ensembles, orchestra, ballet, and contemporary dance. He is also the electric guitarist for the chamber music group NOW Ensemble, helping to bring this instrument into new musical contexts. His music is recorded on seven albums released on the New Amsterdam label by artists including yMusic and Michi Wiancko. Dancigers studied music composition at Yale, the Yale School of Music, and Princeton University. He is currently Assistant Professor at New College of Florida, where he directed New Music New College from 2020 to 2022.

Danciger’s sextet Everness (2013) appears on yMusic’s 2014 recording Balance Problems. In an October 2014 interview with textura, CJ Camerieri, the ensemble’s trumpet player, said the following about the piece:

Taking its title from a Jorge Luis Borges poem of the same name, “Everness” by Mark Dancigers is yet another example of how our composers are using the unique instrumentation of yMusic to create new textures and colours. Borges writes in the poem “unending are the mazes,” and from the opening violin solo to the repeated woodwind arpeggio and culminating in the hauntingly beautiful closing chorale, this piece uses the ensemble’s unique orchestration to both create and navigate these mazes.

Everness unfolds over four distinct sections that all feature, to an extent, ostinato patterns, arpeggiating figures, and sustained melodies. The first, marked “elegant”, features a lyrical violin solo over viola and cello accompaniment with long-held tones coloured by notes plucked in the left hand. Downward-flowing arpeggios on winds and violin lead into the second section, which Dancigers describes as “suspended, floating, articulate”. Here, the ensemble plays quietly chugging figures, save the violin, which sings a long melody of poignant leaps. The third section is characterized by “bold” arpeggios, which, after briefly played by the strings, are taken up by flute and clarinet, as the string trio meanders through a contrapuntal “maze”. In the final chorale, the individual voices gradually dissolve into sublime harmony.

Gabriella Smith (b. 1991) is a composer whose work invites listeners to find joy in climate action. Her music comes from a love of play, exploring new instrumental sounds, and creating musical arcs that transport audiences into sonic landscapes inspired by the natural world. An “outright sensation” (Los Angeles Times), her music “exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy” (The New York Times). Current projects include a large-scale work for Kronos Quartet, commissioned in celebration of their 50th anniversary season, and an album-length work for yMusic featuring underwater field recordings. She and her longtime collaborator cellist Gabriel Cabezas perform together as a cello-violin-voice-electronics duo.

Tessellations was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition for yMusic, and was premiered on April 8, 2018, at The Cube in Detroit. The piece is on yMusic’s 2020 album Ecstatic Science. It opens with a grooving rhythm tapped on the cello’s body, to which the other instruments add their various exclamations in turn, thereby creating an interlocking motivic pattern, or “tessellation”. These initial sounds (pitchless) have a playful percussive quality, with the players using extended techniques—blows, glissandos, and ricochet bow strokes. The texture gradually morphs to pitched music (glissandos elongated, strings plucked), while trumpet and clarinet hold static tones. Thereafter the ensemble locks into a new pattern (instruments now bowed and blown), to which one of the players contributes a line of wordless singing. They continue into another pattern of layered motives, clearly melodic now, that blend in “harmony”. As sustained tones reappear on the trumpet and clarinet, the fluid texture on the other instruments gradually dissolves to noise, and the piece draws to a close with the same grooving rhythm tapped on the cello that had started it.

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (The New York Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out New York), Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980) has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Opera, and many others. In 2018 she became one of the first two women, along with Jeanine Tesori, to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a Grammy Award. She is Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012 to 2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia.

Mazzoli’s Ecstatic Science is the title work of yMusic’s 2020 album, and was originally premiered at Carnegie Hall, New York, in December 2016. She provides the following description of the piece:

There’s a lot of math at play; chord progressions are drawn-out, multiplied, condensed, and layered. Melodies are flipped upside-down and fractured into the smallest possible element. The horizontal becomes vertical and the vertical stretches systematically into a twisting melody. The “science” behind the notes provides a frame for a persistent, bubbling energy, a scaffold for the ecstatic gestures that eventually consume everything else.

Listen out for two main musical ideas, introduced from the start, which form the basis of this piece. The first motive consists of sustained notes in the strings, with the violin playing upward glissandos intermittently. As the music progresses, this initially slow-moving melody is taken up by each of the wind instruments in faster, more recognizable versions, including a soaring rendition played by all three. The second, in contrast to the first, consists of lively burbling fragments on flute and clarinet, which they play in alternation to create a single musical line. Beginning as quick interjections to the first idea, the individual instruments later play the parts of the melody alone, without the other; at other points during the piece, the trumpet joins in, and the clarinet plays all the parts of the melody. After their ecstatic development, both ideas return to their original “forms” at the work’s conclusion.