Music from Copland House

Music From Copland House is the acclaimed resident ensemble at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home in New York, now restored as a unique creative center for American music. Since its trium­phant New York debut as the Opening Night of Merkin Hall’s 1999-2000 season, Music from Copland House (MCH) has come to occupy a special place on the U.S. musical scene as perhaps this country’s only wide-ranging American repertory ensemble. Provocatively uniting past and present, American and non-American, it journeys across 150 years of our nation’s rich musical legacy, reaching back deep into the 19th century and forward to just-completed compositions.

The ensemble has been engaged by some of America’s foremost concert presenters, including Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, and the Caramoor International, Cape Cod, Bard, and Ecstatic Music Festivals. MCH has collaborated with the European Broadcasting Union and National Public Radio on a special concert showcasing American works that has been extensively aired in over 20 European countries, and makes its Mexican debut in 2014-15. MCH is the featured ensemble on Copland House’s popular main-stage concert series at the historic Merestead estate in nearby Mount Kisco, only an hour north of New York City. The ensemble has com­mis­sioned Chen Yi, Richard Danielpour, Tamar Muskal, Pierre Jalbert, Derek Bermel, and Sebastian Currier, whose Copland House work, Static, won the highly-coveted Grawemeyer Award in 2007, and has also premiered many compositions written especially for it by Du Yun, Samson Young, Henry Mollicone, and Leung Kei Cheuk (Gaybird). The ensemble followed its much-praised debut recording on Arabesque, the first complete cycle of Copland’s chamber music, with two releases on Koch International, respective­ly devoted to chamber music by Currier and John Musto. Inspired by Copland’s peerless, lifelong advocacy of American composers, MCH also offers children’s programs, master classes, lectures, residencies, and workshops, and other educational and community outreach activities.

MCH’s exceptional Founding Artists are widely admired for their instrumental command and musical insights in works both old and new: clarinetist-composer Derek Bermel, pianist and Copland House Artistic and Executive Director Michael Boriskin, flutist-conductor Paul Lustig Dunkel, violinist Nicholas Kitchen (of the Borromeo String Quartet), and cellist Wilhelmina Smith (of The Mannes Trio and Variations String Trio). They are regularly joined by outstanding, award-winning Principal and Guest Artists, including violinists Curtis Macomber, Harumi Rhodes, and Jesse Mills; violists Danielle Farina and Kathryn Lockwood; cellists Alexis Pia Gerlach, Nicholas Canellakis, and James Wilson; flutist Linda Chesis; clarinetists Meighan Stoops, Carol McGonnell, and Alexander Fiterstein; pianists Michael Barrett, John Musto, and Blair McMillen; sopranos Amy Burton and Julia Bullock; baritones James Martin and Philip Cutlip; and many others.