World Premiere of A New Song

Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling” (Detroit Free Press). Weston’s honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley; the Arts and Letters Award in Music; a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and Castle of our Skins at the Longy School of Music. Weston co-authored with Olly Wilson, the fifth chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, Duke Ellington as a Cultural Icon, published by Cambridge University Press. His work Juba for Strings won the Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition. In 2021, he won the first Emerging Black Composers Project sponsored by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Symphony.

Weston’s Flying Fish, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its 125 Commission Project and the American Composers Orchestra, was described as having, “episodes of hurtling energy, the music certainly suggested wondrous aquatic feats. I was especially affected, though, by an extended slower, quizzical episode with pensive strings and plaintive chords” (New York Times). The Boston Landmarks Orchestra commissioned Griot Legacies for choir and orchestra, a work created with four innovative arrangements of African American Spirituals. Griot Legacies demonstrates Weston’s “knack for piquant harmonies, evocative textures, and effective vocal writing” (Boston Globe). The Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Church Wall Street recorded an album of Weston’s choral works. The Bang on a Can All-Stars premiered Weston’s composition Dig It, commissioned by the group for the Ecstatic Music Festival in NYC.

Dr. Weston is currently Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and an instructor for the MAP and Pre-College programs at the Julliard School.

Vocalists

• Sherezade Panthaki soprano
• Sarah Davis Issaelkhoury alto
• Jacob Perry Jr. tenor
• Patrick Kilbride tenor
• Paul Max Tipton bass
• Ian Pomerantz bass

Read the Program Notes

This performance is supported by generous gifts from the J. Reilly Lewis Legacy Fund, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts.