Longleash: Small and Subtle Changes

About the Performers

Longleash is an ensemble with a traditional instrumentation and a experimental identity. The “expert young trio” (Strad Magazine) takes its name from Operation Long Leash, a Cold War-era CIA operation that promoted American avant-garde artists in Europe. “Fearlessly accomplished” (Arts Desk UK), Longleash has quickly earned a reputation in the United States and abroad for innovative programming, artistic excellence and new music advocacy. Recent and upcoming engagements include Americas Society (NYC), Noguchi Museum (NYC), Schwob School of Music (GA), Five Boroughs Music Festival (NYC), Princeton Sound Kitchen (New Jersey), Bowerbird (Philadelphia), Ecstatic Music Festival (NYC), National Sawdust (Brooklyn), and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy, NY). Appearances abroad include Jeunesse (Vienna), Átlátszó Hang (Budapest), FUAIM Music (Cork, Ireland), Trondheim International Chamber Music Festival (Norway), Echoraum (Vienna), and Open Music (Graz, Austria). In the 2021–2022 season, Longleash is excited to commission new works from composers Leilehua Lanzilotti, Katherine Balch, and Igor Santos. The recipient of grants from New Music USA, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Music Academy of the West, Chamber Music America, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Longleash has premiered over 30 works and received critical acclaim for their “tight playing,” “lucid interpretations,” and “inspired” premiere recordings (Tempo). Longleash has given workshops at University College Cork, Royal Irish Academy of Music, The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, Manhattan School of Music, Hunter College, New York University, The Graduate Center (CUNY), and Ohio University. In 2015, Longleash founded The Loretto Project (Kentucky), an annual new music series and tuition-free composition workshop that supports promising collegiate composers while presenting socially minded programs and celebrating diverse cultural perspectives. 
Longleash consists of pianist Julia Den Boer, violinist Pala García, and cellist John Popham. 

About the Program

Inspired by Alexander Calder's well-loved mobile sculptures, Igor Santos imagines each instrument as "an individual object from a mobile structure rotating (looping) musical phrases independently from each other."* 

Jimena Maldonado's image-based works prompt performers to build on tangram patterns, developing sonic "mosaics becoming increasingly full and complex every time."*

Through experiments in repetition, Vicente Atria excavates multiple meanings in the same musical building blocks, discovering the "uncanny capacity of things to look different while remaining the same."* 

In the work Far From Shore, Linda Catlin Smith shares her fascination with melodic lines that seem to float: "the piece has a languid and drifting quality, exploring small and subtle changes, like staring at the calm sea as the light dims towards evening."* 

James Diaz, whose work has often drawn inspiration from the psychedelic, imagines out-of-order pop song forms in which "cyclical repetition is confined within sections, tethering us to the present moment rather than triangulating our position within the work’s broader timeline."** 

*excerpted from composer's program note
**excerpted from Longleash program note