String Orchestra Premieres

Natalia Domínguez Rangel is a Colombian/Dutch visual artist and music composer currently living and working in Vienna and Amsterdam. Her practice includes making sculptures, installations, and performances. Her work delves into the intersection of sound and sculpture, crafting immersive encounters. Driven by a deep curiosity about the connection between sound and sculpture, she explores how these two mediums can intertwine. The interplay of materiality, spatiality, temporality, stillness, and interaction forms the bedrock of her artistic endeavors, as she deftly responds to the surrounding environment and current events, and draws inspiration from everyday listening experiences as well as the acoustic impacts in our environment. 

However, Domínguez Rangel's exploration goes beyond the surface, as she delves into the realms of critical listening and the broader acoustic ecologies that exist beyond human-generated sounds. By focusing on the physiological and psychological impact of sound on the body and environment, she seeks to deepen our understanding and connection to the sonic world around us. In her sculptures and compositions, Domínguez Rangel explores a visual representation of critical listening, delving into the intricate layers of structures, textures, forms, impact, and materiality. This detailed approach invites viewers to engage with the hidden nuances of sound and its impact, and encourages a profound contemplation of our own bodily ecosystems and their interconnectedness with the environment. 

Domínguez Rangel has exhibited her works throughout Europe and Latin America in various contexts, from festivals to galleries, museums, and interventions in public spaces. She is a docent in the field of Sound Studies since 2017 at Design Art Technology department of ArtEZ, in the city of Arnhem, Netherlands, and teaches Sound in Sculpture at Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst (mdw) in Vienna, Austria.

Eduardo Aguilar was born in 1991 in Ocotlán de Morelos, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. He studied composition at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His graduation thesis "Autoreflection” was distinguished with honors in October 2018. In it, Aguilar investigates his own process of creation, addressing issues around the concepts of idea, imagination, perception, representation, thought, design, and reality. 

Aguilar has won several competitions including the “NEW Special Ensemble Prize” of the Impronta Ensemble Composition Competition (Germany, 2019), the “JACK Studio” project of the Jack Quartet (United States, 2019), two categories of the composition competition “The music of tectonic and volcanic seismicity” of UNAM's Institute of Geophysics (Mexico, 2019), the “Competition for the Creation of the University Seminar of Research and Artistic Creation UNAM” (Mexico), 2017), the “Concurso de Composición para Orquesta de Cámara Arturo Márquez” (Mexico, 2014 and 2017), the first edition of the “Cátedra Extraordinaria de Composición Musical Arturo Márquez – UNAM” (Mexico, 2016), and the “Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico del Estado de Oaxaca – PECDA” (Mexico, 2015), as well as distinctions in the first “Concurso Internacional de Cuartetos de Cuerda: Nuestra América” (Mexico, 2015), the “II International Composition Competition SBALZ” (Spain, 2015), among others. 

Light, paint, paper, motors, plastic bags, percussion machines, a black umbrella, or a dark tunnel of 18 meters are some of the objects found in his works. His musical practice has extended to other disciplines. In addition to music scores, Aguilar translates his ideas into scripts, poems, graphics, pictorial designs, light designing, instructions for musicians to build sculptures with their instruments, carpentry instructions, execution projects, choreographic guides, or an instruction to recite a text. He has experimented in audiovisual platforms, from documentaries to GIF collages. He has developed multidisciplinary projects that include: humor and text; history, scene, dance, and music; polysensory sculptures; geophysics; and movement, space and light. Aguilar has elaborated studies where he explores space through visual and sound intensity. In a fundamental way, Eduardo’s main interests focus on energy, movement, space-time structures, and the self-representation of concepts in abstract.

Winner of the 2019 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, David Fulmer has garnered numerous international accolades for his bold compositional aesthetic combined with his thrilling performances. A Guggenheim Fellow, and a leader in his generation of composer-performers, the success of his violin concerto at Lincoln Center in 2010 earned international attention and resulted in immediate engagement to perform the work with major orchestras and at festivals in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and Australia. Fulmer made his European debut performing and recording his concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Matthias Pintscher in 2011. That same year, Fulmer made his debut at Tanglewood appearing with the work. 

A surge of recent and upcoming commissions include new works for the New York Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Salzburg Foundation, BMI Foundation, Concert Artists Guild, Washington Performing Arts, Kennedy Center, Fromm Music Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, and Tanglewood. 

As a conductor, Fulmer recently led the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Elision Ensemble, and Sydney Modern Music Ensemble, along with appearances at the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Tanglewood Music Festival, and Lucerne Festival. Recent and upcoming highlights include important debuts leading the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Asko Ensemble, South Netherlands Philharmonic, Meadowns Symphony Orchestra, and St. Petersburg Symphony, and assisting with concerts and projects of the New York Philharmonic. He was Director and Curator of Prisms and Antiphons—a music commissioning inititative at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. He began his residency at the Everson Museum in the fall of 2021. Fulmer made a triumphant return to the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra, which included a collaboration with IRCAM. 

This season, he returns as curator and conductor of the Mannes American Composers Ensemble in programs of twentieth and twenty-first Century music, and continues his close collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble. Appointed as the Music Director and Conductor of the Hunter Symphony Orchestra, Fulmer will lead the orchestra in his fifth season, featuring the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, Wagner, Fauré, Debussy, Schubert, Florence Price, and John Zorn. 

He made his debut appearance in 2014 on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series at Walt Disney Concert Hall. During the summer seasons, Fulmer has led concerts at the Chamber Music Northwest Festival, and Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. Fulmer was the recipient of both the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Carlos Surinach Commissioning Award from BMI. He is the first American recipient of the Grand Prize of the International Edvard Grieg Competition for Composers. He has also received the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the BMI Composer Award, the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a special citation from the Minister of Education of Brazil, the Hannah Komanoff Scholarship in Composition from The Juilliard School, and the highly coveted George Whitefield Chadwick Gold Medal from the New England Conservatory. 

Fulmer appears regularly and records often with the premiere new music ensembles in New York, including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Argento New Music Project, Speculum Musicae, the Group for Contemporary Music, and the New York New Music Ensemble. His work has been recorded by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the New York Philharmonic. He has appeared recently on the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Live from Lincoln Center broadcasts. Fulmer is Director of Orchestral Studies, Head of Strings, and Composition Faculty at Hunter College. He graduated from The Juilliard School.

The Hunter Symphony is comprised of students from Hunter College as well as the metropolitan area and involves collaboration and instruction with experienced professional players. It performs two concerts each semester for the Hunter College community.