WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. – After a very successful debut of the faculty ensemble last year, the Williams College Department of Music proudly expands the I/O New Music BOX concert to a full weekend festival, featuring four concerts over three days that explore the most innovative new music being created around the world. Performances will take place over three days from Thursday, Jan. 7 through Saturday, Jan. 9, at '62 Center and the Williams College Museum of Art. These free events are open to the public, however all performances at '62 require tickets via the Box Office: 413-597-2425.

On Thursday, January 7, 10pm in the Dance Studio in the ’62 Center, the Iota Ensemble directed by Williams senior music majors Brian Simalchik and Alex Creighton will open the festival with a late-night concert entitled “After Hours—Young Americans,” featuring works by seven composers, all under the age of 40 who are working in New York and New England.

In addition to premieres of works by Simalchik, Creighton, and fellow student Jacob Walls, Iota will also present works by Missy Mazzoli (whose music has been described as “post-Radiohead, post-Romanticism”), Trevor Gureckis, Timo Andres, and Sarah Kirkland Snider (“...a startling new voice...” —Bruce Hodges, Monotonous Forest). These young composers are blazing new compositional paths, offering a glimpse of a post-classical music that reflects the influences of electronica, jazz, rock, pop, ambient, and minimalist musics.

On Friday, January 8, 8pm in the CenterStage in the ’62 Center, I/O New Music directed by Matthew Gold and Steven Bodner will present “THE BOX—music by living composers,” a concert mapping what is newest and most innovative in contemporary music across the world. While six of the seven works presented were written in the last decade, the composers who wrote them hail from six different countries (Greece, Brazil, Denmark, The Netherlands, Austria, and the United States) and several generations (with birthdates from every decade from the 30s through the 70s).

The works presented, though, reveal an aesthetic affinity, emphasizing “sound”—especially the exploration of completely new sounds and new ways of producing them—and new ways to organize “time” over more conventional musical elements. The Recitations for solo voice by Georgs Aperghis serve as a framing device for this concert: just as the composers performed tonight are mostly working outside of the mainstream, pushing off in new directions to try to create new musical languages, Aperghis’s Recitations can be heard as an attempt to create new musico-linguistic meanings. I/O will be premiering works by Stratis Minakakis and by Williams’ own David Kechley, as well as performing works by Louis Andriessen, Georges Aperghis, Bernhard Lang, Alex Lunsqui, and Niels Rønsholdt.

On Saturday, January 9, 2pm in the Williams College Museum of Art, soloists from I/O New Music will turn the museum from a static physical space into a vibrant temporal one. Works range from Paul Hindemith’s solo cello sonata to Paul Groh’s Jive Turkey for solo viola, to works by Aperghis, Scelsi, and John Cage. Audience members will be given a map and a time schedule so that they may construct their own musical experience, deciding which of the musical installations they wish to hear up close. Come hear the museum transform into a resonant, ephemeral space.

On Saturday, January 9, 8pm in the CenterStage in the ’62 Center, the Opus Zero Band and Percussion Ensemble, conducted by Steven Bodner and Mathew Gold respectively, combine to perform the final program of the festival, featuring the American premiere of Michel van der Aa’s Preposition Trilogy for ensemble and soundtrack. Van der Aa (b. 1970, Netherlands) is one of Europe’s most sought-after composers today. In fact, he was the first Dutch composer to win the prestigious International Gaudeamus Prize (1999). For van der Aa, music is more than organized sound or a structuring of notes. He believes that sound is malleable: it can constantly assume other forms, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not. His sounds – like real people – can be flexible or stubborn; they either take control or get the short end of the stick; they reinforce or counteract each other.

The central theme, then, in his high-density Preposition Trilogy—Above, Between, and Attach—is the relationship between the musicians and the soundtrack, the ways in which the acoustic sounds interact with electronic counterparts. While the soundtracks to his pieces are pre-realized, the interaction between live musicians and pre-recorded sounds is anything but static. Instead, the discourse is spontaneous, volatile and dynamic, with the musicians entering into a sonic dialogue with electronics. Experiencing van der Aa’s music, then, is not purely aural, but also visual—hearing his music is a visceral, phenomenological experience. Rounding out the program are works for four alto saxophones by Elliott Carter and six celli by Wolfgang Rihm.