Tickets
General Ticket: $30
Member Ticket: $25
Student: $25
This program is supported in part by Susan Lacy, Steve and Michele Pesner, Clifford Ross and Nicolette Donen, and the Friends of the Fund for Music at The Church.
COME BE THE FIRST TO HEAR THREE NEW WORKS PERFORMED BY ROOMFUL OF TEETH!
Two-time Grammy winners Roomful of Teeth present a performance featuring new music by some of today’s most visionary composers, including Christopher Cerrone, Mingjia Chen, and Eliza Bragg. The Church is thrilled to welcome the vocal ensemble back for a week-long residency as they workshop these three new works, in preparation for their premiere performance at The Church on Thursday, January 23, to be followed by a sold-out show at Zankel Hall presented by Carnegie Hall on Saturday, January 25 to include an additional world premiere new work by Gabriela Ortiz. This residency and performance will continue the group’s exploration of creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques.
Help us welcome back the Roomful of Teeth ensemble: Estelí Gomez, Mingjia Chen, Eliza Bagg, Martha Cluver, Virginia Kelsey, Jodie Landau, Steven Bradshaw, Thann Scoggin, and Cameron Beauchamp, and join us for an unforgettable evening.
This residency is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
ROOMFUL OF TEETH
-
Roomful of Teeth is a Grammy Award–winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music using a continuously expanding vocabulary of singing techniques.
Roomful of Teeth has built a significant and ever-growing catalog of music through deep collaboration with a broad range of composers including Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, William Brittelle, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta, Paola Prestini, Nathalie Joachim, Caroline Shaw, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Clyne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Cava Menzies, Judd Greenstein, Terry Riley, Toby Twining, Ted Hearne, Eve Beglarian, Caleb Burhans, Ambrose Akinmusire, Michael Harrison, Peter S. Shin, and Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate.
Recent appearances include performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, King’s Place in London, and the Barbican. The group has also performed commissioned works in collaboration with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and others, and has also moved into stage work with the visionary opera director Peter Sellars in Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus.
The Roomful of Teeth discography includes their self-titled first album, released in 2012, which was awarded a Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance and featured Roomful of Teeth member Caroline Shaw's Pulitzer Prize–winning piece Partita for 8 Voices. Other recordings include: Render (2015), The Colorado (2016), Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble’s album Sing Me Home, which won the 2016 Grammy for Best World Music Album, and two EPs, The Ascendant (Wally Gunn) and Just Constellations (Michael Harrison). Teeth's recordings have been featured on television and in film, including Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, Netflix’s Dark, Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé.
The latest album, Rough Magic (New Amsterdam Records, 2023) was captured using groundbreaking recording techniques and innovative spatial technology. Roomful of Teeth was recognized at the 66th Grammy awards in 2024, winning Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for Rough Magic; and composer William Brittelle’s work Psychedelics, which appears on Rough Magic, was nominated for a Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Roomful of Teeth is devoted to creating beauty and community with passionate curiosity, contagious enthusiasm, and deep gratitude.
Website: www.roomfulofteeth.org
Instagram: @roomfulofteeth
YouTube: @RoomfulOfTeethOfficial
Vimeo: /roomfulofteeth
Facebook: /roomfulofteeth
CHRISTOPHER CERRONE
Composer
-
Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations.
Recent works include In a Grove, an opera co-produced by LA Opera and Pittsburgh Opera, hailed as "a vividly immersive thriller" by The New York Times; Breaks and Breaks, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony; A Body, Moving, a brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony; The Year of Silence for the Louisville Symphony and baritone Dashon Burton; The Air Suspended, a piano concerto for Shai Wosner; and The Insects Became Magnetic for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His first opera, Invisible Cities, was a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Cerrone is a triple Grammy nominee, with his recent studio recording of In a Grove named one of the best of 2023 by The New York Times. He won the 2015–16 Samuel Barber Rome Prize and was a resident at the Laurenz Haus Foundation in Basel, Switzerland from 2022-23.
Christopher Cerrone holds degrees from Yale and the Manhattan School of Music. He is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York, and joined the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music at the New School in 2021. He lives in Jersey City with his wife. christophercerrone.com
MINGJIA CHEN
Composer
-
Mingjia Chen sings, composes, improvises, writes songs, writes words, curates shows, draws, animates, designs, hangs out in Los Angeles and Toronto, was born in Beijing, leads the chamber-pop Ensemble Tortoise Orchestra, is one-half of synth pop band uoou, belts and yodels as part of Roomful of Teeth, makes records as Mingjia (3 in the world, 1 in the oven), occasionally performs with the queer songbook orchestra & Wild Up, runs the secret-Santa-style songwriter showcase series Not My Song, is described as “one to watch” by I care if you listen and “beautiful, mature, and exceptionally coherent” by the Whole Note, recently graduated from the University of Southern California, is inspired by the works of Joanna Newsom, Milton Nascimento, and Nina Simone, and sets out to celebrate the tender, heartbreaking joy that is ever-present in anything and everything.
ELIZA BAGG
Composer
-
An experimental vocalist and composer, Bagg is known for her “ethereal” aesthetic (The New York Times) and “gossamer” singing (The New Yorker), along with her unique performance and improvisational practice. Frequently developing new work in collaboration with composers like Ted Hearne, Ellen Reid, Gabriel Kahane, Caroline Shaw, Meredith Monk, and John Zorn, Bagg has performed as a soloist around the globe from the Concertgebouw to Carnegie Hall. She has sung operatic roles in venues from the Komische Oper Berlin to the Prototype Festival, is a member of Roomful of Teeth, and has soloed with the New York Philharmonics and Los Angeles Philharmonic. Bagg’s compositional work combines virtuosic singing, mainstream pop aesthetics, and historically informed performance with electronic processing to explore the “valley between authenticity and artifice” (The Guardian). She has been in residence as a composer at Yaddo and Avaloch Farm, and has had theatrical works presented by REDCAT New Original Works Festival and Wild Up’s Endless Season. She has performed her innovative work for processed voice at institutions such as Big Ears Festival, Birds of Paradise Festival, Musica Festival Strasbourg, De Doelen, and the Bemis Center. Dubbed an “electro-pop alien” by NPR, Bagg has released three solo albums and tours globally under the name Lisel.