Preview for TAK editions Podcast Season 1, episode 1: Bethany Younge - at midnight i walked into the middle of the desert

Bethany Younge, composer
with Charlotte Mundy, voice, and Laura Cocks, flute (TAK Ensemble)

TAK Editions Podcast: Bethany At Midnight (Teaser)

Honored with 2021 Fromm Commissioning Award from Harvard University, MacADowell Fellowship, Salvatore Martirano Composition Award, Ettelson Composer’s Award, Chamber Music of California’s »California Prize«, and Nicola de Lorenzo Prize (three times), Selim Göncü aims to create a personal balance of contrasting polarities in his music. Raw gestures are contrasted with transparent textures, elegant timbres are interrupted/combined with abrupt impulses, obsessively-mechanical loops are interpolated with freely flowing improvisations.

His works have been performed by acclaimed ensembles including Ensemble InterContemporain, L’Instant Donné, Ensemble Proton Bern, Ensemble Échappé, Quatuor Tana, Stadler Quartett, East Coast Chamber Ensemble and Alarm Will Sound in festivals such as ManiFeste, Festival Musica, Firenze Suona Contemporanea, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik and Missouri International Composers Festival.

Selim graduated from the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz with the highest distinction and currently continues his doctoral studies in composition at University of California, Berkeley. His primary teachers are Franck Bedrossian, Clemens Gadenstätter and Edmund Campion.

He currently is Composer-in-Residence of New York based new music sinfonietta Ensemble Échappé and is contributing director of sfSound.

“Some of it reminds me of minimal music, the repetitions, the different layers that build up little by little, but she doesn’t hide behind them, she uses these techniques to express her own ideas. I find it wonderful how carefully she goes about it. When she’s onto an idea, she doesn’t just grab it, but approaches it carefully and gives the idea time to blossom.” – Tuula Simon, WDR 3, “3 von jetzt” (“3 of now”)

Sophia Jani is a German composer of contemporary classical music who takes a poetically minimalist approach to composition. She is the current Composer in Residence of the Dallas Symphony for the 2023/24 and 2024/25 seasons, as well as the 2023 Musical Artist in Residence of the Arvo Pärt Center and recipient of the APC Fellowship.

Her music has recently been performed by the New Jersey Symphony, the Munich Symphony, Bang on a Can, musicians of the Dallas Symphony, the Goldmund Quartet, vocal sextet Sjaella, and pianist Eunbi Kim, among others. She has also contributed music to successful film, theater, dance and album projects.

In 2021, Jani was awarded the prestigious Scholarship for Music by the City of Munich for her solo violin piece III. Her debut album of chamber works, 2022’s Music as a mirror, received a nomination for the German Classical Music Prize “Opus Klassik.” In June 2022, she co-composed and produced “Tulips” with violinist Darian Donovan Thomas, which was featured on !K7’s String Layers Vol. II. And in July 2022, she participated in the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute at Princeton University, where her composition “What Do Flowers Do at Night?” was performed by the New Jersey Symphony under conductor David Robertson.

In addition to her work as a composer, Jani is passionate about building a diverse and international community of artists that open-mindedly addresses the challenges notated music faces in the 21st century. To that end, she is one of the founders and artistic directors of “Feet Become Ears”, which is a platform that commissions, presents, and celebrates contemporary chamber music.

Jani holds degrees from the University of Augsburg, the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich and the Yale University School of Music where she studied with Martin Bresnick and David Lang, made possible through the generous support of the Fulbright foundation.

Through cyclical, everyday mundanities like cooking a next meal or answering a phone call from a loved one, we weave webs of positions towards ourselves and others that inevitably collide, creating the structure and flow of our lives. The significance of these ordinary moments often slips past our awareness, though in these moments’ constancy they do more to shape and represent our lives than the scarcer, high-intensity milestones that we look forward to or that stick out in our memory.

My intermedia sound installations and staged music theater works transport participants to dramatized recreations of these small moments. I use combinations of music and field recordings, video and lighting, performance and narrative, as well as site-specificity and audience interactivity to plunder these moments’ emotional depths, expose their intimacies, and elevate their meanings within our lives.

Regarded as “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care If You Listen), TAK delivers energetic performances "that combine crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex.” (WIRE Magazine). The ambitious ensemble “impresses with the organicity of their sound, their dynamism and virtuosity” (New Sounds, WQXR). Dedicated to the commissioning of new works and direct collaboration with artists working in a variety of disciplines, TAK promotes ambitious programming at the highest level. 
 The quintet has released four albums to critical acclaim, including Oor (2019), which launched their in-house media label TAK editions. This label creates broadly accessible platforms for audience engagement with a host of new music media with a focus on original TAK content. The ensemble's Youtube videos have been viewed 15,000 times, and the TAK Editions Podcast has received over 5,000 listens from across the globe.

'Love, Crystal and Stone' by Ashkan Behzadi out on TAK editions 5/10/22

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TAK’s operations occur on Lenape lands—Lenapehoking; we acknowledge the Lenpae as the original people of this land and their continuing relationship with their territory.

TAK Editions Podcast: Bethany At Midnight (Teaser)

TAK ensemble