Modern Notebook for July 26 - August 2, 2025

Photo: composer Liza Lim (photo credit: Astrid Ackermann).

On the next Modern Notebook with Tyler Kline: With the earth as muse, Colin Jacobsen offers a musical tribute to Ruth Crawford Seeger in his piece A Short While to Be Here… — imagining the voice she might have found had she lived longer. Weaving together folk memories, modernist language, and the fleeting beauty of life on this fragile planet, his piece pulses with reverence for all who come and go.


Then: Liza Lim’s cello concerto, A Sutured World, took shape through months of frustration and discovery — an act of sewing together broken fragments to reveal something whole and luminous. Like golden joins in shattered pottery, her music traces the line between damage and healing.


Also featured this week are composers Isidora Zebeljan, Jessie Montgomery, Cassie Wieland, Kitty Xiao, Lillian Yee, James Woodhall, Sinan C. Savaskan, and Yukiko Watanabe. Performers include Daniel Rowland and Nino Gvetadz, the New York Youth Symphony, Jessica Pollack, Brooklyn Rider, Nimbus Trio, International Low Brass Trio, Cantores Lucis, Noemi Gyori, Nicolas Alstaedt with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Longleash.


Hour 1

  • Hum Away, Strings! by Isidora Žebeljan
  • Jessie Montgomery’s Soul Force
  • hands by Cassie Wieland
  • Colin Jacobsen’s A Short While to Be Here...
  • Nipper by Kitty Xiao
  • Lillian Yee’s The First Six
  • Ave Verum Corpus by James Woodhall

Hour 2

  • Always at Dusk, No. 3 by Sinan C. Savaşkan
  • Liza Lim’s A Sutured World
  • ver_flies_sen by Yukiko Watanabe

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