Details
Forging music through movement and shared experience, Foundry reveals how collaboration shapes music, culminating in Pamela Z’s world premiere that transforms musicians’ stories into sound.
PROGRAM
MARK GUSTAVSON Turning (2012) *
LAURIE SAN MARTIN Seven Pines (2019, rev. 2026)
SOFIA JEN OUYANG Commotion (2024) *
PAMELA Z Generation (2027) - World Premiere/Commission
*This piece is a West Coast Premiere.
INSIDE THE MUSIC
Mark Gustavson — Turning
Musical ideas rotate, return, and evolve, creating a sense of perpetual motion. Inspired in part by Charles Ives’s The Cage, its recurring sections expand with each return, revealing new possibilities within familiar material. Gustavson’s rhythmic interplay and subtle transformations give this music its "ingenious" form, as praised by The Boston Globe.
Laurie San Martin — Seven Pines
The program pauses for a moment of quiet reflection with San Martin’s richly atmospheric and deeply lyrical soundscape. Luminous harmonies and subtle changes of instrumental color evoke the enduring presence of the natural world across a series of contrasting movements.
Sofia Jen Ouyang — Commotion
Rhythmic vitality and inventive instrumental colors drive Commotion, where energetic exchanges and constantly shifting textures turn disruption into play. Ouyang’s music explores the intersections of musical, literary, and philosophical ideas, inviting listeners to hear movement not simply as disorder, but as a source of surprise and possibility.
Pamela Z — Generation
Created especially for SF Contemporary, Generation explores how artistic knowledge and shared experience pass between generations. A pioneer of live digital looping—whose music has been described by The New York Times as “technically startling and fluidly soulful”—Pamela Z transforms interviews with current and former ensemble musicians into digitally manipulated sound, turning personal stories into a living portrait of community, collaboration, and musical memory.
Discover how music is forged through relationships between composers and performers, ideas and influences, past and present. Get a rare glimpse into that creative process as a new work takes shape through the voices and experiences of the musicians who bring it to life.
