Explore the Festival
Hear Now Music Festival
The Hear Now Music Festival, created in 2011, is focused on composers who live and work in the Los Angeles area, performed by stellar Los Angeles musicians and ensembles. Over the past twelve years, the Hear Now Music Festival has presented 214 works by 168 Los Angeles-based composers. Hear Now serves as an incubator for the discovery of new talent. Works are submitted anonymously by an open call for scores and reviewed by a ten-person committee. In this way, numerous composers—emerging and mid-career—have been brought to critical and public attention.
*Programming and artists subject to change, please refer to the participating organization’s calendar listing for the most up-to-date program.
Events
California Festival
Including two compositions recently commissioned for the California Festival, HEAR NOW presents a program of compositions by eight Los Angeles composers. The pieces will be performed by the three HEAR NOW resident ensembles—the Lyris Quartet, Brightwork new music, and the HEX Vocal Ensemble—as well as other outstanding Los Angeles musicians.
Piece(s)/Composer(s)
FALLEN SKIN, FLYING WINGS, 2019
Moni Jasmine GUO
ROCK A BYE BYE, 2020 (HEAR NOW MUSIC COMMISSION)
Nina SHEKHAR
KYRIE-MERCY-ANA M, 2020
Michael ROTH
CONTINUUM: CAUSE AND EFFECT, 2023 (HEAR NOW MUSIC COMMISSION)
Arash MAJD
INSPIRED BY DOUBT, 2020
Hugh LEVICK
SELECTIONS FROM ARKHIPOV, 2022
Peter KNELL
ARTIFACTS
Isaac SCHANKLER
THRESHOLD, 2019
Kay RHIE
Program Notes
Moni Jasmine Guo’s work Fallen Skin, Flying Wings was written to send the message to those who are struggling or maybe even discouraged with life— the fallen will one day stand up from the ground to find they have wings and can fly.
Nina Shekhar ‘s Rock a Bye Bye for the Lyris String Quartet was commissioned by HEAR NOW in 2020 and was inspired by friends of hers who were expecting during the pandemic. Nina writes: “I wondered what it felt like to bring new life into a world that suddenly feels so different.”
Michael Roth composed KYRIE-MERCY-ANA M, an a cappella motet for eight voices that combines sacred texts with English secular texts assembled and created by Alice Ripley. This KYRIE, the opening movement from their music/theatre piece LANDSCAPE THE TAR ROOF TREE, is a reflection and meditation on the great Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. It will be performed by HEX.
Dr. Arash Madj’s Continuum: Cause and Effect was commissioned by HEAR NOW in 2022 and is from a series of works that employ forward motion and continuity of sound to create structure.
Requiring a pianist with Yevgeniy Milyavskiy’s exceptional sensibility and talent, Hugh Levick’s Inspired By Doubt is aggressive, lyrical, explosive and barely audible in turns as it enacts a fragmented, gestural drama.
Excerpts from Peter Knell Knell’s opera ARKHIPOV conjure a moving portrait of the Russian chief of staff responsible for defusing a world-ending nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
About Artifacts, composer Isaac Schankler says it is "in a sense about the collision of time scales that often happens when electronic music and acoustic music meet. When I mashed these things together, byproducts popped out, and I kept some of these artifacts.”
In Kay Rhie’s Threshold, initial materials “trigger” reactions, the following materials “respond”, and in the final section this material takes a new course—unpredicted at the beginning of the piece—which carries it to a place of faint memory of the past.