Author: jmodney

Wet Ink in the New York Times

Concert Reviews, News

Soper and Modney perform "Cipher"

Wet Ink got a nice review in the New York Times for our recent concert as part of Issue Project Room’s Gaudeamus Muziekweek.  I was fortunate to perform some great new works by Kate Soper, Ted Hearne, and Chris Trapani.  A short excerpt is shown below.  Please click here to see the full review.

“Another of the ensemble’s composer-performers, Kate Soper, sang her own “cipher,” an exotic score in which her vocal settings of text fragments from Wittgenstein, Freud, Jenny Holzer, Michael Drayton and Sara Teasdale closely matched, in timbre and gesture, a brash violin line played energetically by Joshua Modney. Sometimes Ms. Soper ran a hand along the fingerboard.”

Concert Review: Wet Ink @ FeNAM

Concert Reviews, News, Shows

Wet Ink Septet

Wet Ink got a nice review in the San Francisco Classical Voice for our concert at the Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University. Here are the highlights:

“No group was more bracingly thought-provoking and expansive than the Wet Ink Ensemble. These seven New York musicians/composers are fearless in testing the limitations of what instruments or musical forms can be. Best of all, they don’t shy away from integrating the spoken word as a tasty and dramatic counterpoint to the music. That played out powerfully in the unnerving but entrancing two movements from Voices From the Killing Jar, written by vocalist Kate Soper. Here hypnotic music was defined by start and stop rhythms punctuated by Soper’s sung text and finger-caress of a cymbal. In one of the movements the text was an incantation mining the Iphigenia tale, wherein the words exclaim Clytemnestra’s wish for bloodshed.  Later, sax player Alex Mincek’s Nucleus bloomed in a set of short movements in which saxophone and drum interchanged musically stark exclamations.”

For the full review, please click here.

Babbitt Memorial Concert

Shows

I am pleased to be a part of a Milton Babbitt Memorial Concert at CUNY Graduate Center in a couple of weeks.  I will perform Babbitt’s Composition for Four Instruments with an incredible lineup of musicians: Pat Spencer, flute, Charles Neidich, clarinet, and Chris Gross, cello.  I will also be giving my second performance since the premier of “Vitulatory Strains” for solo violin, by Daniel Colson, a former Babbitt student.

Babbitt Memorial Concert
CUNY Graduate Center
May 10, 8:00pm

Wet Ink this Saturday

Shows

Spring Premieres

Saturday, April 30, 8pm
St Peters Church – Chelsea
346 West 20th St (between 8th and 9th Aves)
Manhattan

Wet Ink is proud to present a concert of U.S. and world premieres by some of the most vital and compelling voices in contemporary music, including newly commissioned works by legendary trombonist/composer George E. Lewis and Pulitzer Prize-winner Lewis Spratlan. The concert will also feature U.S. premieres of major works by Stefan Prins and Simon Steen-Andersen, two of Europe’s leading young composers, along with new large-scale works by Wet Ink directors Sam Pluta and Eric Wubbels.

Program:
George Lewis – New Work *
Lew Spratlan – Process/Bulge *
Simon Steen-Andersen – Chambered Music #
Stefan Prins – Fremdkörper #1 #
Sam Pluta – Portraits/Self Portraits *
Eric Wubbels – katachi *

*World Premiere #US Premiere