Seattle Modern Orchestra

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Seattle Modern Orchestra

Seattle Modern Orchestra is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike. For complete program information, please visit our website:
www.seattlemodernorchestra.org

04/27/2026

Looking for some weird, wacky and wonderful fashion inspo for our 1986 prom on Saturday? Check out these totally tubular threads 👀💃👔

📆 May 2, 6pm Contemporary Dance Center. Be there or be square! 😎

Tickets @ seattlemodernorchestra.org

04/15/2026

In 1986, Melody Sumner, Kathleen Burch, and Michael Sumner created a dinner party in an art book, filled with conversations and text scores from avant-garde luminaries of the time: The guests go in to supper.

To celebrate the book's 40th anniversary, SMO presents two nights of interactive music, poetry, prose, and dance at Whim W'Him Seattle Contemporary Dance Center on May 1 & 2, curated by Sarah Kolat.

🍄 NIGHT 1: Friday, May 1
The ensemble presents John Cage's long-form poem, Mushrooms et variationes, with a new dance by James Kirby Rogers alongside Cage's Music for Seven (by Six). This fusion honors Cage's historic partnership with Merce Cunningham, and Seattle’s role in bringing the two visionary artists together.

🪩 NIGHT 2: Saturday, May 2
The supper party turns into a prom inspired by The guests go in to supper and the spirit of 1986. Expect bites and beverages, a sneak peek at next season, musical presentations, a wallflower room with games, and, of course, a dance floor. Come dressed for the occasion, however you define it. Weird, wonderful, formal, awkward, glamorous, conceptual, prom-adjacent: all are welcome.

Tickets: https://bit.ly/411PVYr

04/06/2026

This Wednesday, April 8, pianist Aaron Wonson will step in to make his SMO debut with Ligeti's Piano Concerto, replacing Cristina Valdés who has withdrawn from the performance due to an injury. Aaron has deep experience with the concerto, and we are delighted that we can still bring this rarely-performed work to our community.

Currently based in Boston, Aaron has collaborated with composers Phillip Cashian, Lei Liang, Elizabeth Ogonek, and conductors David Dzubay and Timothy Weiss. Recent recording projects include an arrangement of Bela Bartok’s first violin sonata for piano and alto saxophone and a jazz trio album.

Don’t miss this unforgettable evening encompassing Ligeti’s groundbreaking work alongside new and recent pieces from the University of Washington School of Music composition department.

🎟️: https://bit.ly/4dNyMJq

04/03/2026

On April 8, SMO presents “the new normal” by University of Washington composition faculty member William Dougherty at Meany Hall. “the new normal” is a response to the summer of 2016. Responding to widespread xenophobia, violence, and racism, the piece uses collage to connect samples from six different musical sources. These include a recording made by 20th-century ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax of Black prisoners at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, Monteverdi’s “Ahi troppo, ahi troppo e duro,” and sounds drawn from police radio recordings connected to mass shootings and the killings of unarmed Black Americans.

“What’s striking to me about revisiting the piece ten years later is how little distance I feel from the conditions that shaped it. When I wrote it in 2016, it felt like a response to a particularly intense and unsettling moment…What may have initially been a reactive gesture now feels, to me, more like a document of listening: to the past, to mediated sound, and to the overlapping social realities embedded in those materials.” — William Dougherty

🎟️: https://bit.ly/4dNyMJq

03/29/2026

On April 8, SMO returns to University of Washington School of Music's Meany Hall for our third annual residency concert, performing Huck Hodge's La Llorona. Hodge's chamber concerto draws on images from the 1585 Florentine Codex of Bernardino Sahagun. Known in English as "A General History of the Things of New Spain," these texts reflect the universal themes of loss, fear and hope.

🪈 La Llorona features UW flute professor Donna Shin, described as “dazzling” by the Boston Globe. Dr. Shin has had solo performances with the People’s Liberation Army Band of China, Seattle Symphony and the Sewanee Summer Music Festival.

🎟️: https://bit.ly/4dNyMJq

03/09/2026

📝🎶 COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Jérémy Jolley

Jérémy Jolley is the founding director of SMO. Raised in the French Alps before moving to Seattle in the late 90’s, he has worked across genres, playing guitar in rock and fusion bands and studying composition at the University of Washington.

Jolley's (contro-)clessidra is a series of layered, bespoke duos crafted over more than a decade for SMO’s musicians. The title refers to the (reverse-)hourglass: a chronometer in which the sand moves up against gravity, contrary to our usual experience of linear time.

(contro-)clessidra features field recordings, spatial live sound, and references to Luigi Nono, Édouard Glissant, Merce Cunningham, Gérard Grisey, and Jolley’s teacher Joël-François Durand.

📅 March 12 at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University's Raisbeck Auditorium

🎟️: https://bit.ly/4qborJT

03/04/2026

📝🎶 COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Arun Chandra

Arun Chandra is a composition professor and director of the Evergreen Experimental Ensemble. Chandra's works challenge the social and political contexts of music creation and performance. His new piece for SMO, Ways of Resisting, features text from Bertolt Brecht's Stories of Mr. Keuner.

"This composition is an effort to address the contradictions between asserting identity while working in coordination with others. Every phrase in this composition is an attempt to be a verbal utterance, in the guise of a musical gesture, made by an individual, within a context of others also asserting themselves. Each person (each instrument) is attempting to articulate what they think is going on, and should be done." — Arun Chandra on Ways of Resisting

📅 Hear the world premiere on March 12 at 's Raisbeck Auditorium.

🎟️: https://bit.ly/4qborJT

02/28/2026

📝🎶 COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Anahita Abbasi

Anahita Abbasi is the co-founder of the Schallfeld Ensemble and the Iranian Female Composers Association, whose mission is to empower Iranian women in music and in the arts. Abbasi’s works invite musicians to respond to each other in the moment through unique extended techniques.

In the sixth installation of Abbasi’s Situation series, "Happenings," various boxes can be played in any order. The work reflects on the changed nature of our world during the pandemic. Commissioned by SMO in 2021, we rehearsed mostly online, coming together in person for the dress rehearsal and the live-streamed performance.

📅 On March 12 at Cornish's Raisbeck Auditorium, hear a re-imagined version in its first showing for a live audience. Today our “happenings” are different, but the challenge to stay connected, find meaning, and make sense of our environment through sound remains constant.

🎟️: https://bit.ly/4qborJT

📷: Dietmar Ney

02/27/2026

Because your feed could use more analog synth solos 🎛️💯

🎥 CHARI plays the Moog Subsequent 37 in the 2024 world premiere of their work, Breaking Time, at The Royal Room.

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Seattle, WA

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http://www.seattlemodernorchestra.org/

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