Friday, January 5, 2024, 7:30 PM
Saturday, January 6, 2024, 7:30 PM
Sunday, January 7, 2024, 3 PM

San Diego New Music and the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library present the 2024 soundON Festival, exploring cutting-edge contemporary music from around the world. This year we celebrate the music of San Diego composer and longtime friend of SDNM and NOISE Adam Greene, and we feature a new work by Mark Menzies commissioned by the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library.

January 5–7, 2023

7:30 PM

San Diego New Music and the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library present the 2023 soundON Festival, exploring cutting-edge contemporary music from around the world, including rising international voices Yu Kuwabara (Japan), Adrian Demoč (Slovakia), Alyssa Aska (Austria), and D. Edward Davis (United States). Entitled Spolia, this year’s festival explores the traces of the past recast into unique new expressions, just as ancient artifacts are reincorporated into newer architecture to become spolia. Inspired by Katherine Balch’s Musica Spolia, this theme threads through works including Yu Kuwabara’s Five Images-In nomine and Adam Greene’s Memos, and works incorporating recorded sound fragments, like D. Edward Davis’s broad call and Kay He’s On the Rime of the Fading Forest.

January 6–8, 2022

7:30 PM

San Diego New Music and the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library present soundON Festival (formerly known as soundON Festival of Modern Music), featuring the ensemble in residence, NOISE, coming together after a long hiatus due to the pandemic. The members of NOISE have curated a festival exploring the surreality of the gradual return to “normalcy” and the irreversible perspective of a world transformed and that will never be “normal” again. The program features winning selections from the pandemic-delayed 2020 soundON Call for Scores and highlights an internationally diverse lineup of composers including Uri Kochavi (Israel), João Pedro Oliveira (Portugal), Jinhee Han (Korea), and Peter Hager (Philippines). World premieres by Luke Schultze and NOISE member Franklin Cox will be debuted. The eclectic and international collection of works embrace imperfection, liminality, chimeric adaptations, tension, and the cautious return to the illuminated beauty of the world welcoming us back.