The Loop is the official blog of Metropolis Ensemble, a new destination for ensemble updates, exclusive interviews, and music discussion.
Metropolis Ensemble is a nonprofit professional chamber orchestra in New York City dedicated to emerging the next generation of performers and composers. Part of our mission is to provide our community of arts enthusiasts access to leading composers and musicians, helping to break down the barriers between artists and audiences, and inspiring a new generation of music lovers. That’s where
The Loop
comes in. [caption id=“attachment_276” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Concert rehearsal at The Times Center in April 2008 for "LOOP” by composer Ryan Francis.“]
[/caption] The blog gets its name from our April 2008 concert
, that featured the works of Ryan Francis, Maurice Ravel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Erik Satie (arranged by David Bruce). Ryan’s world premiere
explored repeating electronic patterns that at once were metrically complex and harmonically lucid. He was inspired by early 20th century works of Ravel and Satie, while looking to evolve his own
and reshape the listener’s expectations. In many ways, the LOOP concert and Ryan’s premiere in 2008 was an important step forward for Metropolis Ensemble. We started to recognize that our concerts could present works from diverse musical spheres and offer a kaleidoscopic sense of intertwined musical dialogue between artists and genre and between the present and past. And we opened up the lines of communication and artistic discussion between composer, musician, and arts enthusiast, largely through the medium of our website and social media sites. This, in our humble opinion, is a complete re-imagining of the entire concert experience. A concert doesn’t simply take place in one night, but begins with behind-the-scenes access to the artistic and production process, and reverberates in the world of contemporary classical music, long after the musicians have left the stage. A concert never truly ends when it can continue to be relived, reinterpreted, and rediscovered online. Thus our web environment continues to adapt and respond to this changing landscape, so we can best accommodate these ideals and give the audience a broad, detailed, honest, and uplifting perspective into music.
We are striving to take you further up and further into the lives of the outstanding composers and musicians we have the privilege to collaborate with in each concert.
We are fostering the commission and creation of outstanding new music by publishing online media and providing digital downloads.
We are reaching into the community to serve schools with arts education opportunities.
And perhaps most importantly, we are inviting you to be a vital, relevant, and enthusiastic voice in the Metropolis family.
,
,
, and
. We can’t wait to get to know you! Thanks for reading! Armistead Booker Editor of
The Loop