Oerknal opens its 2015/16 season with a program highlighting the cutting-edge of new music from The United States, curated by American composer and conductor Lewis Nielson!

These concerts revolve around two excerpts from Jason Eckardt's monumental "Undersong" series: 16 and Aperture. 16, one of the most virtuosic works for flute yet written in the 21st-century, combines the world of speech - inarticulate, choked, breathy - with traditional flute playing and a landscape of percussive strings. The music moves from a world of (apparent) attempts at verbal communication towards an atmosphere of extreme tension and aggression. Aperture is made up of various instrumental solos and musical statements variously juxtaposed and thrown against each other demonstrating Eckardt's view of the disjunction inherent in contemporary society. Rounding out the program are Lewis Nielson's You Choose - an intensely moving duet for flute and piano setting poetry by Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton - and the premieres of two commissions written especially for Oerknal, Lay down your burden by Kyle Bartlett and Weg der Schwäne, Lied by Reiko Füting. 

These four composers span a wide range of aesthetic styles but are united in the belief that contemporary music, no matter how fringe, serves an essential social function and that a composer should always be in dialogue with the political and social contexts of his or her environment.