news and press

• “Every concert by the New York Youth Symphony includes the premiere of a new work by a young composer. This one began with an entrancing seven-minute score, “Snow,” by Mark Dancigers, born in 1981, trained at Yale and now studying at Princeton. The composer describes the work as evoking a scene of standing on a mountainside during a snowfall. If you did not know this, though, you might still have been beguiled by the transparent scoring, the squiggling Morton Feldman-like string figurations that run through the piece, and the high-pitched sustained tones and rustling riffs that eventually collide into tremulous lyrical lines.” —Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
  
  
• “ The concert's premiere, Danciger's The Bright Motion, hailed from Debussy's sound world, but progressed in a minimalist spirit with long, luxurious ideas (rather than punchy ostinatos) reiterated with modifications more felt than heard.”—David Patrick Stearns, in The Philadelphia Inquirer
  
  
• -“A crystalline shimmer of notes that flickered among the players gradually broadened into longer phrases in Mark Dancigers’s “Thaw.” The piece was rich in beguiling timbres; one especially memorable passage paired [the cellist’s] spiccato bounces with twinkling crotales.” —Steve Smith, The New York Times
  
  
• “The guitarist Mark Dancigers presented three of his “Electric Guitar Études,” in which the finger-tapping techniques and digital effects of heavy metal were codified and structured into attractive miniatures.”—Steve Smith, The New York Times
  
  
• “Several ensembles provided evidence of careers shaped by Bang on a Can’s innovations. Two of these, Eighth Blackbird and the International Contemporary Ensemble, found vigor in the high-minded severity of pieces by Franco Donatoni and Galina Ustvolskaya. A third, NOW Ensemble, offered highly attractive, unabashedly rock-influenced works by Mark Dancigers, Missy Mazzoli and Judd Greenstein.”—Steve Smith, in The New York Times
  
  
• NOW Ensemble’s debut CD receives Five Stars in both Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago. NOW Ensemble was also hailed as “outstanding” and having “repertoire plenty deep enough to be dredged on multiple passes” by Molly Sheridan in The Washington Times, March 9 2008.