We’re thrilled to announce that the Fromm Music Foundation has awarded a commission to our good friend Ruby Fulton to write a new piece for us!

We’ll be premiering the piece during the 2012-13 season, so be sure to keep an eye out for it.  The work will be a part of our ever-growing RIOT Project, which will also includes works by Randall Woolf, Bob Ostertag, Frederic Rzewski, David T. Little and more, which re-examines the role of riots in the evolution of American culture.

Here’s what Ruby has to say about the project:

I’m really excited to be writing a piece for Newspeak. I heard them play a few months ago in Baltimore and it was love at first note. The piece I’ll be writing is a part of Newspeak’s RIOT project, in which several composers from various cities around the U.S. are exploring the history of riots taking place in their city. I thought it’d be interesting to look further back than the Civil Rights riots, and when I started reading, I found out about a massive bank riot that happened in Baltimore in 1835. The story of little guys fighting back against the rich few is strangely relevant to today’s political/economic downward spiral. I’m really looking forward to digging through documents at the Maryland Historical Society and the public library to see what I can piece together for a text.

We can’t wait to sink our teeth into it, Ruby!

Newspeak is proud to have been chosen as a participant in WNYC/WQXR’s STAR Initiative program. The  Salute The ARts Initiative is a free program that profiles 36 small cultural non-profit organizations in the New York Metropolitan area over a 12-month period, through on-air promotional announcements and free website support.  We will be featured throughout the month of January.

We’re big fans of WNYC and WQXR, and are proud to be featured often on both John Schaefer’s New Sounds show, and on Q2 Music, WQXR’s innovative web station.  We’re excited to be further involved with WNYC/WQXR through this project.

…what a Newspeak rehearsal looks like, just check out this trailer for the Ecstatic Music Festival, which was filmed during one of our bright blue and purple and cabled rehearsals back in November.

We’ll be playing on the festival on February 24th, with Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, and hey: it’s going to be great!  You should come!

It’s been an amazing year for Newspeak. We recorded and released our critically acclaimed debut CD, sweet light crude-complete with an amazing video by Satan’s Pearl Horses–and embarked on our first concert tour since 2005 to support it. We held a residency at Princeton University, where we premiered six new works, and subsequently recorded two of them. We commissioned a new opera from Corey Dargel with the generous support from Meet The Composer’s Commissioing Music/USA program, and continued to serve the musical and non-musical communities, by co-presenting the second annual New Music Bake Sale and performing a benefit for the Brooklyn Young Mothers’ Collective.

We made great strides in 2010, but none of this would have been possible without you!

2011 promises to be just as great, as we kick things off in mid-February with a show as part of the Tune In Festival at the amazing Park Avenue Armory. We’ll share the stage with the Grammy award-winning ensemble eighth blackbird, and then only a week later, we join with the Grammy-nominated Secret Society, led by composer Darcy James Argue for a special New Sounds Live event as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Hall. In June, we’ll travel to New Haven, to perform and record Newspeak founder David T. Little’s opera Soldier Songs at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, complete with expert panels discussing the effects of PTSD on returning veterans.

But again, we can’t do it without you!

You can help ensure that Newspeak can continue to grow by making a year-end, fully tax-deductible contribution! Donations (in any amount!) can be made online via Paypal, or via check, written to “Newspeak New Music Ensemble” and sent to our address below.  We depend on the financial support of people like to you help keep Newspeak running year after year, and this year is no different.

As ever, we greatly appreciate your support, and wish you all the best for a happy new year!

PS – Don’t forget to vote for sweet light crude as your favorite new disc of 2010!

Check out the music video, by Satan’s Pearl Horses, then head to New Amsterdam Records, Amazon, or iTunes to buy the CD/download the audio!

Long time coming!

Newspeak is proud to announce the release of our first CD: sweet light crude

Listen here:

Recorded at Clinton Studios in March, and mixed through the summer by Lawson White, sweet light crude brings stories of hope, loss, inaction and rage.  Through six compositions, commissioned from some of the most exciting young composers writing today, Newspeak shows its unique ability to reach the transcendental highs of a great rock band while maintaining the lyricism, dexterity, and nuanced intricacy of classical chamber music.

The disc begins with Oscar Bettison’s furious B&E (with aggravated assault)–a mixed-meter revolution–which is followed by Stefan Weisman’s understated, enigmatic and passive I Would Prefer Not To.  Passivity turns to obsession in David T. Little’s dark and crooked love song to oil, sweet light crude,  which is followed by a glimmer of hope in Missy Mazzoli’s In Spite of All This; the quiet before the storm.  That storm comes in Pat Muchmore’s apocalyptic, Reznor-infused Brennschuß, which roars upon the listener with Pynchon-esque imagery, and guest vocals from Morean of the German black metal band Dark Fortress.   When the storm clears, we’re left with a dust bowl, and the sounds of the howling wind. Thus begins Caleb Burhans’ Requiem for a General Motors in Janesville, WI, which brings the album to its cathartic conclusion.

Although each composition holds its own ground–and exists in its own universe of ideas, colors and sound–each tells its own important part of our story.

sweet light crude will be officially released on New Amsterdam Records on November 16, 2010.  It will be distributed on Naxos of America, and available everywhere.

Newspeak is very pleased to officially announce a new project with composer/singer Corey Dargel, who will write a new opera for us entitled The Three Christs. Being created in collaboration with the San Francisco-based novelist Andrew Sean Greer (author of The Story of a Marriage), the opera tells the story of three psychiatric patients who each suffers from the same delusion — the belief that he or she is Jesus Christ — and the psychologist who tries to cure them of their delusions.

Corey Dargel, photo by Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler of New Catalogue

The Three Christs received Meet The Composer’s prestigious Commissioning Music/USA award and will be directed by Emma Griffin, whom many of you know from Corey’s Removable Parts and Thirteen Near-Death Experiences. Newspeak, Dargel, Greer, and Griffin are developing The Three Christs with the support of New York Theatre Workshop, and NYTW will present an hour-long, invitation-only reading of excerpts from this exciting new project in their intimate, 65-seat 4th Street Theatre in the East Village on September 13th.

The full premiere will take place during Newspeak’s 2012-2013 season.

Jim doing his best Rick Wakeman, recording Caleb’s Requiem for a General Motors in Janesville, WI.

David and Melly in their isolation booths.

Brian and Taylor.  (Taylor’s thunderous Marshall 4×12 was in then next room, at full volume.)

Eileen recording David’s sweet light crude.

David’s drums, awaiting the beating they received in Pat Muchmore’s Brennschluß.