Featuring a variety of student ensembles from Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School High School and Face the Music, this performance will include works by the SMSHS Jazz Ensemble, an 8-hands arrangement of Bizet’s Carmen, Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 5 performed by Face the Music, and other chamber works.
Kaufman Music Center is New York’s go-to place for music education and performance.
It’s where music lovers, from curious fans to renowned performers, come together to explore their musical passions. Founded in 1952 as a community music school, today’s Kaufman Music Center is one of the city’s most vibrant cultural organizations, combining world-class teaching with electrifying performances featuring rising young classical stars, Broadway icons and cutting-edge performer/composers who are re-defining contemporary music. It’s home to the youth new music ensemble Face the Music; Merkin Concert Hall; Lucy Moses School, a community arts school for all ages; and Special Music School, a K-12 public school for musically gifted children.
About Special Music School High School
In the fall of 2013, Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School (P.S. 859) expanded into the high school grades at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Complex on New York City’s Upper West Side, with a music curriculum that emphasizes the development of the student as a musician for the 21st century. With the establishment of the high school extension, Special Music School (SMS) is the city’s only K-12 school that teaches music as a core subject.
The school is unique even among New York’s highly regarded arts high schools in providing talented young musicians the opportunity to pursue serious, pre-professional music studies along with a rigorous academic curriculum. Open to SMS eighth grade graduates as well as students from all five boroughs of New York City, the high school admits 50 students per grade, for a total enrollment of 200 students when all grades are accepted in the 2016-2017 school year. Currently, the school enrolls approximately 150 students in grades 9-11.
About Face the Music
Called “a force in the new music world” by The New York Times, Kaufman Center’s Face the Music is the country’s only ensemble for 18-and-under that is solely devoted to the music of living composers. Now in its 11th season, Face the Music has grown from an after-school club of eight kids to a massive group of over 200 students from all over the tri-state area who convene every week to write, rehearse, and perform music together. Face the Music performs music for large groups (orchestra, jazz band, improvisation ensemble); cultivates, workshops, and performs music by its own member-composers; and partners with the Kronos quartet with “Kronos at Kaufman,” a one-of-a-kind string quartet program devoted to contemporary music.
The ensemble advances Kaufman Music Center’s commitment to contemporary music and provides unparalleled performance and education experiences for the next generation of musical leaders. Face the Music has performed at numerous New York City venues such as Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, Roulette, the DiMenna Center, and BAM Café. Outside of New York, members of Face the Music have performed at the Washington (DC) Performance Arts Society, and, just this past December, in Prince Albert II’s Oceanographic Institute in Paris, France, as part of the Climate Change Summit. The group has participated in Lincoln Center Out of Doors and the Bang On A Can Marathon; has worked with professional musicians such as the JACK Quartet, Alarm WIll Sound, David Robertson, and Vijay Iyer; and has been featured on WQXR’s Young Artist Showcase, NPR’s All Things Considered. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have written feature stories about the group.
