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Baldwin Giang, Ensemble Garage & Friends
Scenes from the Post-Diaspora
Post-globalization identity and hybridity in urban environments have shaped the personal background of Baldwin Giang, composer and pianist-in-residence at Mahler & LeWitt Studios.
Scenesfrom the Post-Diaspora explores these themes and develops them in a multi-movement multimediaopera where Giang's music, masterfully interpreted by the German Ensemble Garage together with artists from from Taiwan, Vietnam, the Netherlands and Italy, is accompanied from by footage made in urban environments that have marked the composer's personal journey.
"For the movement set to Rome"- Giang comments-"I am working with Filipino video artist Liyrc De La Cruz. We are interested to how queerness and migration intersect with the palimpsestic nature of Roman city life: just as Rome is built on many layers of history that are often submerged but can emerge in ruptures of historical time in unexpected places in the city, queerness is largely invisible but is made visible during opportune flashes and clandestine encounters. Immigrants also rise and fall in the social imaginary of contemporary Rome. I am interested to how this constellation of ideas can suggest new approaches to the revelation and layering of musical material, the unfolding of musical time, and to a nonlinear perspective on the future."
Baldwin Giang is an internationally renowned composer, pianist, interdisciplinary creator and educator whose music engages the energies of the audience and artist community and creates concert experiences that are opportunities for wonder and collective judgment. He won the Samuel Barber Rome Prize and is a resident at the American Academy in Rome for 2023/2024.
Spoleto production Festival dei Due Mondi
presented from American Academy in Rome and Mahler & LeWitt Studios
in collaboration with Fondazione Carla Fendi
Please be advised that dates and times may be subject to change.
See www.festivaldispoleto.com for updates.
He recently completed a Fulbright Artist Fellowship in 2022-2023 to Taiwan and was named resident composer with the Louisville Orchestra in 2024-2025. He was nominated/finalist for the 2022 Gaudeamus Award, the most prestigious international award for composers under the age of 35. His music has been performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, Chicago's Symphony Center, and the Chateau de Fontainebleau. He has received commissions from the National Sawdust Ensemble, Metropolis Ensemble, New York Youth Symphony, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Loadbang, Playground Ensemble, Grossman Ensemble, Fondation Maurice Ravel, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Robert Black Foundation, Music in Bloom, How It's Musically Made, and Music from Copland House.
National and international festivals that have presented his work include IRCAM's Manifeste (France), Ecoles d'arts Americaines de Fontainebleau (France), Concours International de Piano d'Orleans (France), Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Netherlands), 24th Annual Young Composers' Meeting (Netherlands), Valencia International Performance Academy (Spain), highSCORE (Italy), Contrasti Festival (Italy), Aspen Music Festival, Edward T. Cone Institute of the New Jersey Symphony to Princeton, Yale in Norfolk's New Music Workshop, CULTIVATE at Copland House, Avaloch Farm Music Institute, Albany Symphony's American Music Festival, Bang on to Can Summer Music Festival, June in Buffalo, New Music on the Point, NUNC!3, National Sawdust's Digital Discovery Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, Midwest Graduate Music Consortium , Midwest Composers Symposium, SCI National Student Conference, North American Saxophone Association Conference and NSEME. Baldwin graduated from Yale University and earned a B.to. with honors in both music and political science from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, earning an M.to. as a Regents Fellow. Baldwin is currently a doctoral student and member of the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he studies with Augusta Read Thomas, Sam Pluta, Anthony Cheung, Hans Thomalla, Courtney Bryan and Felipe Lara.
Ensemble Garage was founded in 2009. Its ten members are constantly seeking answers on artistic, social and aesthetic questions that define our time. In doing so, the Ensemble explores methods and means to create realms ("ways," "spheres," "realms"?) of expression through contemporary composition.
Since its founding, the ensemble has been producing innovative artistic stimuli, shifting its focus to the reflection of the (post)-internet-society with its digital-media expressions, shaping the development of new music toward trans-media, theatrical and performative forms of production.
An important part of the ensemble's work is collaboration and exchange with other artists, especially with composers of the new generation. For this, Ensemble Garage has organized and curated numerous concert-exchanges with young composers from from Germany, Poland, the United States, Finland, Turkey, and France, among others. In addition, the ensemble regularly collaborates with curators and guest artists from from various fields such as video (e.g. Warped Type) and dance (e.g. Mouvoir / Stephanie Thiersch). In this way it implements the "Community of Practice"-a method of artistic work in which members from different artistic fields collaboratively explore their respective practices, which can result in concrete artistic work.
Since fall 2019, Ensemble Garage has hosted the Acts 'n Sounds concert series several times a year, presenting different programmatic concepts with various topics at different venues in Cologne. It also collaborates with the concert series FRAU MUSICA NOVA, developing transmedia concerts that cross the boundaries of club-culture, experimental music theater, and performance, particularly supporting the artistic work of women.
As a guest, the ensemble performs regularly at renowned festivals in Germany and abroad, such as Acht Brücken Festival Cologne, Eclat Stuttgart, Warsaw Autumn, Musica Strasbourg, Ruhrtriennale, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Kunstfestpiele Herrenhausen, SPOR Festival Aarhus (Denmark), GAIDA Festival Vilnius (Lithuania), Warschauer Herbst, Musica Strasbourg and Mixtur Barcelona (Spain), among others.
BABX + Adrien Mondot
Jazz Club
