Postcards from America – Contemporary Music from the USA for the Saxophone

As part of the American Days Festival in Stuttgart, Nikola Lutz and Mark Lorenz Kysela played selections from Postcard Pieces, a project initiated by John Sampen and Marilyn Shrude, where established American composers were asked to write short pieces highlighting their musical styles. Just as postcards give us an impression of another place, the selected works gave the audience an idea of the eclecticism of contemporary music in the United States, a multifaceted country where divergent musical languages exist simultaneously.

Along with music of an older generation, works by three younger American composers were presented to further demonstrate the diversity of contemporary American music through its embrace of experimentalism and popular culture idioms. The duo premiered a work for two saxophones and playback by Joseph Michaels, who has been living in Stuttgart since 2008. Mark Lorenz Kysela gave the German premiere of a work for solo soprano saxophone by the Chicago-based composer Drew Baker. To conclude the concert, Robert Phillips, a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude at the time, improvised with the duo on electronics.

Graphic design by Jörg Koch.