NOW Ensemble Official Website | NOW Ensemble on Facebook | NOW Ensemble on Twitter | NOW Ensemble on Instagram

NOW Ensemble is a dynamic group of performers and composers dedicated to making new chamber music for the 21st century. With a unique instrumentation of flute, clarinet, electric guitar, double bass, and piano, the ensemble brings a fresh sound and a new perspective to the classical tradition, infused with the musical influences that reflect the diverse backgrounds of its members. Having recently celebrated ten years together as an ensemble, they have brought some of the most exciting composers of their generation to national and international recognition. In recent seasons, NOW has performed at Lincoln Center, the Apples and Olives Festival in Zurich, Switzerland, Town Hall Seattle, Da Camera Houston, and in Carnegie Hall’s Neighborhood Concert Series. From 2016-2018 they were the inaugural ensemble in residence at San Diego’s Art of Élan. Highlights of the 2018-19 season include a major collaboration with Sarasota Contemporary Dance, premieres of new works by composers Sean Friar and Michi Wiancko, and the recording of NOW Ensemble’s sixth album, due out by New Amsterdam Records in 2020.

Judd Greenstein is a composer of structurally complex, viscerally engaging works for varied instrumentation. A passionate advocate for the independent new music community across the United States, much of Judd’s work is written for the virtuosic ensembles and solo performers who make up that community and is tailored to their specific talents and abilities.
Judd’s philosophy as both a composer and a curator involves music that is an organic blend of multiple styles, sounds, and instruments, open to all influences. Standout groups that reflect this polyglot sensibility, including yMusic, Roomful of Teeth, and NOW Ensemble, all counted Judd among their earliest commissions and continue to perform his work to this day. As a national and international audience has taken notice of these and other like-minded artists, Judd has been increasingly in demand as a composer for the orchestra and the stage, with recent commissions from the Minnesota Orchestra, the Lucerne Festival, and the North Carolina Symphony, among many others. Recent projects attest to the diversity of Judd’s output: an orchestral song cycle for indie rock vocalist DM Stith, an opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, a ballet score for Isabella Boylston and choreographer Gemma Bond, and a flute concerto for Alex Sopp and the Knights. In 2020, Judd will be re-launching The Yehudim, an ensemble of singers, percussionists, keyboards and guitars that explores Biblical subjects through a contemporary lens.

In addition to his work as a composer, Judd is active as a promoter of new music in New York and around the world. He is the co-director of New Amsterdam Records, an artists’ service organization that supports post-genre musicians in developing their most personal new projects. He is the curator of the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York’s Merkin Hall, an annual showcase of new collaborative concerts between artists from different musical worlds, and he is a founding member of NOW Ensemble, the composer/performer collective that develops new chamber music for their idiosyncratic instrumentation. He also co-curates the Apples & Olives festival in Zurich, Switzerland, helping to bring to Europe the post-genre ethos of the Ecstatic Music Festival and New Amsterdam.

Judd has received degrees from Williams College, the Yale School of Music, and Princeton University, and has received Fellowships from the Tanglewood Music Center, the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, and the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab.

David Krakauer Official Website | David Krakauer on Facebook | David Krakauer on Twitter | David Krakauer on Instagram

Only a select few artists have the ability to convey their message to the back row, to galvanize an audience with a visceral power that connects on a universal level. David Krakauer is such an artist.

Widely considered one of the greatest clarinetists on the planet, he has been praised internationally as a key innovator in modern klezmer as well as a major voice in classical music. In 2015 he received a Grammy nomination in the Chamber Music/Small Ensemble category as soloist with the conductorless orchestra A Far Cry, and a Juno nomination for the CD Akoka with cellist Matt Haimovitz.

Over the past decade Krakauer has emerged as an electrifying symphonic soloist who brings his singular sound and powerful approach to the concert stage. He has appeared with the world’s finest orchestras including the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Baltimore Symphony, Brooklyn Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, the Weimar Staatskapelle, the Orchestre de Lyon, the Phoenix Symphony, the Dresdener Philharmonie, and the Seattle Symphony.

Highlights of Krakauer’s lauded career include performances with the Kronos, Emerson, Tokyo, Orion, and Miro String Quartets; performing during the inaugural season of Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall with renowned jazz pianist Uri Caine; an eight-­year tenure with the Naumburg Award-­winning Aspen Wind Quintet tours and recordings with Abraham Inc which he co-­leads with Socalled and Fred Wesley and performing in the International Emmy Award-­winning BBC documentary Holocaust, A Music Memorial from Auschwitz.

Krakauer’s discography contains some of the most important clarinet recordings of recent decades. Among them are The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (Osvaldo Golijov and the Kronos Quartet/Nonesuch), which received the Diapason D’Or in France, The Twelve Tribes (Label Bleu) which was designated album of the year in the jazz category for the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, and Paul Moravec’s Pulitzer Prize-winning composition Tempest Fantasy (Naxos). He has also recorded with violinist Itzhak Perlman/The Klezmatics (Angel) and Dawn Upshaw/Osvaldo Golijov (Deutsche Gramophon). His unique sound can be heard in Danny Elfman’s score for the Ang Lee film Taking Woodstock and throughout Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson. New releases include his 2015 album Checkpoint with his band Ancestral Groove (Label Bleu), Paul Moravec’s Clarinet Concerto with The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP sound), and The Big Picture on his own label, Table Pounding Records in 2014.