The New American Concerto project is a multi-season commissioning project that explores the form of the violin concerto and its potential to activate social awareness through music. A diverse collective of American composers engage with socio-cultural topics that are relevant and personally meaningful. This project invites composers to view their subjects through the lens of violin and orchestra, asks them to re-examine the conventional musical form of the concerto, and establish a new form for the 21st Century that utilizes the fluctuating dynamic between the individual and group as a ripe metaphor for contemporary times.
ARCO Collaborative continues its mission to advocate for and disseminate the music of under- represented composers by producing educational residencies and workshops with student musicians where composers and Ms. Koh offer mentorship alongside masterclasses and talks emphasizing the creative and collaborative process.
Inspired by the writing and work of female Korean visual artist, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Traces will premiere on November 17-19, 2022 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop.
Each movement will represents the steps that society takes to become Fascist regimes. Procession was premiered on February 3 at The Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra. Subsequent performances were with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall as part of the 2022 BBC Proms Festival.
For Marcos Balter premiered with Detroit Symphony on November 6, 2020. Future performance with New Jersey Symphony in 2022.
This work is inspired by three female artists of color and their work: painter Alma Thomas (1891- 1978), painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), and designer, architect, and artist Maya Ying Lin (b. 1959). Each movement corresponds to a separate work of art by each of these artists.
Syzygy was premiered with the Chicago Sinfonietta on March 9, 2020. Additional performance with Louisiana Philharmonic in January 2021.
This concerto is based on a set of short songs using found texts from a broad range of American women poets who wrote poems entitled “Sanctuary.” Definitions of this word center around sacredness but also around safety.
Sanctuary was premiered on January 15, 2020 with the Orlando Philharmonic. Future performance with American Composers Orchestra in March 2022.
Christopher Cerrone’s violin concerto, commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, explores the impact of technology in transforming the way we think and live our lives. Among Cerrone’s inspirations for exploring this subject is the city of Detroit itself, situated in the Rust Belt region where workers in many industries have seen their jobs threatened by advances in technology. The concerto engages with the tension between automation and manual labor, as well as its human consequences. The music also reflects on how our patterns of thought are influenced by an increasingly “plugged-in” world, from 24/7 surveillance to unending streams of tweets and texts.
“Good trouble,” “necessary trouble” — these are favorite phrases of U.S. Representative John Lewis, referring to the strategies and tactics of the Civil Rights movement and the ongoing struggles for equality and justice in the last six decades. This work is dedicated to Vincent Chin, whose murder in the early 80s signaled an ongoing pattern of violent hate crimes against people of color. His death became a watershed moment for antiracist activism, which is as urgently needed today as it has ever been.
Trouble was workshopped at Oberlin Conservatory and premiered at the Ojai Music Festival on June 8, 2017. Additional performances with The Knights at Tanglewood Music Festival and Miller Theatre (New York) and Louisiana Philharmonic.
September 2024 Issue
Review: Vijay Iyer: ‘Trouble’ | Jennifer Koh, violin; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor (BMOP/sound)
Pwyll ap Siôn, Gramophone Magazine
Koh's performance in Iyer's Trouble was reviewed in Gramophone's September 2024 issue. The review was included in Gramophone's Sounds of America, a section focusing on recent recordings from the US and Canada.
"[Trouble] benefits enormously from a finely balanced and nuanced interpretation by violinist Jennifer Koh, who manages to capture the range of emotions expressed throughout."
September-October Issue, 2024
5 Minutes with Jennifer Koh
Thomas May, Strings Magazine
Jennifer Koh's interview feature with Thomas May for Strings Magazine's September-October issue. The two discuss Koh's New American Concerto project, her involvement in Vijay Iyer's Trouble, and more.
June 17, 2021
For a Composer, the Final Minutes Are Critical
By Seth Colter Walls, The New York Times
A recent work for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra — “A Body, Moving,” featuring tuba, trumpet and a percussionist who uses a bike pump — saves its most emotive material for its closing minutes. That is also true of Cerrone’s violin concerto for Jennifer Koh, “Breaks and Breaks,” performed with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2018. (The concerto shares material with the string quartet “Can’t and Won’t,” which was also released as a single last year.)
Xian Zhang conducting the violinist Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in Mr. Sorey’s “For Marcos Balter.” Photo Credit: Sarah Smarch for The New York Times
Tyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest Year
By Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
“For Marcos Balter” is even-keeled, steadily slow, a commune of players rather than a metaphorical give-and-take between an individual and society. Ms. Koh’s deliberate long tones, like cautious exhalations, are met with spectral effects on the marimba. Quiet piano chords amplify quiet string chords. At the end, a timpani roll is muted to sound almost gonglike, with Ms. Koh’s violin a coppery tremble above it.
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Vijay Iyer – TROUBLE
This is my first concerto, and I didn't want to rehash the typical narrative positioning a heroic individual over or against a multitude. Ms. Koh told me that the soloist could instead be viewed as someone willing to be vulnerable, to publicly venture where most people won't, to accept a role that no one else will accept, to bear the unbearable. In other words, the soloist can embody the relationship of an artist to her community: not so much a "leader" or "hero," but something more like a shaman, a conduit for the forces in motion around us.
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