Amir ElSaffar’s New Quartet have pulled off the trick of creating something that moves and sounds like jazz, but with a much deeper resonance…a rich and rewarding experience.
—Chris Ingalls, PopMatters
The evening of contemporary music highlights ElSaffar’s New Quartet and Ibarra’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sky Islands”
Two of the most inventive figures in contemporary music share a single evening of groundbreaking work on Thursday, October 1 at John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge. Trumpeter, vocalist and composer Amir ElSaffar and his New Quartet with Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, Tania Giannouli on microtonally tuned piano and Ole Mathisen on tenor saxophone perform, as well as percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra and her Talking Gong ensemble with pianist Alex Peh and flutist Claire Chase, guest percussionist Levy Lorenzo, and the Parker Quartet. The 7 p.m. free concert is curated and hosted by Chase and presented by the Department of Music and Arts Thursdays, a university-wide initiative sponsored by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA) that makes free performances, exhibitions, lectures and other events available to the public.
ElSaffar, whose music draws on Iraqi maqam, expanded his working trio into his New Quartet with the addition of the Greek pianist Giannouli. They first played together in 2023 at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, a meeting released last year on Maqām Records. For this concert, the piano is retuned to ElSaffar's own microtonal scheme, which pulls seven of the twelve pitches away from equal temperament, one by a full quarter tone.
Ibarra’s 2024 piece “Sky Islands” takes inspiration from the musical traditions of Luzon's sky islands and represents the Montane Forest ecosystem through a performative sonic installation featuring interlocking rhythms and melodies found in the bamboo, gong and flute music of the Kalinga and Cordilleras Region. Ibarra has described the work as a musical call to action, highlighting Luzon's rainforests — an endangered region with 31 endemic species, including the Philippine eagle. Sky Islands was a 2024 Fromm Music Foundation commission and won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Composer, trumpeter, santur player, vocalist, and bandleader Amir ElSaffar has been described in the New York Times as “the celebrated trumpeter and composer who explores vital connections between jazz and Arabic music." A recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, US Artist Fellowship, and Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, ElSaffar has earned an international reputation for his work combining jazz and western classical music with the microtonal Maqam music of Iraq and the Middle East.
His six-piece Two Rivers ensemble and 17-piece Rivers of Sound orchestra, combining Western and Arabic instrumentation and musical languages, have released five critically acclaimed albums and have toured throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. ElSaffar has also composed numerous works for chamber ensembles, symphony orchestras, jazz and Middle Eastern music ensembles, and transcultural works for Flamenco, Gnawa, and Raga musicians. ElSaffar is an expert trumpeter conversant not only in the language of contemporary jazz, but has created new techniques to play microtones and ornaments idiomatic to Arabic music.
He was a member of Cecil Taylor's large ensembles from 2002 to 2005, and has performed in the ensembles of Archie Shepp, Vijay Iyer, Danilo Perez, and Anthony Davis. Additionally, ElSaffar plays the santur (Iraqi hammered dulcimer) and sings, and is one of the few living performers of the centuries-old, now endangered, Iraqi maqam tradition. In 2001, after winning the Carmine Caruso Jazz Trumpet Competition, he funded a trip to Baghdad to find and study with the few surviving masters of the Iraqi Maqam, then spent five years pursuing these masters across the Middle East and Europe. Described as “an imaginative bandleader, expanding the vocabulary of the trumpet and at the same time the modern jazz ensemble" (All About Jazz), ElSaffar is an important voice in an age of cross-cultural music making.
Susie Ibarra is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipinx-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice includes composition, performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multichannel audio installations, recording, and documentary. She is the founder of Susie Ibarra Studio and, with artist—musician and engineer Jake Landau, co-founded the label and publisher Habitat Sounds.
She works to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, like musika katutubo from the Philippines, advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters, and supports initiatives in addressing water and desert climate, and women and girls education with Joudour Sahara, Morocco.
Ibarra leads several ensembles including Talking Gong Trio with Claire Chase and Alex Peh. She has recorded over 40 albums and performed in events and venues such as Carnegie Hall; the Olympics; and the Sharjah Biennial. Her book Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm was released in March 2024.
Recent honors include a 2025 Pulitzer Prize in music, 2025 Creative Capital Artist Award, 2024-2025 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program fellowship, and 2024 Charles Ives Fellowship with the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2022 Music Fellow, United States Artists 2019 Music Fellow, TED Senior Fellow 2014, and National Geographic Explorers Storyteller 2020.
“Sky Islands” takes inspiration from the musical traditions of Luzon's sky islands and represents the Montane Forest Ecosystem through a performative sonic installation. The piece explores Ibarra's percussion sound language in extended techniques for all players, featuring Philippine Northern style interlocking rhythms and melodies found in bamboo and gong and flute music of the Kalinga and Cordilleras Region in Luzon.
It is a musical call to action, highlighting Luzon's rainforests — an endangered region with 31 endemic species, including the Philippine Eagle — with the aim of connecting people to our fragile and beautiful ecosystems and drawing awareness to changing climate and global community practices.
Claire Chase, described by the New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument's ever-expanding universe," is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, curator, and teacher. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists.
She was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize for Classical Music from Lincoln Center. Chase served as the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall in the 2022-23 season and as the Music Director for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival.
Chase has performed as a soloist recently with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Helsinki Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Kyoto Symphony, and London Philharmonia.
In 2013, Chase launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036, described by The New Yorker as “a quarter-century journey with little precedent." Now in its 12th year, Density reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, educational initiatives, and a community-focused approach to cultural production. Chase is the artistic director of Density Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the flute in the 21st century.
As an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, serving as artistic director until 2017 and developing an artist-driven organizational model that resulted in the premieres of over 1,000 new works.
A deeply committed educator, Chase is Professor of the Practice in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cultural advocacy. Her discography includes twelve solo albums of world premiere recordings and dozens of collaborative recordings.
Two of the most inventive figures in contemporary music share a single evening of groundbreaking work on Thursday, October 1 at John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge. Trumpeter, vocalist and composer Amir ElSaffar and his New Quartet with Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, Tania Giannouli on microtonally tuned piano and Ole Mathisen on tenor saxophone perform, as well as percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra and her Talking Gong ensemble with pianist Alex Peh and flutist Claire Chase, guest percussionist Levy Lorenzo, and the Parker Quartet. The 7 p.m. free concert is curated and hosted by Chase and presented by the Department of Music and Arts Thursdays, a university-wide initiative sponsored by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA) that makes free performances, exhibitions, lectures and other events available to the public.
ElSaffar, whose music draws on Iraqi maqam, expanded his working trio into his New Quartet with the addition of the Greek pianist Giannouli. They first played together in 2023 at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, a meeting released last year on Maqām Records. For this concert, the piano is retuned to ElSaffar's own microtonal scheme, which pulls seven of the twelve pitches away from equal temperament, one by a full quarter tone.
Ibarra’s 2024 piece “Sky Islands” takes inspiration from the musical traditions of Luzon's sky islands and represents the Montane Forest ecosystem through a performative sonic installation featuring interlocking rhythms and melodies found in the bamboo, gong and flute music of the Kalinga and Cordilleras Region. Ibarra has described the work as a musical call to action, highlighting Luzon's rainforests — an endangered region with 31 endemic species, including the Philippine eagle. Sky Islands was a 2024 Fromm Music Foundation commission and won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Composer, trumpeter, santur player, vocalist, and bandleader Amir ElSaffar has been described in the New York Times as “the celebrated trumpeter and composer who explores vital connections between jazz and Arabic music." A recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, US Artist Fellowship, and Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, ElSaffar has earned an international reputation for his work combining jazz and western classical music with the microtonal Maqam music of Iraq and the Middle East.
His six-piece Two Rivers ensemble and 17-piece Rivers of Sound orchestra, combining Western and Arabic instrumentation and musical languages, have released five critically acclaimed albums and have toured throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. ElSaffar has also composed numerous works for chamber ensembles, symphony orchestras, jazz and Middle Eastern music ensembles, and transcultural works for Flamenco, Gnawa, and Raga musicians. ElSaffar is an expert trumpeter conversant not only in the language of contemporary jazz, but has created new techniques to play microtones and ornaments idiomatic to Arabic music.
He was a member of Cecil Taylor's large ensembles from 2002 to 2005, and has performed in the ensembles of Archie Shepp, Vijay Iyer, Danilo Perez, and Anthony Davis. Additionally, ElSaffar plays the santur (Iraqi hammered dulcimer) and sings, and is one of the few living performers of the centuries-old, now endangered, Iraqi maqam tradition. In 2001, after winning the Carmine Caruso Jazz Trumpet Competition, he funded a trip to Baghdad to find and study with the few surviving masters of the Iraqi Maqam, then spent five years pursuing these masters across the Middle East and Europe. Described as “an imaginative bandleader, expanding the vocabulary of the trumpet and at the same time the modern jazz ensemble" (All About Jazz), ElSaffar is an important voice in an age of cross-cultural music making.
Susie Ibarra is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipinx-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice includes composition, performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multichannel audio installations, recording, and documentary. She is the founder of Susie Ibarra Studio and, with artist—musician and engineer Jake Landau, co-founded the label and publisher Habitat Sounds.
She works to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, like musika katutubo from the Philippines, advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters, and supports initiatives in addressing water and desert climate, and women and girls education with Joudour Sahara, Morocco.
Ibarra leads several ensembles including Talking Gong Trio with Claire Chase and Alex Peh. She has recorded over 40 albums and performed in events and venues such as Carnegie Hall; the Olympics; and the Sharjah Biennial. Her book Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm was released in March 2024.
Recent honors include a 2025 Pulitzer Prize in music, 2025 Creative Capital Artist Award, 2024-2025 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program fellowship, and 2024 Charles Ives Fellowship with the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2022 Music Fellow, United States Artists 2019 Music Fellow, TED Senior Fellow 2014, and National Geographic Explorers Storyteller 2020.
“Sky Islands” takes inspiration from the musical traditions of Luzon's sky islands and represents the Montane Forest Ecosystem through a performative sonic installation. The piece explores Ibarra's percussion sound language in extended techniques for all players, featuring Philippine Northern style interlocking rhythms and melodies found in bamboo and gong and flute music of the Kalinga and Cordilleras Region in Luzon.
It is a musical call to action, highlighting Luzon's rainforests — an endangered region with 31 endemic species, including the Philippine Eagle — with the aim of connecting people to our fragile and beautiful ecosystems and drawing awareness to changing climate and global community practices.
Claire Chase, described by the New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument's ever-expanding universe," is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, curator, and teacher. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists.
She was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize for Classical Music from Lincoln Center. Chase served as the Richard and Barbara Debs Creative Chair at Carnegie Hall in the 2022-23 season and as the Music Director for the 2025 Ojai Music Festival.
Chase has performed as a soloist recently with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Helsinki Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Kyoto Symphony, and London Philharmonia.
In 2013, Chase launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036, described by The New Yorker as “a quarter-century journey with little precedent." Now in its 12th year, Density reimagines the solo flute literature through commissions, performances, recordings, educational initiatives, and a community-focused approach to cultural production. Chase is the artistic director of Density Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the flute in the 21st century.
As an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, serving as artistic director until 2017 and developing an artist-driven organizational model that resulted in the premieres of over 1,000 new works.
A deeply committed educator, Chase is Professor of the Practice in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cultural advocacy. Her discography includes twelve solo albums of world premiere recordings and dozens of collaborative recordings.
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