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School of Music

  • Mike Block, cello, and Sandeep Das, tabla

Southern Exposure New Music Series

Southern Exposure 2019–2020 Season

Shows are free and take place at 7:30 p.m. in the UofSC School of Music Recital Hall, 813 Assembly St., Columbia SC, unless otherwise noted.

Our wide-ranging 2019-20 season, united as always by musicians and musical programming of the highest caliber, features members of the Silk Road Ensemble, an acclaimed flutist, a performance competition, and a legendary string quartet plus chorus.

Mike Block, cello, and Sandeep Das, tabla

Mike Block, cello, and Sandeep Das, tabla

Friday, Sept. 27, 2019
8:00 p.m., School of Music Recital Hall

Pioneering cellist Mike Block and tabla virtuoso Sandeep Das are members of Yo-Yo Ma’s esteemed Silk Road Ensemble. Like the Silk Road, their duo is a melding of East and West, celebrating cross-cultural musical connections and featuring two of the world’s most creative and masterful musicians. The duo will perform compositions from Western Classical and North Indian Hindustani traditions, adaptations of music from around the world, and several of their own original works.

Passionate about connecting communities through music, Block is at home in a wide range of musical styles, and has been hailed by Ma as the “ideal musician of the 21st Century.” He is among the first cellists to stand and move while playing, and was the first standing cellist to perform at Carnegie Hall, in a performance characterized by The New York Times as “Breathless … Half dance, half dare.”  

Das, a 2019 Guggenhem Fellow, is one of the world’s leading tabla (north Indian drums) players. Like Block, he often creates his own music, and has been featured in concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Royal Albert Hall, and the Concertgebouw. Das is one of the few Indian classical musicians who has collaborated, performed with, and composed for major symphony orchestras, string quartets and jazz musicians.

Claire Chase

Claire Chase, flute

Friday, Nov. 15, 2019
7:30 p.m., School of Music Recital Hall

Claire Chase, pathbreaking flutist and founder of ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) is well on her way to becoming a New Music icon. The New York Times has called her “the most important flutist of our time.” “Technically brilliant, audacious in her approach to programming and presentation, cyclonic in her energy, she proves that difficult music can give delight” (The New Yorker). Chase has commissioned and given the world premieres of hundreds of new works for flute in performances throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and awarded the Avery Fisher Career Prize in 2017.

Chase’s Southern Exposure performance will include Marcos Balter’s 45-minute work Pan, in a new version for solo flute and electronics. Pan is an homage to the Greek goat god of the Wild, depicting his dualist capacities for creation and destruction. In it, Chase plays, sings, speaks, and acts; the work “feels like an extension of her torrential spirit” (The New Yorker).

Living Earth Show

Savvy Chamber Competition – 3 Ensemble Finalists

Cancelled, due to Covid-19
Saturday, Feb. 22, 2020
7:30 p.m., School of Music Recital Hall

The nation’s first chamber music competition to evaluate both artistic excellence and creative event design returns, now in a new single-concert format on Southern Exposure. Competing for a grand prize residency in 2020-21 at UofSC valued at $10,000, three finalist ensembles, selected in the fall from a pool of more than 50 applicants, will each perform 20-minute sets. The 2020 finalist groups are: the Beo String Quartet; RighteousGIRLS, a flute and piano duo; and Founders, a quintet comprised of violin, cello, bass, trumpet, and clarinet. Beo will be performing a program that traces the evolution of the string quartet, including a triple quartet written by the group’s violinist, Sean Neukom. RighteousGIRLS takes aim at UofSC graduate Andy Akiho’s 21 in an innovative arrangement that includes electronics and improvisation. Founders reimagines and responds to Olivier Messiaen’s 20th-century masterpiece, Quartet for the End of Time.

The Savvy Competition was created in the summer of 2013 to reward groups going above and beyond the traditional concert format. Winning ensembles include groups that have gone on to great success in the field and returned to UofSC on numerous occasions for concerts and classes: C Street Brass (2013), The Fourth Wall (2014), Earsight Duo (2015), invoke (2016), and The Living Earth Show (2017).  Southern Exposure, Spark, and the SAVVY Musician in Action are delighted to bring a reenvisioned competition and concert back to Columbia. 


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