Tribeca New Music presents POLITICS and PREMIERES featuring six new works, including the world premiere of LOSER: The Wit and Wisdom of Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States of America, a five-part musical portrait written for five instruments and voice by composer Arthur Gottschalk, and sung by baritone Timothy Jones. The premieres continue with Mariners, Small Spaces, and Coaster by  ShoutHouse founder composer/pianist Will Healy along with Good For You, and Trio for Two Violins and Cello by composer/violinist George Meyer.

• LOSER: The Wit and Wisdom of Donald J. Trump 45th President of the United States of America is a sextet for five instruments and voice sung by baritone Timothy Jones. The work, which addresses issues of misogyny, racism, and tyranny, was commissioned by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and written by composer Arthur Gottschalk using public domain quotations by Donald Trump. Gottschalk describes the work as "delicious irony," with the words of a would-be autocrat sung by a suave and urbane African American gentleman. The premiere was scheduled for July 2022, but was canceled after a performer tested positive for COVID-19. Despite the work's controversial nature, Gottschalk believes it necessary to reflect the time in which we live and to prevent similar political monstrosities from happening again.

Arthur Gottschalk   A man whose music is described as “infectious, loud, and fun” (Gramophone Magazine) and “fascinatingly strange” (BBC Music Magazine), award-winning composer Arthur Gottschalk is Professor of Music Composition at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received the Gold Medal and Record of the Year in Music Composition from the Global Music Awards for his Requiem: For the Living, and was honored with a prestigious Bogliasco Fellowship, as well as the First Prize of the Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Originale of Corciano, Italy for his Concerto for Violin and Symphonic Winds.

Timothy Jones (bass-baritone) enjoys a reputation as a charismatic presence on operatic and concert stages throughout the United States, Europe and South America. His performance of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts's Einstein on Mercer Street is featured on PNME's recent recording Against the Emptiness. The Boston Globe hailed his voice as "stentorian and honeyed" and The Chicago Tribunecalled his "complete connection with the text extraordinary."

• Small Spaces (a quartet for flute, violin, viola, and vibraphone) will have its New York Premiere by Will Healy.  “Small Spaces was written in the small space of my Brooklyn apartment in the winter of 2021. It was drawn from a short piano recording I made two years ago in the equally cozy confines of an apartment on the Upper West Side. Sometimes, he inspiration for a piece comes from a phrase, story, concept, or the timbres of a group of instruments playing together. With this piece, however, the initial seed of an idea came to me shortly after receiving the commission, long before the COVID-19 pandemic delayed all concerts and activities. I improvised the opening ostinato on the piano, with its irregular, bouncing rhythm, and recorded it as a message to my future self to be developed into this piece. I carried this one-minute recording around with me on my phone through four apartments, two relationships, and countless other musical projects, while my life and the world around me transformed dramatically. Looking back at that initial recording feels like a time capsule, and it inspired a very different piece in this current moment than it would have in 2019.” --WH

• Mariners (NY Premiere) by Will Healy is written for clarinet, violin, and piano. “I began writing Mariners in a small town in Italy, where I was doing my best to write nothing at all. I had been composing continuously for a few months through the cold, dark New York winter, and had been looking forward to a vacation. I was playing Chopin at the piano in my room at the Bogliasco Foundation, near the city of Genoa, and was struck by the beauty of the setting. The doors were open to the ocean and azure blue stretched far into the horizon. I began improvising some simple textures, imitating the layers of melody and harmony in Chopin’s preludes. Back in Brooklyn, where I could hear the foghorns from the harbor miles away reverberating through my apartment, I thought about that setting often. That is where the piece was completed. It was premiered in Door County, Wisconsin, at the Midsummer’s Music Festival in July 2022.”  --WH

• George Meyer will perform the world premiere of his Trio for Two Violins and Cello, drawing from his classical and bluegrass training under his father, five-time Grammy Award-winning bassist and composer Edgar Meyer. The Trio uses a wonderful instrumentation too little used since the time of Bach, combining Indian classical music, the energy of bluegrass improvisation, and his own unique fiddle music background. The last movement features a rhythmic bowing idea inspired by the virtuosic playing of the great Swedish band Väsen.

• Coaster and Good for You (two World Premieres), for piano and violin, continue an on-going collaboration between pianist/composer Will Healy (Coaster) and violinist/composer George Meyer (Good for You). Intricate and sophisticated rhythmic flavor is drawn from jazz, newgrass color, and improvisation, which sets the tone for these engaging works. 

Will Healy is the founder and artistic director of ShoutHouse, a collective of hip-hop, jazz, and classical musicians. Recent ShoutHouse performances have taken place at the Kennedy Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and (le) Poisson Rouge, and their music has been featured on WNYC’s “New Sounds,” among other radio programs. Their debut album, Cityscapes, was released in 2019 by New Amsterdam records, and Healy’s recent 30-minute piece for chorus and ShoutHouse, Orbits, was premiered at Roulette Intermedium in 2022.
Healy’s awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Scholarship, two ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, Vassar College’s W.K. Rose Fellowship, a J-Fund commission, and residencies at the Bogliasco, Willapa Bay AiR, and Brush Creek Foundations. Healy has written chamber and orchestral pieces for the New York Philharmonic’s Bandwagon and YPC Concert series performances, including an original work for rapper and orchestra performed by the New York Philharmonic. He holds an M.M. in Composition from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Samuel Adler, John Corigliano, and Steven Stucky.

Violinist/composer George Meyer has performed his own compositions in a variety of settings, including Chamber Music Northwest, Bravo! Vail, the Savannah Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Telluride and RockyGrass Bluegrass Festivals, the Charles Ives Concert Series, the Rome Chamber Music Festival, and the Kyoto International Festival. He has appeared in performance with his father, Edgar Meyer, and with Mike Marshall, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Fred Sherry, and Paul Neubauer. Born in Nashville, he holds degrees from Harvard College and the Juilliard School.

POLITICS and PREMIERES is made possible in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.