Conversations in Modern Music

Conversations in Modern Music is funded by the Jaroslav F. and Barbara S. Hulka Fund for Music in the Chapel Hill community. This series endeavors to enhance the musical interests of an informed community audience by bringing performers, composers, and music historians with an expertise in new music to UNC.

Concerts will be paired with a public lecture or open rehearsal in order to provide community audiences with opportunities to engage with composers and performers about the ideas that inform their music. We especially invite members of our Chapel Hill and greater Triangle communities to join us as we explore the language of contemporary music by engaging some its most creative practitioners.

Fall 2024

October 26 • Kafka Fragments (Kafka-Fragmente) by György Kurtág • Curtis Macomber, violin, and Susan Narucki, soprano • 8:00 pm • Moeser Auditorium
Talk TBA

Stellar new music champions Susan Narucki (soprano) and Curtis Macomber (violin) in two rare performances of the hellishly difficult but exhilaratingly beautiful Kafka Fragments. Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s seventy-five-minute multi-movement work uses fragments of texts from the diaries of Franz Kafka, to create a kaleidoscopic world of sound, sense and expression. Each fragment – some lasting less than a minute –is singular and potent; each movement offers a glimpse of a distinct viewpoint, and each gains in meaning through juxtapositions throughout the work as a whole. -New Music USA

Spring 2025

February 13 • Hub New Music • 7:30 pm • Moeser Auditorium
Talk TBA

Dubbed “contemporary chamber blazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music is a “prime mover of piping hot 21st-century repertoire” (Washington Post). Founded in 2013, Hub has commissioned dozens of new works for its distinct combination of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. The “nimble quartet of winds and strings” (NPR) actively collaborates with today’s most celebrated composers on projects that traverse today’s richly diverse musical landscape.