Emerald City Music to Receive $15,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Commissioning New Work by Fred Onovwerosuoke

Composer Fred Onovwerosuoke

Emerald City Music to Receive $15,000 Grant
from the National Endowment for the Arts

Commissioning New Work by Fred Onovwerosuoke

Premiere Performances February 9 & 10
Presented by Emerald City Music in Seattle & Olympia

Concert Details: www.emeraldcitymusic.org/season/oboe-oboe

Seattle, WA — Emerald City Music is pleased to announce it has been approved by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for a Grants for Arts Projects award of $15,000. This grant will support a core pillar of Emerald City Music’s mission and history: supporting the creation of new works for chamber music settings –– specifically the commissioning of a new composition by Fred Onovwerosuoke titled Concertino for Two Solo Oboes and String Quintet (A Tale of the Fisherfolks), which will be premiered at Emerald City Music’s next concerts on February 9 and 10, 2024. This project was sparked in collaboration between the University of Cincinnati-College Conservatory of Music and Emerald City Music.

In total, the NEA will award 958 Grants for Arts Projects awards totaling more than $27.1 million that were announced as part of its first round of fiscal year 2024 grants.

“The NEA is delighted to announce this grant to Emerald City Music, which is helping contribute to the strength and well-being of the arts sector and local community,” said National Endowment for the Arts Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “We are pleased to be able to support this community and help create an environment where all people have the opportunity to live artful lives.”

Kristin Lee, Artistic Director of Emerald City Music says:

“We are deeply honored to receive this distinguished grant from The National Endowment for the Arts—our first time in the eight seasons of Emerald City Music's history! This award not only gives us the opportunity to present the innovative composition by Fred Onovwerosuoke but also solidifies our organization's role within the vibrant communities of Seattle and Olympia.”

Onovwerosuoke’s new composition, Concertino for Two Solo Oboes and String Quintet (A Tale of the Fisherfolks), features an unusual, yet intentional, instrumentation: two oboes and string quintet. Works with this instrumentation are extremely rare and were only popular in the baroque era with composers like Tomaso Albinoni and Antonio Vivaldi. Bringing a new contemporary voice to this instrumentation opens opportunities for myriad future arts presenters to similarly diversify the canon of classical music.

Commissioned composer Fred Onovwerosuoke was born in Ghana of Nigerian parents, and writes music that bears influences from Africa, the Caribbean and the American Deep South. “FredO,” as friends call him, has spent time in over thirty African countries researching and analyzing some of Africa’s rich music traditions. About his music, he writes: "I see hidden across Africa a gold-mine of unlimited musical scales and modes, melodic and harmonic traditions, and, yes, rhythms - abundant yet largely untapped. My compositions are informed by my travels around the world, and each piece is harnessed and nurtured by an African sensibility that is unmistakable and genuine."

Onovwerosuoke’s influences are wide and varied, and he is much at home discussing Beethoven, Debussy and Stravinsky as well as foremost exponents of various traditional musics. In 1994 he founded the St. Louis African Chorus to help nurture African choral music as a mainstream repertoire for performance and education in America. Today, the organization’s mission has broadened to include classical/art music by lesser-known composers particularly of African descent and renamed Intercultural Music Initiative. ​​​Onovwerosuoke’s numerous awards include multiple ASCAP Awards, American Music Center Award, Meet-The-Composer Award, and Brannen-Cooper Brothers Award. He has published several books: Songs of Africa in several volumes, Twenty-Four Studies in African Rhythms, Twelve African Songs for Solo Voice & Piano and Afro Caribbean Mass for Mixed Voices & Piano. Fred Onovwerosuoke serves on the boards of various professional bodies and maintains an active schedule as composer-in-residence, guest conductor or speaker on the subject of art music by African descent composers.

About Emerald City Music:

Emerald City Music (ECM) is the Pacific Northwest home for eclectic, intimate, and vibrant classical chamber music experiences. Deemed "the beacon for the casual-classical movement" (CityArts), ECM hosts world-renowned musicians in unique concert experiences. Founded in 2015, Emerald City Music produces and tours seven productions annually, with each tour visiting Seattle’s South Lake Union (415 Westlake, a chic contemporary venue with an open bar), Olympia’s Minnaert Center (a 495 seat modern concert hall), a once annual concert at the Bellingham Music Festival, and an annual concert in New York City.

ECM has gained recognition regionally and nationally as a major player in the chamber music scene. Artistic Director Kristin Lee –– a touring violinist awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant and a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center –– is regarded for her innovative programming that both honors the tradition of chamber music while expanding the genre’s boundary past common limits. Emerald City Music made a name for itself beginning in its second season with a national collaborative commission with Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams, and has continued to press the boundary of chamber music with accolades like a tour of Steve Reich’s iconic and rare Music for 18 Musicians, a pitch-black performance of Georg Haas’s “In the Dark” quartet, and the West Coast debut of the Danish folk group The Dreamers’ Circus.

ECM values real, authentic connection and holds the belief that music possesses the innate power to connect people, inclusive of varying backgrounds and perspectives. Over eight years, artists from every corner of the globe have visited Emerald City Music to prove just that: there exists a special connection between artist and listener that only music can facilitate.

For more information on other projects included in the NEA’s grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.