2025-2026 Season

New Cartographies

On October 26, 2025, counter)induction presents an evening of compelling contemporary chamber music exploring the full spectrum of human experience through sound. The program opens with Alvin Singleton’s deeply moving “Jasper Drag” for piano, cello, and violin—a profound meditation on collective memory inscribed to James Byrd, Jr., while Suzanne Sorkin’s “Swept” features darting clarinet lines alongside cello. The evening continues with Eric Moes “Amicable Couplings,” a 2025 composition that playfully references organ and harpsichord coupling mechanisms through unusual registral doublings, followed by Douglas Boyce's the vastness hitherto spoken of is as great in one direction as in another for piano trio, drawing its title and affect from William James's his discussion of "extensity" as an "entirely peculiar kind of feeling." The program concludes with Kyle Bartlett’s “Dream Journal”—a haunting work for cello and piano that translates the composer’s dreams into music, capturing the fragmented logic of sleep where rational thought dissolves into surreal poetry.

Ephemeral Circuits

counter)induciton will return to Williamsburg Biannual in early February for an event that explores the architecture of this new space through the distribution of music. Bartlett's work for solo cello, One May Come, explores the poetics of anticipation, allowing expressive silence to ballast the hesitance and emotion of awaiting the lover’s arrival. Boyce's In Stylus Fantasticus for clarinets is a 24-tone exploration of the dimensionality of the musical space of pitch and rhythm. Fausto Romitelli's "Trash TV Trance" (2002) is a groundbreaking solo electric guitar work that fuses contemporary classical composition with rock influences, demanding complex techniques and extensive effects to achieve its psychedelic sound. And to bring the performers back together, Jukka Tiensuu's Rubato explores the relationship between the individual and the collective. All players share a single melodic line but perform it with free tempos, creating ever-shifting layers of polyphony.

Ars Poetica

On March 27, 2026 at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, "Ars Poetica" explores craft's role in music across cultures through an evening meditation on the intermix of cultures, music, and poetry. The program features Kyle Bartlett's *Before*, imagining music's foundational stage through gentle timbral manipulations; Christian Carey's atmospheric *Spell Weaver* from his *Proteus* cycle; Nils Vigeland's *Quodlibet*, tracking an undergraduate's journey while deconstructing Beatles songs; Yoon-Ji Lee's premiere *Untamed Things*, exploring wildness as resistance through rapidly transforming gestures inspired by Jack Halberstam's *Wild Things*; and Douglas Boyce & Marlanda Dekine's multimedia *Ars Poetica (re: orchestrated)*, which reconnects with ancient oral storytelling traditions by drawing from Western Art Music, Gullah Geechee cultural roots, and West/Central African influences to combine poetry and musical performance in this approximately one-hour evening of contemporary chamber music performed on piano, violin, viola, cello, guitar, clarinet, and spoken word.