Summer Solstice Celebration

Metropolis Ensemble

The Grammy-nominated nonprofit Metropolis Ensemble is dedicated to commissioning and producing ambitious projects in contemporary music. Since its founding in 2006 by conductor Andrew Cyr, the NYC-based ensemble has brought together expert musicians for each project, expanding opportunities for emerging composers and performers while captivating audiences through bold collaborations and inventive instrumentations.

Metropolis has premiered hundreds of new works at venues such as the Hollywood Bowl, Kennedy Center, Met Museum, Lincoln Center, BAM, Celebrate Brooklyn(!), Brooklyn Steel, New Victory Theatre, and on The Tonight Show. The ensemble’s creative partnerships extend to leading cultural institutions, including Creative Time, COSM LA, Dacamera, Cambodian Living Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, and BBG.

Metropolis Ensemble’s studio recordings have earned national and international acclaim. Most recently, The Blind Banister (Timo Andres/Nonesuch) was nominated for the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album and featured in The New York Times, Gramophone, and on NPR as one of the Best Classical Albums of 2024. Other notable recordings include Telekinesis (Tyondai Braxton/Nonesuch), which earned two 2023 Opus Klassik nominations, and Homestretch (Timo Andres/Nonesuch), recorded at Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall, for which producer David Frost won the 2014 Grammy for Classical Producer of the Year. The ensemble’s recording of Dreamscapes, featuring Vivian Fung’s Violin Concerto—commissioned and recorded by Metropolis—won Canada’s 2013 Juno Award for Best Classical Composition. Their debut album, Concertos (Avner Dorman/Naxos), featuring conductor Andrew Cyr and mandolinist Avi Avital, earned their first Grammy nominations in 2010.

Through groundbreaking collaborations and acclaimed performances, Metropolis Ensemble continues to redefine contemporary classical music and inspire audiences worldwide.

Matthew Evan Taylor

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor has been hailed as a “risk taker” (Neil De La Flor, Huffington Post), who has “…wrestled with the societal boundaries of Black artistry only to blast them apart…” (Dr. Kori Hill, I Care if You Listen) by making music that is “insistent and defiant…envelopingly hypnotic” (Alan Young, Lucid Culture).

His work includes concert music, such as okussa: for Damascus (2023, commissioned by the Next Festival for Emerging Artists) for string orchestra; chamber music like Get Up! (2022, commissioned by Timothy McAllister) for alto saxophone and piano; online streaming projects, most notably Postcards to the Met (2021–2022, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art), which has accrued over 500,000 views on Instagram; and free improvisations as in his acclaimed Unheard Mixtapes (2020–2021, commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble; New Amsterdam Records).

Dr. Taylor calls his recent work AfroPneumaism: a liberatory practice that centers the human breath as a primary organizational structure of music. These compositions subvert the accepted assumptions of virtuosity, precision, and the sublime while harnessing the breathing process as a means to celebrate the humanity of performers and their witnesses. In 2025, Dr. Taylor will release his first LP, Life Returns, which was recorded live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022.

Erik Hall

Erik Hall is a musician, composer, and record producer in southwest Michigan.

He has recorded and performed solo, as In Tall Buildings, and with NOMO, Wild Belle, His Name Is Alive, and Lean Year, appearing at Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, Coachella, Pitchfork Music Festival, SXSW, WOMEX, Montreal Jazz Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, and on Conan and The Tonight Show.

As a producer/engineer Erik has worked on records for Lean Year (Western Vinyl), Natalie Bergman (Third Man Records), Small Sur (Worried Songs), and Justin Walter (Kranky).

He composed the score for the feature film The Night Clerk and contributed music to The Mountain, which premiered worldwide at the Venice International Film Festival and in the U.S. at Sundance.

In 2020 Erik released his solo re-creation of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record. He followed in 2023 with a multitracked reinterpretation of Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato.

DITHER

The electric guitar quartet Dither is dedicated to an eclectic mix of experimental repertoire that spans composed, improvised, and electronic music. Formed in 2007, the quartet has performed across the U.S. and abroad, presenting new commissions, original compositions, multimedia works, and large guitar ensemble pieces. Dither’s members are Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore, and Brendon Randall-Myers.

Dither has performed and collaborated with artists including Eve Beglarian, Nels Cline, Fred Frith, Mary Halvorson, David Lang, Ikue Mori, Phill Niblock, Lee Ranaldo, Laurie Spiegel, Lois V. Vierk, Yo La Tengo, and John Zorn. They have brought their live 13-guitar rendition of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint to the Barbican Center, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, the Ellnora Guitar Festival and WNYC’s New Sounds Live. The quartet has also performed at the Guggenheim Museum, the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Performa Biennial, the Amsterdam Electric Guitar Heaven Festival, Hong Kong’s Fringe Theater, the Winter Jazz Festival, and the Borealis Festival.

Dither produces an annual Extravaganza, a raucous festival of creative music and art, which has been called an “official concert on the edge” by The New Yorker and “the here and now of New York’s postclassical music scene” by Time Out New York. They have released four full-length albums, including Dither plays Zorn on Tzadik, featuring the premiere recordings of several of John Zorn’s improvisational game pieces, which was named one of the year’s “best avant albums” by Rolling Stone.

Georgia Mills

Georgia Markakis Mills is an American conductor, pianist, and maker of classical and contemporary music.

Showcasing versatility across orchestral repertoire, opera, and new music, Georgia has conducted acclaimed ensembles and collaborated with such artists as Chris Thile, George Lewis, Nico Muhly, Augusta Read Thomas, Dylan Mattingly, Darian Donovan Thomas, Modney, Julia Wolfe, Louis Andriessen, Judd Greenstein, and Courtney Bryan.

In 2024, Georgia led the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra in a concert featuring Beethoven’s Eroica symphony and conducted the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra in a program of works by Stravinsky, Copland, Nardi, and Mozart. She led the award-winning new music group Alarm Will Sound as their first guest donductor in a program of premieres along with Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite, and conducted the International Contemporary Ensemble in their program featuring works by Courtney Bryan for the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival. In recent months Georgia led the Berkshire Symphony Orchestra in a concert of Beethoven, Debussy, Mazzoli, and Stravinsky in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and led the New Conductors Orchestra in Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye in New York.

Georgia completed her Doctor of Musical Arts in conducting at the Eastman School of Music in May 2024, when she was awarded the Walter Hagen Conducting Prize and was nominated for the Lecture Recital Prize in recognition of her research on micropolyphonic transformations in the music of György Ligeti. At Eastman, she served as assistant conductor of the Musica Nova Ensemble under the direction of conductor Brad Lubman. Georgia held graduate teaching awards in conducting and music theory at Eastman, and was an adjunct professor of orchestration at Roberts Wesleyan University.