Metropolis Ensemble's founding harpist Bridget Kibbey kicks-off this new initiative with a concert presentation entitled Music Box, featuring the world-premieres of six newly commissioned works for solo harp.

Music Box gathers music by composers born in other countries who now call the United States home. Moved by both their individual stories and their music, Bridget solicited new work whose inspiration is based in folk idioms from each composer's country of origin as well as from their own personal narratives. The harp is an instrument emblematic of storytelling and folklore. Music Box will allow the harp to carry this tradition forward into the 21st century, giving expression to the diverse voices that make up contemporary American culture.

I would especially like to thank June Wu for her extraordinary leadership and commitment to our performing artists and composers and to all those who contributed so generously to The June Wu Artist Fund to make this series possible. I would also like to thank the good people at (Le) Poisson Rouge, David Handler, Justin Cantor, and Ronen Givony as well as the able staff at LPR for being such important advocates and supporters of our community of emerging musicians and composers. Special thanks as well to Jessica Healy and Buffalo Trace, Jakub Ciupinski, Zipora Fried, Kristin Lee, Candice Madey, Jennifer McCrae, Andrew Schorr, Jonathan Schorr, Sara Menker, Jennifer Salomon, Richard Salomon and Laura Landro, Roy and Diana Vagelos, and tonight's host committee for their efforts to broaden our community of fans, friends, and supporters.

So, tonight, we are an orchestra of one, yet in Bridget's hands (and feet), she will sound like many! Thank you and enjoy tonight's show.

Aside from drinking great beer and listening to fabulous bands, we spent every night joining hundreds of local Bretons, packed into massive halls to dance to traditional pipers or bands in large circles, arm-in-arm. With each new reel or change in the music, the locals instinctively changed their steps to a new regional dance. I was in shock. Citizens of all ages knew these complicated steps, and joyously danced away the nights, celebrating their region. I was schooled by the eighty-three-year-old woman to my right wearing stilettos. With a proud gleam in her eye, she firmly grasped my arm, yelling "Comme ç̧a!!"

With sore feet and a heavy dose of whimsy, I walked away from the festival having witnessed folk music and dance as powerful means to creating and celebrating one's community...

I came home with this music fresh in my ears and decided to try my hand at arranging a couple reels - Templehouse and Mountain Road. But, more than that, I decided to create a project that would showcase some of the folk music of some of my very own NYC neighbors: composers born in other countries who have immigrated to the United States, weaving their rich cultural backgrounds into the American fabric.

My hope was two-fold: that audiences would have a whimsical taste of these cultures, much like my experience in Brittany; and two, using their own folk heritage as a springboard, that each composer would stretch the boundaries of the harp, creating new solo works for the instrument.

Welcome to Music Box! I hope you enjoy encountering the harp and each of these cultures as much as I have, and thank you for joining me this evening. I'd like to offer my sincerest gratitude to Andrew Cyr and Metropolis Ensemble for collaborating with me to present this project, to each of the composers for their incredible contributions, to Concert Artists Guild, and to all my friends, fans, and family who have supported and encouraged me in my musical endeavors and beyond.

Much of this process involves searching for ways to make the material sound resonant on the harp. In this way, the piece builds upon my 2005 harp cycle Every Lover is A Warrior, where I worked with folk songs from Appalachia, France, and Hungary.

Since I spent my first nineteen years in Canada and many of its folk songs are as familiar to me as breathing, choosing and working with its songs presented a special challenge. I needed to cast aside my own associations with the songs, to hear them in a new light, and to mine the musical material for its own intrinsic beauty.

A la Claire Fontaine is a lyrical French Canadian folk song about lost love. I used changes in modality and unusual non-diatonic pitch collections to capture the bittersweet essence of the original words: "It has been a long time since I have loved you; I will never forget you."

I's the B'ye is an irrepressible Newfoundland jig, its title in dialect: "I am the boy who builds the boat, and I am the boy who sails her..." I interwove continuous melodic layers with cross-rhythms against the tune and played with the coloristic possibilities of harp harmonics, making a hybrid that resembles a Maritime jig fused with a Baroque toccata.

The Huron Carol ('Twas in the moon of Wintertime) is a Christmas song introduced to Canada by the Jesuits with the goal of converting its Native people. It describes the birth of Jesus in a silent, snow-covered winter landscape. Wise men's gifts are replaced by furs and pelt harvested by the native people in the woods. This movement links the mystery of Christian mysticism with the pristine natural environment in Ontario, the county's central region.

My prelude - the opening movement - features bell-like sonorities; the postlude is a perpetual-motion movement that accumulates resonance over the entire range of the harp, evoking the emergence of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis).

Northern Lights was written on a private commission from the Boston-based couple Conrad and Louise Golaski to celebrate their 40th Wedding Anniversary in 2011.

Bandoneon, inspired by the expressive accordion-like instrument regarded by many as the soul of the Argentinean Tango, was initially scored as the second movement of my Cape Cod Concerto, for clarinet, piano, and orchestra.

My dear assistant Charles Whalen and I specially adapted both pieces for the wonderfully talented harpist, Bridget Kibbey.

The most common "glitch" technique is similar to the sound of a skipping CD, except here the effect is notated into rhythmic patterns that correspond to certain musical material and forms, transforming the sounds associated with digital reading errors into something aesthetic. In Glitch Box, I have also created a live electronic element in which dozens of musical cells, modular pre-composed musical material that can be activated spontaneously, combined with the texture, and manipulated at will. This allows for live improvisation within predetermined parameters when 'played' by the laptop performer throughout the piece. The combined results mix the dry amplified signal from the harp with processed and pre-generated sounds to create the impression that the acoustic harp and electronics sound as a single instrument.

It is a spiritual, a lament and a reverence for fragile beauty. Las Pequenas Flores is composed with a section for the soloist to improvise on. The intention to compose this piece for solo harp was to capture it's delicacy and power, as well as am homage to music for plucked strings in traditional and contemporary music.

The piece plays around the very subtle difference between a steady 4/4 meter and that of a 17/16 meter when played in a fast tempo. This extra sixteenth note adds some sort of anxiety to the mix that makes one look for other "downbeats" to relate to.

In this piece, one can find elements of American minimalism, in which apparently-distant rhythmical elements can actually groove together in a unifying larger cycle, as well as one of the most used motifs in club music: the never-ending triplets against a steady beat. Elements of Indian rhythms techniques are equally found in the middle transition section, which uses time compression that leads the piece to the end of the "party". In short, it is all about time and groove, using an instrument that is not known for its club-capacity!

I was immediately taken with the use of the harp as a raw, vibrant and above all, rhythmic instrument and this piece is a kind of homage to the Venezuelan tradition. Of course, being a solo harp piece, the soloist needs to be both lead and rhythm section - making for a pretty challenging piece - the third movement in particular is packed with fiendish cross-rhythms which no mortal harpist should be able to play.

Composers often struggle to write for the harp, not just because of the technical difficulties of the instrument, but also, I think, because everything sounds so beautiful - it can be hard to get variety when even the harshest dissonance sounds so sweet. But my instinct was to embrace this sweetness rather than deny it and I was struck by the fact that what came out as I started writing the piece reminded me of the sound of the old wind-up music boxes we've all seen lying around our relatives houses.

"Caja de Música" - Spanish for "music box" - seemed an appropritate title, and the resulting piece, in three movements, is a strange hybrid of these two totally unconnected traditions. There are strong hints of Joropo throughout - including a 3-beats-to-a-bar time signature at the start of all three movements; but there is also something of that music box naivety here too.

It has been my great pleasure to get to know and work with Bridget Kibbey these last couple of years, who is deservedly gaining a reputation as one of the finest harpists of her generation. Her commitment to my new piece from the earliest sketches to the finishing touches has been a model that I only wish other players would follow and it is an infinitely richer piece thanks to her thoughtful contributions and suggestions during the process of our transatlantic collaborations. It is also a pleasure to work again with Metropolis Ensemble, a group of extraordinarily talented and spirited musicians I have had the pleasure to write music for on many occasions.