CONVERSATION SERIES: MAKING SPACE AT THE ARMORY
ARTIST TALK: GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS
friday, october 3, 2025 at 6:30pm veterans room featuring
11,000 Strings composer Georg Friedrich Haas
in conversation with artist, composer, and Director of the Computer Music Center at Columbia University Seth A. Cluett
11,000 Strings is made possible with support from Joan Granlund. In-kind support is provided by Apple.
Leadership support for the Armory’s artistic programming has been generously provided by the Anita K. Hersh Philanthropic Fund, Charina Endowment Fund, Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, the Pinkerton Foundation, the Starr Foundation, and the Thompson Family Foundation.
Major support was also provided by the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, the SHS Foundation, and Wescustogo Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature as well as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.
Armory board members include Chairman Emeritus Elihu Rose, PhD; Co-Chairs Adam R. Flatto and Amanda J.T. Riegel; President Rebecca Robertson; Vice Presidents David Fox and Pablo Legorreta; Vice President and Treasurer Emanuel Stern; Marina Abramović; Abigail Baratta; Joyce F. Brown; Cora Cahan; Hélène Comfort; Paul Cronson; Tina R. Davis; Jessie Ding; Sanford B. Ehrenkranz; Roberta Garza; Kim Greenberg; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins; Samhita Jayanti; Edward G. Klein, Brigadier General NYNG (Ret.); Ralph Lemon; Jason Moran; Janet C. Ross; Stephanie Sharp; Joan Steinberg; Dabie H. Tsai; Avant-Garde Chair Adrienne Katz; Directors Emeriti Harrison M. Bains, Jr. and Angela E. Thompson; and Wade F.B. Thompson, Founding Chairman, 2000–2009.
Cover image: Stephanie Berger Photography.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS
Georg Friedrich Haas (born 1953 in Graz, Austria) taught at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (lastly as associate professor) and at the Music Academy in Basel. In 2013 he was appointed MacDowell Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York and since then has taught composition there. Haas feels both rooted in the European tradition and strongly influenced by the aesthetic freedom of American composers like Charles Ives, Harry Partch, John Cage and James Tenney. He also has repeatedly made reference to the musical concepts of the composers Giacinto Scelsi and Ivan Wyschnegradsky. In a survey published in the January 2017 issue of the Italian music periodical Classic Voice, 100 esteemed experts were asked to choose “the most beautiful music composed since 2000.” By a wide margin, they awarded first place to Haas. His wide-ranging output, including numerous works for large orchestra, for chamber orchestra, instrumental concertos, eight operas, eleven string quartets, a variety of other chamber music and vocal works, etc., is constantly finding new audiences worldwide – and not only at special new music events; his compositions are also reaching a traditionally schooled public. Haas has devoted his work to the utopian ideal of creating a new music that is both expressive and beautiful – not despite but because of the fact that it is new.
NEXT AT THE ARMORY
ARTISTS STUDIO GUILLERMO E. BROWN
OCTOBER 11
Drummer, composer, and creator Guillermo E. Brown pushes music performance to new heights through musical collaborations, sound installations, and singular theatrical works. Brown comes to the Veterans Room for an insightful overview of the past, present, and future of his work, including some of his Creative Capital projects and new compositions played on a new audio-visual musical instrument he is building as part of the Doris Duke Foundation Performing Arts Technology Lab. His collaborators include percussionist Nêgah Santos, multi-instrumentalist Yusuke Yamamoto, and drummer and multi-instrumentalist Cinque Kemp.
SETH A. CLUETT
Seth Cluett is a composer and artist whose quiet, patient music explores the territory between the senses, with a compelling attention to perception. His work is driven by themes of ecological resilience, often expressed through materials found in nature. Cluett’s “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). His research interests and critical writings investigate spatial audio and sensory computation. Cluett is on the composition faculty at Columbia University, where he is Director of the Computer Music Center. Since 2017, he has served as Artist-in-Residence at Nokia Bell Labs.
THE FAGGOTS AND THEIR FRIENDS BETWEEN REVOLUTIONS
DECEMBER 2 – 14
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
This cult book of fables and myths serves as the starting point for a new music theater adaptation from the creative minds of composer Philip Venables and director Ted Huffman. Together they conjure up a world that takes the original text on a kaleidoscopic journey that ignores boundaries just like the characters on stage do, drawing on theater, dance, and song from the Baroque to Broadway and beyond. The performers serve as actors, storytellers, and musicians all rolled into one, continually swapping roles while doing away with gender and genre norms and replacing them with unapologetic individuality and a lust for life. The resulting cabaret-like spectacle is both vulnerable and daring, a fantastic parable hiding a political manifesto for survival that gives voice to the marginalized and oppressed everywhere.
