Support the next generation of international composers

Support our 10th Momenta Festival
with a tax-deductible donation to Momenta
this holiday giving season

Celebrating Charles Ives at 150 with Momenta, composer Eun Young Lee and bassoonist Adrian Morejon

​I hope you are enjoying the holiday season. While Momenta is dispersed for the holidays (albeit 3/4 of us in Connecticut!), we are busy planning next season and fundraising for the tenth annual Momenta Festival. We've already secured the venues and booked the dates, so please mark the new 2025 calendars you all got as holiday gifts:

October 4 and 5, 2025 at Broadway Presbyterian Church
October 8 and 9, 2025 at Americas Society

All concerts will be FREE and will start at 7pm!

Looking forward - Emilie writes:

​Fall 2025 will mark the Momenta Festival's tenth anniversary: a decade of musical camaraderie amongst ourselves, our guest artists, and our audiences. With your help--particularly this year, given the erroneous bureaucratic ruling that eliminated a large chunk of our customary funding--we can continue our radical policy of programming carte blanche. Your donation will facilitate our festival's fullest range of collaborative and aesthetic possibilities.

Your generosity will allow us to dream up programs that explore what makes us human, what concerns us, what unites us--those most urgent questions that are vital for us all to remember, perhaps now more than ever.

In case any of you missed the news from our last 2 emails - Momenta now has its own nonprofit status. We took over the nonprofit organization of violinist/composer Cornelius Dufallo, and the official name of the organization is C.B.D. Music, Inc dba Momenta Quartet. The online link above lets you donate by credit card, PayPal or Zelle, but if you prefer to write a check, please make it payable to Momenta Quartet and mail it to:

Momenta Quartet
Attn: Stephanie Griffin
1075 Grand Concourse, Apt. 2A
Bronx, NY 10452

C.B.D. Music, Inc dba Momenta Quartet is a registered 501(C)(3), EIN: 84-1688812. Your contribution is tax-deductible within the United States to the fullest extent allowed by law.

Meanwhile, looking back at highlights from 2024 - Emilie reminisces about our recent collaboration with Korean composer Eun Young Lee and bassoonist Adrian Morejon, in New York City and Boston: ​

A core Momenta belief, as continually reflected in our Momenta Festival programming, is that the arts are for everyone, and that music can be a catalyst for exploring the broader human issues that affect us all. The operative word is "all": our festival concerts are free admission, and in partnership with the nonprofit Music For Food, all donations go to the local food pantry and aid organization Broadway Community.

Rather than seal away our work in an ivory tower, our yearly member-curated festival delights in reaching across perceived temporal and aesthetic divides. We mingle old standards and neglected works alongside the next generation of creators, from newly-commissioned works to live improvisation. Our curated program concepts have explored everything from tyranny and liberation, to toy pianos and the idea of "play" in music, to Japanese philosophy, to commemorating Juneteenth, to the evolving American identity–to name just a few.

​My program from this past fall examined how composers use folk music traditions to process personal and collective memory. It featured the world premiere of "Pax Aeterna" (Latin for "eternal peace"), a new Guggenheim-commissioned work written for us and guest bassoonist Adrian Morejon by the Korean-American composer Eun Young Lee. The work was inspired by the recent 70th anniversary of the Korean Armistice Agreement and interweaves North and South Korean folk tunes, in homage to a fractured people's shared cultural memory. To introduce her work, Dr. Lee spoke of her deep connection to these folk songs and her abiding hope for peace on the Korean Peninsula. (In powerful resonance to this, we ended the evening with Charles Ives' transcendent second string quartet, in which Ives uses a melting pot of American folk and classical-canon references to confront his own turbulent musical lineage and promote a radical vision of a society united in its diversity.) We've since taken "Pax Aeterna" on the road! A few weeks ago we visited Dr. Lee's home base of Boston Conservatory at Berklee, giving the work's Boston premiere and--as is also central to Momenta's mission--fostering the next generation of composers by workshopping and premiering six new works by BoCo students.

Left to right: Adrian Morejon, Dani Elizalde, Emilie-Anne Gendron, Michael Haas, Gwen Clores, Alonzo Marshall, Grigori Balasanyan, Stephanie Griffin, Phoenix Geyser, Alex Shiozaki

We're proud of our impact on the next generation of composers, as witnessed by the photo (above) of Momenta and Adrian with five of the six happy composers at the Boston Conservatory on December 6!

Thank you for your support and enjoy the final days of 2024,

Stephanie
Violist....and Treasurer!