Tribeca New Music Festival

The Flea; Thu 4–Sun 7

ACME

Photograph: Tristan Cook

The central notion behind the Tribeca New Music Festival, hosted each spring by the New York Art Ensemble in the cozy Flea Theater, is that modern classical music is for everyone, not just an anointed elite. The reigning aesthetic, dubbed “the emerging avant pop” by executive and artistic director Preston Stahly, welcomes a wide variety of composers, united by creative engagement with popular culture.

Kicking things off on Thu 4 is cellist Clarice Jensen’s American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), with a program that includes Jefferson Friedman’s rich, invigorating String Quartet No. 3, along with fresh works by Nico Muhly, Caleb Burhans and Ryan Streber. Fri 5 brings familiar faces under a new name: Fittingly billed as Anti-Depressant, violinist Jennifer Choi and pianist Kathleen Supové tackle pieces by inventor Emanuel de Raymondi, maverick improvisers Susie Ibarra and Gregor Huebner, Clogs member Padma Newsome, sampler expert Randall Woolf and Dutch innovator Jacob ter Veldhuis (Jacob TV).

The program on Sat 6 focuses on music by composers in their twenties and thirties—Alexandra du Bois, Caroline Mallonée, Matt Marks, Paula Matthussen, Missy Mazzoli and William Zuckerman—and includes a pair of pieces for the unlikely pairing of banjo and electronics. Wrapping things up on Sun 7, Ethel violinist Mary Rowell and pianist Geoffrey Burleson soar through pieces by Eve Beglarian, Nick Didkovsky, Marc Mellits, Eric Moe, Daniel Bernard Roumain and that wily old tunesmith Roy Harris.—Steve Smith

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