Atlanta collective puts the focus on contemporary chamber music

The adventurous and uncompromising Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective adds a vital new voice to the local music scene.

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For Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective executive and Artistic Director Bryan Wysocki, his organization’s upcoming season finale is another positive step forward in his efforts to put Atlanta on the map for contemporary chamber music.

The Atlanta music scene has been a major tributary to several genres, with hip-hop, metal and jazz outstanding among them. But one of the more unexpected vibrations in the city’s musical undercurrents has been the classical chamber music scene. Between stalwart devotees of the classical canon (the Georgian Chamber Players), those who balance the old with the new (the Atlanta Chamber Players) and those who barrel full-speed ahead into the avant-garde (Bent Frequency), the chamber music scene has become a diverse and captivating realm for Atlanta concertgoers. Still, Wysocki seeks to fill a niche: the need for a contemporary chamber orchestra. 

“We have a lot of great chamber ensembles in Atlanta, but there’s not really a large ensemble that’s modeled after New York’s Alarm Will Sound or Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente,” Wysocki explains. From that impetus, the Atlanta Contemporary Music Ensemble (ATLCMC) was born in the fall of 2023. 

The ATLCMC’s 2024-2025 season will conclude Saturday, May 31. The Deep Listening Scavenger Hunt, a series of long-form percussion works spread throughout the site, will run from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m., followed by Mid-Century Minimalist Classics from 7 p.m. until 8 p.m. Both take place at South River Art Studios.

The scavenger hunt (which is not a competition) will consist of percussion-centric pieces spaced throughout the facility in what Wysocki describes as a “choose your own adventure concert,” providing a soundtrack for an afternoon of browsing through the South River Art Studios’ shops and galleries.

Mid-Century Minimalist Classics, a seated concert, will be divided between the works of Julius Eastman and Frederic Rzewski, both lesser-known modernist composers. The works fall just outside the realm of “mid-century,” with all of them dating to the 1970s and early ’80s. Nevertheless, Wysocki maintains that they embody the revolutionary spirit of the ’60s.

“They’re both radical composers,” says Wysocki. “They both sought out deliberately social and political commentaries in their pieces.”

Rzewski was an avowed socialist whose works are all free to perform due to his opposition to copyright and intellectual property law. Both of the pieces being performed, Coming Together and Attica, were inspired by the 1971 prisoner uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility, in which inmates took prison staff hostage to demand improvement in the abysmal living conditions. Government response to the attempted coup resulted in what the official report described as “the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.”

From an auditory standpoint, the two works run the gamut from spoken word over spitfire ostinato riffs (Coming Together) to the kind of hypnotic, sculptural repetition found in Philip Glass or Steve Reich (Attica). They are challenging pieces, to be sure, but the most immediately digestible of the works on offer.

Eastman, even when paired with the likes of Rzewski, is a consummate surrealist. The concert’s opening and closing pieces are two interpretations of his work Oval, a single sheet of staff music across which an oval is created. The piece can be played vertically or horizontally, so it will be performed both ways. Eastman’s more palatable — if at times cacophonic — Stay On It will serve as the evening’s centerpiece.

Eastman’s life, like that of so many extraordinary creatives, was marked by the crushing weight of personal demons. He experienced drug addiction and homelessness toward the end of his life and eventually died at age 49 for reasons that remain disputed. His postmortem legacy has languished in obscurity for decades, and Wysocki hopes to bring a renewed interest to the firebrand composer who described himself as “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest and a homosexual to the fullest.”  

With this season finale, the Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective is staking a bold and uncompromising claim on the city’s classical music scene. At its heart is Wysocki’s sense of vitality and urgency. “Even though our thing is new music, we’re presenting a concert from dead composers from the ’70s and ’80s,” he admits. “But their messages are still incredibly relevant.” 

Where & When

Atlanta Contemporary Music Collective performs Deep Listening Scavenger Hunt (3 p.m. to 5 p.m. May 31) and Mid-Century Minimalist Classics (7 p.m. to 8 p.m. May 31). Tickets for the evening’s seated concert are $10. South River Art Studios, 1300 Fleetwood Drive SE. atlcmc.net.

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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.