Press Material for NWEAMO 2026
NWEAMO 2026 Festival “Hybrid Waves from the Pacific Rim and Beyond”
It’s tempting to predict that this year’s NWEAMO Festival (short for New West Evolving Art & Music Organism) will be the most ambitious and diverse in the history of this 28-year-old, all-things-are-possible event. At least it is until you recall just how ambitious and diverse previous iterations of this freewheeling festival have been.
The 2020 edition featured two Pulitzer Prize-winning composers: veteran UC San Diego music professor Roger Reynolds and Philadelphia’s Jennifer Higdon, who is also a three-time Grammy Award winner in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category.
The 2019 edition included a Mercedes-Benz van equipped with nearly $900,000 worth of top-end audio gear, while the 2004 edition featured a futuristic karaoke machine that could synthesize up to 40,000 songs, in real time, with a 64-piece virtual orchestra that followed the melody, tuning and rhythm of whoever happened to be singing. Other editions showcased a software-equipped carpet that produces sound and what was billed as the world’s first random-access, analog robotic DJ system.
To be held this weekend at SDSU’s Smith Recital Hall, the two-day 2026 NWEAMO Festival will open Saturday with three world premieres.
Saturday’s concert featuring the 70-piece SDSU Symphony Orchestra will also spotlight works by Texu Kim, David Ward Steinman and Christopher Adler, who will perform on a bamboo Laotian mouth organ known as a khaen.
Sunday’s concert will feature the New York Composers Concordance’s performance of Seth & Gene’s Excellent Electroacoustic Adventure, an 80-minute multimedia electroacoustic work that features pianists Seth Boustead and Lesi Mei, guitarist Gene Prtisker, soprano Ljiljana Winkler and alto saxophonist Todd Rewoldt. The program will also include the world premiere of Waters’ piano and electronics piece, “Twinkle,” and compositions by Dan Cooper, Jae Eun Jung, Debra Kaye and Amy Wurtz.
7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, and Sunday, Feb. 22. Smith Recital Hall, 5500 Campanile Drive, SDSU. $25 suggested donation “or whatever you can afford.” nweamo.org
When Joseph Martin Waters, Professor of Music at San Diego State University, inaugurated his NWEAMO Music Festival 28 years ago, it was devoted to electronic music. As the field of new music became more stylistically diverse, Waters decided to diversify the embrace of his annual festival, and Saturday’s opening program of the 2026 New West Evolving Arts and Music Organism (NWEAMO) Festival at the university’s Smith Recital Hall proved aptly eclectic.
Saturday’s NWEAMO Festival program opened with Christopher Adler’s solo performance on the khaen, a traditional Thai wind instrument. A master of the khaen and a member of the music faculty at the University of San Diego, Adler offered his own “Cowries” from 2021 to demonstrate the sonic capabilities of the khaen. Adler’s piece opened with dulcet, slowly moving clusters and grew into animated solo themes augmented by digital loops that complemented Adler’s lively ostinatos. The mild, reedy sound of the khaen could be compared to the quieter sounds of the traditional western accordion, and the range of its melodic capabilities parallels that of an orchestral oboe.
Christopher Adler playing the khaen [Photo (c.) Alex Matthews]
Composer Texu Kim, a recent addition to San Diego State University’s music faculty, was represented on the program with his 2021 “Bird Songs” for violin and flute. Violinist Christian Gonzales and flutist Elena Yarritu engaged in a series short, highly accented motifs as brisk antiphonal dialogues that imitated bird song rather than quoting specific birdsongs à la Olivier Messiaen. Yarritu used a variety of flutes from the low bass flute to the piccolo to provide a variety of flute timbres for this essay, and Gonzales’ supple, suave violin sonority complemented her various flute timbres. Like many of Kim’s works, “Bird Songs” finds the perfect balance between serious and whimsical moods.
Violinist Christian Gonzales & flutist Elena Yarritu [Photo (c.) Alex Matthews]
Two of Joseph Martin Waters’ own recent compositions were premiered on the program, “Gaian Entanglement Toccata” for solo piano and “Dokkaebi” for flute and piano. Cho-Hyun Park’s fleet technical keyboard mastery delivered the brilliant staccato ostinatos of the solo piano toccata, a clever etude in which each hand executed bravura parallel figures mostly in the bright, upper range of the instrument.
Cho-Hyun Park [Photo (c.) Alex Matthews]
In “Dokkaebi,” Park was joined by flutist Elena Yarritu for this clever virtuoso caprice that was inspired by the supernatural spirits—sometimes called goblins—of Korean folklore called the dokkkaebi. The flute executed most of the thematic invention, sinuous lines that alternated with short, animated figures, although imitative sections between the flute and piano proved that strict counterpoint still has a role in contemporary composition.
“Emotional Contagion” for violin and piano by Jae Sun Jung, the NWEAMO Festival’s Assistant Director, provided the third première on Saturday’s program. An extended rhapsody in ternary form, “Emotional Contagion” gave the most ingratiating themes and a brilliant cadenza to violinist Christian Gonzales, while pianist Cho-Hyun Park supplied hypnotic collaboration.
The program closed with the San Diego State University Orchestra under the baton of Director Michael Gerdes performing David Ward-Steinman’s 1957 Concert Overture. When I came to SDSU in the 1960s as a graduate student and taught there in the 1970s, David Ward-Steinman was not only the Music Department’s sole composer-in-residence, but the faculty member who redefined and reorganized the entire curriculum for music majors.
Written in the post World War II serialist mode that academic composers of that era believed was divinely inspired, Ward-Steinman’s compact, densely scored Concert Overture bristles with fleet themes of dubious and constantly fluctuating tonal identities. The work is a tribute to both the breadth of Ward-Steinman’s thematic imagination and to the limitations of the serialist aesthetic. The six minutes of Concert Overture seemed like 20, yet it was unclear where we had traveled on this intense musical voyage.
This concert was presented by the NWEAMO Festival 2026 at San Diego State University’s Smith Recital Hall on February 21, 2026. The NWEAMO Festival continues in the same venue on Sunday, February 22.
Ken Herman, a classically trained pianist and organist, has covered music for the San Diego Union, the Los Angeles Times’ San Diego Edition, and for sandiego.com. He has won numerous awards, including first place for Live Performance and Opera Reviews in the 2017, the 2018, and the 2019 Excellence in Journalism Awards competition held by the San Diego Press Club. A Chicago native, he came to San Diego to pursue a graduate degree and stayed.Read more…
