Laws of Nature will feature a world premiere by visionary Icelandic-Canadian composer Fjóla Evans, a trance-inducing multimedia work by Australian composer Kate Moore, a brooding and powerful piece by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and a new arrangement of music from legendary harpist and songwriter Joanna Newsom’s sprawling and transcendent second album, Ys.

This evening of music will play with our conception of time and space, giving perspective on the brisk pace of everyday life. Laws of Nature brings together works that ponder our relationship with the world around us: the landscapes and gravities — emotional and physical – that outlastus. Each composer explores the physical and emotional experience of their native landscape, from Iceland to Australia to California.

Fjóla Evans (b. 1987) draws on the rhythms of minimalism and her careful study of the folk music of Iceland in her Contemporaneous-commissioned New Work (2016) which explores the musical nature of dreaming. Anna Thorvaldsdottir‘s (b. 1977) Streaming Arhythmia (2007) is a wintry epic, influenced by the natural environment of her native Iceland. A Netherlands-based Australian composer, Kate Moore (b. 1979) draws on a different vision of the natural world with her piece Days and Nature (2012), which features a new Contemporaneous-commissioned sound sculpture by Eric Farber. The concert closes with the premiere of an arrangement of harpist/singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom‘s (b. 1982) dazzling and intricate Sawdust and Diamonds (2006), a song of life, death, and waves.