CompFest 2025: In Our Own House

CompFest 2025 “In Our Own House” looks local to explore building creative arts community within and around Emory. The Festival features Atlanta-based new music ensemble Bent Frequency and composer Alvin Singleton. Each of the works on the Festival program were selected for the different ways they could build community as an experimental art practice. Singleton’s chamber quartet In Our Own House, whose title inspired the Festival theme, opens the first night’s concert. It invites a question: what is “our” house

This past fall, Bent Frequency worked with six Emory student composers in an extended residency to create a suite of miniatures. These will be presented on the first night’s concert, which also includes Emory Professor Dwight Andrews’ Three Baldwin Poems (sung by the brilliant Maria Clark, Emory Artist Affiliate in voice) and Paresthesia, a new electronic piece by Emory Assistant Professor Adam Mirza.

The second night opens with Singleton’s Every Next Day,  which was commissioned by Bent Frequency in 2022. Virtuoso flautist Lina Andonovska, who joins Emory’s performance faculty in Fall 2025, performs a solo piece from Singleton’s Argoruseries. New music guitarist Jesse Langen visits from Chicago to perform Sivan Cohen Elias’s Engine Room, from another angle with Andonovska and to join Bent Frequency for Camilles, a chamber composition with electronics by Emory Assistant Professor Katherine Young.

The concluding work on the Festival is Raven Chacon’s American Ledger No. 1, which is described by the composer as “a narrative score for performance, telling the creation story of the founding of the United States of America.” The graphic score for this performance will take the form of a large flag. It is being created by students and faculty under the direction of Dana Haugaard (Emory Director of Visual Arts), who received guidance from the composer. Bent Frequency will lead an ensemble made up of faculty, students and guest artists.