Missy Mazzoli ready to finish up her CSO tenure with a bang

This month, Missy Mazzoli enters her final weeks as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence, and she plans to go out with a bang.

“It’s great,” she said. “I think it is very important to finish what I had planned to do and to promote the composers whom I wanted to promote.”

An internationally acclaimed musical figure, at home in the concert hall, opera stage or chamber-music settings, Mazzoli has a bevy of upcoming events related to her post:

■ May 27: Mazzoli’s Volume, a work for two percussionists, will be performed as part of CSO Sessions, a series of small-ensemble concerts filmed in Orchestra Hall and streamed on the CSOtv video portal. The featured musicians will be Principal Percussion Cynthia Yeh and Assistant Principal Timpani Vadim Karpinos.

■ June 10 and June 24: Programming curated by Mazzoli will be the focus of the June episodes of CSO Sessions. The two lineups are titled “Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity” (June 10) and Requiem (June 24) and feature works by seven composers, including three world premieres.

■ July 6: Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) will anchor the season finale of the streaming series of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO’s pre-professional training orchestra. In addition, a performance of a 2009 sextet for mixed ensemble, Still Life With Avalanche, featured in Episode 1 of the Civic Orchestra series, remains available for free, online streaming.

Tenures of the CSO’s composers-in-residence, have often been set at two years. That was supposed to be the case for Missy Mazzoli, who took over the post in fall 2019. Because of unexpected interruptions, including the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in March 2020, her tenure was extended through the 2020-21 season.

Among Mazzoli’s duties as composer-in-residence has been curating the repertoire for MusicNOW, the CSO’s four-concert, contemporary-music series presented annually at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. It features chamber works performed by orchestra musicians and guest artists. Because of the pandemic, many of the works she had hoped to feature could not be performed as originally scheduled.

Seven of those pieces will be featured on the June 10 and 24 episodes of CSO Sessions. “I’m really glad that I have the opportunity to do this,” Mazzoli said. “My priority has always been to support the composers that I’ve programmed, particularly the ones that the CSO has commissioned through MusicNOW.”

Last May, MusicNOW was supposed to present a Mazzoli-curated program that marked the 55th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a highly influential collective of ground-breaking, genre-busting artists that was founded in Chicago. Mazzoli is friends with composer and trombonist George Lewis, who in 2008 published a history of the AACM titled A Power Stronger Than Itself. Mazzoli discovered that the CSO had never officially collaborated with the group. “And in my mind, those are the two big musical organizations of Chicago,“ she said. ”So, I thought, this is their 55th anniversary, and it would be a great opportunity to highlight a small part of what is a really massive, extraordinary, very diverse organization.”

Two selections from that canceled program will be featured June 10, including a CSO-commissioned work by Nicole Mitchell, a flutist and former AACM chair. “I’m thrilled,” Mazzoli said. “I’m a huge fan of all these composers but, really, that we have a new piece from Nicole Mitchell that the CSO has commissioned is a big deal.”

Also on the program will be the world premiere of Wadada Leo Smith’s Delta Blues and the debut of a version of Mazzoli’s Dark With Excessive Bright for solo contrabass and string quintet. The latter, featuring principal bassist Alexander Hanna, is a commissioned arrangement of a 2014 work ordered by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Aurora Orchestra.

Performing on the June 24 program will be Quince Ensemble, an all-female, contemporary vocal quartet that was established in 2009 at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, where the singers were graduate students. The title selection for this program is the world premiere of Requiem by Courtney Bryan, a professor of music at Tulane University in New Orleans. The 20- to 25-minute piece will feature Quince Ensemble, as well CSO musicians on clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba and percussion.

The rest of the lineup will consist of Gilda Lyons’ Bone Needles, a wordless duet from 2006; Tomeka Reid’s Prospective Dwellers (2016), and The Pub, a world premiere by Chicago-based composer David Reminick. That last work is from a group of songs that Reminick is writing for Quince called In Dreams, which is in turn part of a larger work titled The Sleep Cycle.

Along with her curation of the MusicNOW-inspired programs in June, Mazzoli’s own chamber works have been showcased this season. Her string quartet Death Valley Junction was featured in Episode 9 of CSO Sessions, and Volume is set to begin streaming May 27. The latter was written in 2006 by Mazzoli for fellow students when she was pursuing her graduate studies at the Yale School of Music in New Haven, Conn.

The original instrumentation was steel drum and vibraphone with two kick drums (foot-operated drums often seen as part of trap sets) and five bottles of water, and she later created a version that substituted a second vibraphone for the steel drum. The 10-minute work won the 2008 ASCAP Young Composers Award.

Volume was inspired by steel-drum music from Trinidad, along with "the extraneous instruments that are part of the steel-drum tradition, but it is not quoting that music at all,“ she said. ”It is music of my own invention that takes into account the timbre of the steel drum," which is then transposed for the vibraphone.

She included water bottles because they are easily obtainable and because they produce a recognizable yet unexpected sound in a concert setting. “The clinking glass is something everyone has heard but you don’t necessarily hear it tuned in the context of this complicated piece,” she said.

Though Mazzoli’s CSO tenure concludes in June, her relationship with the CSO will not be completely over. She wrote Orpheus Undone, a 15-minute work, for the CSO, and it was supposed to have had its premiere in April 2020. But that debut has been postponed until some yet-to-be-announced date.

“I wrote it with this orchestra in mind,” she said. “I still very much want them to be the ones to premiere it.”

Note: A webinar, originally scheduled for May 20, has been postponed until the fall. Mazzoli will join Jessie Montgomery, recently appointed as her CSO successor, for the webinar “From the Composer’s Studio,” a free, live-streamed conversation about what it means to work with symphony orchestras in 2021. The webinar will be followed by a Q&A session.