The Chapel Hill Contemporary Music Ensemble is joining forces with the Duke New Music Ensemble thanks to the prestigious Kenan-Biddle Partnership Grant.
The grant awards $5,000 to student-initiated projects that stimulate collaborative arts programs between Duke University and UNC.
“This grant’s a really cool thing because it allows us to work with the Duke New Music Ensemble,” said Edmond Harrison, philanthropy director of the CHCME, who also is a staff writer for The Daily Tar Heel. “It’s really rare to even find one ensemble who plays contemporary music, and we hope to bring that music to audiences at Chapel Hill and Durham.”
Harrison, who also wrote the grant proposal, outlined a series of three concerts for fall 2014 in which the two ensemble groups will perform original student-composed music together.
“I approached (CHCME Executive Director) Richard Drehoff with the idea of finding someone from Duke and collaborating,” Harrison said. “It was a hurdle, but once we worked it all out, everything else went pretty smoothly.”
Drehoff, a UNC alumnus who graduated in 2012, created CHCME in December of his last year. Since then, he’s acted as the ensemble’s head and maintained an active role in facilitating events.
“We don’t get a chance to interact with Duke composers very often, so this gives us the opportunity to collaborate in a way we haven’t before,” Drehoff said. “It’ll be neat to bring in audiences from both groups and see how they interpret it.”
The CHCME focuses on performing pieces written within roughly the last decade in the hopes of exposing what’s going on in the world of music today. The Duke New Music Ensemble has similar goals in mind, and its members seem to share the same enthusiasm about the prospect of collaboration.
“This grant means we now have resources allowing us to plan concerts together and ideally perform for both Durham and Chapel Hill,” said Jamie Keesecker, a Duke graduate student and head of the Duke ensemble.
