Faculty compositions featured on Momenta Quartet program

Presented by the Olin Arts Alive  music series and the Bates College Museum of Art, the renowned Momenta Quartet performs new music by two Bates composers at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 4, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission is $12 and tickets are available at batestickets.com. Free tickets are available to the first 100 seniors and students; please reserve by calling 207-786-6163. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

The Momenta program includes the premieres of music by Bates composers Hiroya Miura and William Matthews, as well as music by Debussy, Haydn and Jason Kao Hwang.

The quartet will also offer a critique of music by Bates student composers at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5, in Olin Concert Hall. This workshop is free and open to the public.

Praised by The New York Times for its “focused, fluid performance” and by contemporary music website Sequenza 21 for its “fire, fantasy and absolute musical commitment,” the Momenta Quartet has premiered more than 50 works in the past seven years and has collaborated with more than 80 composers.

Based in New York City, the quartet performs nationally and internationally. The quartet’s repertoire ranges widely from the classics to contemporary. The members of Momenta are violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Adda Kridler, violist Stephanie Griffin and cellist Michael Haas.

Inspired by the current Bates College Museum of Art astrophotography exhibition Starstruck, Miura’s “Singularity” adapts cosmic radiation readings to serve as the harmonic basis for his piece.

The imagery in “Mare Tranquillitas,” a musical and video piece composed by Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music at Bates, incorporates astrophotographs from Starstruck and photographs of Momenta’s instruments.