•PROJECT SPOTLIGHT: 7 KINSHIPS •

7 Kinships was composed in 2022 for Ensemble Connect. Written for woodwind quartet, this piece is a seven movement work that explores the social interplay amongst a group of virtuosic instruments, each occupying its own rich world of color and texture, the notions of solitude and collectivity, and how tending to the inner mechanisms of our individual bodies and instruments can inform the outer possibility for connection and kinship. 7 Kinships was premiered at Skidmore College with a New York premiere at Carnegie Hall in February 2023.

• PLANETARY CANDIDATE •

Announcing Planetary Candidate, an album of bold new compositions for solo violin from Michi Wiancko, “an alluring soloist with heightened expressive and violinistic gifts” (Gramophone Magazine) whose compositions have been described as “silvery and evocative” (The New Yorker).

This project documents her journey as a violinist allowing her to “manifest and passionately inhabit a multitude of musical worlds.” Through this set of spectacular new works for violin, Wiancko celebrates her nearly four-decade relationship to an instrument that, when she plays it, “feels like an act of breathing.”

Out now on New Amsterdam Records. For press inquiries, please contact: katy@newamrecords.com // 479.856.5217

Buy the album

“Intriguing and exquisitely beautiful...music that breaks through the pop-classical barrier.”

— The Strad Magazine

Photo credits (here and top portrait): Anja Schütz

MICHI WIANCKO is a violinist and composer whose creative work encompasses a wide spectrum of new composition, collaboration, and interpretation.

Her current and upcoming commissions include a new opera called Arkana Aquarium produced by Experiments in Opera, new works for Boston Chamber Music Society, NOW Ensemble, Jupiter String Quartet, Cavani String Quartet, and Anne Akiko Meyers. Highlights from past commissioning projects include works for the The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Bern with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Anna Prohaska, Liquid Music, Aizuri Quartet, Metropolis Ensemble and Ecstatic Music Festival. She also composes music for short and feature-length films, commercials, and for her own band, Kono Michi.

A passionate interpreter of contemporary music, Michi has been fortunate enough to work closely with a wide array of her favorite living composers including Gabriela Lena Frank, Missy Mazzoli, Vijay Iyer, Judd Greenstein, David T. Little, PaviElle French, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, William Brittelle, Paula Matthusen, Mark Dancigers, Jessie Montgomery, and Christopher Adler.

In September of 2020, she released an album of newly-commissioned works for electro-acoustic solo violin on New Amsterdam Records. Her mentors include Donald Weilerstein and the late violinist and composer Robert Mann, with whom she studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Juilliard, respectively.

In addition to her composition and performing career, Michi is director and curator of Antenna Cloud Farm, a music festival, arts retreat, and community organization based in western Massachusetts. She also teaches a course on 21st century musicianship and creativity at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

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