The pre-concert discussion has been canceled. Guests should plan for an 8pm concert start time.

View the Program

View the Livestream

The concert program showcases Derek David’s recent expansive works for solo viola and string quartet, featuring guest musician Jesse Morrison, violist of the Calgary Philharmonic, local freelance ensemble Semiosis Quartet, and the composer as vocalist. The central theme of the concert highlights the incorporation and reflection on Yiddish folk songs as a rich musical and linguistic medium, based on ongoing studies with the renowned Yiddish folksong scholar and practitioner Ethel Raim.

The recent compositions and musical output of Derek David are informed by active studies of Yiddish music, culture, and language, integrating these elements into a historically informed concert compositional voice.

Di Fayerdike Libe – Passionate Love – די פֿײַערדיקע ליב is supported by the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology and co-presented with the MIT Music and Theater Arts.

About the Artists

Derek David is a composer, conductor, and music educator based in Boston, Massachusetts. His dramatic and vibrant chamber music has been performed in both Europe and the United States and has received great recognition from audiences and critics alike. 

David’s String Quartet (2011) has been met with international praise and repeated performances throughout the United States. It was described by Sabino Pena Arcia of France’s Classiquenews.com as “a true musical jewel of the 21st Century.” The quartet was awarded both the EAMA Nadia Boulanger Institute Prize and the Morton Gould ASCAP Award in 2011, as well as first place in the American Prize in Composition–Chamber Music in 2015. Additionally, he is the current recipient of the 2018 SFCM Hoefer Prize for his accumulative body of work over the past 10 years. David is currently the musical director of “A Besere Velt” – אַ בעסערע װעלט, one of the few choirs in the world dedicated to the performance of Yiddish repertoire and the only Yiddish activist group promoting economic and racial social justice.      

Jesse Morrison joined the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra for the 2019–20 season. Morrison recently lived in Toronto where he frequently played with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, as well as with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota.

Described by the Boston Musical Intelligencer as “astonishing,” Boston-based Semiosis Quartet is quickly gaining a reputation as a dynamic ensemble dedicated to presenting the string quartet repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Joe Maurer is delighted to return to his home state of Massachusetts to teach ethnomusicology courses at MIT. He received a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago (2020) and a BA in music, public policy, and education from Brown University (2010). His primary areas of research include heritage music education in Chicago immigrant communities, maritime music/sea chantey revivalism, and the nonprofit arts education sector.