Claire Chase – acclaimed flutist, curator, cultural producer, and Professor of the Practice of Music at Harvard University – offers a lecture-performance on her ongoing Density 2036 project, an initiative that has been described as “a 24-journey with little precedent” by The New Yorker and “one of the great musical undertakings of our time” by The New York Times.

Chase will perform excerpts from the first 12 years of Density and discuss the curatorial, performative, and educational dimensions of the project at its halfway point.

Cosponsored by Penn's Department of Music.

Claire Chase is a soloist, collaborative artist, educator, curator and advocate for new and experimental music. She has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of composers, and she has championed new music internationally by forming organizations, cultivating intersectional alliances, founding commissioning initiatives and supporting community and education programs that reach new audiences. She was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Chase has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from The Curtis Institute of Music and The Cleveland Institute of Music.

In 2013 Chase launched Density 2036, a 24-year commissioning project to create an entirely new body of repertory for flute between 2013 and 2036, the centenary of Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking 1936 flute solo, Density 21.5. Each season as part of the project, Chase premieres a new program of commissioned music, with seven hours of new repertory created to date. She released the world premiere recordings of the first five years of the Density cycle in collaboration with the producer Matias Tarnopolsky at Meyer Sound Laboratories in Berkeley, CA in December 2020.