7 pm ET
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Abby Harris, Maria Emiliano, and Isabelle Tseng.
Overview
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This is one of 12 Music of the Americas Spring 2027 concerts. Learn more about the season lineup.
Video of the concert will be released at a later date. Remember to follow Music of the Americas on YouTube or Facebook to watch this and other exciting performances.
Composers Now premieres new works by Maria Emiliano, Abby Harris, and Isabelle Tseng as part of the Second Stage Commission and in celebration of Luna Composition Lab’s tenth anniversary, Luna Lab@10. Luna Composition Lab provides mentorship and performance opportunities to young composers who are female, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming.
About the Artists
Maria Isabel Emiliano is a Dominican composer from Santo Domingo now based in New York City, where she studies at the Mannes School of Music with David T. Little. She has received commissions from the Kronos Quartet, the Kennedy Center, and Orozco Ballet Contemporáneo, and is the founder of the Toccata Quartet in Santo Domingo. Her training spans the Mannes School of Music and the Academia de Música Patricia Logroño, with additional workshops led by Angélica Negrón, Inti Figgis-Vizueta, Donnacha Dennehy, Martin Amlin, and Carlos Sánchez-Gutiérrez.
Her music has been presented at the Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Fábrica de Arte Cubano, the Kennedy Center, Quinta Dominica, Centro Cultural de España, and the San Francisco Jazz Center, as well as festivals including BUTI and soundSCAPE. She has served as music librarian for the multi‑Grammy‑winning Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and is currently preparing collaborations with the National Contemporary Dance Company of the Dominican Republic, Orozco Contemporáneo in Cuba, and Dominican folkloric artist José Duluc. Her work explores Latin sound worlds with a focus on Dominican folkloric traditions and Cuban influences.
Abby Harris is a New York City–based composer and pianist. She currently studies composition with Robert Cuckson at the Mannes School of Music and has previously worked with Timo Andres, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Tamar Muskal, and Kevin James. Her works have received recognition from MATA Jr., NFMC, the Robert Avalon Competition, and others. Performances of her music include presentations by ICE, Duo Envol, the Cincinnati May Festival Chorus, and Hypercube Music/Ensemble Ipse.
Isabelle Tseng is an award‑winning composer from Florida whose music tells stories through emotional perspective and bridges cultures through shared human experience. Her work has been recognized by ASCAP and Luna Composition Lab, and performed by ensembles including Imani Winds, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Kronos Quartet, and Ensemble for These Times (E4TT). Her music has appeared at festivals hosted by the American Composers Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and the Mannes School of Music.
Her work engages language—spoken, cultural, and musical—and the shifting meanings between them. Drawing from cultural references and fragments of speech, she creates music that moves between familiarity and estrangement. Collaboration is central to her practice, and she has worked closely with performers to develop a physical, performer‑driven approach to sound. Recent projects include commissions for violinist Jennifer Koh, the Princeton Opera Company, and Princeton Chinese Theater.
The MetLife Foundation Music of the Americas concert series is made possible by the generous support of Presenting Sponsor MetLife Foundation.
The 2026–2027 series is also supported, in part, by the Howard Gilman Foundation, Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and Mid Atlantic Arts.