Ensemble for These Times

Ensemble for These Times focuses on 20th and 21st century music that is relevant, engaging, original, and compelling, music that resonates today and will speak to tomorrow. E4TT strongly believes in the power of artistic beauty, intelligence, wit, lyricism, and irony to create a deep understanding of our times and the human condition. E4TT formed in 2007/2008 when soprano Nanette McGuinness and David Garner met during recording sessions at Skywalker Ranch; it quickly grew to include pianist Dale Tsang and then cellist Anne Lerner. Recent performance highlights include a tour to Madrid, Spain, in Fall 2017 and at the 2016 Krakow Culture Festival in Poland. Past highlights include a four-city tour to Hungary in Fall 2014 as part of the Daniel Pearl World Music Days and sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Budapest; the world premiere of Garner’s Chanson für Morgen in 2011 at Trinity Chamber Concerts, supported in part by a grant from the East Bay Fund for Artists and produced in association with the 26th Jewish Music Festival; the European premiere of Chanson für Morgen in Berlin in 2012, with the Jüdische Gemeinde Berlin, and concerts at the German Consulate General in SF, Old First Concerts, Peninsula JCC, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Trinity Chamber and Noontime Concerts, among others. From its inception, E4TT has had a strong, ongoing commitment to new music by women composers or with texts by women writers, as well as by emerging and less-known composers. Formerly the Jewish Music & Poetry Project (JMPP), the ensemble rebranded in Fall 2015, with the JMPP continuing as a project of the group. The ensemble’s new name was inspired by one of E4TT’s first songs, “In dieser Zeit” (translation, “In These Times”), to a text by German/Polish poet Mascha Kaléko (1901-1976). Part of Garner’s first major work for the group, “In dieser Zeit” is on the ensemble’s 2016 CD, Surviving: Women’s Words, four major song cycles to texts by Jewish women poets, reflecting on their wartime experiences. "Surviving: Women’s Words" was made possible by grants from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and SFFCM’s Musical Grant Program. Since its first major commission using texts about the Holocaust by Polish-German/ Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko, the JMPP has focused on bringing new, nearly new, forbidden, and forgotten music to light, with a dual emphasis: 1) new music to texts by Jewish women poets or by women composers; 2) music by composers who were banned, exiled, or destroyed in the Holocaust.