A meta-exploration of cyclical regeneration, Everything Again Is New works like an ecosystem and unfolds like a dream: musical cells divide and proliferate, melodic phrases fracture and recombine, silence surprises. It invites the audience to consider musical time as a system of overlapping cycles and urges the ear to listen differently, this night and beyond.

Learn more about Everything Again is New here.

This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.

ABOUT KYLE SANNA

Hailed by The New Yorker as a “first-rate, versatile musician”, Brooklyn-based guitarist and composer Kyle Sanna’s musical work spans four divergent disciplines: contemporary composition, jazz and improvisation, the traditional music of Ireland, and music technology and production. His recent releases include The City Sleeps (traditional Irish tunes on solo guitar), Everything Again Is New (algorithmic electronic music), and Ground Patrol's Converge (conceptual improvisations). An album featuring Undone Landscape, his 34-min piece for clarinet, percussion, string orchestra, and live electronics, written for and performed by Kinan Azmeh and The Knights, will appear on Phenotypic Recordings in 2027.

Sanna's compositions have been performed at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, the Royal Opera House in Oman, Sydney’s ABC studios, the National Recital Hall in Taipei, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and many points between. He has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, The Knights, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Palaver Strings, Beta Collide, and soprano Danielle Birrittella. Festival acceptances include the International Symposium on Electronic Art, The Oregon Bach Festival, and Art Basel Miami Beach. Sanna's “ruminative and shape-shifting” (San Francisco Chronicle) work for string quartet, Sequence for Minor White, won First Prize in the Charlotte New Music Festival Composition Competition. His music is featured in two recent films by Ken Burns: “The U.S. and the Holocaust” and "The American Revolution". 

Kyle Sanna has arranged music for Béla Fleck, Jan Vogler, Anne-Sofie Von Otter, The Amsterdam Sinfonietta, and for Yo-Yo Ma on two Grammy Award-winning albums. In the past year his arrangements have been performed at Carnegie Hall by The Knights and in Dublin by Martin Hayes and the Irish National Symphony Orchestra. His arrangements have appeared on The Colbert Report, NPR’s Performance Today, and on the Sony Classical, Sony Masterworks, In a Circle, and Naïve labels.

In addition to his composing and arranging, Sanna performs regularly as an improvising guitarist with Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand, Ground Patrol, and We The Gleaners, and performs music based in the Irish tradition with Martin Hayes, Seamus Egan, Maeve Gilchrist, and Dana Lyn, with whom he performs every month at the renowned Brooklyn venue Barbès. He is equally at home in the recording studio as on the stage, and has produced nine full-length albums by various artists.

Kyle Sanna studied jazz at the University of Oregon and composition at France’s Université Lumière Lyon II. He is a 2024 recipient of the New York State Council for the Arts individual artist grant. He lives in Brooklyn, New York where he hosts the Summercamp Concert Series for touring musicians.

kylesanna.com

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ABOUT LILY HOLGATE

Lily Holgate is a violinist, singer, and educator based in Brooklyn. She performs throughout the Northeast in chamber ensembles, orchestras, and theatrical productions, and last year played in the orchestra of the acclaimed revival of Ragtime at Lincoln Center.

Lily is one half of Sibyl, a duo with her sister, singer Chloe Holgate. Sibyl explores sibling closeness, femininity, and mental health through intricate harmonies and sparse yet powerful compositions. NPR's All Songs Considered described their debut album as "beautiful and haunting and complex." sibylmusic.com

Lily has taught music in schools and privately for over a decade. Passionate about extending the reach of chamber music, she has created interactive, educational concerts for audiences in schools, libraries, hospitals, and prisons, as well as sensory-sensitive performances for children with autism. Drawn to the places where music and healing meet, she is currently pursuing a degree in mental health counseling at CUNY Hunter College. 

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ABOUT KINAN AZMEH

“Intensely soulful… Virtuoso” — The New York Times
“[Azmeh’s] rhapsodic clarinet [is] able to seduce with a rare intimacy and explode in ecstasy.” — Los Angeles Times
“Spellbinding!” — The New Yorker
“Brilliant liquidity and meltingly beautiful tone” — The Times, London

Hailed by critics and audiences alike, Syrian-born, Brooklyn-based Kinan Azmeh has built an international career on the belief that composing, performing, improvising, and collaborating are not separate disciplines, but interconnected facets of a single, complete musical practice.

Equally at home in the classical concert hall, the jazz club, and the world-music stage, Azmeh has developed a singular musical voice that moves freely across genres and disciplines His career reflects a lifelong desire to bring together the different dimensions of the musician—creator and interpreter, composer and performer, individual voice and collective improviser.

Azmeh has appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Bavarian Radio, Montreal Symphony, West-Eastern Divan Orchestras and the NDR BigBand among many others. He has performed at some of the world’s most prominent venues, including Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie,  the UN General Assembly, Royal Albert Hall, Elbphilharmonie, Teatro Colón, the Opera Bastille, the Tchaikovsky Grand Hall, and the Kennedy Center.

His collaborators have included Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Barenboim, John McLaughlin, Marcel Khalife, François Rabbath, Aynur, and Djivan Gasparian. Since 2012, he has also been a member of the Silkroad Ensemble, appearing as both clarinetist and composer on its Grammy Award-winning album Sing Me Home.

His compositions span solo, chamber, and orchestral music, as well as opera, film, electronics, and multimedia, with commissions by the New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, The Knights, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Elbphilharmonie, Brooklyn Rider, Aizuri Quartet, Cello Octet Amsterdam, and Bob Wilson, among others. His album Uneven Sky with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin received the OPUS KLASSIK Award in 2019. His first opera, Songs for Days to Come, fully sung in Arabic, premiered in Osnabrück, Germany, in 2022. He also leads his own Arab-Jazz quartet, Kinan Azmeh CityBand, and was a founding member of the improvising ensemble Hewar. 

His artistry has inspired an extensive body of music written specifically for him, including seven concertos and dozens of chamber works by composers from around the world.

Kinan's work and life have been also the subjects of several documentary films including "Music of Strangers" by academy-award winning American director Morgan Neville, and the recent documentary "Half Moon" by Dutch film maker Frank Scheffer. 

He is a graduate of The Juilliard School as a student of Charles Neidich, and of both the Damascus High Institute of Music where he studied with Shukry Sahwki, Nicolay Viovanof, and Anatoly Moratof, and Damascus University’s School of Electrical Engineering. Kinan earned a Doctor of Musical Arts from the City University of New York in 2013.

Kinan Azmeh serves on the United States National Council for the Arts.

www.kinanazmeh.com

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ABOUT NATHAN KOCI

Nathan Koci is a composer, performer, and music director working across a variety of styles and disciplines, from theater to dance to improvised and experimental musics. As an accordionist, he has performed and recorded with Kyle Sanna, Sam Sadigursky, Dana Lyn, Guy Klucevsek, South African artist William Kentridge, Maira Kalman, John Heginbotham, Stew and Heidi, Alarm Will Sound, the Micheal Leonhart Orchestra, the improvising chamber quartet The Hands Free (Caroline Shaw, Eleonore Oppenheimer, James Moore), and oral history folk trio And Friends (Elena Moon Park and Brett Parnell).

As a seasoned music director and supervisor in theater and opera, he has conducted Tony-award winning shows on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and internationally. Credits include Courtney Bryan’s Suddenly Last Summer, Ritesh Batra and the Lazour’s musical adaptation of The Lunchbox, Sufjan Stevens and Justin Peck’s Illinoise, Anäis Mitchell’s Hadestown (1st National Tour), Daniel Fish’s reimagined Oklahoma! and Most Happy In Concert, and Ted Hearne’s The Source.

He gravitates towards new works, having recently collaborated with William Kentridge on his latest multi-modal theater work The Great Yes, The Great No as a musical arranger and performer. nathankoci.com