Ibarra’s recent work will be brought to life by dynamic mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran; longtime collaborators violist Daniel Doña, pianist Alex Peh, and the Arneis Quartet (violinists Heather Braun and Rose Drucker, Doña on viola, and cellist Agnes Kim); sound engineer-field recordist Jake Landau; and the composer herself on percussion. Biochemist and climate scientist Daniel Ibarra will discuss critical research efforts to deeply understand how the Earth’s water and carbon cycles respond to forcings, including anthropogenic climate change, in this NS+ For Nature evening, hosted by NS+ curator Elena Park.

The program will include Parallels and Confluence: Bugang and Pasig Rivers, scored for piano quintet; it is a love song for two Filipino rivers—one, the most pristine, and the other, the most polluted—both of great ecological, cultural, and historical importance. On kulintang, the composer will join Doña for Laktawan at Tumalon (Skip and Jump), while Moran and Doña will perform “Pasig River” from CHAN: Sonnets and Devotions in the Wilderness, a song cycle commissioned and premiered by MaerzMusik Berliner Festspiele last March, produced with her DAAD Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst fellowship in music and sound. These works are included in a trilogy of new compositions, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sky Islands, to be released on September 12, with celebrations in Berlin, Manila, and New York City.

Often topical and always imaginative, NationalSawdust+ is a lively performance and conversation series, curated by Elena Park, in which artists and thinkers share their passion for music and explore timely ideas, making surprising connections. Since October 2015, NS+ has been a home for intimate stories and unexpected artmaking, blurring boundaries between genres and disciplines. This season, NS+ For Nature continues to investigate the interplay and collision between the natural and human worlds, featuring musicians, artists, writers, and activists working to preserve and restore the environment. Recent programs have focused on ocean and riverkeeping, decarbonization and regeneration, and indigenous wisdom. 

Tapping luminaries from theater, film and visual art, literature, science, technology, and beyond, NS+ guests have included Jad Abumrad, Tenzin Choegyal, Catie Cuan, Ava DuVernay, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Vicky Takamine Holt, Min-Jin Lee, Yo-Yo Ma, Domingo Morales, Nico Muhly, Ellen Reid, Carl Hancock Rux, Gabriella Smith, Patti Smith, esperanza spalding, Carrie Mae Weems, Marina Abramović + Laurie Anderson, and Caroline Shaw + Anthony Roth Costanzo + Gandini Juggling. The NS+ team includes Ras Dia and Avery Leigh Draut.

For Nature is made possible by the generous support of Kathryn and Emmanuel Morlet and the Wescustogo Foundation.

Main photo by Jill Steinberg.

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

SUSIE IBARRA

Susie Ibarra is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipinx-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice includes composition, performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multichannel audio installations, recording, and documentary. She is a Yamaha, Zildjian, and Vic Firth Drum Artist.

Ibarra is the founder of Susie Ibarra Studio and, with artist-musician and engineer Jake Landau, co-founded the label and publisher Habitat Sounds. She works to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, such as musika katutubo from the Philippines; advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters; and supports initiatives in addressing water and desert climate. Last year, NS+ presented Insectum featuring Ibarra with Graham Reynolds and Jeffrey Zeigler. 

Ibarra leads several ensembles including Talking Gong Trio with Claire Chase and Alex Peh. She has recorded over 40 albums and performed in events and venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Olympics, and the Sharjah Biennial.

Her book, Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm, was released in March 2024. 2025 honors include the Pulitzer Prize in music for her piece Sky Islands, Creative Capital Artist Award, and Callie’s Studio Residency in Berlin, preceded by the 2024-25 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program fellowship, for which she is based in Berlin, and the Charles Ives Fellowship with the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2024). She is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Music Fellow (2022), United States Artists Music Fellow (2019), TED Senior Fellow (2014), and National Geographic Explorers Storyteller (2020).

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ALICIA HALL MORAN

Mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran is a multi-dimensional artist performing and composing between the genres of Opera, Art, Theater, and Jazz. "Moran finds the truth of the character in her magnificent voice” (Los Angeles Times).

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DANIEL DOÑA

Violist Daniel Doña has distinguished himself as an active international performer and pedagogue. His collaborations with musicians from multiple traditions has led him to explore the beauty of a polystylistic musical space, gaining praise for being “especially at home in this harmonic world” (San Francisco Classical Voice). He serves on the viola faculty of the Boston University (BU) School of Music alongside his duties as Director of Undergraduate Studies and Coordinator of String Chamber Music. He is also Co-Director of BU’s Tanglewood Institute String Quartet Workshop. In addition to teaching at BU, Dr. Doña serves as Director of Chamber Music of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras and teaches students in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra Intensive Community Program. Equally at home as a researcher and scholar, he has written program notes for Tanglewood, Caramoor Center for the Arts, and other concert presenters. His notes have gained praise for being “lucid and erudite” (The Boston Musical Intelligencer). An avid chamber musician, he is a member of TriChrome, BiND Ensemble, and the critically acclaimed Arneis Quartet. 

Recent and upcoming performance highlights include appearances at Composers Now Dialogues Series (hosted by Tania León), the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, and MaerzMusik in Berlin. Doña’s ongoing collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipinx-American composer Susie Ibarra has brought him to perform at the Asia Society Triennial, MassMoCA, and at the Joudour Sahara Festival, where he collaborated with musicians from Ghana, Mali, and Morocco. His recording of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Hypnagogia is scheduled to be released on the AVS Presents label this year. 

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ALEX PEH 

“And his heroic battle with Ms. León’s arduous “Rituál” proved stunning.”

— David Mermelstein, Wall Street Journal (June 7, 2025)

Described by the Wall Street Journal as possessing “facility, flair and fearlessness,” pianist Alex Peh collaborates with musicians globally in search of shared resonances that emerge from friendship and connection. A 2021 Fulbright Global Scholar, 2019 Asian Cultural Council Fellow, and 2022 National Endowment for the Arts grantee, he works with notable musicians across a wide range of genres and styles to explore areas of intersection and shared language. Peh collaborates and performs with percussionist and composer Susie Ibarra and flutist Claire Chase in a trio called Talking Gong. They released their debut album in 2019, Talking Gong, on New Focus Recordings. Their newest piece composed by Ibarra, Sky Islands with the addition of the Bergamot String Quartet and percussionist Levy Lorenzo, received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in music. As an Asian Cultural Council fellow, Peh travelled to Yangon, Myanmar to study Burmese Sandaya piano with pianist Dr. U Yee Nwe. In 2021, Peh received a Fulbright Global Scholar fellowship that allowed him to connect with Greek pianist Nikos Ordoulidis in Naoussa, Greece; Burmese pianist Ne Myo Aung in Bangkok, Thailand; and Pooyan Azadeh in Bayreuth, Germany.

Peh received his musical training from Indiana and Northwestern University. He was a fellow at the Banff, Aspen and Tanglewood Music Festivals. He is an Associate Professor of Piano at SUNY New Paltz, and Associate Chair of the Music Department.

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ARNEIS QUARTET

“With high risks came high reward, and the Arneis Quartet offered an intense, indelible experience.” 

— The Boston Globe

The Arneis Quartet performs an eclectic range of programs from the standard to contemporary, including commissions of new works and interdisciplinary collaborations in New England and throughout the world. Known for playing with “a conviction that commands attention” (Fanfare) and “a unique collective sound which is as warm and full of sparkle as liquid gold” (The Boston Musical Intelligencer), the quartet is playfully named after the Arneis grape—a varietal that is difficult to grow, but which yields an exquisite white wine.

Working with living composers serves as a key part of the Quartet’s artistic mission. Recent commissions include a piano quintet by Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipinx-American composer Susie Ibarra as part of Arneis’s Kaisahan Initiative, launched in 2022 to explore projects and partnerships across a diverse range of cultural traditions. Gramophone praised their “vivacious rendition” of Elena Ruehr’s String Quartet No. 8 on a recently released recording of her works. Arneis partnered with Coro Allegro to premiere Andrea Clearfield’s here i am: i am here, based on open letters by LGBTQ+ youth advocates Mimi Lemay and Sam Brinton. Other recent premieres and collaborations include works by Gabriela Lena Frank, Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, Jonathan Berger, Julien Labro, and Aaron Travers.

Committed to community engagement and music education, the Quartet has worked with music students at the Boston Arts Academy, Perkins School for the Blind, and the Boston Public Schools. Quartet members are on the faculties of Boston University and St. Anselm College. The Quartet also works with students in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras Chamber Music Program and Intensive Community Program.

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JAKE LANDAU

Jake Landau is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, sound engineer, and field recordist based in Berlin. He is co-founder of the label and publisher Habitat Sounds. Landau’s hybrid artistic practice is constantly evolving and taking new shape. With music as a backbone, he started as a drummer from a young age, soon picking up the guitar and piano. His love and study of music and instruments expanded further to natural sounds and recording during his college years. This led to studying the musicality of all sounds and applying studio recording techniques and practices in remote and rugged natural locations through extensive work with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra. Together, Landau and Ibarra have recorded music and natural soundscapes—fresh water, glaciers, birdsongs, oceans, trees—in the Sikkim and Indian Himalayas, Moroccan Sahara, and in UNESCO Sites Doñana National Park in Spain and Jasmund National Park on the Baltic Sea in Germany. Inspired by the visually stunning aspects of these places, Landau began documenting them with photography as well. He has released close to ten Splice Sound Packs with Ibarra, including Migration, Memories: Melancholy Pop, and Heart and Breath: Ambient Hypnotic with Ibarra and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire. He has also engineered and spatialized surround sound installations for Ibarra’s Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change, shown at the San Francisco Exploratorium, TED Climate Countdown, and Arko Art Center in Seoul, among other places. Landau can be heard on his Dreambook album series and Ibarra’s albums Perception and Walking on Water. He has performed with Ibarra at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Zamane Festival in Morocco, and MaerzMusik in Berlin.

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DANIEL IBARRA

Daniel Ibarra is a Filipino-American biogeochemist and climate scientist working on the water and carbon cycles. He is an Assistant Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences and Environment and Society at Brown University. He studies modern rivers and catchments, as well as the terrestrial geologic record to understand past and present changes in climate. In the Philippines, his research group currently monitors numerous cave systems and is working to produce records of past climate using stalagmites over the last 200,000 years; in this NS+ evening, he and Susie Ibarra will preview upcoming plans to capture data and sounds of cave river systems in three islands there, to help Southeast Asian communities better prepare for the threats of monsoon season.

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ELENA PARK

Award-winning filmmaker, producer, and NationalSawdust+ curator Elena Park has moved freely through the worlds of arts, culture, and media throughout her colorful career. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she founded Lumahai Productions to embrace opportunities for artistic collaboration and social change with artists, thinkers, and communities as well as institutions, large and small. 

Elena's first hour-long documentary, Eun Sun Kim: A Journey Into Lohengrin (2024), produced with San Francisco Opera, garnered two Northern CA Emmy nominations (outstanding direction and arts/entertainment program) following multiple broadcasts on KQED. Her Visual Cavafy series (2023) showcased the talents of Taylor Mac, Julianne Moore, Caroline Shaw, and Carl Hancock Rux with Daniel Bernard Roumain, Bora Yoon, and Jeffrey Zeigler, among others. Commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, the visual poems were screened at the NYC’s New Museum and later seen in Athens and Alexandria.

Additional director/executive producer credits: eight In Song short films, featuring artists including Pretty Yende and Jamie Barton; Cleveland Orchestra’s Emmy-nominated In Focus programs, conducted by Alan Gilbert and Jane Glover; Vân-Ánh Võ for Stanford Live; and Jake Heggie's Intonations for the Cabrillo Festival. For the Metropolitan Opera, she is Executive Producer of the Saturday radio broadcasts and was Supervising Producer for the first 140 shows in its worldwide Live in HD series.

Selected roles: Curator for SFO's INSTIGATORS; Supervising Producer for San Francisco Symphony's MTT25: An American Icon; Special Advisor for …(Iphigenia); Artistic Consultant for the Kennedy Center; Executive Producer for WNYC Radio; and Strategic Advisor for SFO, Cambodian Living Arts, and Meyer Sound. TV/film credits: Bel Canto, Amazon's Mozart in the Jungle.