LIMINALITY 2025
USA (EAST COAST) Tour
PC Quentin Charier
ENSEMBLE DU BOUT DU MONDE
Short Description of Project
The Ensemble du Bout du Monde (EBM) presents Liminality, a program that explores the tension of existing between worlds—past and future, tradition and innovation. EBM is an award-winning collective of four classically trained saxophonists from Israel, Italy, and the United States, currently based in Belgium, France, and Italy. As a contemporary ensemble, they place art in unexpected, strikingly original contexts. The saxophone quartet is their primary medium for challenging and redefining the boundaries of this versatile formation. Shaped by diverse cultural influences, EBM balances European musical heritage with an active engagement in the global contemporary scene.
This performance tour also marks the pre-release of EBM’s debut quartet album, beyond, which will be available for purchase directly from the artists. Please see below to pre-order a CD via Wise or Venmo transfer and get your CD directly after this concert. Cash will also be accepted.
ACADEMIC Program
XAS (1987) - Iannis Xenakis
Zeruan* (2020) - María Eugenia Luc
“…B.S. unfolded…” [Kandinsky-Etüde 9]* (2020) - Frederik Neyrinck
Thalassografia - Small Nepenthian* (2019/2025) - Stratis Minakakis
Transumanar * (2025) - Giulia Lorusso
you’ve been talking in your sleep (2010) - David Biedenbender
High Octane + (2025) - Zachary Askew Cook
* - indicates US premiere
+ - indicates world premiere
Program Notes
The Ensemble du Bout du Monde presents Liminality, a program exploring the tension of existing between worlds - between past and future, tradition and innovation. As an ensemble shaped by diverse cultural influences, EBM embodies the duality of being rooted in European musical heritage while constantly evolving within the contemporary global landscape. This tour serves as both a celebration of transatlantic artistic exchange and a meditation on what it means to inhabit multiple spaces at once.
The concert opens with Iannis Xenakis’s XAS (1987), a searing ritual in which four saxophones become a single molten force that periodically fractures into elemental shards. The piece’s title slyly rearranges the letters of “SAX” and of Xenakis’s own name; its jagged canons, brutal fff dynamics, and extreme registers fling us head‑first into a world where order and chaos constantly trade places.
From this raw sonic landscape we ascend into María Eugenia Luc’s Zeruan (2020). “Zeruan” is Basque for “In Heaven,” and Luc treats the sky as an endless expanse of possibility: a tongue‑ram thud in the lows, a fading soprano tone that dissolves into bisbigliando, and a breathy aeolic sigh provide the genetic code for a work that gradually deconstructs itself into independent clouds of slap‑tongues, multiphonics, and wind‑borne noise.
Frederik Neyrinck’s …B.S. unfolded… [Kandinsky‑Etüde 9] (2020) answers with a kinetic study in perspective. Inspired by Kandinsky’s layered canvases, the score casts the baritone saxophone as quasi‑soloist, unfolding angular figures that burst briefly into three‑dimensional relief before collapsing back into abstraction. Colors flash, velocities shift, and spatial planes slide past one another, reminding us that a single gesture can be contour, texture, and narrative all at once.
We then turn to Stratis Minakakis’s Thalassografia-Small Nepenthian (2018/2025), whose Greek title translates as “sea-etching.” Commissioned by EBM and first performed in Tallinn, Estonia, the work has been freshly revised for this tour. Minakakis conjures the Aegean seascape in shifting layers of sound: saxophone without mouthpiece whorls of air, salt‑spray slap‑tongues, and shimmering harmonics ebb and flow like waves against a rocky shore. The work’s lines overlap and recede, tracing sonic currents that suggest both the vastness and the restless instability of open water.
Rising from these fluid seascapes into a realm of spiritual metamorphosis, Giulia Lorusso’s Transumanar (2025) pushes the idea of fluid identity still further. Borrowing Dante’s neologism for “trans‑humanizing,” Lorusso imagines the quartet as a single breathing organism that repeatedly blossoms into individual voices before fusing again into a luminous, overtone‑rich whole. The music lingers in the friction between medieval mysticism and the 21st‑century dream of transcending physical limits, inviting listeners to dissolve the self through deep, communal listening.
To end the concert, the quartet invites you to the dreamworld of, David Biedenbender's you’ve been talking in your sleep (2010). The piece hovers at the veil of consciousness, inspired to imitate - through the saxophone - the half-coherent language and nocturnal sounds the composer’s wife utters while immersed in her dream world. The quartet lets lucid, groovy rhythms mutate into nonsense babble, and familiar tonal fragments slip into mysterious murmurs. The piece leaves us suspended - awake yet dreaming, coherent yet incomprehensible - in the most intimate liminal space of all.
Across these six vantage‑points, ancient ritual meets imagined futures; matter dissolves into spirit; unity yields to fracture and back again. By claiming the threshold as home, Ensemble du Bout du Monde invites you to inhabit that shimmering realm where multiple possibilities coexist.
FESTIVAL Program
Quatuor, Op. 109 (1932) Alexandre Glazunov
Andante et Scherzo (1938) - Eugène Bozza
Recitation Book (2006) - David Maslanka
High Octane + (2025) - Zachary Askew Cook
+ - indicates world premiere
Program Notes
The Ensemble du Bout du Monde presents Liminality, a program exploring the tension of existing between worlds - between past and future, tradition and innovation. As an ensemble shaped by diverse cultural influences, EBM embodies the duality of being rooted in European musical heritage while continually evolving within a contemporary global landscape. This tour is both a celebration of transatlantic artistic exchange and a meditation on what it means to inhabit multiple spaces at once.
Exiled from Russia and newly settled in Paris, Glazunov wrote his Saxophone Quartet for the pioneering Quatuor des Saxophones de la Garde Républicaine, dedicating it to the ensemble that revealed the instrument’s expressive reach. Scored for the now-standard SATB configuration, the music bridges late-Romantic lyricism with the bright, modern timbre of Adolphe Sax’s invention. In this program it opens the door to liminality itself -familiar harmonic landscapes heard through an unfamiliar, glowing medium.
Bozza’s two-movement gem, Andante et Scherzo, composed for Marcel Mule and the Garde Républicaine quartet, lingers on the hinge between repose and exuberance. A long-breathed, cantabile Andante gives way - almost without warning - to an effervescent Scherzo of rhythmic wit and quick-silver exchanges. The piece is a study in crossing: how a single step can carry us from stillness to motion, from reflection to play.
With Maslanka’s Recitation Book, the quartet arrives at a threshold of memory and renewal. The five movements meditate on ancient melodies -Lutheran chorales, Gregorian chant, and a poignant madrigal by Gesualdo -treating them like short readings meant to be spoken aloud. Old and new, voice and instrument, private prayer and public ritual coexist in a single sound-world. Placed here, the work becomes a liminal dusk where the past surfaces and the future begins to glow.
Seen together, the three works trace a single arc: Approach - Glazunov reframes 19th-century lyricism through a 20th-century instrument; Crossing - Bozza pivots from serenity to head-long dance; Vigil - Maslanka watches remembrance transform into renewal. Liminality is thus more than a theme; it is an experience the audience undertakes - passing, with each piece, from one state of being to another and discovering what waits on the far side of the threshold.
Sponsored By
The Ensemble du Bout du Monde is an endorsed artist ensemble of Henri Selmer Paris.
This program is made possible through the generous support of Henri Selmer Paris and Conn-Selmer.
Additional support has been received from West Chester University, Susquehanna University, Faith United Church of Ickesburg, Greenwood High School and the Greenwood High School Theatre Program, Rowan University, the Old Dominion F. Ludwig Diehn School of Music and ODU Bands, the Ruth L. Blankenship Concert Series, Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute, the Perry County Council of the Arts, the Canton Area School District Education Foundation, Robert M. Sides, the NTUAA, the Northern Tier Regional Planning and Development Commission, and the New England Conservatory.
