Bassoonist

This transformative initiative, dedicated to amplifying the voices of incarcerated composers, will present a free public concert at Carnegie Hall featuring world premieres of original songs and compositions created by individuals currently and formerly incarcerated in maximum-security facilities across the United States—including Sing Sing Correctional Facility (NY), Fishkill Correctional Facility (NY), Lee Correctional Facility (SC), Cheshire Correctional Facility (CT), and San Quentin State Rehabilitation Center (CA).

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Music for Transformation: Songs from Inside Maximum Security Prisons

Carnegie Hall

Matthew Aucoin’s Music for New Bodies (2024) is an uncategorizable work of music-theater: part opera, part song cycle, part vocal symphony. Based on poetry by Jorie Graham, the piece is a portrait of our moment in history as seen through the eyes of a cancer patient undergoing a drastic medical procedure. As the patient experiences the transformation of her own body, she meditates on questions that range from the personal to the cosmic: in a time when life is more and more virtual, what does it mean to have a body? And above all, after our species has poisoned the planet with uncountable toxins, can we still listen to what the earth has to tell us?

“Music for New Bodies” at Tanglewood

Tanglewood Music Center

A program featuring new works for bassoon, including works by incarcerated composers.

Faculty and Friends

Johns Hopkins University

Decoda is thrilled to announce the 10th Anniversary Season of Decoda’s celebrated Chamber Music Festival at our new home, tucked away in the picturesque Blue Ridge Mountains, right outside of Asheville, North Carolina, June 23 - 30, 2024. 

Decoda’s new summer partner, Warren Wilson College, aligns harmoniously with our own mission to create, connect, and spread compassion through music. Believing that “the world needs curiosity,” Warren Wilson is a campus community that fosters relationships with community partners through meaningful engagement, sustainable agriculture practices, and by educating the next generation of “curiously insightful, experienced, and capable individuals.” 

Decoda cannot wait to celebrate ten years of our unique summer festival, which is dedicated to training the next generation of young artists to rethink and reimagine their role in society. Through outstanding chamber music making, creative collaboration, and hands-on project design and development, DCMF cultivates the vision of community through music with the young artists of tomorrow.

Decoda Chamber Music Festival 2024

Warren Wilson College

The Carmel Bach Festival is excited to expand its activities beyond the July festival with a special concert, “A Season on the Wind,” which celebrates the epic migration of North American birds, performed by The Bowerbird Collective, a stellar musical ensemble from Australia that “makes art for nature.” They combine live music, spectacular visuals, and immersive soundscapes to tell nature stories.

A Season on the Wind: Music for Migratory Birds

Carmel High School

Woodwind Department Recital: Brad Balliett Studio

Centre Street Performance Studio

Some 200 years after Bach’s death, 20th Century composers were still heavily inspired by the Baroque Era and the compositional techniques used (fugue, counterpoint, etc.), Stravinsky being one such composer. The fact that this will unquestionably still be the case in 2050, makes Bach’s music an eternal inspiration.

Philip Dukes & Friends III: Bach’s Eternal Inspiration

Savannah Cultural Arts Center

Brad Balliett, Bassoon & Mikael Darmanie, Piano

Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University

Woodwind Department Recital: Brad Balliett Studio 2023

An orchestra transformed into a trio, a string orchestra to a septet, and a quartet to a string orchestra—these powerful works not only transform themselves but transport the listeners. The merry pranks of Till Eulenspiegel are followed by the stirring postwar elegy of Metamorphosen in two of Strauss’s most ingenious works, and we close the festival with Schubert’s dramatic and powerful String Quartet re-envisioned by Mahler as an even more dramatic and powerful symphonic work, performed by an all-star string ensemble.

Join us for the Musical Prelude with Pelia Quartet for their performance of Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major.

Finale: Metamorphosis

Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center

Using the instrumentation of some of the most iconic pieces in music—Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet and Schubert’s Octet and “Trout” Quintet—composers Brahms, Françaix, and Chris Rogerson create their own unique and masterful works.

Join us for the Musical Prelude with Aestas Trio for their performance of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (arr. for piano trio by Eduard Steuermann)

Bassoonist

Brad Balliett

Events

Past events

Jun 3, 2026

Music for Transformation: Songs from Inside Maximum Security Prisons · Decoda

Aug 7, 2025

“Music for New Bodies” at Tanglewood · AMOC / American Modern Opera Company

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