mission statement

thingNY is a 501c3 not-for-profit collective of composer-performers who create and perform theatrically charged experimental music, champion the work of avant-garde and contemporary classical composers, and collaborate across disciplines, media and genres.

brief history

The New Yorker's Alex Ross listed thingNY as part of the city’s burgeoning avant-garde classical music scene “striking an attitude of resistance to mainstream culture.” Comprised of composer-performers from the NYC metro area, thingNY creates and performs theatrically charged experimental music and collaborative fluxus-esque multimedia works which have included a collaboratively-created opera, a radio play by Beckett and over a hundred premieres of new music.

Some of thingNY's upcoming projects include a new verbose experimental opera called Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young and a day long site-specific performance of Robert Ashley's television opera Perfect Lives with the collective Varispeed.

Called an "inventive new music cabal" by Time Out New York, thingNY has brought their blend of performance art and improvisation to theatres, concert halls, art galleries and DIY venues around New York including the Galapagos Art Space, Judson Memorial Church, the Tank, the University of the Streets, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Littlefield, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Issue Project Room, the Brick Theatre, Dixon Place, and the Stone, as well as various historical homes throughout and beyond the metro area as part of their traveling concert/sound installation, IN HOUSE.

New Music Box hailed thingNY's first album, the eccentrically excessive opera ADDDDDDDDD, as "rapid-fire... pulseracing... all consuming.... packaged with a fun, quirky, comic book libretto. A lovely item that takes the album a step beyond the usual CD release, it makes the physical object in the digital age an interesting piece of art in and of itself, worthy of shelf space and providing plenty of additional visual stimulation."

In February 2011, thingNY presented their second mass-commissioned avant variety show, SPAM v. 2.0. Besides thingNY's usual flair for the excessive and diverse performances, the SPAM show is deeply rooted in expanding the involvement of arts community. The first SPAM concert was a marathon of over one hundred experimental compositions and nonpositions, submitted by artists, composers and listeners around the world including Kathleen Supove, Doug Yule, Joseph Nechvatal, Pauline Oliveros, William Brittelle and Kyle Gann (who wrote that the marathon was "as avant-garde as anything I’ve seen recently – by which term inexactly mean that it was more focused on how we live at this exact moment than on the traditional conventions of concert-giving."