The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library is pleased to announce The Stories We Tell, the 12th Annual soundON Festival of Modern Music. The four-day long series of concerts, performances, workshops, lectures, and art is curated by Franklin Cox and Christopher Adler.

SDNM is also proud to present the soundON Workshop, on Saturday, January 12, at 12 pm, providing local student musicians with the unique opportunity to engage with and perform contemporary music. Other soundON Festival Concert dates are Thursday, January 10, at 7:30 pm; Saturday, January 12, at 7:30 pm; and Sunday, January 13, at 2 pm.

The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, together with San Diego New Music, presents the soundON Festival of Modern Music, annually in January. The soundON Festival of Modern Music brings together an international roster of composers and performers to present a four-day exploration of contemporary chamber music. Featuring performances by NOISE and Affiliated Artists, the multi-day festival format allows us to present unconventional works in an informal and enjoyable setting. We also reach out to young artists and audiences through an interactive workshop to build a new generation of new music supporters and artists. Now in its eleventh year, the soundON Festival has become a fixture in the musical landscape of San Diego.

Curators Franklin Cox and Christopher Adler chart the evocative domain between language and music with an adventurous collection of the newest music that is the signature of the annual soundON Festival. Instrumental music with strong narrative elements ranges from Gleb Kanasevich's contemplative Solo, to Jason Eckardt's explosive and virtuosic tour-de-force After Serra, to radical deconstructions in a brand new work by Franklin Cox, commissioned by the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. From guest composers Sungji Hong and Derek Keller, music tells stories with both sound and visual image. And language itself becomes the subject in works by Erin Gee, where the sound of speech is translated into musical sound, and Lei Liang's Aural Hypothesis which is based on the gestures of Chinese calligraphy. soundON favorite Stephanie Aston returns to perform a duo by Kate Soper, with NOISE flutist Lisa Cella, in which the musical medium explodes language to its fullest expressive potential. And percussionist Morris Palter will perfrom selections from Christopher Adler's recent collection of settings of Russian transrational futurist poetry in visually-evocative scores.