This Wednesday, January 27, at 8:00 pm, Penn will welcome the first of three remarkable pianists for the series of concerts devoted to new music, Eighty-Eight Lately. Marilyn Nonken was an outstanding artist on the scene in the later part of my time as a student in New York in the ’80s, and she has continued to be a tremendous advocate for living composers. She is particularly associated with spectralist composers like Murail and Dufourt, in part because of her elegant book, The Spectral Piano. Pieces by those two composers will be on the January 27 concert, along with music by David Rakowski, Mikel Kuehn, Richard Carrick (the works by the latter two composers are premieres), and Christopher Trapani. Later installments of the Eighty-Eight Lately series will feature Gregory DeTurck and Matthew Bengston. All the concerts are at Rose Recital Hall in Fisher-Bennett Hall on the Penn campus at 34th and Walnut.

Here’s a video of Marilyn playing Rakowski’s Fists of Fury: