Tim Tai, Staff Photographer

The Yale Schwarzman Center has released the programming for its 2023-2024 season, and it is set to include performances from Grammy Award-winning singers, multimedia artists and experimental chamber musicians.

Announced on Aug. 28, the season’s program kicks off on Sept. 9 with a conversation and performance featuring Grammy-winning recording artist Corinne Bailey Rae, on the subject of her fourth studio album, “Black Rainbows.” In October, the center will host performances by sonic artist Ash Fure, performing a new work titled “ANIMAL: A Listening Gym,” as well as singer Joseph Keckler. 

 In December, the American Modern Opera Company will perform “El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered,” a work composed by John Adams with libretto by Peter Sellars. Finally, acclaimed singer Renée Fleming will perform at the Schwarzman Center from Jan. 18 to 20, 2024.

“The 2023-2024 season at Yale Schwarzman Center promises to be a memorable celebration of creative expression and community unity,” Rachel Fine, executive director of the Schwarzman Center, wrote in a press release. “The artists activating the Center’s many spaces this season invite us to explore both contemporary ideas and emerging themes through works that are pioneering, poignant, timely and provocative.”

The Schwarzman Center was founded in 2021 after Stephen Schwarzman ’69 gave the University $150 million to establish a center for performing arts and community-building. 2022-23 was its inaugural performance season.

Rae — known for her 2006 single “Put Your Records On” and her performance on the “Fifty Shades Darker” soundtrack — is slated to perform her newest album and speak in a public conversation with professor Daphne Brooks. The talk and performance will highlight her album’s many inspirations, which include, according to Maurice Harris, the center’s director of marketing and communications, “Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse, ancestors, and music as a vessel for transcendence.”

“ANIMAL: A Listening Gym” is a commission by the Schwarzman Center to the sonic artist Ash Fure, whose acclaimed music received a nomination for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in music. Featuring an immersive installation accompanied by live performances during designated times, the experience includes full-body sonic machines that allow participants to experience the work through many different senses.

Keckler’s Oct. 5 performance, “An Evening with Joseph Keckler,” will feature an “affecting” and “absurdist” night of “stories and songs,” Harris wrote. 

“El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered” — the work the American Modern Opera Company is slated to perform in December — is an adaptation work by the wide-reaching American opera composer John Adams — known for his operas “Nixon in China” and “Doctor Atomic” — for a chamber music group. The work centers the voices of Latin American writers and women. 

“‘El Niño’ … explores the central themes of the nativity — the immaculate conception, the unique relationship between mother and child, and gift giving — but the work ruminates on the notion that with the promise of new life, there is the equal threat of inexplicable violence and sacrifice,” wrote Julia Bullock, a classical singer who rearranged “El Niño” for a 2018 digital performance set at the Met Cloisters.

Experimental chamber group JACK Quartet will also perform at the center in December, presenting composer Catherine Lamb’s “divisio spiralis.” Harris added that JACK quartet, which has been a longtime collaborator with Lamb, is committed to helping new composers develop modern works outside of traditional paths for classical music.

The season will close out with a series of performances by singer Renée Fleming, who has won five Grammy awards and has received the National Medal of Arts. 

“Renée Fleming is a rare jewel who is heralded for her artistry, her humanity and commitment to the arts and we are blessed to have her as a Schwarzman Center Advisory Board Member,” Fine said about Fleming’s upcoming performance at the Schwarzman Center.  “Her performance and collaboration with the Schwarzman Center and the Yale School of Music this season are unparalleled opportunities for our campus and New Haven communities to hear a living legend.”

Though some students are grateful to see the center’s spaces accommodating life in the arts, some are unaware of the opportunity to see such performances.

Jacqueline Lashmanova ’27 told the News that while she is aware of the program, she “[doesn’t] know exactly what it entails.”

“I think I’ve seen posters about it,” Lashmova said. “I’d be curious to learn more and explore with some of my friends.”

Tickets to Schwarzman Center performances are free to the public and available on the center’s website, although some events require preregistration. 

The Schwarzman Center is located at 168 Grove St.