Linnaean member Elijah Shiffer is a senior at the Manhattan School of Music, a composer, and a virtuoso performer on flute, clarinet, and alto saxophone. Since he was thirteen he has been performing his own and others’ compositions in numerous venues around the city, including Jazz at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. He won DownBeat magazine Student Music Awards in 2009 for original song and original extended composition and received the Young Jazz Composer Award in 2008 and 2010 from ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and was a finalist in 2012. For tonight’s concert, he will be joined by several other Manhattan School students. He writes, “We will be playing pieces that I have written that are influenced by the nature of NYC parks; they present musical portraits of Riverside Park, Central Park, Jamaica Bay, and Orchard Beach/Pelham Bay Park. The images and events I am influenced by focus on the small insights the parks offer into, respectively, the river, the woods, the ocean, and the Sound. Each piece is also influenced by a change of season, especially as it relates to bird migration; together the pieces represent a year in the life of the natural areas of New York City. I will be explaining what each piece represents, and how I translate my influences into music.”
