top of page
About
In Real Time
Scroll down on this page to learn more
In Real Time is a commissioning series in which cellist Josh Halpern partners with a living composer to build a musical portrait of that composer—their voice, their influences, and the friendship between them. With the commissioned work as the centerpiece, every additional piece on the program serves to contextualize and illuminate it, extending a direct invitation to you, the listener, inside the lives and relationships that shaped it.
Each partnership begins long before anyone sets foot onstage. Over the course of a year, Josh and the composer meet, talk, and exchange ideas—improvising together, editing each other's work, and exploring questions until a throughline emerges. Josh's job is to help uncover who this composer is—because when we have a sense of who someone is, we open our ears to them.
After a year, this collaboration gets its live premiere—the new work anchoring a carefully curated program built to illuminate the composer's influences, obsessions, and creative world. The result is a listening experience with a specific point of view, a narrative arc, and a sense of genuine occasion. Audiences don't just hear a new piece in isolation—they hear the story of how it came to be.
The live concert is only the beginning. We develop each In Real Time project into a studio album—not a straight document of the performance, nor simply an audio product, but a full multimedia experience. Just as we opened the hatch to the composer's brain, we gather everything we've discovered that expands and deepens the world we've built—writing, artwork, interviews, and more—and hand it to you to explore for yourself.
The multimedia dimension of In Real Time is an extension of the curatorial approach that shaped the music.
For Letters to My Daughters, Scott Ordway's real letters will be woven throughout, as will writing by George Saunders (Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo) and Holocaust survivor, author of Try to Make Your Life, and friend of Josh, Margot Friedländer.
For Cio da Terra, Kuwait-born watercolorist Zahra Marwan will create original album artwork that mirrors the music itself—vivid and offbeat on the surface, with profound mystery and depth underneath.
Program notes, filmed interviews, and Josh's own writing round out each project.
In Real Time has just gotten started. Two projects have had live premieres and will be recorded soon. There are many more composers, friendships, and musical worlds to come! To make it all happen and share it with the world, we need your help. So please—sign up for updates and consider making a donation. We made this for you!
bottom of page