2017 NYC Program Booklet
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THE 2017 RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL Welcome! It is my pleasure to welcome you to the fifth-annual Resonant Bodies Festival in New York City. RBF began in 2013, with a mission to catalyze the creation of new vocal music, expand new vocal music’s audience, and challenge and transform the role of the vocal recitalist. To my delight, critics, performers, and audiences have greeted our efforts with sustained acclaim. Four years later, we have reached a new chapter in the Festival’s evolution: expanding beyond New York City. This past May, I visited Melbourne for the first-ever Resonant Bodies Festival Australia. It was thrilling to dive into the musical culture of the city and hear local artists. The experience profoundly affected me as a curator, widening my scope of what we call “contemporary music”—who belongs to it, and for whom it is performed. As we continue to take Resonant Bodies to new places, we will adapt our format to the culture of the location, which means sometimes changing how we do things. This brings up the question: what is at the core of Resonant Bodies Festival? The answer is always: freedom. Empowering artists with curatorial control. And in this, RBF’s aim is quietly revolutionary: for much of the history of Western classical music, vocalists were trained to be “vessels”—instruments at the (typically male) composer’s disposal. The autonomous vocalist and performer, empowered to realize their own creative potential, is a radical paradigm shift. We believe the art form as a whole will correspondingly advance when vocalists have “full voice” in the process and are treated as creative, self-actualizing beings. We have awakened a sense of community among new-music vocalists. RBF gives them a space to develop their creative and curatorial ideas, and its now-international community sparks exciting collaborations. RBF has also significantly stimulated the growth of new vocal repertoire—in four years, more than 60 works have premiered on our Festival—and provides wide exposure for these new works. Between our performances and rich digital resources (see page 24 to read about Resonant Bodies Podcast, MRMR, and the Contemporary Vocal Music Database), we have created a model with traction. We have established a platform for individual singers to inform and inspire one another and their audiences, resulting in an energy of bold artistic discovery and appreciation. We are so grateful this year for new foundation support: The Aaron Copland Fund, The Alice M. Ditson Fund, The Amphion Foundation, The Ellis L. Phillips Foundation (providing major support for our expansion beyond NYC), New Music USA (a two-year grant for NYC- based ensembles and presenters), and The BMI Foundation. And, of course, to the individuals who have supported us all along the way—we truly could not be here today without you. Thank you for your generosity and support. So, happy fifth birthday, ResBods! I am so proud of all you have done, and all you will do. Lucy Dhegrae Founder/Director, Resonant Bodies Festival RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL | 1 The 2017 Resonant Bodies Festival September 5th to 7th, 2017 Roulette | 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY Tuesday, September 5th 7:30pm Theo Bleckmann page 2 8:15* Jennifer Walshe 4 —intermission— 9:30* Davóne Tines 6 Wednesday, September 6th 7:30pm Hai-Ting Chinn 8 8:15* Joan La Barbara 10 —intermission— 9:30* Odeya Nini 12 Thursday, September 7th 7:30pm Mary Bonhag 14 8:15* Kamala Sankaram 16 —intermission— 9:30* Kayleigh Butcher 18 *exact start-times for later sets may vary slightly each night www.resonantbodiesfestival.org 2 | RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL Theo Bleckmann Tuesday, September 5th, 7:30pm Songs in Color and Black and White (2000-2017) Theo Bleckmann (b. 1966) voice, live electronics, and piano Nitai Hershkovits, piano RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL | 3 About the Performers A jazz singer and new-music composer of eclectic tastes and prodigious gifts, Grammy- nominated Theo Bleckmann makes music that is accessible, sophisticated, unsentimentally emotional, and seriously playful. Bleckmann has released a series of gorgeous and irreverent albums on Winter & Winter, including recordings of Las Vegas standards, of Berlin Kabarett, and of popular “bar songs” (all with pianist Fumio Yasuda); a recording of newly-arranged songs by Charles Ives (with the improvisational jazz/funk collective Kneebody); and his Solos for Voice and Toys, where Bleckmann brought just his stunning vocal technique, his emotional commitment, and his suitcase full of oddly evocative voice-altering gadgets to the project of recording delicate songs and poems alone at a monastery in the Swiss Alps. In his highly-acclaimed CD release of 2012, Hello Earth - The Music of Kate Bush, Bleckmann managed to bring an entirely new and quite gorgeous perspective to the songbook of the British pop recluse. 2013 saw the release of Mother Goose Melodies, a return to Bleckmann’s uniquely interpretive collaborations with Fumio Yasada. In 2014, Bleckmann toured Europe with Ambrose Akinmusire and recorded with Julia Hülsmann’s trio, for a 2015 album release on ECM. Bleckmann has collaborated with a remarkable roster of contemporary musicians and composers, including Laurie Anderson, Peter Eldridge, Philip Glass, Kate McGarry, Sheila Jordan, Luciana Souza, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kenny Wheeler, John Zorn, Bang on a Can All-Stars, and, most prominently, Meredith Monk, with whom Bleckmann worked as a core ensemble member for fifteen years. His uniquely flexible and colorful voice has also inspired compositions by, among others, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Ikue Mori, Kirk Nurock, Julia Wolfe, and, prominently, Phil Kline, who wrote three major song cycles for Bleckmann: Zippo Songs (2004), Locus Solus (2006), and Out Cold (2012), which premiered at BAM's new Fischer Building in 2012. www.theobleckmann.com Born in Israel to a Morrocan mother and a Polish father, Nitai Hershkovits started playing the clarinet at age 12, and discovered his love for the piano at age 15. He has performed with Jorge Rossy, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Greg Tardy, Charles Davis, Mark Guiliana, Zohar Fresco, Steve Davis Diego Urcola, and Robert Sadin, and recorded with Daniel Zamir, flutist Ilan Salem, and Avi Lebovich. He has performed at venues including the Salle Pleyel, Vienna Konzerthaus, l’Olympia, Alter Oper, North Sea Jazz Festival, Antibes Jazz Festival, Jazz à Vienne, Montreux Jazz Festival, Barbican Center, and Tonhalle, amongst others. Hershkovits frequently collaborates and records with internationally-acclaimed bassist and composer Avishai Cohen. He joins Avishai on the albums Duende (EMI/Blue Note), Almah (EMI/Parlophone), and From Darkness. Hershkovits’s debut album, I Asked You a Question (Raw Tapes), was released in February 2016. He was awarded the highest scholarship given by the Israel-American Music Foundation (AICF) four years in a row, and received a B.A. degree from the Jerusalem Rubin Academy of Music. 4 | RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL Jennifer Walshe Tuesday, September 5th, 8:15pm The Church of Frequency & Protein (2010) Music: Jennifer Walshe (b. 1974) Text: Kara Feely & Jennifer Walshe voice, trumpet, trombone, cello, guitar, piano, percussion NEW YORK CITY PREMIERE International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) Nathan Davis, percussion Ross Karre, percussion Katinka Kleijn, cello Daniel Lippel, guitar Weston Olencki, trombone Cory Smythe, piano Nathan Wooley, trumpet RESONANT BODIES FESTIVAL | 5 About the Program “Cast adrift in a post-apocalyptic future, the scientists were free to pursue experimentation at the farthest fringes of science. They pioneered work in hard artificial intelligence, developed self- replicating nanobots, proved the existence of dark matter. As the years passed, however, the extreme isolation of the situation began to take its toll. Gradually they came to believe that the answers to the universe’s most profound questions were to be found in the pop cultural detritus of the 20th century. The scientists saw the pop culture of this time as the expression of a universal mind, the product of interactions between vast numbers of morphic fields; a pathway to an infinitely-expanding consciousness. Their experiments investigated the ability of the kill screens of 1980s videogames to open portals in the fabric of space and time; the effect of kung fu movies on quantum phase spaces; how internet memes might be used to become immortal.” —Dermot Fitzpatrick The Church of Frequency & Protein draws on material from Walshe’s opera The Geometry, commissioned by Object Collection with funds from the Arts Council of Ireland, premiered in New York in 2010. With special thanks to: Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near; Rupert Sheldrake Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong, a documentary about competitive arcade game players battling to achieve the highest score on Donkey Kong; H+ magazine, the journal of the transhumanist movement; I’m in ur basement killing your d00dz; The Best Soap Opera Death Scenes ever; The Hagakure or Book of the Samurai by Yamamoto Tsunemoto; Aubrey de Grey; Life Extension Foundation; Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) Foundation; Tom Selleck Waterfall Sandwich; Michael Gonzalez’s Donkey Kong walkthroughs; The Evolution & Transhumanism IRC chat rooms; The Cybernetic Beingness Revival (CyBeRev) project, a website where visitors can upload individual units of their consciousness so that their Digital Mindfile will ensure they will live long after their physical body has passed on. About the Performers “Without a doubt, hers is the most original compositional voice to emerge in Ireland in the last 20 years.” —Michael Dervan, The Irish Times Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1974. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Kevin Volans in Dublin, and graduated from Northwestern University (Chicago), with a doctoral degree in composition in 2002. Her chief teachers at Northwestern were Amnon Wolman and Michael Pisaro. In 2000, Jennifer won the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt.