April 6-8: Three Experimental Operas Performed by thingNY
Friday, April 6, 2012
Vinko Globokar – Un Jour Comme Un Autre
thingNY – ADDDDDDDDD
Saturday, April 7, 2012
thingNY – ADDDDDDDDD
Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young – Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young [New York Premiere]
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Vinko Globokar – Un Jour Comme Un Autre
Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young – Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young
Chashama @ Moe’s Taxi
26-15 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City
Subways: E, G, M, N, R, Q, 7
Bus: B62, Q39, Q67
LIRR: Hunterspoint Ave.
All performances begin at 8:00pm
$15 general admission
$10 students
$30 Weekend Pass
On April 6-8, thingNY will perform three pairings of three experimental operas in an abandoned taxi garage in Long Island City. The operas include Slovenian composer Vinko Globokar’s Un Jour Comme Un Autre, an underperformed gem of the 1970s avant-garde, comprising an account of a tortured woman during the French-Algerian War that eerily parallels the political repressions and prisoner torture of today. After a two-year hiatus, thingNY’s first collaboratively composed opera ADDDDDDDDD, called “rapid-fire… pulseracing… and all consuming” by NewMusicBox, comes home to NYC. Finally, Jeff Young and Paul Pinto present the New York premiere of their verbose mobile opera about immigration, Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young. The three operas will be performed twice each, with a unique pairing of two operas on each night.
Un Jour Comme Un Autre is the rarely seen masterpiece of Slovene-French composer Vinko Globokar that launched Diamanda Galas into the spotlight as a virtuosic and dramatic vocalist. Emerging new music soprano Gelsey Bell takes the lead role in this semi-staged opera dealing with the cruelties of arrest and torture. Based on real events, the vocalist’s beautiful utterances are transformed into terrifying squeals and screams as she endures kidnapping, interrogation, isolation, beatings, and, eventually, her death.
“One day at a time. At a time. I take it. I take it and I look. I look awful today. I have man lips. I could change them. I could cover them up with some bloating-color lip shiner – like ochre – or something.”
Influenced by Robert Ashley, Berg, Boulez, Braxton, and Björk, thingNY’s collaboratively composed ADDDDDDDDD is an opera exploring the sweet sounds of excess. In a poetically verbose blend of noise, song, and spoken word, the five composer-performers highlight the everyday excesses of our lives via a montage of numbers, appointments, pet peeves, dreams, and commercial interruptions in five-part harmony.
“What is the alternative, I ask? Do we have a blind-eye anarchy here? Whose side are you on? The Swedes?”
Scored for violin, voices, percussion, and turntable, Jeff Young and Paul Pinto, Patriots, Run for Public Office on a Platform of Swift and Righteous Immigration Reform, Lots of Jobs, and a Healthy Environment: an Opera by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young is a satire of a political campaign that centers around speeches and debates on the topic of immigration and national identity. This summer, Patriots
was toured by Paul Pinto and Jeffrey Young throughout the Northwestern U.S. The work is a “portable” opera – the loading and unloading of the stage is part of the performance – a format inspired both by the fleeting nature of political campaign visits and the transient lives of immigrant workers.
This program is made possible (in part) by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
“As avant-garde as anything I’ve seen recently – by which term inexactly mean that it was more focused on how we live at this exact moment than on the traditional conventions of concert-giving.”
-Kyle Gann (PostClassical)
The New Yorker’s Alex Ross listed thingNY as part of the city’s burgeoning avant-garde classical music scene “striking an attitude of resistance to mainstream culture.” Comprised of composer-performers from the NYC metro area, thingNY creates and performs theatrically charged experimental music and collaborative fluxus-esque multimedia works, which have included a collaboratively created opera, a radio play by Beckett, and over a hundred premieres of new music.
Called an “inventive new music cabal” by Time Out New York, thingNY has brought their blend of performance art and improvisation to theatres, concert halls, art galleries, and DIY venues around New York including the Galapagos Art Space, Judson Memorial Church, the Tank, the University of the Streets, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Littlefield, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Issue Project Room, the Brick Theatre, Dixon Place, and the Stone, as well as various historical homes throughout and beyond the metro area as part of their traveling concert/sound installation, IN HOUSE.
New Music Box hailed thingNY’s first album, the eccentrically excessive opera ADDDDDDDDD, as “rapid-fire… pulseracing… all consuming…. packaged with a fun, quirky, comic book libretto. A lovely item that takes the album a step beyond the usual CD release, it makes the physical object in the digital age an interesting piece of art in and of itself, worthy of shelf space and providing plenty of additional visual stimulation.”
http://www.thingNY.com/
Avant-garde trombonist and composer Vinko Globokar has written over 80 works, from solo to chamber to opera, many of which explore the voice and speech, and include elements of improvisation. He has premiered works by composers such as Mauricio Kagel, Toru Takemitsu, and Louis Andriessen. Many compositions have been written for him by composers including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, and Luciano Berio, with whom Globokar studied. He also studied under Rene Leibowitz and Andre Hodeir in Paris.
Although born in France in 1934, Globokar spent his teens in Slovenia. Starting out as a jazz musician, his studies in Paris included not only trombone, but also conducting (incidentally, he went on to conduct the Warsaw Philharmonic and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, among others). In 1967, he began an almost ten-year tenure as a music professor in Cologne, where he co-founded the improvising group, New Phonic Art. He spent much of the ’70s as a department head of IRCAM and, beginning in the mid-’80s, was head of 20th-century music at the Scuola di Musica de Fiesole/Firenze. He has performed with world-renowned improvisers Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and many more.
For more information, visit http://www.thingny.com/3operas/
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