minis/Trajectories – CD release

2016 is a big year for thingNY! Highlights include a peak at Rick Burkhardt‘s “Passover,” awards from Chamber Music America and the New Music USA Impact Fund, Paul and Gelsey off to Broadway to star in The Great Comet and, of course, our second full-length album with works by Paul and I, to hit shelves September 20th.

minis/Trajectories includes Paul Pinto’s ongoing series of minis (short, theatrical, stream-of-consciousness compositions, blending chamber music, storytelling, and poetry) along with my two works Trajectories (a 4-movements for vocalizing instrumentalists and improvability) and Chronolinea (a whispering/screaming concertino for vocalist and ensemble).

Pre-order now and receive a free ticket to our CD release party at HERE Arts in SoHo.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016 @7:30pm
HERE Arts Center (145 Ave. of the Americas, New York, NY)
admission is $9 and includes a digital copy of the album
Performances by: thingNY, Jerome Kitzke, Helado Negro, Radical 2, members of the cast of Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812

Pre-order: minis/Trajectories
Gold Bolus Recordings GBR024

New Thread Quartet: Elliott Sharp’s “Vivarium”

Elliott Sharp’s Vivarium is a program of new and recent works partially drawn from his just-released album, Tranzience, on New World Records. With the talents of top contemporary players and ensembles JACK Quartet and New Thread Quartet, Vivarium brings Sharp’s works into exciting and unexpected realms. New Thread will perform Sharp’s adventurous work Approaching the Arches of Corti, for 4 soprano saxophones.

Thursday, September 15, 2016 @8:00pm
Roulette (509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY)
admission: $20/15 ONLINE $25/20 DOORS
FB event page

Jaw Box – World Premiere

Saxophonist Geoff Landman performs the world premiere of my work, Jaw Box for solo soprano saxophonist, as part of a Guest Artist Recital at UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance in Kansas City on September 12th. Alongside works by Berio, Bach, Vasenna and Lazcano, this looks to be an epic display of saxophone execution. Jaw Box occupies a realm between pitch, unpitch, speech, and noise. All sounds are acoustic – produced by the solo soprano saxophonist, vocally, bodily, through the instrument, or in combinations.

Monday, September 12, 2016 @7:30pm
White Recital Hall
James C. Olson Performing Arts Center (4949 Cherry Street, Kansas City, MO)
FREE admission
More information HERE

International Contemporary Ensemble: Free Micro-Concert
Young Composers Concert 2

1:00 pm Hearst Plaza

ICE performs music by young composers.

New music-theater works by writer-composers Rick Burkhardt and Gelsey Bell, including the world premiere of Burkhardt’s PASSOVER, and new scenes from Bell’s Rolodex. Both composers explore the vocalizing instrumentalist in disjointed modes of storytelling.

Sun. Jul. 17, 2016, 8pm
JACK
505 1/2 Waverly Ave.
Brooklyn, NY

Rick Burkhardt – PASSOVER
Gelsey Bell – Rolodex
Rick Burkhardt – The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving

Gelsey Bell, voice
John Murchinson, bass and voice
Paul Pinto, percussion and voice
Erin Rogers, percussion and saxophone
Rave Duder, clarinet and voice

Commissioned by thingNY, PASSOVER is a performance-ritual for six singing/speaking performers, seated at a dinner table on which there lies a double bass. Each performer relates the story of a friend’s escape: from a bad marriage, from an unfair situation at work, from a run-in with a traffic cop, from an ethically compromising opportunity, from an awkward family dinner. Ultimately, it becomes clear that all of these friends form one collective identity.

thingNY’s own Gelsey Bell will lead the ensemble in new songs from her evolving game-piece opera Rolodex. Praised by the New York Times as “imaginative,” with work that is “uncomfortably powerful,” “virtuosic,” and “haunting,” Bell draws on techniques across music and theatre to create a disjointed storytelling with a score in the form of a rolodex.

Also on the program, another of Burkhardt’s table-top music-theater piece from 2003, the award-winning The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving, for three speaking percussionists. Time Out New York declared that Hymn “has taught us to listen to the conversation in several keys, and the virtuosic performers play them all—the troubling bassline of violence, the abrasive tenor of self-righteousness, and, every now and then, the clear, bright treble of a really funny joke.”

http://www.thingny.com/events/dr-sandwich-bellthingnyburkhardt