April 6-8: Three Experimental Operas Performed by thingNY

Date: April 8, 2012
Time: 8:00 pm

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/

RSVP on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/251135508307725/

January 29, 2012

Sweet Soubrette residency – Spike Hill, Brooklyn

Date: March 20, 2012
Time: 11:00 pm

Sweet Soubrette appears at Spike Hill throughout March as part of RocketHub’s Takeoff Tuesday Artist Spotlight Residency Series. Horns will join in Tuesday, March 20th!

Spike Hill
186 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
11:00pm

www.sweetsoubrette.com
www.spikehill.com
www.rockethub.com

March 5, 2012

New Thread in Arizona

Date: March 16, 2012
Time: 8:20 am

North American Saxophone Alliance
Biennial Conference
Arizona State University
March 15-18, 2012

New Thread Saxophone Quartet
Friday, March 16, 2012, 8:20am
Katzin Concert Hall, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts

Performing new works by Anthony Gatto and Erin Rogers and the world premiere performance of Harmonixity by Richard Carrick.

NTQ

NTQ

January 29, 2012

Colin Davin, guitar premieres Rogers – American Guitar Society

Date: March 10, 2012
Time: 8:00 pm

Premiere of new work for solo guitar by Erin Rogers, commissioned and performed by guitarist, Colin Davin.

THE AMERICAN GUITAR SOCIETY
2011 – 2012 CONCERT SERIES

$20 General Admission, $15 AGS Members, $10 Seniors & Students
CONCERT LOCATION: RECITAL HALL (ROOM 106)
MUSIC BUILDING
LOS ANGELES VALLEY COLLEGE
5800 Fulton Ave, Valley Glen, CA 91401

Colin Davin is widely regarded as one of the most compelling classical guitarists of his generation. Known for his engaging stage presence, he has performed for audiences in the United States, Canada and France. He has earned first prize in several international guitar competitions, and has earned a reputation as a virtuoso guitarist and a refined interpreter. He will dazzle you with his technique and artistry.

Davin_AGS

October 1, 2011

New Thread at Vaudeville Park, Brooklyn

Date: March 1, 2012
Time: 7:30 pm

Sliding scale donation: $8-15
Doors: 7:30pm
New Thread Quartet
Mike Perdue
The Harvard Institute Drumset Orchestra

Vaudeville Park
26 Bushwick Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211


Experimental ensemble thingNY is excited to announce the brand new Seven Immediacies Series debuting this March at Brooklyn venue Vaudeville Park. This music series is thingNY’s first official foray into curating a series as a group. thingNY’s goal for the Seven Immediacies Series is to present ambitious new well-developed works by artists who maintain a high standard of performance. Each installment of the series will pair local and visiting emerging classical and experimental artists with a large-scale new work, difficult to program because of its extreme length or unusual ensemble. The series will be presented in seven installments from March to July 2012.

Founded in 2011 in New York City, the New Thread Quartet is committed to the creation and performance of saxophone quartet repertoire from New York’s burgeoning new music scene. Members of the ensemble are active as composers, performers, educators and industry professionals, and hold degrees from the most prestigious conservatories and music schools in the US and Europe.Still in its inaugural year, New Thread has given 3 concerts of works by New York composers, performing at George Mason University in Fairfax VA, SUNY Potsdam, and South Oxford, Brooklyn. With a mission to bring the city’s music to the ears of young saxophonists and enthusiasts beyond the 5 boroughs, New Thread will perform at the 2012 NASA Biennial in Tempe, Arizona, and the upcoming World Sax Congress in St. Andrews, Scotland. Tonight, New Thread is presenting new works by composers Richard Carrick, Anthony Gatto, Gilbert Galindo and Erin Rogers. New Thread is Geoffrey Landman,Kristen McKeon,Justin Marks and Erin Rogers.

Mike Perdue (Pittsburgh, PA) is an improvising percussionist and composer. Originally from a farm in rural south Alabama, Perdue has made his way to the contemporary art music scene in New York by way of the Contemporary Performance Program at Manhattan School of Music, where he earned his master’s degree in 2011. Perdue’s early influences, which range from marching drumline to church music to the symphony orchestra and beyond, are manifested in his current creative output and instrumental technique. As a performer/composer, he has premiered his own work with the ensembles Tactus (New York), Ossia (Rochester), Alia Musica (Pittsburgh), with the NYC theater company Sister Sylvester, and with cellist Mariel Roberts. Mike performs a set of scenes for solo percussionist entitled Words and Letters and Numbers. Equally employing found objects, traditional instruments, the voice, and the body, Perdue asks the eternal question: “You can lead a horse to water… but how?”

Cataract, devised by Paul Pinto, is the inaugural project by the newly assembled, tentatively titled The Harvard Institute Drumset Orchestra. Comprised of percussionists near and far, Cory Bracken, Michael Evans, David Grollman, Mike Perdue, Mike Pride, Paul Pinto, and Julian Sartorius, Cataract is an hour-long cascading roll exploring all the surfaces of six drum kits.

February 5, 2012