ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird is pleased to welcome the E-MEX Ensemble from Essen, Germany to a special performance in the historic Christ Church sanctuary. The concert will feature works for pipe organ, flute, percussion, and narrator/actor including Gyorgy Ligeti cataclysmic masterpiece "Volumnia" and a world premiere by Philadelphia based composer Kyle Bartlett.   THE PROGRAM…

PRISONER'S SONG Erik Ruin, shadow puppets and projections Gelsey Bell, voice, metallophone, and sound design Rick Burkhardt, director   ABOUT THE EVENT Prisoner's Song is a performance created by composer Gelsey Bell and visual artist Erik Ruin about the prison experience. Using shadow puppets and projections alongside a variety of musical idioms, the piece draws…

ABOUT GLENN JONES Glenn Jones is a master of American Primitive Guitar, a style invented in the late 1950s by John Fahey, whose traditional fingerpicking techniques and wide-ranging influences were used to create modern original compositions. Jones, who led the post-rock ensemble Cul de Sac, brings his own made-up tunings, the use of custom-crafted partial…

Bowerbird is pleased to present the extraordinary bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood for a concert that explores the connections and tensions between technology and that most enduring of sounds -- the human voice. In this program of world premieres, a group of composers created music for solo voice and electronics were selected by Nicholas Isherwood, who constantly…

Bowerbird is excited to welcome the San Francisco-based Del Sol String Quartet for an intimate concert in the Maas Building's Hi5 Studio. Featured on the program will be work Ruth Crawford Seeger's serialist "String Quartet" (1931), Ben Johnston's microtonal "“"String Quartet no. 10" (1995), and music by the radical early experimentalist George Antheil.   ABOUT…

Bowerbird is pleased to present an encore screening of Philippe Garrel’s visually arresting silent film Le Révélateur, performed live with an original score by Philadelphia’s own Mary Lattimore and Jeff Zeigler. Le Révélateur was one of the first films of the Zanzibar group (a coterie of mostly French artists and filmmakers who began making experimental…

Bowerbird is pleased to present the Philadelphia premiere of Pierluigi Billone’s “1+1=1”, an 80 minute exploration into the boundless terrain of two bass clarinets performed by the California based duo of Samuel Dunscombe and Curt Miller. A student of Salvatore Sciarrino and Helmut Lachenmann, Billone’s music can sound elemental and primordial, yet at the same…

ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird is excited to present flutist Christopher Schelb and pianist Michael Tan in an all Sciarrino program. Schelb will perform selections from "L'opera per Flauto, Vol. 1" and Tan will perform four of Sciarrino's Nocturnes. There is something very particular that characterizes the music of Salvatore Sciarrino: it leads to a different…

Bowerbird is excited to present the Philadelphia record release celebration of Bombogenic, a new album by Sonic Liberation 8 with the The Classical Revolution Trio & Oliver Lake. The album celebrates the 15 year anniversary of Sonic Liberation 8 with a new collection of compositions and arrangements showcasing a unique confluence of loft jazz, Afro…

ABOUT THE EVENT The first installment of Composing the Tinnitus Suites: 2016 is the premiere performance of Philadelphia Hearing Damage. This band of broken ears is a crowd-sourced creation of local Philadelphia artists. Fishkin worked with these musicians in the summer of 2016, teaching them how to play the Lady's Harp, and to apply its…

ABOUT THE EVENT The second installment of Composing the Tinnitus Suites: 2016 consists of solos and duets between Ellen Fullman and Daniel Fishkin. Fullman is the inventor of the Long String Instrument, an 80 foot long string instrument consisting of stainless steel wires that she strokes with rosined fingertips. Fullman has used her instrument to…

ABOUT THE EVENT The third installment of Composing the Tinnitus Suites: 2016 consists of compositions for and by Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, and Ron Shalom. Shalom, Schrey, and Fishkin are members of New Perplexity, a collective of new wartime composers and scholars. Schrey performs on the Hardanger Fiddle, a Norwegian folk instrument lined with sympathetic…