ZEITGEIST: GEORGE CRUMB AT 90 – NIGHT 1 A collection of George Crumb's most evocative music performed by Philadelphia's Arcana New Music Ensemble. The program features the haunting setting Apparition, with texts drawn from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” and all four books of Madrigals with text by Spanish poet Federico…
ZEITGEIST: GEORGE CRUMB AT 90 – NIGHT 2 Two major works for solo amplified piano, the zodiac-inspired Makrokosmos I and the more recent Metamorphoses, celebrate George Crumb's unfettered imagination as he requires the pianist to be a virtuoso at the keyboard while playing inside the piano and vocalizing as well. PROGRAM Makrokosmos, Book I (1972)…
ZEITGEIST: GEORGE CRUMB AT 90 – NIGHT 3 The Daedalus Quartet performs Crumb's Vietnam War-haunted Black Angels for amplified string quartet, “a work of frightening intensity, where Jimi Hendrix and Pierrot Lunaire shake hands with the devil.” A selection of Crumb’s early music rounds out the picture of this essential American artist’s lengthy career. PROGRAM…
Philadelphia-born, New Jersey-raised polymath Laraaji has maintained a pursuit of spiritual transcendence through music since the mid-70s. After several years of studiously developing an aesthetic informed by Eastern faiths and transcendental research in his long-time home in Harlem, in 1979 Brian Eno stumbled upon him busking in Washington Square Park in New York, improvising celestial…
Bowerbird is pleased to present "Neil Feather: Sound Mechanic" an evening dedicated to the sonic contraptions of Neil Feather, inventor of such fantastical instruments as "The Wiggler", "The Nondo," "Thunderwheels," "Magnapooters," "Apex Roto-Zither," and the "Thumbsnake." The night will feature a performance of a work-in-progress chamber concerto composed for Feather’s instruments alongside the Arcana New…
Bowerbird is pleased to present an evening featuring a new collaborative work by between vocal group Variant 6 and instrumental / percussion trio Square Peg Round Hole. Philadelphia vocal sextet Variant 6 are staunchly devoted to performing new music, commissioning and collaborating with a wide variety of forward-looking composers and ensembles. Its peerless vocalists find…
This superb New York chamber trio deftly applies the instrumentation of the classic jazz piano trio to dazzling new contemporary writing. Pianist Karl Larson, percussionist Matthew Evans, and bassist Pat Swoboda achieved an early apotheosis in 2018 with American Dream, a concert-length commission from the Brooklyn composer Scott Wollschleger, which according to Bandcamp Daily, “toggles…
Ithaca composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies presents a cinematic version of her stunning 2017 video work Contralto, a bracing yet tender meditation on gender dysphoria viewed through the lens of transgender women finding a comfortable new speaking voice. Based on her experience in Ithaca College’s Voice and Communication Modification Program for People in the Transgender…
Since her emergence in New York’s No Wave scene in the late 1970s as a percussionist in DNA, Japanese native Ikue Mori has used auto didacticism to forge one of the most singular aesthetics in contemporary music. Since switching from a richly intuitive approach to drums to electronics during the 1980s she’s refined an elusive,…
Philadelphia's favorite vocal sextet Variant 6 presents world premieres by Joanne Metcalf and Klaus Sandvig on a program that brings light in the dark of winter. Joanne Metcalf's music draws inspiration from Renaissance and medieval polyphony, ancient Georgian music, and contemporary extended techniques. Her new work will set a poem by Denise Levertov: "The Sea’s Wash…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Same Animal, Different Cages, a two night portrait of composer David First. Now based in Brooklyn, First was born in Philadelphia and was active in the city during the 1970s and 80s as the composer and guitarist for the influential avant rock band The Notekillers. His work ranges from pop…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Same Animal, Different Cages, a two night portrait of composer David First. Now based in Brooklyn, First was born in Philadelphia and was active in the city during the 1970s and 80s as the composer and guitarist for the influential avant rock band The Notekillers. His work ranges from pop…
Due to circumstances beyond our control this concert has been postponed to a date to be announced later. George Stavis is a singular player, among the finest 5-string banjo players of his generation. Although trained in the traditions of Pete Seeger and Earl Scruggs, in the late 1960s Stavis developed a unique approach to the…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Philadelphia based piano virtuoso David Hughes performing a "Schubertiade" - a program that explores the music and spirit of Franz Schubert alongside work by contemporary composers inspired by his music. Victor Hugo famously wrote that "forty is the old age of youth, fifty the youth of old age." This program,…
This event was originally scheduled for Feb 26 but has been rescheduled for March 11. Rightfully renowned as a composer, vocalist, choreographer, and stage director, Meredith Monk’s underseen films present their own inventive reflections on the cataclysms of history. Quarry began as a live multimedia opera in 1976 featuring a black and white short film…
Austrian laptop music pioneer Fennesz recently released his first album in nearly five years, Agora, and it reinforces the inscrutable beauty of his aesthetic. His work is steeped in romanticism, with each piece patiently wending its way through meticulously plotted narratives of remarkable concision, marked by orchestral swells and shimmering ambience. Using a blend of…
Bowerbird is pleased to presented the duo of Peter Evans (trumpets) & Levy Lorenzo (percussion/electronics). Evans and Lorenzo began performing duo as part of the International Contemporary Ensemble's OpenICE commissioning series in early 2016. Their music is an otherworldly blur of dense rhythmic frameworks, elaborate notated pieces, open improvisation and weird drones. Lorenzo's complex of…
Introduced by Gregory Zinman, editor, “We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik” After moving from his native Seoul, first to Germany to study music alongside the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, and then to the United States, Nam June Paik lived what seems like the romantic archetype of the post-war…
