Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho film screening with live performance by Eva and Jesse Sheppard and Andy McLeod. Bowerbird is pleased to present a screening of the 2015 biopic "Voice of an Eagle" about enigmatic guitarist Robbie Basho. The evening will be opened by performances by Andy McLead, and father-daughter duo…
Bowerbird is pleased to present the international collaboration between daxophone masters Daniel Fishkin (Philadelphia) and Kazuhisa Uchihashi (Japan). The daxophone is a thin hardwood strip played with a bow, created by German improviser/inventor Hans Reichel in 1987. The instrument’s sound, somewhere between a cello and a badger, ranges from furtive gurgles to wild screams.…
ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird is pleased to present "The Music of Moondog", a survey of the idiosyncratic rounds and songs by composer Louis Thomas Hardin Jr (1916 - 1999). The eccentric street musician known as Moondog dressed in Viking garb and regularly performed on the sidewalks of New York's Sixth Avenue. This concert is the…
ABOUT THE EVENT Currently over 100 feet in length, LONG/GONE is a single intricately-cut piece of paper which flows freely from image to image. Narratives and scenarios (often drawn from classic works of literature from Homer to Dante) emerge and collapse and spill over and into each other. In performance, Erik scrolls the paper-cut continually…
For the final concert, Eastman's powerful work for 10 cellos The Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc and its introspective companion vocal piece Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc will be performed. Far ahead of their time, these pieces incorporate a much more atonal language into Eastman's minimalist aesthetic. The concert will open with…
ABOUT THIS EVENT Julius Eastman perfected his multifarious minimalism in three works of the late seventies: "Crazy Nigger", "Evil Nigger", and "Gay Guerrilla". Each work is scored for multiple instruments of the same kind. This concert features two of the works performed as a piano quartet and Gay Guerrilla performed by a large ensemble of…
ABOUT THE SERIES Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental is an interdisciplinary, multi-artist project that examines the life, work, and resurgent influence of Julius Eastman, a gay African American composer and performer who was active internationally in the 1970s and 80s, but who died homeless at the age of 49, leaving an incomplete but compelling…
ABOUT THE SERIES Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental is an interdisciplinary, multi-artist project that examines the life, work, and resurgent influence of Julius Eastman, a gay African American composer and performer who was active internationally in the 1970s and 80s, but who died homeless at the age of 49, leaving an incomplete but compelling…
ABOUT THE EVENT Three Voices, written in 1982 for Joan La Barbara, was the last solo vocal piece he wrote before his death in 1987 (For Stefan Wolpe, dedicated to his composition teacher and written for chorus and two vibraphones, post-dates it). It sets part of Wind, a poem by his friend Frank O'Hara that…
ABOUT THE EVENT The evening features two sets by Moor Mother, working under the theme of Community Futurism, in collaboration with Black Quantum Futurism and the Community Futures Lab. The first set includes improv collaboration of live instrumentation with drums, saxophone, bass, synth, and text. The second features music from the album Fetish Bones as…
Bowerbird is pleased to present the duo of Loren Connors and Chris Forsyth and a performance by Philadelphia's Taiwan Housing Project LOREN CONNORS has improvised and composed original guitar music for over four decades. His music - which embraces the aesthetics of blues, Irish airs, blues-based rock and other genres while letting go of…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a screening of David Scott Kessler's evolving documentary The Pine Barrens: Whitesbog Edition with a live score performance by The Ruins of Friendship Orchestra. Guiding the viewer through the New Jersey Pineland's winding, rust-colored rivers; its dark, sandy forests and slowly developing towns, The Pine Barrens creates a contemplative, complex,…
Bowerbird and The Rotunda are pleased to welcome back a Philadelphia favorite: The Alash Ensemble. ABOUT THE EVENT ALASH are masters of Tuvan throat singing, a remarkable technique for singing multiple pitches at the same time. Masters of traditional Tuvan instruments as well as the art of throat singing, Alash are deeply committed to traditional…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Svitanya, a Philadelphia-area women's vocal ensemble that specializes in folk music of Eastern Europe. Founded in 2001, the ensemble started with six singers performing purely a cappella arrangements. The early members included two mother-daughter pairs, fitting for a genre in which songs have been passed from mother to daughter for…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a screening of Shirley Clarke's 1985 film "Ornette: Made in America". "Ornette: Made In America" captures Ornette's evolution over three decades. Returning home to Fort Worth, Texas in 1983 as a famed performer and composer, documentary footage, dramatic scenes, and some of the first music video-style segments ever made, chronicle…
Bowerbird is pleased to screen three documentary films marking the 50th anniversary of "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering". In 1966 ten New York artists and thirty engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories collaborated on a series of innovative dance, music and theater performances, "9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering", held in October at the 69th…
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…
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…
