People
< class="people-type-title"> Long Play 2024
Iannis Xenakis was born May 29, 1922, in Romania and died February 4, 2001, in Paris, France. He was a composer, architect, and mathematician who originated musique stochastique, music composed with the aid of electronic computers and based upon mathematical probability systems.
Learn more about Iannis Xenakis here.
Rebekah Heller plays Steve Reich (world premiere) and Julius Eastman
Rebekah Heller is one of our most productive musical citizens – ultra-bassoonist, collaborative artist, educator, and advocate for new music. On Long Play she will premiere Steve Reich’s Grand Street Counterpoint (the street both she and Steve live on!), for solo bassoon and 10 pre-recorded bassoons, based on Reich’s Cello Counterpoint from the early aughts. Rebecca will also premiere her own arrangement (painstakingly transcribed from a live cello performance by Clarice Jensen) of Julius Eastman’s driving The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc.
Laurel Halo presents Atlas live with Leila Bordreuil
Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist, composer and sound-artist from France. She accesses concepts as diverse as Noise, contemporary classical, free jazz, and experimental traditions but adheres to none of them. Her music mixes deep melancholia with harsh noise-walls at ear-bleeding levels, and was described by the New York Times as “steadily scathing music, favoring long and corrosive atonalities”.
Driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, Leila challenges conventional cello practice through extreme extended techniques and unorthodox amplification methods, to the extent she sometimes seems to be playing the P.A system rather than the cello. Her compositions frequently incorporate sound-spatialization by way of site-specific pieces and multichannel installations, and focus on neurological perception and our physiological relationship to sound and space.
Photo Credit: Camille Blake
claire rousay
claire rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life’s banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex.
Ekmeles performs George Lewis, Hannah Kendall and Georg Friedrich Haas
New York experimental vocal sextet Ekmeles performs works by legendary composer and scholar George Lewis and increasingly acclaimed composer and storyteller Hannah Kendall that explore different aspects of the African-American diaspora. Lewis’s piece Lone Coast Anacrusis, for voices and accordion, gives voice to the peoples displaced and the communities shattered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, based on Nathaniel Mackey’s poem of the same name. Hannah Kendall’s This Is But an Oration of Loss memorializes – hauntingly, delicately, passionately – a massacre of slaves on a ship in 1781. Ekmeles will also perform works by the highly sensitive and imaginative researcher into the inner world of sound, Georg Friedrich Haas.
Alex Weiser/Ben Kaplan, The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, produced by American Opera Projects
C&V alumni Alex Weiser (composer) and Ben Kaplan’s (librettist) new opera – The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language
AOP mounts a concert reading featuring 5 singers and 6 instrumentalists. Co-produced by The Neighborhood.
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, a new chamber opera based on the true story of Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark, who in 1950s post-war New York City sets out to write the world’s first fully comprehensive Yiddish dictionary — an effort of linguistic preservation, and a memorial to the dead.
The opera invites audiences to consider the extent to which a language and a culture can be saved, the nature of grief, and the power of language itself to transform and shape us into who we are.
Jason Weisinger as Yudel Mark
The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life will be an inclusive and welcoming community hub with a physical Brooklyn location. We will be a gathering place for local Jewish groups and organizations that don’t have their own space, for new programming, and for cross-community collaboration. We will produce programs to fill gaps, raise up underrepresented perspectives, and welcome the thousands of Brooklynites that have not yet found their Jewish home. We hope to create a welcoming space that reflects the spirit of Brooklyn—future-thinking and deeply historical, iconoclastic, and sacred. And that serves an excellent cup of coffee.
American Opera Project’s website
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the 14th Street Y
Ana Roxanne
Ana Roxanne is a New York based musician working at the interzone of electric meditation, dream pop, and ambient songcraft. Her self-titled EP was later reissued by Leaving Records before signing with Kranky for her official full-length debut, 2020’s Because Of A Flower. Her inspirations span the secular (R&B divas of 1980’s and 90’s) and the spiritual (Catholic choral traditions in which she was raised), synthesized into a uniquely intuitive sonic language, equal parts atmospheric and ancient, healing and hermetic.
Photo Credit: Rich Lomibao
Maria Chavez [DJ]
Born in Lima, Peru and based in NYC, Maria Chávez is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist and DJ. Her latest album, “Maria Chavez PLAYS Stefan Goldmann’s Ghost hemiola” was nominated for a Preis der deutschen schallplattenkritik in 1/2020. Currently, Maria is on the cover of the textbook about the history of Experimental and Electronic music by Routledge Publishing.
Photo Credit: Martyna Szczesna
Robert Black Tribute Concert: John Luther Adams’ Darkness and Scattered Light
This past year our friend Robert Black passed away. One of the great bass players of our time and a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, he was a part of everything we did, from our first concert in 1987 until this year. No-one on the planet could make the double bass sing, dance, sound like a drum, spin like a top, like Robert Black. And no one dedicated his life to the new with as much invention, musicality and passion. We are all blessed to have been his friends.
Robert’s last recording was John Luther Adams’ Darkness and Scattered Light. This beautiful album overflows with JLA’s monumental reflections on the vastness and majesty of the natural world. It was released after Robert died and went on to receive a Grammy nomination. The music on it has never before been performed before in its entirety – rich, sonic, deep, complete, and live.The concert will be performed by five bassists – all former students of Robert’s and alumni of the Bang on a Can Summer Festival – and will be led by longtime Bang on a Can colleague Gregg August, including bassists Tristan Kasten-Krause, John-Paul Norpoth, Eleonore Oppenheim, Will Yager.
Robert Black Photo: Stephanie Berger
John Luther Adams: Pete Woodhead
Rafiq Bhatia with Chris Pattishall
Like many of his favorite things, there is much more to Chris Pattishall than meets the eye, and it gets stranger the deeper you dig. Most know him as a pianist with a “forthright relationship to the jazz tradition” (New York Times) and a hard-earned endorsement from the music’s traditional establishment—Wynton Marsalis once shortlisted Pattishall among his favorite young improvisers, and he’s also worked with Jimmy Heath, Jon Hendricks, and Wycliffe Gordon.
