We are delighted to welcome Rene Lussier, Caroline Shaw, Gabriella Smith, and Zhang Shouwang (of the Beijing band Carsick Cars) to our big family of People’s Commissioning Fund composers!
The 2016 Peoples Commissioning Fund Concert is on February 6th at Merkin Hall and is part of the 2016 Ecstatic Music Festival!
The concert will also include Julia Wolfe’s “Reeling” from Field Recordings, and with Trinity Choir led by Julian Wachner from Wolfe’s 2015 Pulitzer-prize winning work Anthracite Fields, also nominated for a Grammy this year.
John Schaefer of WNYC-FM will host the evening for future radio broadcasts on his program, “New Sounds LiveQ2 Music and will be available for on-demand listening at Q2Music.org.
More about the 2016 PCF composers:
René Lussier’s new field recording for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Nocturne, is inspired by an intimate observation. Lussier says, “In the last 30 years, I have often transcribed and transposed spoken language into music. I did the same with chickens, various tools, motors, etc. Everyday life sounds inspire me for new frame works, new directions. This time, the music is generated by my sweetheart sleeping. The rhythm and drama of her breathing, the melodies of her snoring.” Lussier, a native of Quebec, Canada, is a composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist is known to New York audiences for his years of collaboration in the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet.
2013 Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw’s new piece has an unexpected inspiration as well. Shaw says, “I’m working with Library of Congress recordings from the 1970s, of quilters from North Carolina and Virginia talking about quilting. I love the way they speak about design and craft, about technique and imagination.”
Gabriella Smith says “I get a lot of my inspiration from the forms, structures, and energies in the natural world, and I also like math, which can describe these forms, designs, and energies so elegantly”. Smith comes from
the San Francisco Bay area and she is currently a 2015-16 ArtistYear Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, dedicating a citizen-artist year of national service in the Philadelphia region.
Zhang Shouwang, frontman for the popular Beijing rock band Carsick Cars, and the experimental group White, has been one of the driving forces behind China’s underground music scene for the last decade. Incarnations of Shouwang’s “White Project” have ranged from the guitar sextet White Ensemble, a rock duo called White 2J, an electronic duo called White+, and more. Collaborators include the likes of legendary New Yorkers Sonic Youth and German avant-noise pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten.
