John Adams, John Cage, Henry Cowell, The  Deep Listening Band, Paul Dresher, Morton Feldman, Ellen Fullman, Kyle Gann, Ge Gan-ru, Peter Garland,  Erik Griswold,  Lou Harrison, Erdem Helvacioglu, William Hooker, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Jeffrey Roden,  Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Somei Satoh, Stefano Scodanibbio, Stephen Scott, Carl Stone,  Richard Teitelbaum, Stephen Vitiello. Evan Ziporyn

 

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard SummerScape presents the New Albion Festival, a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the record label known as the “voice of West Coast new music,” at the Spiegeltent from August1–10.

New Albion Records was named for the idea of  a new land,  after Sir Francis Drake’s original name for California in the 1400’s. It travels from the arc of invention introduced into American composition by Henry Cowell, to the neglected 15th-century master Johannes Ciconia, to the minimalists, and then to the post modern generation, commingling the medieval with the modern. It has created its own American aesthetic devoted to beauty, thoughtfulness, intensity of feeling, and wide open spaces.

08/08 New Albion at SummerScape
Tickets on sale now.
Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
For tickets or information,

call 845-758-7900
or visit www.fishercenter.bard.edu

 

 

08/08 New Albion at SummerScape Schedule of Events

Program One

August 1 at 8:30 p.m.

In the 1960s it started to become clear that the West Coast of America had developed its own laid-back, beauty-obsessed music world quite different from the angst-filled European/East Coast scene. This program features work by Lou Harrison, who wrote for Indonesian orchestras and collected scales from all over Asia, whose music was unfailingly melodic; Daniel Lentz, whose unapologetically pretty music is underscored by canons and counterpoint; and Morton Feldman, a quintessential New Yorker whose Rothko Chapel captures in a more poignant way the centered calm of West Coast influence.

Varied Trio (1986)     Lou Harrison
David Abel, violin; Julie Steinberg, piano; William Winant, percussion

O-Ke-Wa (1972)     Daniel Lentz
12 voices from the Wroclaw Opera Chorus with Bells, Rasps, and Drums

Threndody for Carlos Chavez (1978)      Lou Harrison
Marka Gustavsson, viola;
Jody Diamond, Director: Gamelan Si Betty: Michael Heller, Philip Acimovic, Jacqueline Jacobus, Christopher Carro, Walter Farrell, Garry Kvistad,  William Winant

Rothko Chapel (1971)     Morton Feldman
The Wroclaw Opera Chorus; Stephen Bodner, conductor; Marka Gustavsson, viola; Yukiko Takagi, celeste; William Winant, percussion

Solo to Anthony Cirone (1972)      Lou Harrison
William Winant, tenor bells tuned in a just D-major scale

 

General admission: $25

 

Program Two

August 2 at 3:30 p.m.  (family matinee)

No composer more embodies the spirit of new music than John Cage, whose knack for finding music in everyday objects opened up a whole world of new sounds and performance modes. Ge Gan-Ru, combines an Asian sensibility with a Cagean approach to toy instruments in a work that even children can love. And we have Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano, which brought a whole new genre into existence in 1948. The pair of Satoh’s works involve his spiritual voyage into senses of time, infinity and eternity. Featuring the incomparable, international star performer, pianist, toy instrumentalist and Peking Operaesque vocalist, Margaret Leng Tan. Miguel Frasconi, formerly a member of the Glass Orchestra, is an improviser on pieces of glass and other ready-made detritus.

 

Dances from the Galapagos Gamelan       Miguel Frasconi

 Suite for Toy Piano (1948)                   John Cage
Performed by Margaret Leng Tan

Chooks for toy piano and wood blocks           Eric Griswold
Bicycle Lee Hooker for toy piano, bicycle bell and horn, train whistle
(from Old McDonald’s Yellow Submarine, 2004)
Performed by Margaret Leng Tan

 Falling from Stillness Variations            Miguel Frasconi

 Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! (2006)          Ge Gan-ru
A melodrama for voice, self-accompanied by a toy orchestra
Performed by Margaret Leng Tan

 

General admission: $15 ($5 children)

 

Program Three

August 2 at 8:30 p.m.

For all its classical associations, piano music is at the heart of the new-music aesthetic New Albion represents. No one has been more devoted to the new, more accessible movement in piano music than Sarah Cahill, the pianist featured here. Pieces by Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, Peter Garland, Kyle Gann, Ingram Marshall, Terry Riley and Evan Ziporyn—some of them Cahill commissions—demonstrate several streams that have evolved around minimalism.

 

Private Dances (2004)          Kyle Gann
Performed by Sarah Cahill, piano

Five Easy Pieces (2003)       Ingram Marshall
Performed by Sarah Cahill, Joseph Kubera, piano four hands

Pondok (2001)        Evan Ziporyn
Performed by Sarah Cahill, piano

(pause)

Walk in Beauty (1989)       Peter Garland
Performed by Sarah Cahill, piano

Etude from the Old Country ()    Terry Riley
Performed by Sarah Cahill, Joseph Kubera, piano four hands

At the Beach (TK – Year)        Virgil Thomson
Performed by Sarah Cahill, piano, and Rhys Tivey, trumpet

High Color (TK – Year)         Henry Cowell
Performed by Sarah Cahill, piano

 

General admission: $25

 

 

Program Four

August 3 at 8:30 p.m.

Ask any aficionado which piano work from the last third of the 20th century has indubitably entered the standard repertoire, and the obvious answer will have to be Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated. With that work Rzewski, himself an extraordinary keyboard virtuoso, raised the genre of political protest music to a far more visible level, reunited formal clarity and pianistic virtuosity, and proved that there was still spine-tingling music to be made outside the controversial minimalist movement.

 

Song and Poetry (TK Year)         Carlos Barón

The People United Will Never be Defeated (TK Year)            Frederic Rzewski
Performed by Stephen Drury, piano

 

General admission: $25

 

Program Five

August 7 at 5:30 p.m.

Electronic music is a term that still brings to mind a shudder of impersonal noises executed with machine-like precision. But the truth is that by 2008 electronics has pervaded every pore of music, and New Albion has long championed music that uses electronics in listener-friendly ways. These works by Turkish composer Erdem Helvacioglu, the Brooklyn-based group Slow Six, Richard Teitelbaum, Stephen Vitiello and Carl Stone present new music based in electronics that is nevertheless sonically rich and soulful.

 

6pm From Nor’easter (2008)               Slow Six
Gregor Kitzis, violin; Lorna Krier, keyboard; David Nadal, guitar; Stephen Griesgraber, guitar;  Christopher Tignor, violin, keyboards, software

7pm From Bright and Dusty Things (2001)            Stephen Vitiello
Stephen Vitiello, electronics; Pauline Olivers, accordion; David Deutsch, video

8pm From Altered Realities (2007)            Erdem Helvacioglu
Erdem Helvacioglu, acoustic guitar, electronics

9pm L'os a Moëlle (2008)            Carl Stone
Carl Stone, laptop

10pm From Blends (1977)            Richard Teitelbaum
Richard Teitelbaum, electronics; Ralph Samuelson, shakuhachi, Ehren Hansen, percussion

 

General admission: $25

 

Program Six

August 8 at 8:30 p.m.

Just as La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass established a minimalist movement centered in New York, Ingram Marshall, John Adams, and Paul Dresher represented a second-wave minimalism centered in the Bay Area. In Fog Tropes (the piece that put New Albion records on the map), Marshall pioneered a new, filmy kind of minimalism based more in texture and mood than in repetition or rhythm. His friend John Adams, though, became an overnight sensation with Shaker Loops, and became the more orchestrally accessible “fifth minimalist.” Meanwhile, Dresher stayed behind in San Francisco and devoted himself to theater music and chamber works of great melodic elegance. Included as well is an excerpt of Morton Feldman’s homage to Frank Ohara – Three Voices, sung by soprano Joan La Barbra.

 

Fog Tropes (1981)           Ingram Marshall
Performed by Ensemble ACJW
Featuring alumni and fellows of The Academy – a program of Carnegie Hall, The Julliard School, and the Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City department of Education.
Stephen Dunn,  trombone; Paul Murphy,  trumpet;  Alexander Reicher,  trombone;Alana Vegter, french horn;  Nathan Botts, trumpet; David Byrd-Marrow, french horn

Shaker Loops (1978)          John Adams
Owen Dalby, violin; Alexander Woods, violin; Caroline Adelaide Shaw, violin; Elizabeth Weisser, viola; Ezra Seltzer, cello; Ashley Bathgate, cello; Joseph Magar, contrabass

Toward the Night (TK Year)            Somei Satoh
Owen Dalby, violin; Alexander Woods, violin; Caroline Adelaide Shaw, violin; Kisho Watanabe, violin; Elizabeth Weisser, viola; Kensho Watanabe, viola; Ezra Seltzer, cello; Ashley Bathgate, cello; Joseph Magar, contrabass

From Three Voices (TK Year)          Morton Feldman
Joan La Barbara, voice

In the Nameless (TK Year)               Paul Dresher
Paul Dresher and Joel Davel, Quadrachord and Marimba Lumina

 

General admission: $25

 

 

Program Seven

August 9 at 8:30 p.m.

The power of a single player standing before an audience in a performance is at the heart of musical experience. The soloist is like an orator, a poet, a singer. The works tonight are in that tradition. Ge Gan-ru’s Yi Feng, for solo detuned cello was written and first performed in 1982 and remains today as a work of incomparable beauty and invention – it is as though the sensibility of music is exploded across the social mind. The subtle and nuanced string of miniature works for electric bass by Jeffrey Roden; and then the concert length Journey That Never Ends, for solo bass by Stefano Scodanibbio, a consummate work.

 

Yi Feng (1982)          Ge Gan Ru
Madeline Shapiro, cello

From seeds of happiness (TK Year)           Jeffrey Roden
Jeffrey Roden, electric bass

Voyage that Never Ends (TK Year)         Stefano Scodanibbio
Stefano Scodanibbio, bass

 

General admission: $25

 

 

Program Eight

August 10 at 3:30 p.m.  (family matinee)

Stephen Scott has built a career around one of the strangest media ever: the bowed piano, a normal grand piano played by ensemble bowing the strings. It’s an extremely labor-intensive form of performance: several people lean inside the piano, bowing strings with nylon fish line and popsicle sticks treated with rosined horsehair, carefully choreographed not to get in each other’s way. Scott’s melodious music for the device made a splash in the late ’70s, and he has continued to develop the idiom for three decades, in larger and ever more powerful works.

Bowed Piano
Stephen Scott and the Colorado College Bowed Piano Ensemble
Vikings of the Sunrise (1995)                   Stephen Scott

 

General admission: $15 ($5 children)

 

Program Nine

August 10

At 5:30 p.m.

In the Theater Two Lobby of the Fischer Center. Ellen Fullman has developed an amazing performance over many years that convenes disciplines of sculpture, dance, composition and improvisation wherein the performer activates a series of cables (long strings) to vibrate in a hauntingly beautiful manner.

Free and Open to the Public (Note: this event will take place in Thorne Studio in the Fisher Center)
Long Stringed Instrument            Ellen Fullman

 

At 8:30 p.m.

The Deep Listening Band—David Gamper (keyboards and electronics), Stuart Dempster (trombone and didjeridu), and Pauline Oliveros (accordion and electronics)—celebrates its 20th anniversary by bringing its intensely liberated sounds to the Speigeltent. According to Dempster, the group “was formed by accident in October 1988, while recording the award-winning New Albion CD Deep Listening in a two-million gallon cistern with a reverberation time of 45 seconds.” Founder Pauline Oliveros, a renowned pioneer of new forms, says “our work aims to explore new listening strategies, unusual acoustic environments, expanded instrument technologies, and continuously new relationships with audiences.”

 

Deep Listening Band

Celebrating 20 Years 1988-2008

 

Sounding the Bard without Shakespeare

I Listening to Mirrors

II Deep Mirroring

III Mirroring the Bard[o]

 

 

Performed by the Deep Listening Band

Pauline Oliveros, accordion, voice
David Gamper, keyboard, overtone flutes, found instruments
Stuart Dempster, trombone, conch shells, didjeridus, toys

 

General admission: $25.00

 

 

Website: Anon D.