Tickets
About the Show
Theo Bleckmann presents a collaboration between the American Contemporary Music Ensemble and celebrated composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa to perform a selection of her works.
About the Artists
ACME has been performing and interpreting new music for over 10 years, and at National Sawdust will begin exploring the world of creating original music as well. A number of musicians in ACME also identify as composers, and an equal number identify as primarily performers. During their National Sawdust residency, ACME members will work together in making new music – individually and collaboratively, those who compose for public performance, those who compose privately, and those who have never composed. On December 20, they will present their new works and works-in-progress – a mix of composition and improvisation incorporating percussion, electric guitar, bass, and electronics – to the public for the first time.
Players include Timo Andres, piano/keys; Chris Thompson, electronics/percussion; Yuki Numata Resnick, violin; ACME artistic director Clarice Jensen, cello/bass; Aaron Roche, guitar/electronics/synths; and Grey Mcmurray, guitar.
Other Spring Highlights
Ferus Festival: Sxip Shirey’s A Bottle of Whiskey and a Handful of Bees
January 9, 2017 - 7:00pm National Sawdust’s in-house record label VIA Records celebrates its release of the new album by composer, producer, interdisciplinary performer, and NS curator Sxip Shirey.
Lost Spring
March 3, 2017 - 7:00pm One hundred years after the Armenian Genocide, a mother must explain this troubled history to her daughter. But how does one explain inhuman cruelty to innocence itself? Mixing theater, dance, and live music, and further brought to life by the visuals of artist Kevork Mourad, this multi-disciplinary creation is the poetic journey of a woman in quest of her history, in quest of meaning, in quest of a lost spring…
Prototype Presents: Funeral Doom Spiritual
January 13, 2017 - 7:00pm Funeral Doom Spiritual is a song of mourning for what Anthony Paul Farley calls “the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation, and neo-segregation.” This new monodrama composed by M. Lamar and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix draws on themes of apocalypse, end times, and rapture found in Negro Spirituals, what Lamar calls “Doom Spirituals.”
Turquoise Lake, featuring Humayun Khan and Douglas J. Cuomo
March 12, 2017 - 4:00pm Humayun Khan and Douglas J. Cuomo have formed Turquoise Lake, an eight-piece ensemble of musicians from a variety of improvisational traditions to create music that blends the raga tradition of North India and Afghanistan, Farsi poetry of the great Sufi masters, and Afghan folk melodies and ghazals, with western jazz and rock styles.
Sxip Shirey presents: Trevor Wishart
March 25, 2017 - 6:30pm Encounters is an 8-channel sound-surround piece based on speaking voices recorded in the North East of England where Trevor Wishart was A.C.E. Composer-in-Residence from October 1st, 2006 to September 2009, based at the University of Durham. The piece is constructed in 4 Acts of approximately 20 minutes each, combining portraits of individual speakers (accompanied by sounds and imaginary instruments derived from the voices themselves) with computer animation of the entire community of voices - speech that waltzes, speech that locks in harmony, clouds of speech that circle the audience, culminating with speech that transforms into song. The piece was finally completed on January 1st 2011.
Bridging the Gap III
March 5, 2017 - 7:00pm Featuring music by Philip Glass, Paola Prestini, and John Zorn.
Prototype Presents: Funeral Doom Spiritual
January 14, 2017 - 7:00pm Funeral Doom Spiritual is a song of mourning for what Anthony Paul Farley calls “the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation, and neo-segregation.” This new monodrama composed by M. Lamar and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix draws on themes of apocalypse, end times, and rapture found in Negro Spirituals, what Lamar calls “Doom Spirituals.”
James Rhodes
February 4, 2017 - 7:00pm Immortal piano music by history's finest composers performed in an intimate setting with the lights down low and an opportunity to disappear and escape from the world for an hour and a half. Along with a few jokes. And a bit of historical context.
Theo Bleckmann presents Skúli Sverrisson: Sería
February 2, 2017 - 7:00pm Layers of pulsating strings. Streams of cinematic texture. Expanses of heartfelt melody. These are all aspects of the musical world of Skúli Sverrisson, a twenty-first century virtuoso composer and multi-instrumentalist from Iceland who has united broad swaths of contemporary music into a unique personal language.
The New American Songbook
January 11, 2017 - 7:00pm The quarterly web magazine for experimental music, Sound American, moves from the text to the sonic in order to answer the question: “What does a truly modern American Songbook sound like?”
The Thurber Theater: Michael Thurber’s 30th Birthday Concert
January 7, 2017 - 10:00pm Celebrate Michael Thurber's 30th birthday with a concert featuring music by Thurber and guest performers from different musical traditions. The audience will hear performers from the Classical and Jazz worlds as well as the Pop and Broadway worlds.
ETHEL’s HomeBaked Round III
March 8, 2017 - 7:00pm The musically omnivorous string quartet ETHEL, whom The New York Times has described as “indefatigable and eclectic” and The New Yorker has deemed “vital and brilliant,” returns to National Sawdust to present the third chapter of ETHEL’s HomeBaked project. With its focus on emerging NYC-based composers, the project, which began in 2010, has already produced eight compositions, many of which have entered the quartet’s repertoire.
