An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
– Gustave Flaubert from Madame Bovary
“Extreme, and unrelenting expressive intensity…… I read these words in relation to Wagner’s work the other day and it brought to mind the evening I am curating at National Sawdust. Classical music; for lack of a better description – Rock music; and Painting are often described as exhausted mediums with no one expecting much from them by way of expressing their ‘time’… but these mediums have the ability of being so humanly immediate and communicative, the way they can express the ‘now’ (and every other feeling) in an alarming, beautiful, magic much needed way… a touch on a piano key, a stroke of a brush, a scream……. owwwwwwww.”
NS+ Curated by:
About this National Sawdust+ Event
Since she began exhibiting her paintings in the 1990s, artist Elizabeth Peyton’s work has often featured artists and musicians, including composer-musician Nico Muhly and Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, whose music she will feature on her National Sawdust+ evening on Thursday, August 18 at 7pm. The program will open with two pieces by Muhly, performed by violinist Jannina Norpoth and pianist Adam Tendler: Honest Music (2002) and Drones and Violin (2011). The Danish punk band, Marching Church, anchored by Rønnenfelt, will then take the stage.
Images:
Elizabeth Peyton (Nico Muhly) 2016 Colored pencil and pastel pencil on paper 8.6 x 6 inches (21.8 x 15.2 cm) / Elizabeth Peyton Knights Dreaming (K) after EBJ 2016 Oil on board 15 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches (38.7 x 31.1 cm) / Elizabeth Peyton E (Elias) 2013 pencil and pastel on paper 8 3/4 x 6 inches (16 3/8 x 13 3/8 cm)
copyright Elizabeth Peyton; images courtesy of the artist
Marching Church
Marching Church, formerly an outlet for the mostly solo musical experiments of Elias Bender Rønnenfelt (Iceage, Vår), metamorphosed into a full band during the sessions for a 2014 LP on Sacred Bones, This World Is Not Enough. The installation of a permanent supporting cast of collaborators did nothing to tame the project’s wild spirit, and that record was an eclectic, eccentric mix of post-punk, improv, soul music, and more.
Marching Church is fueled music packed with sweat of various origin, dripping from foreheads with eyelids leaning towards closed and a counterfeit energy that never really allows an end to the race. The band in 2016 comprises Rønnenfelt and his frequent collaborator and Iceage bandmate Johan S. Weith (on electric viola and guitar here), Lower’s rhythm section of Kristian Emdal and Anton Rothstein, trumpet player Jakob Emil Lamdahl, and Hand of Dust’s Bo Høyer Hansen. A new album will drop this October.
Music by Nico Muhly
Elizabeth Peyton’s program will feature two pieces by Nico Muhly, performed by violinist Jannina Norpoth and pianist Adam Tendler. Honest Music (2002) has been described as having “the sad beauty of things coming together and things falling apart.”
Nico Muhly’s Drones and Violin is a four-movement work written for Pekka Kuusisto and commissioned by the Muziekgebouw, Eindhoven. Muhly (b.1981) is an American composer and sought-after collaborator whose influences range from American minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition. The recipient of commissions from the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and others, he has written more than 80 works for the concert stage, including the operas Two Boys (2010), Dark Sisters (2011), and the forthcoming Marnie; the song cycles Sentences (2015), for countertenor Iestyn Davies, and Impossible Things (2009), for tenor Mark Padmore; a viola concerto for violist Nadia Sirota; and the choral works My Days (2011) and Recordare, Domine (2013), written for the Hilliard Ensemble and the Tallis Scholars respectively.
He is a frequent collaborator with choreographer Benjamin Millepied and, as an arranger, has paired with Sufjan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom, and Antony and the Johnsons, among others. He has composed for stage and screen, with credits that include music for the 2013 Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie and scores for the films Kill Your Darlings; Me, Earl And The Dying Girl; and the Academy Award-winning The Reader. Born in Vermont, Muhly studied composition with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse at the Juilliard School before working as an editor and conductor for Philip Glass. He is part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks Volumes (2006) and Mothertongue (2008). He currently lives in New York City.
Elizabeth Peyton
Since the 1990s, Peyton began exhibiting her work – paintings of artists, musicians, historical figures, and friends, which she renders from photographs and from life – and more recently, also in still lifes, landscapes and scenes from the opera. Her work has been extensively exhibited internationally in galleries and museums, and is in leading public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Gallery Met, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; and the Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo. Peyton studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She lives and works in New York.
