ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird, in association with Pig Iron Theatre Company, is pleased to present Morton Feldman's Samuel Beckett, Words and Music. The concert will be performed by the Arcana New Music Ensemble with actors Jaime Maseda and Michael T. Williams in the magnificent sanctuary of the Fleisher Art Memorial. THE PERFORMERS Pig Iron…
ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird is pleased to present the first event of the newly rebooted BEGIN ANYWHERE series, a performer-driven, salon-style concert series curated and performed by the musicians of the Arcana New Music Ensemble. With appropriate irony for our current political climate, the concert will feature a variety of works by American composers and…
ABOUT THE EVENT The Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) created some of the most severe, brutalist classical music of the 20th century. Favoring stark textures and unusual combinations of instruments-- she never formally studied orchestration-- her music unfolds in ruthlessly throbbing rhythms, angular melodic shards, and resonant caverns of silence. Though she mostly avoided programmatic…
ABOUT THE EVENT Arcana joins forces with the Prometheus Chamber Ensemble to perform two politically charged works of modern music. Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's 1975 composition Workers Union is notated as a single part that can be played by any kind of instruments, melodic or percussive. Noisy, hypnotic, and powerfully dramatic, Workers Union is a…
Roll strikes, spares, and even gutter balls, while you support Bowerbird's ARCANA NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE. We've rented the whole PEP Bowl facility - which means admission gets you two hours of unlimited bowling *AND* supports our mission of performing beautiful, unconventional music in beautiful, unconventional spaces. ABOUT PEP BOWL Conveniently located in South Philadelphia…
Bowerbird's Arcana New Music Ensemble joins forces with Variant 6, a vocal sextet specializing in contemporary music, for a program of Steve Reich, Morton Feldman, Salvatore Sciarrino, and more. THE PROGRAM Morton Feldman: Voices and Instruments II for three voices, flute, two cellos, and double bass Steve Reich: Proverb for three sopranos, two…
ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird is pleased to present the sixth event of the BEGIN ANYWHERE series, a performer-driven, salon-style concert series curated and performed by the musicians of the Arcana New Music Ensemble. THE PROGRAM Karlheinz Stockhausen: Tierkreis Melissa Dunphy: Handshake: a scherzo Padma Newsome: My Mr. Neverending Kiss Michael Finnissy: Green Meadow Jennifer…
ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird is pleased to present "The Music of Moondog", a survey of the idiosyncratic rounds and songs by composer Louis Thomas Hardin Jr (1916 - 1999). The eccentric street musician known as Moondog dressed in Viking garb and regularly performed on the sidewalks of New York's Sixth Avenue. This concert is the…
Bowerbird is excited to present the music of Pauline Oliveros performed by the Arcana New Music Ensemble. One of the leading composers and performers of the 20th and 21st century, Pauline Oliveros' career spanned four decades and influenced generations of musicians. While Oliveros is most widely known for her improvisationally centered Deep Listening work, her…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a program of rarely performed solo works by Morton Feldman. The concert, which features members of the Arcana New Music Ensemble, includes pieces for electric guitar, trumpet, voice, percussion, cello, piano, and pipe organ. Feldman: The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar (1966) Nick Millevoi, electric guitar Feldman:…
The American composer Tom Johnson (b. 1939) has made a career of quite literally composing by numbers. Motivated by mathematical concepts such as self-similarity, transformations, and tiling patterns, Johnson's compositions are rigorously formalistic, but his use of repetition and familiar musical materials makes the underlying processes recognizable and (usually) enjoyable. The centerpiece of this concert…
One of the most influential American composers of the 20th century, James Tenney (1934-2006) combined the experimental spirit of Cage and company with a rigorous grounding in acoustics, perception, and information theory. This program explores Tenney’s music for string instruments, from his diagrammatic Postal Pieces (1965-71) to his last major work, the string quartet Arbor…
Louis Thomas Hardin, Jr., better known as Moondog, is one of the most famous and influential outsider musicians of the twentieth century. Born in Kansas to a devoutly religious family, Hardin was blinded at age 16 when he dug up a live dynamite cap. For 30 years, from the early 1940s to the early 1970s,…
Bowerbird and the Arcana New Music Ensemble are excited to present the music of Ben Patterson (1934-2016), an important and under-recognized leader of the early Fluxus movement, an international, interdisciplinary community of experimental artists that began in the early 1960s. The program represents Patterson's wide range of compositional strategies. For example - Paper Piece (for 1…