Bowerbird is excited to present Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble performing Mystical Paths, a program of music with spiritual focuses as diverse as Sufism, silence, cooking, and humor. Taylor Brook’s Motorman Sextet anchors the program, as an expressive setting of the most nostalgic episodes from David Ohle’s cult novel Motorman. Forrest Pierce’s Tighten to Nothing explores the composer’s…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Moonlite, a new work by composer Wally Gunn and librettist Maria Zajkowski performed by Variant 6, Mobius Percussion and Veronica Jurkiewicz. Moonlite is a concert-length oratorio is based on the true story of the 19th-century Australian outlaw Andrew George Scott, known as “Captain Moonlite.” Captain Moonlite—a rogue, a brigand, a criminal, and…
Bowerbird is pleased to present an evening of screened and live audio visual shorts including the Philadelphia premiere of Phill Niblock’s newly mastered 1966 film The Magic Sun - an experimental work featuring Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra that was produced using a unique negative process and ultra-tight close-ups on the moving hands and mouths of…
Continuing an already ten year commitment to exploring the music of Morton Feldman, Bowerbird is pleased to present his landmark work Trio (for piano, violin, and cello), performed by NYC based ensemble Longleash. Originally premiered in 1980, Trio is one of Feldman's earliest extended duration works (predated by only his String Quartet No. 1). And…
Bowerbird and Sebastian Petsu are pleased to present Double Decker Music Series 20 (DDMS20) featuring Ursula Rucker and Madam Data. The Double Decker Music series is a unique, intimate mobile concert experience on an open-top double-decker bus. Each evening features live music performances in an urban setting paired with a guided tour of Philadelphia's attractions.…
Bowerbird is pleased to present New Perplexity (Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, Ron Shalom) in an evening of new works created during their upcoming artists-in-residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. New Perplexity is a composer-performer collective intent on creating new contexts for the daxophone, a thin hardwood strip played with a bow, created by the German…
Bowerbird and Sebastian Petsu are pleased to present Double Decker Music Series 21 (DDMS21) featuring Jaimie Branch and Sebastian Petsu. The Double Decker Music series is a unique, intimate mobile concert experience on an open-top double-decker bus. Each evening features live music performances in an urban setting paired with a guided tour of Philadelphia's attractions.…
Bowerbird and Sebastian Petsu are pleased to present Double Decker Music Series 22 (DDMS22) featuring Rosali and Seraiah Nicole. The Double Decker Music series is a unique, intimate mobile concert experience on an open-top double-decker bus. Each evening features live music performances in an urban setting paired with a guided tour of Philadelphia's attractions. The…
A new chamber formation brings together Josh Modney, Mariel Roberts, and Eric Wubbels, three of the leading musicians of the New York new music scene, whose playing draws on over a decade of experience playing together in the Wet Ink Ensemble and Mivos Quartet. Their debut program features if and only if , a new…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Alabama-born sculptor and musician Lonnie Holley (performing with Nelson Patton -Dave Nelson and Marlon Patton) and Philadelphia-based musician, poet, visual artist, and activist Moor Mother. "Despite undeniable sonic and aesthetic connections to Sun Ra and Arthur Russell, Lonnie Holley's music is a law unto itself, with the inimitable blues orator…
ZEITGEIST: GEORGE CRUMB AT 90 – NIGHT 1 A collection of George Crumb's most evocative music performed by Philadelphia's Arcana New Music Ensemble. The program features the haunting setting Apparition, with texts drawn from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” and all four books of Madrigals with text by Spanish poet Federico…
ZEITGEIST: GEORGE CRUMB AT 90 – NIGHT 2 Two major works for solo amplified piano, the zodiac-inspired Makrokosmos I and the more recent Metamorphoses, celebrate George Crumb's unfettered imagination as he requires the pianist to be a virtuoso at the keyboard while playing inside the piano and vocalizing as well. PROGRAM Makrokosmos, Book I (1972)…
ZEITGEIST: GEORGE CRUMB AT 90 – NIGHT 3 The Daedalus Quartet performs Crumb's Vietnam War-haunted Black Angels for amplified string quartet, “a work of frightening intensity, where Jimi Hendrix and Pierrot Lunaire shake hands with the devil.” A selection of Crumb’s early music rounds out the picture of this essential American artist’s lengthy career. PROGRAM…
Philadelphia-born, New Jersey-raised polymath Laraaji has maintained a pursuit of spiritual transcendence through music since the mid-70s. After several years of studiously developing an aesthetic informed by Eastern faiths and transcendental research in his long-time home in Harlem, in 1979 Brian Eno stumbled upon him busking in Washington Square Park in New York, improvising celestial…
Bowerbird is pleased to present "Neil Feather: Sound Mechanic" an evening dedicated to the sonic contraptions of Neil Feather, inventor of such fantastical instruments as "The Wiggler", "The Nondo," "Thunderwheels," "Magnapooters," "Apex Roto-Zither," and the "Thumbsnake." The night will feature a performance of a work-in-progress chamber concerto composed for Feather’s instruments alongside the Arcana New…
Bowerbird is pleased to present an evening featuring a new collaborative work by between vocal group Variant 6 and instrumental / percussion trio Square Peg Round Hole. Philadelphia vocal sextet Variant 6 are staunchly devoted to performing new music, commissioning and collaborating with a wide variety of forward-looking composers and ensembles. Its peerless vocalists find…
This superb New York chamber trio deftly applies the instrumentation of the classic jazz piano trio to dazzling new contemporary writing. Pianist Karl Larson, percussionist Matthew Evans, and bassist Pat Swoboda achieved an early apotheosis in 2018 with American Dream, a concert-length commission from the Brooklyn composer Scott Wollschleger, which according to Bandcamp Daily, “toggles…
Ithaca composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies presents a cinematic version of her stunning 2017 video work Contralto, a bracing yet tender meditation on gender dysphoria viewed through the lens of transgender women finding a comfortable new speaking voice. Based on her experience in Ithaca College’s Voice and Communication Modification Program for People in the Transgender…
