ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird and Sebastian Petsu are pleased to welcome Settled Arrows and Shinjoo Cho to the Double Decker Music Series. Join us on Sunday, August 27th at 8:00 p.m. (rain date, August 29th) for a unique and intimate mobile concert experience on an open-top double-decker bus. Before, between, and after the music, tour…
ABOUT THE EVENT Bowerbird and Sebastian Petsu are pleased to welcome Tether and Jo Nelson to the Double Decker Music Series. Join us on Sunday, September 10th at 8:00 p.m. (rain date, September 12th) for a unique and intimate mobile concert experience on an open-top double-decker bus. Before, between, and after the music, tour guide…
Bowerbird is pleased to present the international collaboration between daxophone masters Daniel Fishkin (Philadelphia) and Kazuhisa Uchihashi (Japan). The daxophone is a thin hardwood strip played with a bow, created by German improviser/inventor Hans Reichel in 1987. The instrument’s sound, somewhere between a cello and a badger, ranges from furtive gurgles to wild screams.…
Bowerbird is pleased to present The World According to Sound, an immersive sonic experience by Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff. During the performance, the audience sits blindfolded at the center of a ring of loudspeakers. Listeners will be transported inside another person's head, and back in time a hundred years to the streets of Berlin.…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a triple bill featuring New York Bassist, James Ilgenfritz, composer and performer Bhob Rainey, and Philadelphia sound artist Gabrielle Losoncy.
Bowerbird is thrilled to welcome master percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani back to the Philadelphia for both a solo set and leading the "Nakatani Large Ensemble", a group consisting of workshop participants. Also on the evening will be CERBERUS- Alban Bailly (cello), Dan Capecchi (drums), and Matt Engle (bass) - a new Philadelphia based Trio that uses…
Bowerbird is excited to present a screening of "Wild Combination", director Matt Wolf's visually absorbing portrait of the seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist, and disco producer Arthur Russell. Before his untimely death from AIDS in 1992, Arthur prolifically created music that spanned both pop and the transcendent possibilities of abstract art. Now, over fifteen years…
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…
Bowerbird is pleased to welcome San Francisco's Friction Quartet to their premiere Philadelphia performance. The program will feature the world premiere of a new string quartet by New Zealander composer (and Philadelphia based) Rosie Langabeer. Opening the evening will be Murmuration celebrating the debut album, "Revised Notes" FRICTION QUARTET Otis Harriel, Violin; Kevin Rogers, Violin;…
Bowerbird is excited to present the Philadelphia premiere of the Quince Vocal Ensemble performing Morton Feldman's "Three Voices" with all three parts performed live. Feldman's "Three Voices" was written for the experimental vocalist and composer Joan LaBarbara in 1982. The original concept involved the live performer singing along with two pre-recorded parts projected through on-stage…
90 mins, black and white, German with English subtitles
... The music of Gavin Bryars falls under no category. It is mongrel, full of sensuality and wit and is deeply moving. He allows you to witness new wonders in the sounds around you by approaching them from a completely new angle. With a third ear maybe... Michael Ondaatj Arcana performs Gavin Bryars medieval inspired…
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…
Bowerbird is excited to present a rare evening of all contemporary music for brass ensemble featuring musicians from the Arcana New Music Ensemble. The program encompasses a wide variety of compositional voices from the last sixty years, including Lois V. Vierk's thorny Jagged Mesa, Michael Nyman's very un-Cagein For John Cage, and more recent works…
WEATHER UPDATE: CONCERT IS HAPPENING AS PLANNED. Bowerbird is pleased to present the the extraordinary vocal ensemble Ekmeles performing Madrigals and Animals, a program celebrating the ongoing history of madrigals - the complex multi-part songs born during the Renaissance period known for their creative text setting (including imitating animals calls). Karola Obermüller’s mass:distance:time relates directly to this…
The music of the Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948-1983) combines diverse influences–from the the cerebral constructions of the European avant-garde to exoticist borrowings from East Asia– into a haunting and inimitable artistic voice. Vivier's intense and colorful music mirrors his life as an eccentric and bon vivant who met a tragic death at the age…
Bowerbird is pleased to present the world premiere of Greg Brown’s Fall and Decline performed by Variant 6. The new work composed for voices and electronics is based on texts of Sadakichi Hartmann, Eprenius, Todd Hearon, Edward Gibbon, and Omar Khayyam. The composition contemplates the inevitable decline of all things natural and manmade. Variant 6…
Bowerbird is pleased to present color as time, an ensemble led by Philadelphia composer / performer Joshua Stamper that inhabits the blur between classical, jazz, folk, and experimental textures. Playing at the edges of the composed and the improvised, the music is inspired by Elliott Carter's and Olivier Messiaen's time-stretching compositional techniques, immersed in a…
