The Rotunda

Due to circumstances beyond our control this concert has been postponed to a date to be announced later. George Stavis is a singular player, among the finest 5-string banjo players of his generation. Although trained in the traditions of Pete Seeger and Earl Scruggs, in the late 1960s Stavis developed a unique approach to the…

Since her emergence in New York’s No Wave scene in the late 1970s as a percussionist in DNA, Japanese native Ikue Mori has used auto didacticism to forge one of the most singular aesthetics in contemporary music. Since switching from a richly intuitive approach to drums to electronics during the 1980s she’s refined an elusive,…

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…

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…

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 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 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…

Bowerbird is pleased to present a double bill of fingerstyle and American primitive guitarists Yasmin Williams and Daniel Bachman. YASMIN WILLIAMS   DANIEL BACHMAN   ABOUT THE ARTIST Yasmin Williams is an acoustic fingerstyle guitarist with an unorthodox, modern style of playing. Her music has been commonly described as refreshing, relaxing, and unique and has…

Philadelphia favorites Alash return to The Rotunda for a FREE concert. Alash are masters of Tuvan throat singing (xöömei), a remarkable technique for singing multiple pitches at the same time. Masters of traditional Tuvan instruments as well as the art of throat singing, Alash are deeply committed to traditional Tuvan music and culture. At the same…

Bowerbird is honored to present a two evening retrospective of pioneering composer Johanna Beyer. The first evening features her percussion music and the second evening features her chamber music. Although Beyer's music was overlooked during her lifetime and for decades after her death, it was some of the most experimental and prophetic work created during…

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 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…

Pressure Wave is a new evening length audio /visual piece by composer/ performer HPrizm (Kyle Austin). The work uses amplified resonance of urban spaces and the intersectional space between Sonic Activism, Musique concrète, and Rap's early roots to examine the dense environments and circumstances that birthed Hip Hop. HPrizm is known for "Evoking images of…

Boston based composer/performer Howard Stelzer performs "Crossing Parallel", a live score to Joe Taylor's poetic film footage of the American southwest. Accompanying this work will be a screening of Philadelphia based film maker David Scott Kessler's Icelandic short film Lopapeysa (with a recorded score by Mary Lattimore and Benjamin Warfield). ABOUT CROSSING PARALLEL "Crossing Parallel", an…