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…
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 excited to present a rare Philadelphia appearance by experimental vocal duo Audrey Chen and Phil Minton. Opening the evening will be cellist-singer Daniel de Jesús. With primary focus on the interplay between the uttered sounds of the mouth and vocal chords, Audrey Chen and Phil Minton plumb the depths of their most inherent…
Bowerbird is excited to present Emma Resmini, an extraordinary young virtuoso performing a program of contemporary music for flute. The program includes "Flautina" from Stockhausen's opera "Montag aus Licht" and Dai Fujikura's "Poison Mushrooms", a threnody to the victims of the Hiroshima bombing. Emma began playing at flute at the age of three and is…
Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho film screening with live performance by Eva and Jesse Sheppard and Andy McLeod. Bowerbird is pleased to present a screening of the 2015 biopic "Voice of an Eagle" about enigmatic guitarist Robbie Basho. The evening will be opened by performances by Andy McLead, and father-daughter duo…
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.…
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…
ABOUT THE EVENT Currently over 100 feet in length, LONG/GONE is a single intricately-cut piece of paper which flows freely from image to image. Narratives and scenarios (often drawn from classic works of literature from Homer to Dante) emerge and collapse and spill over and into each other. In performance, Erik scrolls the paper-cut continually…
For the final concert, Eastman's powerful work for 10 cellos The Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc and its introspective companion vocal piece Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc will be performed. Far ahead of their time, these pieces incorporate a much more atonal language into Eastman's minimalist aesthetic. The concert will open with…
ABOUT THIS EVENT Julius Eastman perfected his multifarious minimalism in three works of the late seventies: "Crazy Nigger", "Evil Nigger", and "Gay Guerrilla". Each work is scored for multiple instruments of the same kind. This concert features two of the works performed as a piano quartet and Gay Guerrilla performed by a large ensemble of…
ABOUT THE SERIES Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental is an interdisciplinary, multi-artist project that examines the life, work, and resurgent influence of Julius Eastman, a gay African American composer and performer who was active internationally in the 1970s and 80s, but who died homeless at the age of 49, leaving an incomplete but compelling…
ABOUT THE SERIES Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental is an interdisciplinary, multi-artist project that examines the life, work, and resurgent influence of Julius Eastman, a gay African American composer and performer who was active internationally in the 1970s and 80s, but who died homeless at the age of 49, leaving an incomplete but compelling…
ABOUT THE EVENT Three Voices, written in 1982 for Joan La Barbara, was the last solo vocal piece he wrote before his death in 1987 (For Stefan Wolpe, dedicated to his composition teacher and written for chorus and two vibraphones, post-dates it). It sets part of Wind, a poem by his friend Frank O'Hara that…
ABOUT THE EVENT The evening features two sets by Moor Mother, working under the theme of Community Futurism, in collaboration with Black Quantum Futurism and the Community Futures Lab. The first set includes improv collaboration of live instrumentation with drums, saxophone, bass, synth, and text. The second features music from the album Fetish Bones as…
Bowerbird is pleased to present the duo of Loren Connors and Chris Forsyth and a performance by Philadelphia's Taiwan Housing Project LOREN CONNORS has improvised and composed original guitar music for over four decades. His music - which embraces the aesthetics of blues, Irish airs, blues-based rock and other genres while letting go of…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a screening of David Scott Kessler's evolving documentary The Pine Barrens: Whitesbog Edition with a live score performance by The Ruins of Friendship Orchestra. Guiding the viewer through the New Jersey Pineland's winding, rust-colored rivers; its dark, sandy forests and slowly developing towns, The Pine Barrens creates a contemplative, complex,…
Bowerbird and The Rotunda are pleased to welcome back a Philadelphia favorite: The Alash Ensemble. ABOUT THE EVENT ALASH are masters of Tuvan throat singing, 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…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Svitanya, a Philadelphia-area women's vocal ensemble that specializes in folk music of Eastern Europe. Founded in 2001, the ensemble started with six singers performing purely a cappella arrangements. The early members included two mother-daughter pairs, fitting for a genre in which songs have been passed from mother to daughter for…