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…
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…
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…
Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada presents his new group featuring Julia Holter and percussionist Corey Fogel performing music from Wada's new album “Nue” out this fall on Brooklyn-based label RVNG Intl. Opening the evening will be a new synthesizer duo project from Jeff Zeigler (Philadelphia) and Dash Lewis (Richmond). In Japanese, ‘nue’ is a mythological…
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 into each other. In performance, Erik scrolls the paper-cut continually across the surface of…
90 mins, black and white, German with English subtitles
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…