Bowerbird, in collaboration with Nightletter, are pleased to present Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 1998 film "The Silence". "The Silence" follows Khorshid, a blind 10-year old living with his mother in a small Tajikistan village. Khorshid earns money tuning musical instruments, while Nadereh -- the beautiful protege of the instrument maker for whom Khorshid works --…
Bowerbird is excited to present Philadelphia's Arcana New Music Ensemble performing a portrait concert of Raven Chacon. PROGRAM Whisper Trio Tessa Ellis, Andy Thierauf, Chelsea Meynig Quiver Tom Kraines, cello Tááʼtsʼáadah Tessa Ellis, trumpet Lats’ aadah Carlos Santiago, violin Biyan Jonathan Leeds, clarinet; Chelsea Meynig, flute; Carlos Santiago, violin; Tom Kraines, cello; Andy Thierauf, percussion…
Dedicated to Daphne Oram On a celluloid film print, even sound is made of light. Running alongside the picture is the optical soundtrack, an image in itself. A beam of light penetrates it, exciting a photoelectric cell with its sound determined by the pattern of black and white. Ever since sound first joined film, artists…
Bowerbird is pleased to present vocal group Variant 6 at University Lutheran performing "Sacred & Profane" - madrigals in a kaleidoscope of texts and sounds: medieval prayers set by Benjamin Britten, fables and fairy-tales conjured by Maurice Ravel, solemn meditations by Pablo Ortiz, and excerpts from Gian Carlo Menotti’s strange and beautiful The Unicorn, the…
Bowerbird is pleased to present pianist Karl Larson performing work from the recently released album Dark Days featuring solo piano compositions of Scott Wollschleger. Dark Days chronicles Scott's solo piano repertoire written between 2007 and 2020. Aspects of style that are heard on his first album Soft Aberration are present again, but now filtered through…
Bowerbird is pleased to bring Laraaji back to our home venue at University Lutheran performing for a second improvised solo piano set this season. ABOUT THE ARTIST 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…
Bowerbird is pleased to present the acclaimed new music duo Ligament. Described as “perverse and nihilistic”, Anika Kildegaard (voice) and Will Yager (double bass) perform as LIGAMENT, an ensemble dedicated to commissioning new music and creating work for their unique instrumentation. LIGAMENT’s performances are a fusion of standard and non-standard elements; sometimes there are high…
Bowerbird and Nightletter are pleased to present the four-part documentary series On The Edge: Improvisation in Music written and produced by Derek Bailey. For more than four decades, Derek Bailey was one of musical improvisation’s foremost apostles. The English guitarist and experimental musician not only has a litany of classic improvised recordings to his name…
Bowerbird and Nightletter are pleased to present the four-part documentary series On The Edge: Improvisation in Music written and produced by Derek Bailey. For more than four decades, Derek Bailey was one of musical improvisation’s foremost apostles. The English guitarist and experimental musician not only has a litany of classic improvised recordings to his name…
Held in the Belgian spring and summer of 1958, the Brussels Exposition was the apogee of World’s Fairs. With its slogan “evaluation of the world for a more humane world” celebrating a new post-war optimism about technology and progress, it was also full of the contradictions of the age, and was equally a celebration of…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Yarn/Wire performing the Philadelphia premiere of Catherine Lamb's "Curvo Totalitas". On the score, Lamb describes the piece: "Synthesizer musicians play their material (which are filtered partials of the percussion recordings) in an unforced manner. Melodic contours unfold slowly, relative to the total time. Tones in contours may occassionally be articulated…
Bowerbird is thrilled to present Ensemble Pamplemousse in Philadelphia performing a brand-new collection of pieces about the elephant in the room, the devil is in the details, the cat's meow, The Whole Nine Yards, and the bottom line. Using instruments new and old, mechanical and human-operated, digital and digitized, some of the pieces explode various…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a double bill featuring Seattle's Telescoping and Philadelphia's Jesse Kudler. Telescoping is a quartet of Dave Abramson (drums, percussion), Al Jones (guitars, electronics, voice), Greg Kelley (trumpet, electronics), and Robert Millis (guitars) that performs "dense, nocturnal improvised music.” Jesse Kudler will be premiering a new site-specific work developed on and…
Bowerbird is pleased to present New York City based pianist Adam Tendler performing American composer Morton Feldman's (1926 - 1987) late period masterpiece For Bunita Marcus . Music critic James Pritchett describes the work: "For Bunita Marcus , like all the late Feldman works, is an adventure that takes a relatively long time to play out, but…
Bowerbird is pleased to present Laraaji in our home venue at University Lutheran performing an improvised solo piano set on our Steinway Model O. ABOUT THE ARTIST 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…
Commissioned by the German public service broadcaster ZDF, Kidlat Tahimik shot this movie in Laguna in the Philippines in 1981 as a contribution to the ZDF teleplay series “Vater Unser” (“Our Father”). These comprised six 45-minute short movies by a group of international directors, which interpreted key phrases from the lexicon of the Apostles’ Creed.…
NEW DATE Pat O’Neill’s rarely-screened masterpiece of West Coast cinema is a dazzling synthesis of fast motion and superimposition, appropriated footage and time lapse photography, chroma keying and long exposures. Water and Power layers images drawn from urban Los Angeles, its water source in the Owens Valley, and an otherworldly interior space in increasingly complex permutations. What…
Bowerbird is pleased to present a collaboration between the Arcana New Music Ensemble and the annual Wildflowers Composer Festival to present works by the festival faculty. The festival is open to composers who identify as part of gender-marginalized communities, which includes cis-women, trans-women, trans-men, and those who are nonbinary or gender-nonconforming. The summer festival is…