Friday, November 30, 2012 at 6:30 pm
Chapel of the Holy Innocents, Bard College
Free and open to the public
Saturday, December 1, 2012 at 7:00 pm
Presented by Neighborhood Classics
P.S. 142 (100 Attorney Street, NYC) — F to Delancey Street or J, M, Z to Essex Street
Tickets $15 in support of P.S. 142 — Purchase here
Shut Your Eyes is an evening of powerful music that will send you sprawling along an emotional and kaleidoscopic voyage — a night of heightened senses brought about by the most visceral music of the present moment. Shut your eyes and Contemporaneous will provide the view.
A founding member of Contemporaneous, Boulder-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Conor Brown’s music draws from Turkish and Balkan folk as well as American minimalism, to create a highly original and compelling musical voice of driving polyrhythms and concentric structures. His large-scale, multi-movement world premiere work Scrolls on this program is a wild, haunting, rock-infused, Anatolian folk-inspired work for four vocalists and ensemble that he wrote specifically for us.
Best known for his work as a guitarist with the indie-rock band The National, Bryce Dessner regularly writes for and plays on the new music scene as well. His recent work O Shut Your Eyes Against the Wind is a dreamscape of morphing textures and beautiful sonorities that takes its title and inspiration from an evocative poem by Black Mountain poet Larry Eigner.
Inspired by the rich sean-nós vocal tradition of his native Ireland, Donnacha Dennehy’s Grá agus Bás (trans: Love and Death) is a dramatic and intense epic for vocalist and just-intoned chamber ensemble. As the music navigates an emotional palate ranging from timeless bliss to devastating terror, Contemporaneous vocalist Finnegan Shanahan will be the beacon on this uniquely powerful journey of ecstasy and destiny that makes an unforgettable impact.
Contemporaneous is thrilled to perform this show for Neighborhood Classics at New York's P.S. 142, hosted by artistic directors Simone Dinnerstein and James Matheson! We are particularly excited to be going into this Lower East Side school in the week before our show to expose the kids to the music of our time and engage them in fun educational activities that we hope will hook them on new music early on! For more information on this great series, click here.
Program:
Conor Brown (b. 1988): Scrolls (2012) — world premiere, Contemporaneous commission
Bryce Dessner (b. 1976): O Shut Your Eyes Against the Wind (2010)
Donnacha Dennehy (b. 1970): Grás agus Bás (2007)
