eighth blackbird releases Lonely Motel: music from “Slide” on CD
“The blackbirds are examples of a new breed of super-musicians.”
– Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
eighth blackbird’s world premiere performance of Slide was the centerpiece of the 2009 Ojai Music Festival, where it made an indelible impact. The genre-defying new music-theater piece wowed the Daily Sound as “part opera, part performance art,…and purely amazing,” while for the Los Angeles Times it “epitomized the kind of new musical world that eighth blackbird is ushering us into. …Powerful and impressive.” An eighth blackbird commission*, Slide exploits the unique blend of virtuosity, new-music chops, and youthful exuberance that marks the Chicago-based, Grammy Award-winning sextet as “the straight-A students of the contemporary scene” (Washington Post). Now, after extensively touring the work, the group makes it available to audiences at home, with Cedille Records’ September 27 release of Lonely Motel: music from “Slide.”
eighth blackbird has consistently drawn praise for its performance of Slide. “The blackbirds brought their irresistible élan,” reports the Los Angeles Times; the work was “brilliantly played by the blackbirds,” affirms Musical America; “eighth blackbird navigated Mr. Mackey’s score without blinking, while also playing roles,” elaborates the Santa Barbara News-Press. Moreover, Slide was, from the outset, an eighth blackbird project. The sextet was instrumental in bringing together the creative and artistic team behind it, participating in the creative process, and presiding over the whole production, including the recording. The six musicians worked in close collaboration with composer, electric guitarist, and Guggenheim fellow Steve Mackey and 2007 Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, actor, and singer Rinde Eckert, both of whom join the ensemble on the new album.
The resulting work is a dish for musical omnivores, part song cycle, part rock opera. While the ingredients are finely diced and there are no actual quotations, the songs are seasoned with homages to composers as diverse as Dowland, Mozart, Stravinsky, Piazzola, and the Beatles. This rich brew reflects the eclecticism both of eighth blackbird, whose members “are without stylistic allegiances: Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, experimentalism, New Romanticism, old Expressionism, rock, smooth jazz, not-so-smooth jazz – all come easily and naturally” (Los Angeles Times), and of Mackey, whose ability to incorporate and transform references to music from Monteverdi to Led Zeppelin is “lithe, subtle, and more than a little playful” (Newsday).
Sung by a lovelorn psychologist played by the “typically riveting” (Musical America) Eckert, the songs in Lonely Motel are about perception, self-delusion, and ultimately the isolation created by the attachments we develop to our own fuzzy, personal views of reality, “produc[ing] some of contemporary music’s finest combinations of music and theater” (Musical America). Small wonder, then, that when eighth blackbird toured the work to Chicago, Tribune critic John von Rhein described it as one of the “winter’s best,” exclaiming: “Leave it to this adventurous sextet to come up with the most provocative new-music event of the spring.”
Princeton professor Steve Mackey has represented the United States in the International Composers Rostrum in Paris and served as composer-in-residence at festivals including Tanglewood and Aspen. His compositions have been released on the Bridge, BMG/RCA Red Seal, Albany, New World, Nonesuch, BMG/Catalyst, CRI, Min/Max, and Newport Classic labels. Rinde Eckert, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama and the Obie Award-winning creator of And God Created Great Whales, is renowned as a writer, composer, director, and performer whose productions have toured extensively. As for eighth blackbird, one of the group’s previous Cedille Records releases, strange imaginary animals, scored two 2008 Grammy Awards, for “Best Chamber Music Performance” and “Producer of the Year, Classical,” as well as being nominated for “Best Classical Contemporary Composition.” As the Los Angeles Times observed, “With these blackbirds singing morning, noon, and in the dead of night, horizons could not but expand.”
A promotional video of Lonely Motel is available here, and portions of eighth blackbird’s multi-media Slide performance are available here. A list of the group’s upcoming season highlights follows below, and much additional information is available at its web site: www.eighthblackbird.org.
* Slide was produced with support from Stanford Lively Arts at Stanford University; the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at University of Maryland; Meet The Composer's Commissioning Music/USA program; Charles C. Jett, Nancy R.G. Church M.D., and Herb and Belle Goldman; Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond; the 2009 Ojai Music Festival; Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University; Corporate Funding by the Boeing Corporation; and the Music Department at Princeton University.
Slide is a rich tapestry of love, human frailty, the desire of control, and eventually the tragic consequences once we have attained it. The central metaphor is a slide from an experiment, which defines every element in this complex drama set with music, movement, and theater. -Rinde Eckert
Slide is a concert-length music/theater work featuring new music ensemble eighth blackbird, actor/singer Rinde Eckert, and composer/performer Steve Mackey.
Eckert plays Renard, an enigmatic psychologist who struggles to describe an experiment examining reactions to in- and out-of-focus slides. The results reveal that our decisions are based on habits or conventions that make it difficult for us to see clearly.
Slide uses the experiment as a metaphor for today's world, where persuasive images are employed to sell a commercial or political product. The work explores the seduction and manipulation of the American psyche, but also the effect of the experiment on Renard himself, who seems irreversibly changed by the experience.
eighth blackbird and Steven Mackey create onstage characters in the story and projected images play an important role. The goal is an unmediated exploration and expression of sound, text, movement and image.
Slide is being created for concert halls and theater spaces and will begin touring in March 2010.
To download a more detailed description, click here .
This project is being managed by Susan Endrizzi and Nicole Borrelli-Hearn. Contact details are below.
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Steven Mackey was born in 1956 to American parents stationed in Frankfurt Germany. His first musical passion was playing the electric guitar in rock bands based in northern California. He later discovered concert music and has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. He regularly performs his own work, including two electric guitar concertos as well as numerous solo and chamber works and is also active as an improvising musician.
As a composer, Mackey has been honored with numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, two awards from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Stoeger Prize for Chamber Music by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and in 2000 the Miami performing arts center acknowledged his contributions to orchestral music with a special career achievement award. His Indigenous Instruments was selected to represent the U.S. at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris in 1990. Mackey was in residence at Tanglewood in the summer of 2006 and will be co-composer in residence with Christopher Rouse at the 2007 Aspen Music Festival. He h as, in the past, been composer-in-residence at numerous universities and festivals including Yellow Barn, Imagine Festival, Bennington and others. He was featured at the 2000 American Mavericks Festival presented by the San Francisco Symphony and the 2003 Holland festival in Amsterdam. Zankel at Carnegie Hall presented a portrait concert of his work on their "Making Music" series in 2006.
Among his commissions are works for the Chicago and San Francisco Symphonies, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Kronos Quartet, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation, the Brentano String Quartet, the Borromeo String Quartet, Fred Sherry, Dawn Upshaw, the Dutch Radio Symphony, the Saint Louis Symphony, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, Leila Josefowicz and many others. Recent premieres include Animal Vegetable Mineral (chamber version) with the Prism Saxophone Quartet at Symphony Space in New York City (2004), and Animal Vegetable Mineral (orchestral version), with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and Prism Quartet in October 2005, Time Release, written for timpani and orchestra with percussionist Colin Currie, and Turn the Key, which the New World Symphony premiered with Michael Tilson Thomas in October 6, 2006, as part of the inauguration weekend of the much anticipated Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, Florida.
Upcoming projects include a newly commissioned 8-guitar piece for the inauguration of th e new concert hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in January 2007, with Hsin-Yun Huang. In March of 2007 he will be featured as guitarist with the American Composers Orchestra performing his work Deal, and in May, Dreamhouse will receive its US premiere in Boston, performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose. He is also working on a violin concerto for Leila Josefowicz.
His monodrama - Ravenshead - for Tenor/actor (Rinde Eckert) and electro-acoustic band/ensemble (The Paul Dresher Ensemble), has been performed nearly one hundred times and is available on a min/max CD. In a year-end wrap up of cultural events, USA today crowned the work the "Best New Opera of 1998".
Available discs of Mackey's work include "Lost and Found": Mackey performing his own solo electric guitar music, released by Bridge records in 1996; "Tuck and Roll": Michael Tilson Thomas conducts orchestral music of Steven Mackey, released in 2001 by BMG/RCA Red Seal; "String Theory": string Quartets and string quartets plus with the Brentano String Quartet released in 2003 on Albany Records; "Heavy Light": Mosaic plays mixed chamber ensemble music, released in 2004 by New World Records; "Banana/Dump Truck: concerti for cello and electric guitar released in 2005 on Albany records and "Interior Design": featuring Curtis Macomber in several violin works. "Tuck and Roll," "Int erior Deisgn" and "Lost and Found" all made several year-end top ten lists including the New York Times. Individual pieces are included on numerous collections on Nonesuch, BMG/Catalyst, CRI, Newport Classics, and many other labels.
As a guitarist he has performed his own music with the Kronos Quartet, the Arditti Quartet, Brentano Quartet, New World Symphony, Dutch Radio Symphony, The London Sinfonietta, Nexttime Ensemble (Parma), Psappha (Manchester), Joey Baron, Fred Sherry and others.
Mackey is currently Professor of Music at Princeton University where he has been a member of the faculty since 1985. He teaches composition, theory, twentieth century music, improvisation and a variety of special topics. As co-director of the Composers Ensemble at Princeton he coaches and conducts new work by student composers as well as twentieth century classics. In 1991, he was awarded the first-ever Distinguished Teaching Award from Princeton University.
Steven Mackey is published by Boosey & Hawkes. |
Rinde Eckert, finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, is a writer, composer, performer and director. His Opera / New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout America, and to major festivals in Europe and Asia.
His career began as a writer/performer in the 1980's, writing librettos for Paul Dresher (Pioneer, Power Failure, Slow Fire, Ravenshead). Working subsequently with choreographers Margaret Jenkins and Sarah Shelton Mann, Eckert began composing dance scores, including the evening-length Woman, Window, Square for The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. With The Gardening of Thomas D, his 1992 homage to Dante which was performed on tour in the United States and France, Rinde Eckert began composing and performing his own music/theater pieces. His staged works for so
lo performer include An Idiot Divine, Romeo Sierra Tango and Quit This House. He wrote Shoot the Moving Things and Four Songs Lost in a Wall for radio. Recent writing credits include Horizon (2007-08 Drama Desk Nominations: Best Play and Best Director, Lucille Lortel Award: "Unique Theatrical Experience"); Orpheus X (Pulitzer Prize nomination); Highway Ulysses and Four Songs Lost in a Wall (The American Academy of Arts and Letters 2005 Marc Blitzstein Award); And God Created Great Whales (OBIE Award: Best Performance, Drama Desk Nomination: "Unique Theatrical Experience"); and the two, one-act plays An Idiot Divine.
Eckert"s work for the theater has been produced by American Repertory Theatre, The Foundry Theatre, Center Stage in Baltimore, Culture
Project, Dobama Theatre Company and Berkeley Repertory Theater; his work has been directed by David Schweizer Tony Taccone, Robert Woodruff, Richard ET White and Ellen McLaughlin. Rinde has directed his own and others" plays and operas for The Asia Society, Juggernaut Theater, Opera Piccola and the Paul Dresher Ensemble.
Current music projects include directing virtuoso percussionist Steven Schick in an evening-length solo-theater work composed/produced by Paul Dresher which debuts in March 2009. Eckert also wrote the text and directed the ensemble Zeitgeist in Sound Stage with Dresher. Eckert and composer Steve Mackey are creating, writing and will perform with the new music ensemble eighth blackbird in the concert-length music/theater work Slide, debuting in June 2009. Eckert wrote text and sang in Mackey"s oratorio Dream House, and the two musicians are members of BIG FARM, the 4-person "prog-rock" band. Rinde Eckert's uniquely eclectic music is available on the Intuition label in Germany and through Songline/Tonefield Productions. The critically acclaimed Sandhills Reunion (music by Jerry Granelli, text by Eckert) was released in 2005.
Following his success teaching a course in creativity at Princeton University in 2007, Eckert begins a 3-year residency in Spring 2009. He was the 2008 Granada Artist-in-Residence at the University of California at Davis Department of Theater and Dance where he wrote and directed Fate and Spinoza, and is currently in partnership with the University of Iowa to create, direct and perform in Eye Piece, a play exploring the loss of vision. Rinde Eckert lives in New York with his wife, Ellen McLaughlin, the playwright and actress.
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Produced by eighth blackbird
Directed by Mark DeChiazza
Created and written by Rinde Eckert
Created and composed by Steven Mackey
Performed by eighth blackbird
Rinde Eckert: actor/singer
Steven Mackey: electric guitarist
Production Stage Manager: Rachel Damon
Audio Engineer: Ryan Ingebritsen
Lighting Design: Thomas Ontiveros
Video Design: Mark DeChiazza & Rinde Eckert
SLIDE is represented for concert bookings by:
David Lieberman Artists' Representatives and California Artists Management
SLIDE premiered at the Ojai Music Festival in June 2009 http://www.ojaifestival.org/
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Co-commissioned by:
Stanford Lively Arts at Stanford University
The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at University of Maryland*
Meet The Composer's Commissioning Music/USA program**
Charles C. Jett, Nancy R.G. Church M.D., and Herb and Belle Goldman
Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond
The 2009 Ojai Music Festival
Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University
Corporate Funding by The Boeing Corporation
The Music Department at Princeton University
*With funds from The Leading College and University Presenters Program of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional support also provided by the James Irvine Foundation.
**Made possible by generous support from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Francis Goelet Trust, the Helen F. Whitaker Fund, Target, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. |
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