singing in the dead of night (2007) 45'
David Lang (b. 1957)
Michael Gordon (b. 1956)
Julia Wolfe (b. 1958)
Prologue: these broken wings, one - David Lang
Episode 1: the light of the dark - Michael Gordon
Episode 2: these broken wings, two (passacaille) - David Lang
Episode 3: singing in the dead of night - Julia Wolfe
Epilogue: these broken wings, three - David Lang
Susan Marshall, Stage Direction
Mark DeChiazza, Assistant Stage Direction
Ryan Ingebritsen, Sound Designer and Engineer
Matthew Land, Lighting Designer
Mary Kokie McNaugher, Costume Designer
Emily Upson, Production Stage Manager
Steve Reich (b. 1936) was recently called "our greatest living composer" (the New York Times), "America's greatest living composer" (The Village Voice), and "the most original musical thinker of our time" (The New Yorker). From his early taped speech pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to his and video artist Beryl Korot's digital video opera Three Tales (2002), Mr. Reich's path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. He has won numerous honors, including several Grammy Awards, and his music has been commissioned, performed and recorded by numerous orchestras and ensembles around the world. For his 70th birthday year (2006), concerts were presented throughout Europe, North America and Asia, and Nonesuch Records released its second box set of Steve Reich's works, "Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective," a five-CD collection spanning the 20 years of his time on the label.
Michael Gordon's works for music theater and opera include What To Wear - his recent collaboration with director Richard Foreman, which recently premiered at the RedCat Theater in Los Angeles. Other works include Aquanetta, about the 1940s B-Movie starlet, for Oper Aachen; Decasia, a multimedia orchestral work with films by Bill Morrison and spectacle by Ridge Theater; Dystopia, a recent work for the LA Philharmonic with film by Bill Morrison; and van Gogh, vocal settings from the letters of Vincent van Gogh, recorded by Alarm Will Sound, soon to be released on Cantaloupe Music. Upcoming projects include a music/theater work in collaboration with Ridge Theater based on the words of Emily Dickinson (BAM Next Wave December 9-13, 2008); and popopera, a collaboration with the Dutch based dance troup Emio Greco/PC.
Audiences around the globe are hearing more and more of the work of David Lang, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Recent projects include The Little Match Girl Passion, a Carnegie Hall commission for Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices; Writing on Water for the London Sinfonietta, with visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, a fully staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; Shelter for trio medaeival and musikFabrik, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe; and loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and orchestra. Upcoming works include a collaboration with visual artist Mark Dion and Ridge Theater Company on an opera, entitled Anatomy Theater; and a complete rewriting of Beethoven's opera Fidelio that will premiere at the Sage Gateshead in the UK in May 2009.
Julia Wolfe's music is heard around the world in performances at the Next Wave Festival at BAM, Settembre Musica (Italy), the Holland Festival, Theatre de la Ville (Paris), Orchestre Nationale de France, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, and more. Recent works include My Beautiful Scream for Kronos and Orchestra, FUEL for Ensemble Resonanz with a film by Bill Morrison, Cruel Sister for string orchestra, Impatience for the Asko Ensemble to the film of the same name by early Belgian experimentalist Charles Dekeukeleire, and an accordian concerto commissioned by the Miller Theater. In November 2008 she will be the featured composer at the PRO ARTE festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. Julia Wolfe's evening length ballad STEEL HAMMER for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trio Mediaeval will premiere at Carnegie's Zankel Hall in November 2009.
Susan Marshall, Choreographer, is the Artistic Director/ Choreographer of Susan Marshall & Company, which, since 1982, has performed the more than thirty dance works she has created with them including Cloudless, The Most Dangerous Room in the House, Spectators at an Event, Arms, and Interior with Seven Figures. Marshall has also created dances for the Lyon Opera Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Boston Ballet and Montreal Danse. Her signature aerial duet, Kiss, is in the current repertory of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Pacific Northwest Ballet. Marshall recently provided the stage direction for Book of Longing, Philip Glass' new work, which is based on the poetry of Leonard Cohen. In Marshall's first collaboration with Philip Glass she directed and choreographed Les Enfants Terribles, a dance/opera. Marshall has also directed a movie musical for RIPFest and choreographed dances in operas staged for the Los Angeles Music Center and the New York City Opera. A 2000 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Marshall is also the recipient of three New York Dance and Performance Awards (BESSIES) for Outstanding Choreographic Achievement.
There are two identical sextets in Double Sextet. Each one is comprised of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone, and piano. Doubling the instrumentation was done so that, as in so many of my earlier works, two identical instruments could interlock to produce one overall pattern. For example, in this piece you will hear the pianos and vibes interlocking in a highly rhythmic way to drive the rest of the ensemble.
The piece can be played in two ways; either with 12 musicians, or with six playing against a recording of themselves. In these premiere performances you will hear the sextet eighth blackbird, who commissioned the work, playing against their recording.
The idea of a single player playing against a recording of themselves goes all the way back to Violin Phase (1967) and extends though Vermont Counterpoint (1982), New York Counterpoint (1985), Electric Counterpoint (1987) and Cello Counterpoint (2003). The expansion of this idea to an entire chamber ensemble playing against pre-recordings of themselves begins with Different Trains (1988) and continues with Triple Quartet (1999) and now to Double Sextet. By doubling an entire chamber ensemble one creates the possibility for multiple simultaneous contrapuntal webs of identical instruments. In Different Trains and Triple Quartet all instruments are strings to produce one large string fabric. In Double Sextet there is more timbral variety through the interlocking of six different pairs of percussion, string and wind instruments.
The piece is in three movements - fast, slow, fast - and within each movement there are four harmonic sections built around the keys of D, F, Ab and B or their relative minor keys b, d, f and g#. As in almost all of my music, modulations from one key to the next are sudden, clearly setting off each new section.
Double Sextet is about 22 minutes long and was completed in October 2007. It was commissioned by eighth blackbird and received its world premiere by that group at the University of Richmond in Virginia on March 26, 2008. The New York premiere was at Carnegie's Zankel Hall on April 17, 2008. The European premiere will be in Liverpool, UK in the fall of 2008.
these broken wings (2007) - David Lang
David Lang writes: "The three movements of these broken wings concentrate on three different physical and musical challenges. The first movement consists of music that requires incredible stamina and intense concentration. Sad, falling gestures dominate the slow second movement, and I gave the vague but hopefully inspiring instruction that the players should drop things when they are not playing. In the last movement I wanted to make a music that danced and pushed forward, in the hope that it would encourage the musicians to do so as well."
the light of the dark (2007) - Michael Gordon
In Michael Gordon''s the light of the dark a fast, wild, late-night drunken jam session spirals out of control. A funky opening cello solo slips and slides around the instrument, colliding with high, jaunty wind figures, swirling virtuosic tunes and unpredictable metallic crashes. In the chaos, players grab any nearby instrument to play, including a harmonica, accordion and guitar; at one point, a noisy Mariachi band gathers around the piano.
singing in the dead of night (2007) - Julia Wolfe
Julia Wolfe writes: The title singing in the dead of night conjures up the still and surreal nighttime experience of being the only one awake. Out of the silence often comes inspiration - finding one's way to a human song, symphony of sound. Singing in the dead of night is its own metaphor - beginnings always beginning in "the dead of night" - in the void into which a creation is made. The virtuosity and intensity of the music are inspired by the high voltage performers of eighth blackbird. The silences, sand, and density are there for the thoughtful and exquisite Susan Marshall."
Susan Marshall writes: "The composers and I felt strongly that the movement should come directly from the act of music-making; not as ornament, an unessential extra layer. This led David, Michael and Julie to make some unusual musical choices, including the use of sand, and struck or dropped metal objects. The challenge was to find expressive imagery connected to the act of sound production, but which was also metaphorically loaded. I wanted to stay out of the literal realm, of "acting" or creating a "story." In many ways, working with eighth blackbird was not dissimilar to working with dancers, except for the fact that we were somewhat constrained by the reality that the musicians had to be able to play the music. I found eighth blackbird open to everything I suggested - sometimes even more open than I was about how far we could go."
Tim Munro: Tell me a little bit about the commission of Double Sextet. Steve Reich: I had heard about eighth blackbird on the grapevine, but what really drew me to the commission was the woman who formerly ran Boosey and Hawkes, Jenny Bilfield [now Artistic and Executive Director of Stanford Lively Arts]. She said, "You've got to write for eighth blackbird, they're just phenomenal and I love the way they play." Jenny had done a lot of very helpful things for me. When she told me what the instrumentation was I said "Jenny, I can't write for an ensemble like that, that's Pierrot Lunaire, that's not me." I need identical instruments to form unison canons that over the years have become the major content of what I do, especially in the piano/percussion department.
I had dealt with this situation before, in writing for soloists in the Counterpoint pieces [eg. Vermont Counterpoint for flute and ten pre-recorded flutes], so I said "why don't you ask them if they'd be willing to record themselves and play against this recording." Then I'd be able to write for two flutes, etc. And it's also a practical instrumentation either way, because putting together twelve people is not unheard of, and having a group play against a recording is very basic these days.
TM: How long did it take you to write the work? SR: I'm a slow composer. The piece took something in the order of eight or nine months, which for 22 minutes of music is moving along fairly briskly. I love writing for woodwinds and love writing for strings, but usually I write for larger groups of them, like in Tehillim, You Are Variations and now Daniel Variations, where you might have 7 woodwinds, maybe string quartet or string quintet. So this was a little unusual. I don't write for standard ensembles. I particularly don't write for orchestra - I wrote for orchestra and found that it really didn't work for me.
TM: This isn't any sort of "moral" objection? SR: No, I wasn't thinking: "Those guys are a bunch of establishment, bourgeouis " No, this is acoustics. I don't need 18 first violins or sixteen seconds, but rather one or three to a part, because if you write rhythmic, contrapuntal, complex music, you need relatively light forces to get the music across. And that's my responsibility.
TM: You were talking during rehearsal about your interest always to create "chamber music." SR: Basically everything I have done is chamber music. Paul Hillier pointed out that even when my music needs a conductor they operate more like a conductor from the Baroque: someone who gives cues and reminders, but basically follows the players. I always work with very good percussionists, so when conductors work with my ensemble, they say, "well, I can't fight this, I'd better join it." When they become part of a unit, then the whole ensemble coalesces around what they hear and what they see.
For example, Tehillim is not a chamber piece like Double Sextet, but it is always chamber music. You have to listen to and see the other players; that is the essence of chamber music. I've felt that way since I was at Julliard; it has always been the model for me, the way it's supposed to be.
TM: The piano and percussion are the sort of lynch-pin in this piece SR: well, they're the motor. I haven't written any piano music in my life, and people say "why don't you have any piano music," and I reply, "well I do have a 2-piano piece." [Piano Phase, for two "phasing" pianists.]
The use of piano as tuned percussion is central to what I do. That kind of piano playing is related to what's known as "comping" in jazz: the playing of piano chords behind a soloist, which is sometimes forceful and sometimes sparse. It is part of a rhythm section, so is related to what the drummer and the bass player are doing.
Now, I'm not a jazz musician and I'm not writing jazz, but that kind of feel has certainly stayed with me, and in Double Sextet Lisa and Matthew are a unit. That's why they have to be close together on stage, so they can physically relate to one another, and why in the pre-recording Judy Sherman and I divided the two tracks (vibes and piano on one track, and winds and strings onto the other), so that someone who's not the percussionist can get as much of that motor track - that tactus, that ictus - as they need, then balance that off with the harmonic/melodic instruments.
What piano and percussion are playing in Double Sextet is rhythmic, but it is also melodic. As I get older I realize that everything has got to be melodic otherwise it fails. For example, as Lisa's chords move, the voicing of the chords form something of melodic interest. I wrote a piece in 1973 called Music for Pieces of Wood, for five pairs of tuned claves. The tuning of the claves is crucial, because the interlocking of these one-note pieces of wood to form melodies has to work otherwise it's a pretty boring piece. Melody is always there in my music.
In Double Sextet there are obviously other much slower, more attenuated melodic lines going on in the winds and strings. I've taken an interest - maybe it goes back to my interest in gamelan music - in people are playing at different speeds. It first surfaced in a piece called Eight Lines [originally Octet], where the pianos are playing (as in Double Sextet), eighth notes and strings are playing (also as in Double Sextet) very, very long attenuated lines.
Someone once said to me, in relation to Eight Lines, "don't you ever write a slow movement?" I replied that it's up to you where you choose to listen: there's a slow movement and a fast movement going on simultaneously. That to me is intrinsically interesting.
You can think of [the Double Sextet relationships] in visual terms. Say you're standing in a city, and looking down from a building at the traffic jipping along. That activity is the piano and percussion lines. Then you look up at the sky, and the clouds move at a very, very slow pace. That is what the woodwinds and strings are.
At the end of Double Sextet the winds and strings join the pianos and vibes, but through most of the piece they are moving many many times slower than the piano and percussion, creating - I've never thought of it that way, but you could say - "hymn"-like melodies, which the pianos and vibes are supporting, harmonically and melodically.
TM: You create some delicious, grinding dissonances in the wind and string parts. SR: I found that I like the use of clusters. I certainly listened to a lot of Bartok when I was younger, and a lot of Stravinsky, and as I got older, a lot of Arvo Part. And Part makes great use of the interval of a second in what comes across as incredibly consonant music. In some moments, Part might have an entire A major scale stacked on top of itself. Stravinsky called it "pan-diatonicism:" consonant clusters; tightly-packed chords.
You will rarely find triads in my music, in any position. But they may be within the cluster. So if you were analysing it, you might say: "Well this is such and such a triad and he has added a ninth here (which is the second scale degree) and the eleventh (the fourth degree). In jazz these are known as added note chords, especially when it comes to dominants.
I am a great lover of dominants, because they are like fuel in your tank. They wanna go somewhere, and if you don't let them go there then they are pushing, pushing, pushing. What happens in Double Sextet, and what happens in a lot of pieces I've written recently is that I start off with material that is either vaguely dominant or sub-dominant in nature, then pursue that for four or five minutes. Then on a dime I modulate up a minor third. And the keys move that way; adding three flats at a time. The music will go from C, to E-flat, to G-flat, to A, and back to C. (This doesn't create a diminished seventh chord; they are modulations.)
Actually, the older I get the more I find myself using the two chord, the four chord, the six chord and the five chord. I'm degenerating into rock 'n roll or early Haydn!
The hallmark of what I've done through my career is a change in harmonic rhythm. People are used to hearing chords - from early Classical period music to late Romantic - change at a fairly brisk pace. There are famous exceptions, like the opening of Das Rheingold (with that long E flat) and Bolero. In my early music I would do an entire piece - perhaps 20 minutes to an hour - in one key. Then I simply couldn't do that anymore; I got bored.
But still, the harmonic movement in Double Sextet is still very slow. The music stays in one key with hardly even an accidental for four or five minutes. Then all of a sudden it changes. The conventional way of modulating, by adding one common tone that is going to join the next key - I did in one piece in the 80s, called Variations for Strings Winds and Keyboards - although some people like it, I think it is one of the least successful pieces I ever did. I went back to doing what I did naturally, which is to modulate suddenly.
Anne Midgette, Washington Post
"Six musicians are playing a duet with recorded versions of themselves. It is like looking into an electronic mirror. The mirror refracts the rapid, driving beat of piano and marimba; it adds a reflected gleam to long-held chords of strings and winds. The players, live and recorded, create layer upon layer of sound, a rich mille-feuille of music, while pinwheeling light-images create visual parallels on the wall behind them."
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
"The one movement that took full advantage of the stage was Gordon's "The Light of the Dark," a zestful, witty scherzo in which the performers took turns offering brisk melodic solos like the members of some kind of traveling band. At the heart of the movement was a distinctive musical punctuation mark, a loud metallic clang from the percussion extended by a long sustained chord from the accordion. That striking musical gesture marked each quick shift in tone, and every time it raised an excited laugh; the one time it didn't arrive on cue created a brilliant comic gem."
Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
"Lasting 50 minutes and staged by the choreographer Susan Marshall, "singing in the dead of night" is a raucous, sad, scary, often disturbing conjuring-up of night images inspired by the Beatles' "Blackbird." Each composer takes a line from Paul McCartney's lyrics. Lang's is "these broken wings," and he uses it in a prologue, middle episode and epilogue. At grating volumes, slow-moving pitches pierced the room. In the middle episode, a sad-sack player is loaded up, head to foot, with buckets, metal pipes and doodads, which slowly clank to the floor. Gordon describes his episode, "the light of the dark," as a drunken, late-night jam session. The cello wails, the violin jigs, the pianist plays mad accordion, the violinist strums a guitar, a percussionist has a tableful of tools. Wolfe, in "singing in the dead of night," brings out the birdseed, poured from buckets onto a table. Pairs of players take turns rubbing the seed, putting their heads down in it, sleeping restlessly."
Allan Kozin, New York Times
"Mr. Gordon's and Ms. Wolfe's scores, interposed among these movements, in some ways match their impulses. Mr. Gordon's piece continues the rambunctiousness of Mr. Lang's opening movement, upping the ante by having the musicians play additional instruments, including accordion and harmonica, usually with an aggressive edge. And Ms. Wolfe's work expands on the melancholy edge of Mr. Lang's middle movement, gradually picking up speed, heft and lyricism."
Comments about eighth blackbird:
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
"In addition to playing their instruments like demons, members of the phenomenal new-music sextet, Eighth Blackbird, often incorporate stage movement into their performances There seems to be nothing they can't do, musically or otherwise "
Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
"Musicians, forced to keep count as though their lives depend on it, typically treat Reich's music as a left-brain activity. But the left brain can't hold all that music, and for listeners, all those fractured rhythms spill over onto the right side, where there is room for spatial perception. A really good performance, then, feels like a barely controlled explosion between your ears. Tuesday's was a really good, rocking, rollicking performance."
Allan Kozin, New York Times
"You can measure a new-music group's success by the composers it commissions. When Eighth Blackbird began performing, in 1996, its repertory consisted largely of revivals of older scores and works by young composers in the early stages of their careers. The group has not forsaken those composers, nor has it given up curatorial programming completely, but the program it played at Zankel Hall on Thursday evening showed that it is now in another league The performance, virtuosic, polished and played largely from memory, was choreographed by Susan Marshall with an amusing quirkiness that reflected the music's energy"
Steve Reich's Double Sextet, commissioned by Grammy-winning new music ensemble eighth blackbird, wins 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music
Steve Reich's Double Sextet - commissioned by eighth blackbird and given its first performances by the group last season - has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The prize is awarded for a distinguished musical composition, written by an American and first performed or recorded in the U.S. over the previous year, and this is the second time an eighth blackbird commission has been nominated (Stephen Hartke's Meanwhile received a nod last year). Scored for two identical sextets each comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone, and piano, Double Sextet can either be played by six musicians against a recording of themselves, or by an ensemble of twelve. For both the world premiere, on March 26, 2008 at the University of Richmond, Virginia, and the New York premiere, at Carnegie's Zankel Hall on April 17, 2008, eighth blackbird performed simultaneously live and pre-recorded; a few months later, the Grammy-winning group collaborated with six students from the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble to perform the work completely live at New York's downtown new music venue The Kitchen.
"I'm very glad that this particular piece got [the award], because I do think it's one of the better pieces I've done in the past few years," Steve Reich says of Double Sextet, which, by juxtaposing live and taped musicians, recalls several of his compositions in the "Counterpoint" series, as well as his ensemble pieces Different Trains and Triple Quartet. The composer explains:
"It's the idea of writing basically unison canons - the same timbre playing against itself, so that when they intertwine, you don't hear the individual voice; you hear the composite. Now, if you have several composites going on at the same time, you really get to an interesting situation, and that's what's going on in Double Sextet."
During both this season and last, eighth blackbird - "a hugely talented and endlessly inventive sextet," as per the Chicago Sun-Times - toured the work across the U.S. and England as part of a program entitled "The Only Moving Thing". Matt Albert, violin and viola player of the ensemble, explains that Double Sextet is "music we get a real charge out of. With Reich, you have an artist who creates beauty with patterns, repetition, and minimalism." Tim Munro, the group's flutist, says: "The piece is a skillful, imaginative and engaging distillation of Reich's work over the past 40 years, featuring funky riffs, soulful lyricism, and playful banter. The adrenalin rush we get performing this piece is very intense, and it leaves us wired for the whole night. It's certainly as close as I'll ever get to being a rock star." He adds, "We're not surprised by the award, given the overwhelmingly positive reception with which the piece has been received around the world." One such enthusiastic response came from Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed, who reviewed eighth blackbird's performance of Double Sextet at the Orange County Performing Arts Center; describing the piece as a "kind of explosion of fractured rhythms that never ceases to amaze the ear," he pronounced the concert "a really good, rocking, rollicking performance."
This summer, eighth blackbird will serve as music director of the Ojai Music Festival. It joins a list of music directors that includes Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez, Lukas Foss, John Adams, and Oliver Knussen, and is only the second ensemble to hold this position. One of the highlights of this summer's festival will be eighth blackbird's performing the eagerly-awaited world premiere of Steven Mackey's Slide, with Rinde Eckert as narrator/singer. This work, "a labor of love for eighth blackbird", is the centerpiece of Ojai 2009.
Double Sextet was commissioned by eighth blackbird through the support of the Carnegie Hall Corporation, the Abe Fortas Memorial Fund of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Liverpool Culture Company - European Capital of Culture 2008, the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond, Orange County Performing Arts Center, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music - Music 08 Festival.
Steve Reich (b. 1936) was recently called "our greatest living composer" (the New York Times), "America's greatest living composer" (The Village Voice), and "the most original musical thinker of our time" (The New Yorker). From his early taped speech pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) to his and video artist Beryl Korot's digital video opera Three Tales (2002), Mr. Reich's path has embraced not only aspects of Western Classical music, but the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western and American vernacular music, particularly jazz. He has won numerous honors, including several Grammy Awards, and his music has been commissioned, performed and recorded by numerous orchestras and ensembles around the world. For his 70th birthday year (2006), concerts were presented throughout Europe, North America and Asia, and Nonesuch Records released its second box set of Steve Reich's works, "Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective," a five-CD collection spanning the 20 years of his time on the label.
Michael Gordon's works for music theater and opera include What To Wear - his recent collaboration with director Richard Foreman, which recently premiered at the RedCat Theater in Los Angeles. Other works include Aquanetta, about the 1940s B-Movie starlet, for Oper Aachen; Decasia, a multimedia orchestral work with films by Bill Morrison and spectacle by Ridge Theater; Dystopia, a recent work for the LA Philharmonic with film by Bill Morrison; and van Gogh, vocal settings from the letters of Vincent van Gogh, recorded by Alarm Will Sound, soon to be released on Cantaloupe Music. Upcoming projects include a music/theater work in collaboration with Ridge Theater based on the words of Emily Dickinson (BAM Next Wave December 9-13, 2008); and popopera, a collaboration with the Dutch based dance troup Emio Greco/PC.
Audiences around the globe are hearing more and more of the work of David Lang, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Recent projects include The Little Match Girl Passion, a Carnegie Hall commission for Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices; Writing on Water for the London Sinfonietta, with visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenaway; The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, a fully staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; Shelter for trio medaeival and musikFabrik, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe; and loud love songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and orchestra. Upcoming works include a collaboration with visual artist Mark Dion and Ridge Theater Company on an opera, entitled Anatomy Theater; and a complete rewriting of Beethoven's opera Fidelio that will premiere at the Sage Gateshead in the UK in May 2009.
Julia Wolfe's music is heard around the world in performances at the Next Wave Festival at BAM, Settembre Musica (Italy), the Holland Festival, Theatre de la Ville (Paris), Orchestre Nationale de France, The Brooklyn Philharmonic, and more. Recent works include My Beautiful Scream for Kronos and Orchestra, FUEL for Ensemble Resonanz with a film by Bill Morrison, Cruel Sister for string orchestra, Impatience for the Asko Ensemble to the film of the same name by early Belgian experimentalist Charles Dekeukeleire, and an accordian concerto commissioned by the Miller Theater. In November 2008 she will be the featured composer at the PRO ARTE festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. Julia Wolfe's evening length ballad STEEL HAMMER for the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trio Mediaeval will premiere at Carnegie's Zankel Hall in November 2009.
Susan Marshall, Choreographer, is the Artistic Director/ Choreographer of Susan Marshall & Company, which, since 1982, has performed the more than thirty dance works she has created with them including Cloudless, The Most Dangerous Room in the House, Spectators at an Event, Arms, and Interior with Seven Figures. Marshall has also created dances for the Lyon Opera Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Boston Ballet and Montreal Danse. Her signature aerial duet, Kiss, is in the current repertory of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Pacific Northwest Ballet. Marshall recently provided the stage direction for Book of Longing, Philip Glass' new work, which is based on the poetry of Leonard Cohen. In Marshall's first collaboration with Philip Glass she directed and choreographed Les Enfants Terribles, a dance/opera. Marshall has also directed a movie musical for RIPFest and choreographed dances in operas staged for the Los Angeles Music Center and the New York City Opera. A 2000 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Marshall is also the recipient of three New York Dance and Performance Awards (BESSIES) for Outstanding Choreographic Achievement.