Armory Festival
The spectacular, gargantuan magnificence of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory has played host to many of New York’s most talked about artistic events of the past few years. So it was a great honor that Kristy Edmunds (the Armory’s consulting artistic director) asked 8bb to curate the Armory’s first ever music festival, Tune-In, scheduled for February 16-20, 2011. We’ve spent the past year plotting and planning, dreaming and dismissing, and have hit upon a program that we hope is of sufficiently large scope to match the immensity of the venue.
We can’t yet announce the full program, but it will include monumental works by Georg Friedrich Haas, Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen and John Luther Adams, performed by 8bb, the Argento Ensemble, Newspeak Ensemble, percussionist Steve Schick and Red Fish Blue Fish.
The festival will take place from February 16-20, 2011 at the Park Avenue Armory. For more information, visit the Armory’s website.
mini-festival at the MCA Chicago
This winter 8bb presents PowerFUL/LESS, an ambitious mini-festival at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art which tests the veracity of Igor Stravinsky’s provocative statement that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all."
The first concert, PowerFUL (January 22nd), is inspired by novelist Chinua Achebe's assertion that "Art for art's sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit," and confronts listeners with passionate musical responses to political issues, including the Chicago premiere of John Corigliano's Mr. Tambourine Man and John Luther Adams’s The Light Within.
The second concert, PowerLESS (February 5th), features Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, a joyous ode of musical abstraction that leads listeners on an engrossing, mesmerizing musical road trip. Johann Sebastian Bach’s equally monumental and apolitical Chaconne from the Partita for Violin in D minor, arranged by eighth blackbird’s own Matt Albert for the full forces on hand, begins the program.
More information, including a video interview with Lisa Kaplan, can be found at the MCA’s website.
West Coast Premiere of On a Wire!
In August we played Jennifer Higdon’s On a Wire with Marin Alsop and her wonderful Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in Santa Cruz, California. This was something of a homecoming, as four members of 8bb also play as members of the orchestra. On a Wire was featured alongside another work of Jennifer’s, her Grammy-winning Percussion Concerto, performed by the orchestra with Colin Currie, percussion.
On a Wire and 8bb’s performance received rave reviews in the local press:
"[On a Wire is an] exuberantly beautiful and inventive group concerto for eighth blackbird, which left the audience exhilarated and tickled [...] [It is] sunny, imaginative, endlessly surprising [...] both a resourceful response to a vexing logistical problem and an eloquent statement in its own right."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"The elite sextet, eighth blackbird, in an imaginative and visually engaging performance [...] featuring dazzling solos and precise unity by this high-spirited ensemble." -Santa Cruz Sentinel
"[eighth blackbird] has a phenomenally high-energy performance style, [and] stayed in constant motion throughout this unusual and beguiling 25-minute concerto [...] It's hard to imagine another sextet playing it with such energy and precision" -Mercury News
recording news!
Our recording of Double Sextet (coupled with the Bang on a Can All Stars’s performance of 2x5) has been released on Nonesuch Records. It has already garnered widespread critical acclaim (it is the first 8bb disc to be named as an Editor’s Choice pick in Gramophone Magazine!), and reached number 7 on Billboard’s Classical Chart during its first week of release. You can download it from iTunes or buy it from Amazon.com.
8bb spent several intense days during September at the Merit School of Music’s Gottlieb Hall with producer Judy Sherman and engineer Bill Maylone, recording half of a new disc for Cedille Records. The diverse repertoire included Stephen Hartke’s Meanwhile, Thomas Adès’s Catch, Missy Mazzoli’s Still Life with Avalanche and movements from Roshanne Etezady’s Damaged Goods. We go back to the studio in January to complete the disc with Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion and Franco Donatoni’s Arpege.
Our next recording release will be the unhinged funkiness of Steve Mackey & Rinde Eckert’s Slide, slated for a Spring release on Cedille Records.
First SMU residency
Next week we begin our first residency at Southern Methodist University as their inaugural Meadows Prize recipients. Our residency during the 2010-2011 season entails masterclasses, open rehearsals, composer readings and a collaborative concert with students that will include a performance of Reich’s Double Sextet. Visit SMU’s website for more details.
500 applications for competition!
 
We’ve had a huge response to 8bb’s new composition competition, held in collaboration with the American Composers Forum and MakeMusic. More than 500 composers have entered from all corners of the United States, submitting applications that together filled 19 postal boxes.
Three finalists will be announced in December, each of whom will receive $1000 and the opportunity to compose a work for 8bb, which will be workshopped and performed in September 2011. A final winner will be chosen from the three new works, and that composer will receive an addition $2000 and a public performance of their piece by 8bb.
We’ll have our work cut out to get through these, but I for one can’t wait to dive into what will surely be a hugely diverse range of music and forage for some musical gems!
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