Ear Heart Music 2014-15 Schedule

From Ear Heart Music:

Ear Heart Music, 2014-15 season at Roulette

Since September 2009, Ear Heart Music has produced over 85 unique concerts with over 65 world premieres. In 2012, the series formed a partnership with Roulette and continues to present dramatic and engaging collaborative events in this ideal venue. The 2014-15 season features the return of the Ear Heart Music Ensemble, original animation by Jeanne Stern, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, three CD release parties, and countless New York premieres… Join us and HEART good music!

September 29, 2014
Richard Reed Parry, Y Music Ensemble, and Nico Muhly
Music for Heart and Breath (Deutsche Grammaphon CD release party)
Ear Heart Music opens its third season at Roulette with a concert to celebrate the release of Richard Reed Parry’s highly acclaimed new CD, Music for Heart and Breath. Y Music Ensemble and Nico Muhly join Parry (most widely known as a band member of Arcade Fire) to comprise the all-star lineup. Parry conceived the music from this CD to be played according to the performers’ own internals rhythms of heartbeat. Pitchfork magazine wrote, “There is a palpable aliveness to the performance that makes the six pieces, written for different configurations, feel like a guided meditation. This is body music, unquestionably, and by the end of the album the music’s subtle internal rhythms have reconfigured your own.”

November 12, 2014
Contemporaneous
Living Toys
The new music chamber orchestra Contemporaneous performs a show of frantic magic through a series of pieces that provide a surround-sound explosion of energy. This is music that moves like data across the internet or electrons around the nucleus. The show opens with Thomas Ades’ Living Toys, an adventurous projection of a child’s magnificent and superhuman vision of his future life. Ades translates these heroic dreams and toys into music, motion and life. Yotam Haber’s We were all follows, a delicate work of extreme vigor. Haber himself describes the piece as “a short burst of physical, muscular energy, sometimes menacing, sometimes exuberant.” Tracing through music this line of fascination, that child-like sense of magic and possibility, the show winds its way to John Adams’ remarkable Son of Chamber Symphony, an apotheosis of the manic joy of discovery. A sky-high detonation of vibrant color, this finale reaches escape velocity, launching us all into orbit, and restoring to us the magic of our craziest dreams.

March 24, 2015
Arkora and Ear Heart Music Ensemble
Songs and Glosses (Redshift Records CD release party)
Featuring original animation by Jeanne Stern
This performance offers the New York premieres of two works, one with vocalist, one with narrator, which expertly explore literary angles and a search for deeper meaning through color and nuance. Benton Roark’s Songs from the Rainshadow’s Edge (Redshift Records CD release) is a delicate and evocative melding of poetry and instrumental timbre that creates a shimmering world within itself – a world of questioning, exploration, and bittersweet nostalgia. Exploring the psychological phenomenon of depersonalization – or a loss of Self – from a first-hand perspective, the poetic impetus stems from using the rainshadow (occurring in the northwest, where the shadow is in fact where the sun is, and rain the norm) as a metaphor for relativism in perception of Self and the world. The narrative arc of the music and text leads the listener through diverse perspectives on the subject from existentialist, Buddhist, and Jungian philosophies. The unusual instrumentation of soprano, flute, viola, bass, electric guitar, and percussion along with original animation by Jeanne Stern add to the slightly surreal impact of the piece.
Revered Spanish composer Benet Casablancas offers us a different type of cycle; one in which musical response follows the spirit-seeking narrative of a pilgrim in Six Glosses on Texts by Cees Nooteboom. Frenetic and compact, but simultaneously open and spacious, the work transcends paradox. Masterful in his color and orchestration, Casablancas responds to the rich fabric of allusions and chiaroscuro, encouraging changes in coloration and expressive register which characterize each movement. In maximizing instrumental possibility to its fullest and most pristine, Casablancas contrasts contemplation with impulse, lyric intermezzi with the bare essence of Haiku, and light scherzando with profound momentum.

May 19, 2015
International Contemporary Ensemble and JACK Quartet
Jason Eckardt’s “Subject” (Tzadik CD release party)
Celebrating the release of Subject, Jason Eckardt’s new record on Tzadik, the JACK Quartet, ICE, and soloists Tony Arnold, soprano; Jay Campbell, cello; Jordan Dodson, guitar; and Eric Lamb, flute perform works from the new record as well as John Zorn’s string quartets Necronomicon and The Dead Man. JACK will also perform the title track, a work that confronts “advanced interrogation” techniques using sound and light, including a complex lighting design conceived by the composer and fully realized for the first time in this performance. Ms. Arnold and conductor David Fulmer lead ICE in a performance of Eckardt’s Tongues, a work that explores glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues,” and evokes the volatile grip of possession that is said to hold the human vessels through which the divine or supernatural passes. Eckardt’s stunningly virtuosic Paths of Resistance is realized by guitarist Jordan Dodson, and Eric Lamb and Jay Campbell will navigate Flux, a duet for alto flute and cello inspired by self-organizing processes in the natural world. Ear Heart Music resident visualist Joshue Ott collaborates.