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schedule of activities
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Program
notes for this concert
Essay
Immigration
and the American Compositional Dream
Essay
Coming
to America —As a Composer
Essay
The
Land of Dreams?
Essay
Profile:
Fellowship Composer Jin Hi Kim
Click here
for a complete
schedule of activities
aco
homepage
concert
schedule
Program
notes for this concert
Essay
Immigration
and the American Compositional Dream
Essay
Coming
to America —As a Composer
Essay
The
Land of Dreams?
Essay
Profile:
Fellowship Composer Jin Hi Kim
|
Sunday, March 18, 3 pm at Carnegie Hall
"Ellis
Island to JFK"
American
music continually enriched by immigrant composers.
American
Composers Orchestra
Dante
Anzolini, conductor
Leon
Fleisher, piano
Jin
Hi Kim, komungo
JIN HI KIM: Eternal
Rock (World Premiere, ACO Commission)
TANIA
LEÓN: Desde...
(World
Premiere, Commissioned by ACO with support from the Koussevitzky
Music Foundation, Inc.)
LUKAS FOSS: Piano
Concerto for the Left Hand
ARNOLD
SCHOENBERG: Variations for Orchestra
A pre-concert
discussion with the composers, free to ticket holders, begins at 1:45
pm; A post-concert audience dialogue will follow.
Tickets: $46,
$35, and $16
Call
CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800.
Tickets are
also available on the Internet at www.carnegiehall.org,
or at the Carnegie Hall box office.
Click
here for a complete
schedule of activities
"Coming
to America" celebrates immigrant American composers in public
forums and free concerts February 14 - March 18
On Sunday,
March 18, 2001 at 3pm in Carnegie Hall, American Composers Orchestra
presents "Ellis Island to JFK," a program that explores the
continual enrichment of American music by immigrant composers. The
afternoon features two world premieres and ACO  commissions:
Desde&ldots;, a new work by Cuban-American composer-conductor Tania
León, and Eternal Rock by Korean-American Jin Hi Kim. The
latter work features Ms. Kim as komungo (traditional fretted Korean
zither) soloist. Also on the program is the Piano Concerto for the
Left Hand by German-American Lukas Foss, performed by Leon Fleisher,
and Arnold Schoenberg's monumental Variations for Orchestra. Dennis
Russell Davies will conduct.
Ms. León
has a close and long-term relationship with ACO and its audiences.
As the orchestra's Latin American Music Advisor, she has been the
guiding force behind Sonidos de las Américas, ACO's six annual
festivals of music from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Puerto
Rico and Cuba, that introduced music by nearly 100 contemporary Latin
American composers. Ms. León's own music combines the
sophisticated rhythms of her home country with rigorous and incisive
harmonic and melodic development. Last season she created a sensation
in Europe with her opera, A Scourge of Hyacinths, developed in
collaboration with Robert Wilson, which had ten performances by the
Grand Theatre de Genève, with more planned in Europe and Latin
America. Last summer her new work Horizons received its premiere at
the Tanglewood Festival.
Jin Hi Kim's
Eternal Rock is her first orchestral commission. The work combines
Eastern and Western instruments exploring a sound-world that crosses
ethnic, national, stylistic, and ontological boundaries. Eternal Rock
is the latest in Ms. Kim's series of compositions based on her
"Living Tones" concept-an improvisational approach deeply
rooted in Korean Shamanistic music in which each tone is alive,
embodying its own individual shape, sound and subtext.
Ms. Kim was
trained as a traditional komungo player in her native Korea, and
later studied composition at Mills College. She is also co-developer
of the world's only electric komungo, creating interactive multimedia
pieces for that instrument and MIDI computer systems. She has
performed her compositions with the likes of the Kronos Quartet,
Xenakis Ensemble, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center,
and has worked with such leading improvisers as James Newton, Oliver
Lake, Evan Parker, and Elliott Sharp. Her music has been performed at
major festivals throughout the world, including the Next Wave,
Darmstadt, and Lincoln Center Festivals. She also collaborated with
virtuosos of the Indian sitar, Japanese koto, African drum and
Australian didgeridoo on her "Komungo Around the World" CD
project. Josef Woodard of The Los Angeles Times calls her work,
"new music/world music at its finest, beyond political
correctness, into the realm of the sublime, where words and cultural
postures fall away."
In advance of
her orchestral premiere, Ms. Kim will perform in ACO's "Composers
OutFront" series at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater on Friday,
March 9th, 2001 at 8:30 pm. There she will perform komungo and
electric komungo solos, plus her Nong Rock for string quartet and
komungo, commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Kronos Quartet. That
program also features Ms. Kim's improvisational ensemble, Quagmire,
with William Parker on bass and the famed Oliver Lake on saxophone.
Born in
Berlin, Lukas Foss was awarded the Gold Medal for Music of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters in May of 2000, recognizing his
position as one of the 20th century's major musical figures. His
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand was written in 1994 for the
program's soloist, Leon Fleisher, commissioned by the Boston Symphony
for its Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert at Tanglewood. Fleisher, a
foremost interpreter of piano left-hand literature, meets the many
challenges posed by Foss in the three-movement work, especially in
the fugal last movement which includes a cue for the orchestra to
shout an homage from the composer to the pianist: "Here's to L.F
from L.F."
Rounding-out
the program is Arnold Schoenberg's landmark Variations for Orchestra,
a work from 1926-28, that solidified the composer's 12-tone
techniques around a grand traditional form. This performance marks
ACO's debut performance of the Schoenberg masterpiece.
The March 18
concert is the culmination of "Coming to America: Immigrant Sounds/Immigrant
Voices," an outreach and civic dialogue project that ties the
music of immigrant composers to issues central to immigration and
cultural absorption in American society. From racial conflict to
ethnic blending, immigration is changing the face of America.  Central
issues of "Coming to America are how composers who are new
Americans play a role in this drama, how they contribute to and are
affected by changing American culture, and larger questions of
identity and access. "Coming to America" includes free
events around New York City beginning on February 14, including
concerts, public forums, in-school residencies, and community
informances (performance/discussions). Click here for a complete
schedule of activities
Composers
participating in the project include Jin Hi Kim, Tania León,
Lukas Foss, and P.Q. Phan, among others. Together these composers
span several generations and waves of immigration, and three continents.
Immigrant
Voices: New York Concert Singers Sunday, March 11 at New-York
Historical Society
On Sunday,
March 11 at 2pm at the New-York Historical Society, Judith Clurman
will lead the New York Concert Singers, a twenty-voice professional
choir, in a program inspired by immigrant folksong. Special guests
include ACO principal harpist Susan Jolles, along with Alan
Muraoka-Sesame Street cast member-as narrator. The concert features
music by early twentieth-century immigrants such as Max Helfman,
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Stravinsky, and Ernst Krenek, as well as
more recent music by such recent American arrivals as Chen Yi
(China), Alla Borsova (Soviet Union), and Paula Prestini (Italy).
Immediately
following the performance will be a public forum entitled "Access
and Identity in Immigrant-American music." Panelists will
include composers Lukas Foss and P.Q. Phan; noted historian and
immigration specialist Nancy Foner (author of From Ellis Island to
JFK); Kathleen Hulser, public historian of the New-York Historical
Society; and Lisa Knauer a musicologist and specialist in Latin
American music.
Tickets & Info:
Tickets for
the March 18, 2001 concert at Carnegie Hall are $46, $33, and $16.
Tickets may be purchased through CarnegieCharge at 212-247-7800, by
visiting Carnegie Hall's website at www.carnegiehall.org, or at the
Carnegie Hall box office, 57th Street at 7th Ave. The concert is
preceded by a discussion with the composers, free to ticket-holders,
at 1:45pm. A post-concert audience dialogue will follow the concert.
Admission is
free for all Informances. The public forum and choral concert are
free with museum admission. Seating for all events is limited. Call
individual venues for information and travel directions. Additional
information is available by calling ACO at 212-977-8495.
Click here
for a complete
schedule of activities
Major
support of the American Composers Orchestra is from Alliance Capital
Management L.P., Americans for the Arts, Mr. Thomas Buckner, the Mary
Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation,
Booth Ferris Foundation, Citigroup Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund
for Music, Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust, Jean and Louis
Dreyfus Foundation, Fidelity Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith
Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, Christian Humann Foundation,
Meet The Composer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, J.P. Morgan &
Co., New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Times Co. Foundation,
Virgil Thomson Foundation, and the Helen F. Whitaker Fund. ACO
programs are also made possible with public funds from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a
state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
The residency of composer P.Q. Phan is made possible through Music
Alive, a program of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet
The Composer. Funding for Music Alive is provided by The Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and
The Aaron Copland Fund for Music. ACO's "Coming to America:
Immigrant Sounds/Immigrant Voices" project is supported by the
Animating Democracy Initiative, a program of Americans for the Arts
funded by the Ford Foundation with additional support of the New York
City Department of Cultural Affairs. |
