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Manhattan School of Music Presents The Manhattan Percussion Project
January 28, 2009 | By Debra Kinzler
The Manhattan Percussion Project will bring together percussionists from the Greater New York area in a collaborative series of performances and discussions. This two day event will present experts including Percussionists Gustavo Aguilar and Jan Williams as well as Composer David Lang in a variety of contemporary percussive disciplines to promote and illuminate the most current thoughts and ideas on the art of percussion playing. A concert highlight will be the world premiere of Gustavo Aguilar’s Not Knowing the Cart Got in Front to be showcased on the final concert taking place on Saturday, February 13 at 7:30 pm in John C. Borden Auditorium. The performances will be by faculty and guest artists as well as students from New York area schools. Schools represented include the percussion ensembles from Manhattan School of Music, Juilliard, Mannes, NYU, Queens College, Purchase, and William Paterson University. The Manhattan Percussion Project’s coordinators are Erik Charleston, Duncan Patton, and Steven Schick.
A complete schedule of all concerts and events is attached below.
All of the Manhattan Percussion Project sessions and concerts are open to the public, are FREE, and no tickets are required. For information call the MSM Box Office at 917.493.4428, or visit www.msmnyc.edu. Manhattan School of Music is located on the northwest corner of Broadway and 122nd Street.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13
Session 1
3:00 pm; Studio 610
Jan Williams in Conversation
The Building Blocks of the Percussive Art
Concert 1
7:30 pm; Ades Performance Space
RIVER PAUL GUERGUERIAN: Boulevard
Queens College Percussion Ensemble
ERIC MOE: Going Tormented
Dominic Donato, Percussion
SAM SHEPARD: Tongues
NYU Percussion Ensemble & blessed unrest theater company
WAYNE PETERSON: Trap Drum Fantasy
Peter Jarvis, Drum Set
ANDY AKIHO: I fallen TwO, for string quartet and steel pans
Andy Akiho, steel pans
GEORGE APERGHIS: Les Guetteurs de sons
Juilliard Percussion Ensemble
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14
Concert II
10:00 am; Studio 610
LOU HARRISON: Fugue for Percussion
Juilliard Percussion Ensemble
HENRY COWELL: Ostinato Pianissimo
William Paterson University Percussion Ensemble
JOHN CAGE: First Construction (in Metal)
Purchase Percussion Ensemble
Session II
10:30 am; John C. Borden Auditorium
Open Dress Rehearsal
GUSTAVO AGUILAR
The creation of Not Knowing the Cart Got in Front
Session III
1:30 pm; Studio 610
“All Across the Universe: The Percussion Music of DAVID LANG”
Steven Schick interviews David Lang
Concert III
3:00 pm; Ades Performance Space
Percussion Solos of DAVID LANG
String of Pearls
Ching-Ping Wang, marimba
Unchained Melody for glockenspiel and 16 robots
Steven Schick, glockenspiel; William Brent, Robot design
The Anvil Chorus
Derek Kwan, percussion
Session IV
4:00 pm; Studio 610; Roundtable Discussion
Group discussion with Gustavo Aguilar, David Lang, Jeffrey Milarsky,
Steven Schick and Jan Williams
Concert IV
7:30 pm; John C. Borden Auditorium
Combined Ensemble: Manhattan School of Music, Juilliard, Mannes and NYU Percussion Ensembles, Jeffrey Milarsky, Conductor
GUSTAVO AGUILAR: Not Knowing the Cart Got in Front, world premiere
DAVID LANG: the so-called laws of nature (2001)
ALBERTO GINASTERA: Cantata para America Magica (1960)
Lucy Shelton, soprano
Gustavo Aguilar, percussionist, composer and improviser, is committed to combining pre-composed (notated) and present-composed (improvised) musical elements that has earned him the reputation as an “intuitive, methodical mystic.” He has performed at festivals throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, including IRCAM’s Festival Agora, the Zagreb Biennale International Festival of New Music (Croatia), the Acousmania International Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music (Bucharest), the Jooksan International Arts Festival (Seoul), and the Green Mills Project (Melbourne), among others. He has worked closely with composers such as Ana-Maria Avram, John Bergamo, Anthony Davis, and Julio Estrada. Since 1997, Aguilar has held the position of Music Director with GroundWorks Dance Theater of Cleveland, and is Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Tug, a documentary production and artist/performance collective. He is from Brownsville, Texas, and has been on faculty at the University of California (San Diego), Del Mar Collge/Texas A&M, Korea National University of the Arts, and the University of Akron.
David Lang’s music has been performed by the Santa Fe Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Kronos Quartet, and at such festivals as Tanglewood, the BBC Proms, The Munich Biennale, the Settembre Musica Festival, the Sidney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, and in theater productions in New York, San Francisco and London; in the choreography of Twyla Tharp, La La La Human Steps, The Nederlands Dans Theater and the Royal Ballet; and at Lincoln Center, the South Bank Centre, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mr. Lang was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, a commission by Carnegie Hall for Paul Hillier’s vocal ensemble Theater of Voices. His other recent projects include Writing on the Water for the London Sinfonietta; The Difficulty of Crossing a Field – a fully staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; Loud Love Songs, a concerto for Percussionist Evelyn Glennie; and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. David Lang is Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Bang on a Can.
Jeffrey Milarsky is one of the leading conductors of contemporary music in New York City today. In the United States and abroad he has premiered and recorded works by contemporary composers, including Charles Wuorinen, Fred Lerdahl, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Jonathan Dawe, Luigi Nono, and Ralph Shapey, among others. His wide-ranging repertoire, which spans from Bach to Xenakis, has brought him to lead such accomplished groups as the American Composers Orchestra, New York New Music Ensemble, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Columbia Sinfonietta, Speculum Musicae, Cygnus Ensemble, Fromm Players at Harvard University, Composers’ Ensemble at Princeton University, and the New York Philharmonic Chamber Music Series. Mr. Milarsky has been a member of Manhattan School of Music’s faculty since 2001, and most recently was named Artistic Director and conductor of the MSM Percussion Ensemble. Additionally, he is Music Director of Juilliard’s AXIOM, and is professor of music at Columbia University where he conducts the Columbia University Orchestra and Manhattan Sinfonietta.
Steven Schick has been a champion of contemporary percussion music both as a performer and teacher for more than thirty years. He has commissioned and premiered more than one hundred works for percussion and has performed these works on major concert series such as Lincoln Center’s Great Performers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella concerts as well as at international festivals including the BBC Proms, the Jerusalem Festival, the Holland Festival, the Stockholm International Percussion Event, among others. Mr. Schick has been a regular guest lecturer at the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Royal College of Music in London. From 19992–2002, he was percussionist of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and from 2000-2004, served as Artistic Director of the Centre International Percussion of de Geneve, and is the Founder and Artistic Director of the percussion group, “red fish blue fish.” Steven Schick is professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, and has taught percussion at Manhattan School of Music since 1995.
Jan Williams’s percussion career began in New York City in the early 1960s. In 1964, he became a creative associate at the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in Buffalo, becoming a member of the University of Buffalo Music Faculty in 1967. Mr. Williams has been a mainstay of the contemporary music scene, not only in Buffalo, but internationally, as percussionist, conductor, administrator and educator.
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