Sparks & Wiry Cries Second Annual songSLAM Festival January 17-18 at DiMenna Center

The Global Platform Dedicated to Art Song Presents its Flagship songSLAM Festival January 17 – 18 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City
 

The second annual festival includes a songSLAM hosted by Tom Cipullo and a recital featuring renowned mezzo–soprano Stephanie Blythe, pianist Kayo Iwama and Fall Island Artists

songSLAMs will take place in eight cities in the US, Canada, UK and Slovenia in the first half of 2020

“The songs ranged in quality from the good to the truly excellent, and with a variety of utterance that included the precious and the polemic, the euphoric through the sardonic, in a diversity of song stylings…The overall impression left by this concert was one of optimism for the future of art song”

– Opera News on the inaugural 2019 songSLAM festival

NEW YORK, NY – On January 17 – 18, 2020, the New York-based global art song platform Sparks & Wiry Cries will present their second annual songSLAM Festival at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City. The festival is an incarnation of the organization's flagship songSLAM series, in which emerging composer/performer teams premiere newly composed art songs and compete for cash prizes.

The festival opens with a songSLAM January 17^th at 7 p.m. (tickets HERE) and also includes a concert on January 18^th at 7 p.m. entitled Between Eternity and Now, featuring mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe with pianist Kayo Iwama and soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon with pianist Ryan MacEvoy McCullough performing world and American premieres by composers James Legg, Sheila Silver, Alan Louis Smith and Adela Maddison (tickets HERE).

Regional songSLAMs are also being co-hosted by Sparks & Wiry Cries throughout the 2019-20 season with art song organizations in eight cities and four different countries.  Cities include: Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Vancouver (Canada), Chicago, Ljubljana (Slovenia), London (U.K.), Buffalo and Knoxville.

A decade ago, soprano Martha Guth and pianist Erika Switzer co-founded Sparks & Wiry Cries as a podcast and online magazine with a vision to contextualize art song in the sharing of recordings, interviews, and articles by prominent artists and scholars. Since then, the organization has grown to include an art song recital series, co-produce world-wide songSLAM competitions, present the annual songSLAM festival, and regularly commission and premiere new works. The organization’s online publication, Sparks & Wiry Cries Art Song Magazine, actively engages conversations through insightful publishing, programming, and commissioning initiatives. 

The songSLAM Festival is integral to Sparks & Wiry Cries’ mission to promote the advancement and preservation of art song by providing opportunities to its creators and performers, and the January 17^th NYC songSLAM will once again be hosted by acclaimed composer Tom Cipullo. The innovative competition – which gets its name from the popular Poetry Slam concept – will feature 10-12 composer/performer teams presenting new art song written for voice and piano. Audiences vote for their favorite new work and winners receive cash prizes.

The second and final event of the 2020 songSLAM festival, Between Eternity and Now, is a continuation of Sparks & Wiry Cries’ biennial partnership with mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and the Fall Island Vocal Arts Seminar, encouraging the study, interpretation and presentation of art song by living American composers.  A recital centered around the theme of family in all of its incarnations, Between Eternity and Now features Ms. Blythe and pianist Kayo Iwama performing James Legg’s 12 Songs of Emily Dickinson (a cycle written for Ms. Blythe) and excerpts from Sheila Silver's Beauty Intolerable, a songbook based on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.  The concert also highlights Fall Island alumni artists Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano and Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, pianist in the American premiere of Five French songs by Adela Maddison, a contemporary of Gabriel Fauré whose work is rarely performed; and the world premiere of Alan Louis Smith's Surfing the thin places, noted by the composer as a chronicle of “the 'thin places' where the temporal and the eternal seem infinitely close.”

“Art song is entering a renaissance,” says Co-Director Martha Guth in a recently published article in Art Song Canada. “Since the music is texted and each piece is relatively short, the stories can be specific, and an evening can be both expansive and deep. Let the poets, composers, performers, and the producers be a better reflection of the broader public, and let us take advantage of the format of the Schubertiade to invite a wider array of ‘Song-Makers.’”

Named in reference to a poem by Paul Goodman, Sparks & Wiry Cries began in 2009 as a podcast and online magazine with a vision to contextualize art song in the sharing of recordings, interviews, and articles by prominent artists and scholars. In 2012, the Casement Fund, Ltd. encouraged co-founders Martha Guth and Erika Switzer to expand their vision and curate an art song recital series based in New York City. In 2015, Sparks received its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status and grew to include the songSLAM competition and a commissioning program. Since 2018, the songSLAM FESTIVAL and Art Song Magazine are actively engaging in current conversations through insightful publishing, programming, and commissioning. For more info on regional songSLAMS, visit www.sparksandwirycries.org/songSLAM