PROGRAM George Lewis Assemblage (2013) Rebekah Heller conductor Isabel Lepanto Gleicher flute Joshua Rubin clarinet Erin Rogers saxophone Jane Yoon harp Erika Dohi piano Josh Modney violin Wendy Richman viola Sterling Elliott cello Ross Karre percussion Blombos Workshop (2020) *US premiere
Cory Smythe piano
Intermission Amina Claudine Myers Stay in the Light (2022) The Amina Claudine Myers Trio Jerome Harris electric bass, voice, guitar Reggie Nicholson drums, voice, gong Amina Claudine Myers composer, piano, organ, voice with special guest Richarda Abrams actress, voice, little instruments
This program is approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes including a 30-minute intermission.
Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at East 67th Street
2023 ARTISTS STUDIO IN THE RESTORED VETERANS ROOM
DOUBLE BILL: GEORGE LEWIS / AMINA CLAUDINE MYERS monday, december 18, 2023 at 7:00pm works by George Lewis performed by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble performed on a special double bill with Stay in the Light by Amina Claudine Myers, performed by her Trio and special guest Richarda Abrams 2023 SEASON SPONSORS
PUBLIC SUPPORT
Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by the Thompson Family Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, The Shubert Foundation, the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, the Reed Foundation, Wescustogo Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Gregory Annenberg Weingarten, GRoW @ Annenberg, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Richenthal Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Armory’s Artistic Council. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature as well as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Front Cover: Amina Claudine Myers Poems for Piano: The Piano Music of Marion Brown. Back Cover: George Lewis Changing with the Times (New World Records). armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory
ABOUT THE PROGRAM George Lewis: Assemblage (2013), for nine instruments Both the title and the musical content of Assemblage refer to a practice of visual artmaking that recombines and recontextualizes collections of natural and human-made objects. Assemblage-like processes were deployed in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Louise Nevelson, and Joseph Cornell; Jean Dubuffet called some of his creations “assemblages d’empreintes,” a name adopted by later generations of artists and curators. Artists such as Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, John Outterbridge, and David Hammons extended the practice, recycling and reframing the quotidian urban detritus of modern civilization’s African American imaginary. Sociologists of science and technology studies associated with actor-network theory, such as Bruno Latour, adopted the image of the assemblage to describe social/material formations that exhibit contingency, heterogeneity, nonlinearity, and emergence, as well as fundamental processes of mediation, remediation, and bricolage that the anthropologist Georgina Born applies to music. These are the spirits I’ve tried to evoke in this piece. — George Lewis
George Lewis: Blombos Workshop (2020), for piano solo This work engages an overarching concern of the Jamaican critical theorist Sylvia Wynter—the promise and potential of the human. Wynter’s account of the human is structured as three consequential “Events”: the Big Bang, the advent of biological life, and the origin of abstract thinking and narrative in the modern human. While the existence of cave paintings dating from the European Upper Paleolithic had long been deployed to mark Europe as the origin point of modern symbolic thought, in 1999, an abstract drawing discovered in Blombos Cave in South Africa was reliably dated at around 73,000 years old, or about the time that the most recent wave of modern humans began migrating out of Africa. This drawing and other materials found at the site, which preceded the European paintings by at least 30,000 years, provided the scientific basis for the decentering of Europe from the origin of the “human symbolic revolution.” This drawing was found in an even older complex, a workshop with container shells and stone tools used for making pigments dating to 100,000 years old. My imagining of this workshop, which has everything to do with music as fundamental to the conception of the human, forms the basis for the sounds and procedures that animate Blombos Workshop. Although the piece is extensively notated, tools for real-time musical creation are provided, along the lines of a conceptual workshop. The pianist should feel free to use the given materials to create a version of the piece that combines my conception with her own. To end the piece, the pianist creates a short open improvisation with personally generated material that never appears anywhere else in the piece. — George Lewis
Amina Claudine Myers: Stay in the Light Stay in the Light was developed after a friend of mine, who is a very spiritual person, gave me a message from a spirit. This spirit told me: “Stay in the Light.” Whether one believes it or not, I did. I understood that this spirit and others like him are here on earth to help us, although they are on another plane. This message stayed with me, and this was an enlightened moment for me. Staying in the light is about love, truthfulness, positivity, and healing. I believe that all creations here on earth can be in the light, and my music gives an example of those who want to be and are already in the light, including animals. — Amina Claudine Myers
ABOUT THE ARTISTS GEORGE LEWIS
George Lewis is a composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, and trombonist. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians since 1971, Lewis is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship (2002), and the Alpert Award in the Arts (1999). A Yamaha Artist, Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of improvising computer programs, and his music is performed worldwide, published by Edition Peters. He is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and co-editor with Benjamin Piekut of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and others. Lewis serves as Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University in the fields of Composition and Historical Musicology, and as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble.
INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE
Now in its third decade, the International Contemporary Ensemble is a multidisciplinary collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to building and innovating collaborative environments in order to inspire audiences to reimagine how they experience contemporary music and sound. Under the leadership of composer and Artistic Director George Lewis, the Ensemble creates a mosaic musical ecosystem as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), honoring the diversity of human experience and expression by commissioning, developing, recording, and performing the works of living artists in “a mission worth following” (I Care If You Listen). Co-founded in 2001 by flutist and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Claire Chase, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works and is the recipient of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, as well as Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year Award. Past artistic leadership includes Co-Founder Claire Chase and Ensemble members Joshua Rubin, Rebekah Heller, and Ross Karre. Notable presenting partners have included Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, TIME:SPANS Festival, Roulette, and Miller Theatre. The Ensemble has given performances at Warsaw Autumn, Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, Cité de la Musique (Paris), Park Avenue Armory, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ojai Music Festival, and Big Ears Festival as well as in venues such as the Dutch National Opera, Carnegie Hall, and Walt Disney Concert Hall.
AMINA CLAUDINE MYERS
Amina Claudine Myers is a pianist, organist, vocalist, composer, improvisationist, actress, and educator. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1966, Myers has performed nationally and internationally throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America. She is well known for her work involving voice choirs, voice, and instrumental ensembles. Myers has released 11 recordings of her music. Myers has recorded and/or performed with Archie Shepp, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra, James Blood Ulmer, Lester Bowie, Bob Stewart, Joey Barron, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Dr. Muhal Richard Abrams, Bill Laswell, Anthony Braxton, and Henry Threadgill, among others. Her larger works include: Interiors for chamber orchestra, premiered by the Orchestra of the S.E.M. under the baton of Petr Kotik; Improvisational Suite for Chorus, Pipe Organ, and Percussion, for 16 operatic voices, pipe organ, and two percussionists; and When The Berries Fell for eight voices, piano, Hammond B3 organ, and percussion. Myers has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet The Composer, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among many others. She was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Arkansas Jazz Hall of Fame in 2010 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from ArtsforArt.Org, presented at the 25th edition of the famed Vision Festival.
RICHARDA ABRAMS
Richarda Abrams is a four-time AUDELCO award-winning actress, singer, playwright, and producer. She has performed at New Federal Theatre, Crossroads Theater, Ivoryton Playhouse, Second Stage Theater, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, Cherry Lane Theater, The Public Theater, and MultiStages. Written works include: First By Faith: The Life Of Mary McLeod Bethune, BETHUNE: Our Black Velvet Rose, and Big Mama and Me. Abrams has received NYSCA Theater Commissions and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement grants. She is fiscally sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts. She jas served as a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council SU-CASA artist teaching creative drama to seniors. Memberships include: Actors Studio, ART/NY, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians co-founded by her father Dr. Muhal Richard Abrams, Episcopal Actors Guild, Dramatists Guild, AEA, SAG-AFTRA, New York Women In Film and Television, and the League of Professional Theatre Women. Abrams holds a BFA with honors in Acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a Master of Arts in Educational Theater from NYU’s Steinhardt and the University of Leeds, Bretton Hall College, England.
PRODUCTION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Andrew Lulling Audio Engineer Steinway & Sons
ABOUT THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF CREATIVE MUSICIANS The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), one of the oldest musicians’ associations in the United States, was co-founded in 1965 in Chicago by Dr. Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Kelan Phil Cohran, and Steve McCall. The AACM New York City Chapter, Inc. was established in 1983 by Dr. Abrams and other AACM members who relocated from Chicago to New York to further their musical endeavors. The Chapter functions as an ensemble of composers and performers whose mission is to present concerts that feature world premieres composed by AACM members. Membership demographics are predominately African American and includes members from a range of backgrounds. AACM artists have developed a body of work that has achieved lasting significance across borders of musical genre and geography, playing a critical role in the ever-evolving process of music creation and its vital influence throughout the world. The organization’s mission is designed to produce concerts and to bring new music to diverse audiences; to create an atmosphere conducive to artistic endeavors for the artistically inclined by maintaining a workshop for the sole purpose of bringing musicians together; and to stimulate spiritual growth in creative artists through participation in programs, concerts, and recitals. AACM concert programs encompass all forms of original music, including gospel, blues, jazz, classical, folk, electronic music, and the uncategorizable, performed by a diverse ensemble of talented musicians whose musical experiences span the globe.
The AACM has nurtured and brought to fruition many accomplished composers/performers, including Amina Claudine Myers, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Thurman Barker, Frank Gordon, Adegoke Steve Colson, Iqua Colson, Chico Freeman, George Lewis, Leonard E. Jones, Reggie Nicholson, Peggy Abrams, Richarda Abrams, and posthumously Dr. Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, Kalaparusha Ahra Difda, Lester Bowie, Steve McCall, Fred Anderson, John Stubblefield, and Fred Hopkins. AACM members have gained international recognition as accomplished musicians and composers, many of whom have been invited by renowned orchestras throughout the world to perform their music. They have received numerous awards for their contributions to the music community, and continue to interact with and teach young aspiring musicians, as well as establishing creative music programs in universities. In 2019, Chamber Music America honored the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians with the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award. Chamber Music America’s highest honor, this award has been presented annually since 1980 to those who have made lasting, significant contributions in the field of music. Peggy Abrams, Richarda Abrams, Thurman Baker, Adegoke Steve Colson, Iqua Colson, George Lewis, Amina Claudine Myers, Reggie Nicholson, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, and Chico Freeman The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians New York City Chapter Inc. Leonard Jones Archival Footage
Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at East 67th Street
ABOUT THE ARTISTS STUDIO Launched in March 2016 alongside the inauguration of the revitalized Veterans Room, the Artists Studio is curated by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur fellow Jason Moran and serves as a space for artists to experiment, collaborate, create, and push the boundaries of their craft. The 2024 Artists Studio Season takes inspiration from the inventive spirit and collaboration present at the room’s inception with interventions by some of today’s most creative voices who have a distinct relationship to sound with a visual aesthetic. 2024 Artists Studio performances invite artist and musician Jasper Marsalis; American poet, musician, and activist Moor Mother with free jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements (IE); performance artist EJ Hill; and playwright, director, producer, and actress Radha Blank to explore exciting new directions in their practice. Previous Artists Studio programs have featured performances by: jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran; Dutch contemporary composer Louis Andriessen and pianist Jason Moran; American composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros and noted author, director, and dream specialist IONE; pianist and composer Conrad Tao and multifaceted percussionist, instrumentalist, and composer Tyshawn Sorey; seminal drummer and acupuncturist Milford Graves and drummer and musician Deantoni Parks; artist Lucy Raven; groundbreaking sound designer Ryan Trecartin with his primary collaborator Lizzie Fitch, music producer and DJ Ashland Mines (aka Total Freedom), and composer/producer Aaron David Ross; acoustic ensemble Dawn of Midi; composer Ryuichi Sakamoto; tenor Lawrence Brownlee with pianists Myra Huang and Jason Moran; multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome; vocalist Dominique Eade and pianist Ran Blake with composer Kavita Shah; experimental composer Alvin Curran; internationally renowned composer, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner Matana Roberts; pioneer of experimental music Charlemagne Palestine; art icon and DJ Juliana Huxtable; composer and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell; experimental composer, improviser, and performer Miya Masaoka; My Barbarian collective founders Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade; cutting edge visual artist Rosa Barba; Dominican accordionist Krency Garcia (El Prodigio); the late trumpeter jaimie branch and visual artist Carol Szymanski; pioneer of performance and video art Joan Jonas; conceptual artist, writer, and performer, Rodney McMillian; and this year’s season-long spotlight of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Inc. (AACM), including programs with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill, versatile drummers and percussionists Thurman Barker and Reggie Nicholson, “musical power couple” (The New York Times) Adegoke Steve Colson and Iqua Colson, MacArthur fellow George Lewis, and multidimensional artist and creator Amina Claudine Myers.
armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory
NEXT IN THE SERIES JASPER MARSALIS march 27 & 28, 2024
Jasper Marsalis is an artist and musician who explores the intersections of popular music and avant-garde performance by working across painting, sculpture, sound, and text. The son of jazz impresario Wynton Marsalis, the multifaceted artist has made a name for himself in his own right with releases under his own name and the moniker Slauson Malone 1 that are deeply ambitious, eccentrically engaging, and play with myriad genres and styles. He comes to the Armory to perform a set inspired by the Veterans Room, layering dissonant sounds on top of one another to create a dense and dizzying suite of sonic collages that invite close listening.
MOOR MOTHER & IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS (IE) saturday, may 18, 2024
American poet, musician, and activist Moor Mother comes to the Veterans Room with two distinct programs that spotlight her work as a solo artist and her collaborations with other musicians who share her drive to dig up the untold. Following a solo set of fringe and avant-garde sonic landscapes rooted in industrial, electronic, noise, punk, and hip hop, she is joined by Irreversible Entanglements (IE), a free-jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality that plays deeply improvised, rhythm music full of love and social commitment.
NEXT AT THE ARMORY RECITAL SERIES JEANINE DE BIQUE & WARREN JONES february 12 & 14, 2024
Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique makes a rare New York appearance with a global program of French melodies, American art songs, and folk songs from the Caribbean.
ILLINOISE
march 2 – 23, 2024 new york city premiere, an armory commission
Tony Award-winning director-choreographer Justin Peck expands upon Sufjan Stevens’s acclaimed concept album Illinois is a bold new music-theater production featuring virtuosic dancers, singers, and musicians and a narrative crafted with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury.
MAKING SPACE AT THE ARMORY RICHARD KENNEDY: GUTTURAL (CONDUCTED CONTACT) friday, april 12, 2024
As a capstone of the Radical Practice of Black Curation symposium in collaboration with Princeton University, multidisciplinary artist Richard Kennedy presents a musical encapsulation of the African diaspora in the Armory’s historic rooms. Titled Guttural (Conducted Contact), this new work opens a portal of participatory gathering as truth emerges through song, dance, and a series of wordless conversations.
Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue at East 67th Street
ABOUT PARK AVENUE ARMORY Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory supports unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of 19th-century European train stations—and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory provides a platform for artists to push the boundaries of their practice, collaborate across disciplines, and create new work in dialogue with the historic building. Across its grand and intimate spaces, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York. The Armory both commissions and presents performances and installations in the grand Drill Hall and offers more intimate programming through its acclaimed Recital Series, which showcases musical talent from across the globe within the salon setting of the Board of Officers Room; its Artists Studio series curated by Jason Moran in the restored Veterans Room; Making Space at the Armory, a public programming series that brings together a discipline-spanning group of artists and cultural thought-leaders around the important issues of our time; and the Malkin Lecture Series that features presentations by scholars and writers on topics related to Park Avenue Armory and its history. In addition, the Armory also has a year-round Artists-in-Residence program, providing space and support for artists to create new work and expand their practices. The Armory’s creativity-based Arts Education programs provide access to the arts to thousands of students from underserved New York City public schools, engaging them with the institution’s artistic programming and outside-the-box creative processes. Through its education initiatives, the Armory provides access to all Drill Hall performances, workshops taught by Master Teaching Artists, and in-depth residencies that support the schools’ curriculum. Youth Corps, the Armory’s year-round paid internship program, begins in high school and continues into the critical post-high school years, providing interns with mentored employment, job training, and skill development, as well as a network of peers and mentors to support their individual college and career goals. The Armory is undergoing a multi-phase renovation and restoration of its historic building led by architects Herzog & de Meuron, with Platt Byard Dovell White as Executive Architects.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Kim Greenberg Andrew Gundlach Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Samhita Jayanti Edward G. Klein, Brigadier General NYNG (Ret.) Ralph Lemon Jason Moran Janet C. Ross Stephanie Sharp Joan Steinberg Peter Zhou
Chairman Emeritus Elihu Rose, PhD
Treasurer Emanuel Stern
Co-Chairs Adam R. Flatto Amanda J.T. Riegel
Marina Abramović Abigail Baratta Joyce F. Brown Cora Cahan Hélène Comfort Paul Cronson Jonathan Davis Tina R. Davis Jessie Ding Sanford B. Ehrenkranz Roberta Garza armoryonpark.org | @ParkAveArmory
President Rebecca Robertson Vice Presidents David Fox Pablo Legorreta Emanuel Stern
Avant-Garde Chair Adrienne Katz Directors Emeriti Harrison M. Bains, Jr. Angela E. Thompson Pierre Audi, Marina Kellen French Artistic Director Wade F.B. Thompson, Founding Chairman, 2000-2009