The highlight of PS21’s summer season will be the New York State premiere of Grammy Award-winning composer John Luther Adams’ Ten Thousand Birds, which will be performed by the acclaimed Alarm Will Sound ensemble at PS21. Drawing inspiration from birdsong, the piece explores the connection between nature and music—a topic Adams has continually explored throughout his career.
A free community program called Follow Me Into the Field. will take place on Thursday, August 6. Led by Alarm Will Sound musicians, families will take a socially distanced musical tour of the PS21/Crellin Park landscape. Through the voyage, instrumental sounds will comingle with the calls of wildlife, rustling leaves, and human footfalls. As in John Luther Adams’s composition, birdsong becomes music, instrumental sounds transmute into natural ones, and the open setting becomes artistic space, where the lines blur between human creativity and natural phenomena.
IN RESIDENCY FROM JUNE 22–24 PLUS JULY 30–AUGUST 8
Experimental opera director Ashley Tata spent her PS21 residency creating Follow Me into the Field!, a site-specific environmental adaptation of Ten Thousand Birds, along our network of trails. The work’s instrumental sounds commingled with the calls of wildlife, the rustling of leaves, and the footfalls of musicians and spectators. Birdsong became music, instrumental sounds were transmuted into the sounds of nature, and the landscape into artistic space, blurring the lines between human creativity and natural phenomena.
Additionally, Alarm Will Sound spent a week workshopping compositions of the Franco-Haitian singer and percussionist Anaïs Maviel and Tyshan Sorey’s For George Lewis, the composer’s multi-textured symphonic homage to his musical mentor. The double album For George Lewis/Autoschediasms was released in 2021.
Alarm Will Sound’s New York Season is made possible by the New York StateCouncil on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and theNew York State Legislature.
Alarm Will Sound gratefully acknowledges our individual donors and the followingfoundations for their support: Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Amphion Foundation,Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, BMIFoundation, Cheswatyr Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Pacific HarmonyFoundation, and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation.
Alarm Will Sound’s 2020 engagement is part of PS21/Chatham PATHWAYS:Blazing Trails to a Sustainable Future. All Pathways public performing arts, arts education and community engagement activities are funded in part through an OUR TOWN grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Columbia County Arts Fund. Alarm Will Sound’s engagement is also made possible through the Arts CONNECT program of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
