2024 House Blend Lineup Announced

2024 House Blend Lineup

PS21’s expansive 2024 season continues with House Blend Concerts, August 18–21

PS21 HOUSE BLEND programs are conceived for our theater with an eye toward bringing virtuosic and thoughtful musicians together in genre-defying combinations. The series opens a creative space unique to our venue, surroundings, and audiences that yields programs that can only be heard at PS21.

PROGRAMS:
AUGUST 18, 5 pm – PS21 HOUSE BLEND I
Conor Hanick plays Johannes Brahms and Galina Ustvolskaya

AUGUST 19, 7 pm – PS21 HOUSE BLEND II. A double bill:
Skylighght, Gelsey Bell (voice) & Erin Rogers (saxophone). Plus, composer/multi-instrumentalist Patrick Higgins (guitar, drums, electronics), improvisations on five tracks from Versus, his latest record

AUGUST 20, 7 pm – PS21 HOUSE BLEND III:
Miranda Cuckson (violin) & Conor Hanick (piano)
Iannis Xenakis: Mikka S.; J.S. Bach: Sonata in D minor (BWV 1004); Charles Ives: selections from Songs (Opus 114); Aaron Copland: Sonata for Violin and Piano

AUGUST 21, 7 pm – PS21 HOUSE BLEND IV. A double bill:
Bonnie Whiting performs Wang Lu‘s Stages for solo speaking/singing percussionist, with stage design by Polly Apfelbaum, and Frederic Rzewski‘s To the Earth for speaking percussionist and four flower pots (text from the Homeric Hymn to Gaia, Mother of All). Plus bass-baritone Davóne Tines singing Eastman Evensong

Enjoy all four House Blend evening performances for one low price with a House Blend Series Pass

PS21’s HOUSE BLEND CONCERTS, our popular perennial brew of classic and contemporary, returns with four adventurous programs in four days, celebrated soloists, duos, and ensembles delivering daring new musical directions with arresting renderings of classic works and cutting-edge compositions and arrangements. Highlights include Skylighght and Stages, but every moment of the four evenings is replete with delights and discoveries. House Blend programs are developed with our venue and audiences in mind, brews of collaboration and genre-defying virtuosity that music lovers will encounter only at PS21.

House Blend offers audiences the chance to get more intimately involved in the music and creative process, through open rehearsals, workshops, artist talks, and informal post-concert discussions where the artists share their thoughts and insights about their interpretive approaches.

The series opens on Sunday, August 18, with the spellbinding pianist Conor Hanick playing works by Galina Ustvolskaya and Johannes Brahms. The following evening, Gelsey Bell and Erin Rogers perform Skylighght, their duet for voice and saxophone, in a double bill with virtuoso composer and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Higgins, “one of the prime movers of the avant-garde” (The New Yorker). On August 20, the fearless, visionary violinist Miranda Cuckson joins Conor Hanick for a concert that spans Bach and Xenakis. House Blend IV, on Wednesday, August 21, features Bonnie Whiting performing Wang Lu’s Stages (2023) for solo speaking/singing percussionist, with a stage design by Polly Apfelbaum, and Frederic Rzewski‘s To the Earth for speaking percussionist and four flower pots (text from the Homeric Hymn to Gaia, Mother of All),” in a double bill with charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines, creator of The Black Clown and other compelling music theater works.

HOUSE BLEND I: August 18, 5 pm
Conor Hanick playing works for piano by Galina Ustvolskaya and Johannes Brahms.
Anthony Tommasini, writing in The New York Times, praised the “ecstatic fervor, as well as effortless elegance” Hanick brings to contemporary and classical music with his “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation.”

Program:
Galina USTVOLSKAYA, Piano Sonatas no. 1–3
Johannes BRAHMS, Three Intermezzi opus 117
Galina USTVOLSKAYA, Piano Sonatas no. 4–6
Total Time: 75 minutes

Ustvolskaya, an intensely spiritual composer whose pounding rhythms and dissonance earned her the sobriquet “The lady with the hammer,” approved of fewer than 30 of her works. About her creative process,, she said, “The whole process of composition is accomplished in my head and in my soul. . . . Music is born in me, and when the time comes, I record it. If the time doesn’t come, I destroy it.” Ustvolskaya studied with Dmitri Shostakovich from 1939–41 and 1947–48, but there are few signs of his influence on her postwar compositions. In fact, he sometimes quoted passages from her work in his own Fifth String Quartet and other pieces and acknowledged her genius when he wrote to her, “I am a talent; you are a phenomenon.”

HOUSE BLEND II: August 19, 7 pm
A double bill: Skylighght and Patrick Higgins, “one of the prime movers of the avant-garde” (The New Yorker)
Gelsey Bell (voice) and Erin Rogers (saxophone) perform their collaborative composition Skylighght, an intimate search for a sonic and physical meeting of voice and saxophone. Singer and musician direct the sound in pathways that float around the room, some sections responding to the architectural properties of the performance space, others pairing singer and saxophone to create novel acoustic effects. Through five moments, each one a natural skylight, the interwoven resonances sculpt the composition like a dance. In the final movement, “Antelope Canyon,” Bell sings into the bell of Rogers’s tenor saxophone while it is playing, exploring its inner chamber and sounding an extraordinary rainbow of diverse multiphonics and harmonic partials.

“The physical vibrations and resonance tones clash, combine, and unite to create rich, vibrant harmonies, harsh dissonances, and stunning different tones, as the two musicians become one.” — Salt Peanuts

Skylighght was released on Chaiken Records on May 10, with a launch party in the catacombs at Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn.

On a double bill with:

Patrick Higgins, New York City-based composer, guitarist, and producer, is acclaimed for his experimental and contemporary classical music. A “formidable concert music composer” (Boston Globe), and “one of the most gifted guitarists working today” (The Quietus), Higgins bridges traditions that extend from baroque chamber music to contemporary noise, electronics, and 20th-century minimalism.

At PS21, Higgins will thread new improvisations for guitar and electronics through live renditions of five of the tracks from Versus, his latest record: “Versus,” “Antinome,” “In Situ,” “Sirocco,” and “Aporia.” A highly emotional and expressive work that pushes Higgins’ own instrumental virtuosity into new territories, the album marks a new direction and development of his acclaimed work as a guitarist and composer, drawing on electronic music, free improvisation, and avant-garde modern composition. He performs guitar, keyboards, synthesizer, drums, and laptop programming across nine tracks that show Higgins at his best, bridging styles and introducing new music that is harsh but seductive, intense yet inviting, and always unexpected.

“Patrick Higgins composes with a scholar’s historical perspective and a punk’s sense of abandon” — Pitchfork

HOUSE BLEND III: August 20, 7 pm
PS21 favorites violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Conor Hanick return with a program of J.S. Bach’s Partita in D minor for solo violin (BWV 1004), Iannis Xenakis’s, Mikka S., for solo violin, Aaron Copland’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, and a selection of Charles Ives’s Songs (op. 114) arranged for piano and violin.

“A fearless, visionary, and tremendously talented artist” (Sequenza 21), Ethan Iverson writes of Cuckson’s rendition of the Xenakis: “Miranda Cuckson has always impressed with an effortless command of the hardest modern music. I first heard her on the 2014 album Melting the Darkness, which opens with the dumbfounding “Mikka S.” by Iannis Xenakis. It’s an incredibly difficult piece, but Cuckson sounds like she’s crooning a blues lullaby.” — Transitional Technology

HOUSE BLEND IV: August 21, 7 pm
A double bill: Bonnie Whiting performing Wang Lu’s Stages and a solo recital by Davóne Tines
Wang Lu’s Stages (2023) for solo speaking/singing percussionist, performed by Bonnie Whiting, with stage design by Polly Apfelbaum.

Wang Lu composed Stages collaboratively with Whiting, to a text adapted from Lucy Corin’s “Questions in Significantly Smaller Font,” in One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses. Wang’s music incorporates urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese elements, and free improvisation, and Stages grew out of Wang and Whiting’s memories of confusion and struggle, Wang as a Communist Young Pioneer in China and Whiting caught between family and religious extremism. The work uncovers and explores hidden stages of consciousness, expressed through the sounds of urban environments, physical movement, vocal intonations, traditional Chinese music, recited and improvised texts, and contemporary instrumental techniques, with familiar objects—pot lids, infant music boxes, radios, SOLO cups, thermal sheets—deployed as musical instruments.

“If you want to be a percussionist in the 21st century, you’ve got to play a lot more than just drums. From flower pots to file racks and found objects, . . . if you can hit, shake, or strike it, it’s a percussion instrument. That’s what drew Bonnie Whiting to the big, wide world of contemporary percussion. . . . a sense of flexibility and possibility — finding music in everyday objects.” — Maggie Molloy, NPR Slingshot

Polly Apfelbaum, stage design
Polly Apfelbaum is a contemporary American artist best known for her self-described “fallen paintings.” Composed of brightly dyed fabric pieces that are often strewn across the floor, her works blur the boundaries of installation, painting, and sculpture. The prolific artist has mounted nearly 60 solo exhibitions worldwide and has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions. Apfelbaum’s works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.

A double bill with:

Davóne Tines singing Eastman Evensong, three solo vocal works by Julius Eastman: “Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc,” “The Lord has given, the Lord has taken,” and “O love, into thy bosom let me rest”

“Davóne Tines is changing what it means to be a classical singer” — Alex Ross, The New Yorker

Bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s daring recitals stretch the boundaries of what classical music can be and the impact it has on audiences. In works such as Recital No. 1: MASS, he interweaves elements of the Catholic Mass by composers from J. S. Bach to Carolyn Shaw and his own experiences to explore themes of spirituality, justice, and identity. LA Times critic Marc Swed called him “one of the most powerful voices of our time, as mesmerizing as a singer can be. His voice can fill a space and then some, ringing gloriously.” Among Tines’s thematic compositions are The Black Clown, a searing rumination on Black history and identity based on the Langston Hughes poem co-created with Michael Schachter, who wrote the rollicking musical-theater score, and VIGIL, in memory of Breonna Taylor, who was shot by police in her own home, a collaboration with fellow AMOC members pianist Conor Hanick and composers Igée Dieudonné and Matthew Aucoin. Alex Ross called Tines’s performance of the Handel aria “Shake the Heavens” “one of those moments which anyone who attends concerts lives to witness: within thirty seconds, I knew I was in the presence of a major artist.”

HOUSE BLEND Special Brew: Gamelan Yowana Sari,
a PS21 PATHWAYS program. August 4th, 4 pm, PS21 Pavilion Theater

New York-based Gamelan Yowana Sari, 20 artists performing traditional Balinese music and dance for the Samara Dana gamelan, plus contemporary compositions by Dewa Alit, Michael Gordon, Kyle Miller, and Evan Ziporyn. Gordon’s Sea Salt and Ziporyn’s Aeriform Kite are 2024 commissions by the gamelan.

Dewa Ketut Alit is the leading Balinese composer of his generation, whose creative and collaborative approach to Balinese gamelan music has contributed to its worldwide popularity. : New York’s Gamelan Yowana Sari have traveled to Bali and back to bring Dewa Alit and his Pangenter Alit I Ketut to PS21.

PROGRAM, August 4:
Pendet Penyambutan — Traditional
Dancer – Miranda Danusugongo
Stones are the Flowers — Kyle Miller (2022)
Sea Salt — Michael Gordon (2024)
Pangenter Alit I Ketut — Dewa Alit (2003)
Dancer – Miranda Danusugondo
Aeriform Kite — Evan Ziproyn (2024)

Join us after the performance to try out the instruments and talk with the performers!

Since forming in 2011, Gamelan Yowana Sari has been a performing Balinese Art Ensemble in residence at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, CUNY. Under the direction of Michael Lipsey and Fred Trumpy, Yowana Sari have toured Bali multiple times, studying and performing under the master composer and musician I Dewa Ketut Alit in Pengosekan, Bali. In 2024, the group commissioned new works from Michael Gordon and Evan Ziporyn and will perform them alongside compositions by Dewa Alit and Kyle Miller at PS21, Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival, and the MASS MoCA Summer Music Festival.

HOUSE BLEND Bonus Tracks: DEEP LISTENING® WORKSHOPS with Nomi Epstein:
Monday, August 5, 7:15 to 9 pm, PS21 Grounds
Wednesday, August 7, 7:15 to 9 pm, PS21 Grounds
Price: $15 dollars a session
Attendees: No musical experience necessary, Age 16+, All movement abilities welcome.

Boston-based composer, curator, performer, and educator Nomi Epstein will guide two Deep Listening® workshops.

How do we listen? What sounds do we notice/perceive and when? How can we change and grow our sonic focus? Deep Listening® is a practice developed by Pauline Oliveros, the pioneering experimental music composer, which facilitates an awareness of our attention to and relationship with sound. The workshops consist of exercises in listening, sonic meditation, movement, and imagination that open our senses to new ways of interacting with the world around us. This practice helps us to be aware of our attention, opens our senses, and enables us to feel a greater connection to our bodies, to others, and to the environment.

By exploring, reflecting on, and discussing the core principles of the Deep Listening practice, we can discover new ways of interacting with the world around us.

ABOUT PS21 PATHWAYS

Through our PATHWAYS programs, we bring visionary artists into workshops, classes, installations, and performances on our grounds and into the community—all free of charge or at low cost. PATHWAYS also fosters collaboration between community arts groups and the Town of Chatham—enhancing cultural life in the Hudson Valley.

PS21: An Open Laboratory

PS21 is an open, creative laboratory where, throughout the season, artists are at work in our theater, barns, and fields. PS21 is open from dawn to dusk every day, and while wandering the trails, meadows, and woodlands, visitors can see creative artists in action while experiencing our untamed natural landscape. Discover the Season!

Support

PS21 House Blend programs received support from The Alice M. Ditson Fund, Wise Family Foundation, The Robert Craft Igor Stravinsky Foundation, and are made possible in part by public funds from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Performance Schedule, PS21 Pavilion Theater:
August 4 at 4 pm
August 18 at 6 pm
August 19 at 8 pm
August 20 at 8 pm
August 21 at 8 pm

Order Tickets and more information
Priority Tickets: $40
General Admission: $30
Student Tickets: $15

2024 House Blend Series Pass (5 concerts, one price!)
Join us for the full series (or “all four concerts”) with a discounted House Blend Pass and enjoy this exciting journey in sound.

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