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Tag: Meredith Monk

Roulette TV: Meredith Monk

Roulette is proud to premiere a new Roulette TV episode featuring the legendary creator and composer Meredith Monk. The episode traces a series of 10 performances that Monk curated at Roulette from 2016–2017 and features an exclusive interview.

Listen to the complete series of 10 concerts Meredith Monk curated at Roulette. Evolving out of a desire to dissolve genre boundaries and categories and highlight the freedom of imagination, authenticity, and liveliness of each artist’s practice, the performances ranged from experimental vocal music to electronic improvisation, from dance to film, and from rock and roll sound art to pop classics reimagined. Artists include David Behrman, Theo Bleckmann, Missy Mazzoli and GABI, American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Don Byron, Robin Holcomb, Ellen Fisher, Phil Kline and Jim Jarmusch, Dick Connette, and Ensemble Connect.

A Call to Curiosity with Meredith Monk

Our friend Meredith Monk recently sat down with Roulette TV in her home, and we loved what she had to say: that art is an antidote to the predictability of daily life and consumer culture.

We couldn’t agree more.

Art gets us out into the world and defines, expands, and challenges who we are. It asks us to take the right kind of risks and pushes us towards who we might become. Roulette is literally named after a game of chance, precisely because we celebrate the risk and adventurousness that define experimental performance, the people who make it, and the people who love it.

We all deserve what Roulette has to offer: a place to come together around delightfully weird live art; to have a beer in our renovated 1928 art-deco theater; to engage with extraordinary work and talk face-to-face about it; to be unapologetically curious together.

We need these values. And Roulette needs you.

Help Roulette protect this creative space we’ve built over the last 40 years — join us in creating a more curious, more connected, more open world.

Curated by Meredith Monk: Missy Mazzoli // GABI

What: Missy Mazzoli and GABI present an evening of vocal exploration curated by Meredith Monk.
When: Thursday, December 1, 2016, 8pm
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $20/15 Online $25/20 Doors $50 Series Pass
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: General Admission $20, Members/Students/Seniors $15, $25/20 Tickets at the door, $50 Series Pass

Brooklyn, NY – Composers and performers Missy Mazzoli and GABI join forces for a rare night of solo and collaborative performances exploring the ethereal fringes of electronic music, classical virtuosity, glitchy vocals, and extended techniques.

For this performance, Missy Mazzoli brings her trademark blend of harmony-drenched electronic soundscapes, virtuosic piano performance, and eccentric minimalism to Roulette’s stage. Mazzoli will perform as a soloist and in new collaborations with Aaron Roche (guitar, voice), Ludovica Burtone (violin) and Gabrielle Herbst (voice). She will present new compositions for electronics, piano, synths, guitar, strings, and voice, accompanied by new films created for her work. Mazzoli is a Brooklyn-based composer and pianist who has received wide critical acclaim for her chamber, orchestral and operatic work. Her first chamber opera Song from the Uproar, based on the life of Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt and featuring a libretto by Royce Vavrek, premiered at The Kitchen in March 2012. She is the founder and keyboardist for Victoire, an electro-acoustic band dedicated to performing her music. Mazzoli is a 2015 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

GABI (née Gabrielle Herbst) performs new experimentations for voice and ensemble inspired by dissolving genres and incorporating her pop sensibility within an evolving landscape of opera. GABI will experiment with extended technique, textural looping, and theatrical performance to present new spatial music for two voices and two harps, as well as music for saxophone, piano, percussion, and electronics. Herbst’s formal training began at an early age, studying Balinese dance and gamelan in Indonesia while learning both the clarinet and piano. She continued her training at Bard College where she studied voice and composition under the tutelage of Joan Tower, Zeena Parkins and Marina Rosenfeld. Her work has been showcased at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, as well as Roulette, who in 2014 commissioned and premiered her first opera, Bodiless. GABI released her debut album, Sympathy, on Software Recording Company in 2015.

About the Series: Curated by Meredith Monk features performers selected by Monk who are following his or her own path, asking questions, finding places that fall between the cracks of genres or categories.

Curated by Meredith Monk: Theo Bleckmann’s Hello Earth! The Music of Kate Bush

What: Theo Bleckmann reinterprets the music of Kate Bush for the second installment of the Curated By Meredith Monk series.
When: Saturday, November 26, 2016, 8pm
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $20/15 Online $25/20 Doors $50 Series Pass
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: General Admission $20, Members/Students/Seniors $15, $25/20 Tickets at the door, $50 Series Pass

Brooklyn, NY – Vocalist Theo Bleckmann takes on the mysterious songbook of British pop recluse Kate Bush by not merely recreating Bush’s music but taking it into other realms of sound and interpretation. Bush’s œuvre is mysterious and often enigmatic in nature: unusual song forms, oracular lyrics and unpredictable meter- and harmony-changes are an anomaly in pop music, making her oeuvre the perfect vehicle for Bleckmann‘s distinctive, interpretive spirit and interest in the unusual.

Kate Bush’s use of British and Irish myths, her references to psychology, literature and film, her meticulously multi-layered productions and her unusually high voice make her idiosyncratic body of work challenging for other artists to interpret. Bleckmann first heard Bush as a young teenager and was immediately intrigued: ”Her music has this thing that I love in art: you’re instantly drawn into someone’s universe without really knowing why but somehow understanding everything in your heart.” Many teenage pop heroes came and went, but Kate Bush remained a constant in Bleckmann‘s life. “Her songs and records never became obsolete – I now realize that the way she layered sound, speech and music became a major influence for my live electronic looping aesthetic.” For Hello Earth!, Bleckmann chooses songs that warranted a different interpretation.

A jazz singer and new music composer of eclectic tastes and prodigious gifts, GRAMMY-nominated Theo Bleckmann makes music that is accessible, sophisticated, unsentimentally emotional, and seriously playful. A resident of New York City since 1989, Bleckmann has released a series of albums on Winter & Winter, including recordings of Las Vegas standards, of Weimar art songs, and of popular “bar songs” (all with pianist Fumio Yasuda); a recording of newly-arranged songs by Charles Ives (with jazz/rock collective Kneebody); his acoustic Solos for Voice I dwell in possibility, and his highly acclaimed Hello Earth – The Music of Kate Bush. Bleckmann has worked with Meredith Monk as a core ensemble member for over fifteen years.

About the Series: Curated by Meredith Monk features performers selected by Monk who are following his or her own path, asking questions, finding places that fall between the cracks of genres or categories.