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On night one of the String Orchestra of Brooklyn’s String Theories Festival, bassist Gahlord Dewald performs a solo set of works by Dewald, Anne Lanzilotti, Alexandra Gardner, and others. After intermission, cellist Andrew Yee of the Attacca Quartet performs Halfie, a program of works that explore their experience as a bi-racial and non-binary person.
Founded in 2007, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn has become an integral part of New York City’s vibrant and diverse musical landscape, bringing together creative instrumentalists, composers, and like-minded organizations and ensembles to collaborate on adventurous musical projects and present them to the public at an affordable price. The String Orchestra of Brooklyn has given more than 90 concerts and presentations of over 400 new and existing works for string orchestra, full orchestra, and chamber ensemble. They have received praise for their admirable commitment to the music of our time by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, I Care if You Listen, The New Yorker, and more.
Cellist Andrew Yee has been praised by Michael Kennedy of the London Telegraph as “spellbindingly virtuosic”. They are a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet who have released several albums to Critical acclaim including their arrangement of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” which Thewholenote.com praised as “ . . . easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” Their latest recording of Caroline Shaw’s string quartets just received two GRAMMY nominations and seems to be making a lot of people happy. As a soloist last season, Andrew performed John Taverner’s The Protecting Veil and Strauss Don Quixote. They like making stop-motion videos of food, drawing apples, cook like an Italian Grandma and has developed coffee and cocktail programs for award-winning restaurants (Lilia, Risbobk, Atla) in New York City.
Gahlord Dewald: My work starts with the bass: the deep sounds near to the earth. The sounds that surround you while standing or walking or running or resting. The sounds that shake along your body. From this root there are other sounds: spectral sounds that are hidden from you or then again revealed, signals traveling along strings and wires and then rippling in the air, stippling shadows of the fundamental bass. The sounds I make co-exist. They co-exist with and envelop you. They co-exist with other sound makers – dancing feet, musicians, recordings of some other place, construction machines, the traffic outside, the sounds of a bird or a dog or a small creature nearby. They focus your experience of where you are now and of place and of existing at this moment in this body among other bodies. All of us make music together in this way.
