The Interpretations series returns with a collaboration between baritone vocalist Thomas Buckner and flutist Robert Dick, alongside a set from composer David First.
This performance is a co-production between Interpretations and Roulette.
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
Thomas Buckner For decades, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the promotion and performance of new and improvised music, collaborating with a host of new music luminaries including: Robert Ashley, Noah Cre- shevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff, and many others. Buckner has appeared at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Herbst Theatre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlin Spring Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Angelica Festival of Bologna. He is featured on over 50 recordings, including 6 solo albums, the most recent being Spontaneous Musical Invention (Recital, 2023), a double album of rarely heard Robert Ashley compositions. For the past 32 years Thomas Buckner has curated the Interpretations series in New York City, and continues to produce recordings on the Mutable Music label, introducing current artists and repertoire, as well as presenting important historic material, previously unavailable in CD format.
Robert Dick was born and raised in New York City. He began playing the flute as a child, having heard the piccolo on the radio in the Top 40 hit Rockin’ Robin. His parent’s responded to his incessant campaigning for a flute by surprising him with a flute and flute teacher after school in fourth grade. Robert gave his first concert that very day! Setting up chairs for his parents as soon as his father came home from work, he excitedly playing page one of the Rubank Elementary Flute Method — and he’s never looked back. Robert attended Yale College, where he received a B.A. degree. At Yale, he met Robert Morris, composer and theorist, who was to be a most important mentor. Robert wrote his first compositions and had his first experiences improvising while a Yale undergraduate. He began his first book THE OTHER FLUTE: A Performance Manual of Contemporary Techniques as an undergraduate senior project, completing the book in his first year of graduate study at the Yale School of Music where he received a Masters degree in composition, studying composition with Robert Morris and electronic music with Bulant Arel and Jacob Druckman. THE OTHER FLUTE was originally published by Oxford University Press in 1975. While in graduate school, Robert composed his ground-breaking Afterlight, for flute alone, the first flute piece to use multiphonics as the primary building blocks of its musical language. Afterlight received a BMI Oliver Daniel Prize and has become a staple in the flute repertoire.
David First has always been fascinated by opposites and extremes. At 20 he played guitar with renowned avant-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor in a legendary Carnegie Hall concert. Two years after that he was creating electronic music on a Buchla 100 analog synth in Princeton University’s EMS (released in 2014 on Dais Records) and leading a Mummerʼs String Band in Philadelphia parades. He has played in raucous drunken bar bands, semi-legal DIY basements and in pin-drop quiet concert halls with classical ensembles. As a composer First has created everything from finely crafted pop songs to long, severely minimalist droneworks. His opera, The Manhattan Book of the Dead, was staged at LaMama’s Annex Theater (NYC) in 1995 and in Potsdam, Germany in 1996. His 2011 song and video, We Are (with vocals by TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone), was released to much acclaim in the Occupy Movement and was officially released on the compilation Occupy This Album which also featured tracks by Patti Smith, Jackson Browne, Willie Nelson, Yo La Tengo, Yoko Ono a.o. First’s performances often find him sitting trance-like without seeming to move a muscle, unless he is playing with his psychedelic punk band, Notekillers, at which time he is a whirling blur of hyperactive energy. He has been called “a fascinating artist with a singular technique” in The New York Times and “a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young” in the Village Voice. First was recently awarded a 2025 recording grant from the New Music USA. He was also a recipient of the Herb Alpert/Ragdale Award for Music Composition and a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship, the prestigious Grant to Artists from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, as well as grants and commissions from the NEA, the Copland Foundation (2010 & 2024), the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and the Meet the Composer Commissioning USA program.
The Interpretations series is a New York-based concert series focusing on the relationship between contemporary composers and their interpreters. Sometimes the interpreters are the composers themselves; more often, the series features performers who specialize in the interpretation of new music. Since its inception in 1989, Interpretations has featured leading figures in contemporary music and multimedia, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Robert Ashley, Anthony Braxton, Thomas Buckner, FLUX Quartet, Joseph Kubera, Annea Lockwood, and Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Ursula Oppens, and Morton Subotnick.
