Performance

Experiments In Opera: The Travel Agency Is On Fire

Fri, Oct 16, 2015

8:00 PM

Please note: This event takes place at The Stone, on the corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street in New York City.

Performances will start at 8 pm and 10 pm.$15 General Admission for each set at the door.

Renegade William Burroughs is known for his challenging and hallucinatory prose as well as his deeply experimental streak. He helped to pioneer the art form of Cut-Ups, repurposing of previously published materials into new art forms. In celebration of the publication of The Travel Agency on Fire edited by Alex Wermer Colan for LOST & FOUND: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, EiO will commission 11 new compositions for ensemble and voice based on Burroughs’ Cut-Ups of modern writers including Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Genet and F Scott Fitzgerald among others. These 11 new works will be premiered by James Ilgenfritz’s Anagram Ensemble featuring vocalists Megan Schubert, Amirtha Kidambi and Michael Douglas Jones. Burroughs’ texts will challenge the commissioned composers to reorganize their musical work around non-linear narratives and ideas and embrace a logic of sound and experience. Each set will feature different songs.

Commissioned Composers: Jason Cady, Natacha Diels, Anne Guthrie, James Ilgenfritz, Travis Just, Lukas Ligeti, Charlie Looker, Elliott Sharp, Aaron Siegel, JG Thirlwell, and Katie Young.

Anagram Ensemble
James Ilgenfritz – director, basses
Brian Chase – drumset, percussion
Jonathan Singer – vibraphone, percussion
James Moore – guitar
Pauline Kim Harris – violin
Sarah Bernstein – violin
Megan Schubert – soprano
Amirtha Kidambi – soprano
Michael Douglas Jones – baritone
Nathan Koci – conductor

Anagram Ensemble integrates the performance practice of improvisers with that of a new music ensemble. Self-sufficient enterprise drove the radical experimentalism of last quarter of the 20th century, from the radical performance practices of the 70s to the post-No Wave energy of the 1980s. It is this tradition that influences the direction of the Anagram Ensemble. Rather than to simply incorporate improvisation into a concert setting, or to incorporate musical forms of concert music into an improvisational setting, Anagram designs each new project to incorporate musical and conceptual elements of multiple musical traditions, all while incorporating esoteric texts and concepts from the literary and philosophical worlds, as well as unorthodox traditions in the visual and performance art world.

Co-sponsored by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative