this week in music

BLOOMSDAY REVEL 2021

Who: Terry Donnelly, Fiona Walsh, Una Clancy, Ed Malone, Aidan Redmond, Fiona Walsh, Gina Costigan, Sarah Street, Alan Gogarty
What: In-person and livestreamed Bloomsday celebration
Where: Blooms Tavern, 208 East 58th St., and online
When: Sunday, June 13, $45, 3:00
Why: For nearly one hundred years, people have been celebrating Bloomsday, when James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place, June 16, 1904. Yes, the seven-hundred-plus-page novel about Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus is set during one day in Dublin. On Sunday, June 13, at 3:00, Origin Theatre Company is presenting its eighth annual “Bloomsday Revel,” happening both live at Blooms Tavern on East Fifty-Eighth St. as well as online. The socially distanced afternoon features dramatic readings by such New York-based Irish actors as Terry Donnelly, Fiona Walsh, Una Clancy, Ed Malone, Aidan Redmond, Fiona Walsh, Gina Costigan, and Sarah Street, musical interludes from Alan Gogarty, and a juried costume contest. Tickets for the in-person show, cocurated by Paula Nance and Michael Mellamphy, are $45 and include Bloomsday-inspired hors d’oeuvres and an open bar. “Luckily we didn’t miss a year in 2020,” new Origin artistic director Mellamphy said in a statement. “We were fully virtual last year, in a program packed with great performances and heartfelt messages. But this year we are creating an all-new hybrid that celebrates the many ways we share experiences like this unique and important literary holiday. James Joyce after all was all about setting new rules in art. . . . We’re immensely pleased to continue that tradition in 2021.”

THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC IN BRYANT PARK

The New York Philharmonic will perform in front of a limited audience in Bryan Park June 9-12 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: The New York Philharmonic
What: Four live and livestreamed concerts
Where: Bryant Park Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
When: June 9-12, free, 7:00
Why: The New York Philharmonic is not yet ready to play live to an audience at its David Geffen Hall home at Lincoln Center, but the classical music company is continuing its outdoor pandemic appearances with four concerts in Bryant Park, June 9-12 at 7:00. The free tickets have all been scarfed up, but the shows will be streamed live over Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube so you can enjoy them from your own home. These picnic performances, with twenty-five members of the orchestra, will be conducted by Lina González-Granados in her NYPhil debut and will feature works by Mozart and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, in addition to a new piece by NYPhil Very Young Composer Ilana Rahim-Braden. Upcoming shows in Bryant Park include New York City Opera on June 18 and July 2, New York Chinese Cultural Center on June 25, Joe’s Pub: Mykal Kilgore on June 26, Carnegie Hall Citywide: Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely on July 9, Spanish Harlem Orchestra on July 16, the Knights on July 23, Adrienne Warren & Friends on July 31, and Greenwich House Music School: Riley Mulherkar and Ella Bric on July 31. Free tickets become available for each show about ten days in advance.

CELEBRATING SERGE GAINSBOURG

Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Rebecca Marder will celebrate the life and legacy of Serge Gainsbourg in live FIAF event

Who: Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rebecca Marder, Michael Cooper
What: Virtual talk
Where: FIAF online
When: Thursday, June 10, free with RSVP, 6:30
Why: Thirty years ago this past March, French singer-songwriter, actor, filmmaker, and bon vivant Serge Gainsbourg died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-two, leaving behind a beloved legacy that has only grown since. On June 10 at 6:30, FIAF will host the live online discussion “Celebrating Serge Gainsbourg,” with the engaging model, actress, and singer-songwriter Jane Birkin, his personal and professional partner from 1968 to 1980; their daughter, actress and singer-songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg; and actress and musician Rebecca Marder, one of six performers in the concert film La Comédie-Française chante Gainsbourg; the event will be moderated by New York Times deputy culture editor Michael Cooper. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

The hourlong film, adapted from Stéphane Varupenne and Sébastien Pouderoux’s Les Serge (Gainsbourg Point Barre), directed by Julien Condemine, and featuring Varupenne, Pouderoux, Marder, Benjamin Lavernhe, Noam Morgensztern, and Yoann Gasiorowski, will be streaming exclusively by FIAF from June 10 to 30; virtual tickets are $15.

THE NEXT FESTIVAL OF EMERGING ARTISTS: 2021 VIRTUAL FESTIVAL

Who: Seth Parker Woods, Gabriela Lena Frank, Kelly Hall-Tompkins, Jessica Meyer, Ashleigh Gordon, Aizuri Quartet, Chi-chi Nwanoku, David Radzynski, Jeff Scott, Trevor New, Lina Gonzalez-Granados, Donna Weng Friedman, Karin Fong, Derek Bermel, choreographer S. Ama Wray, Jonathan Alsberry, Darshan Singh Bhuller, Jamie Benson, Aaron Jay Kernis, Peter Askim, Brian Goldstein, Ross Karre, Elaine Grogan Luttrull
What: Multidisciplinary arts festival
Where: Next Fest online
When: Tuesdays – Thursdays, June 8 – July 1, free with RSVP
Why: Composer, conductor, and bassist Peter Askim founded the Next Festival of Emerging Artists in 2013, “committed to advancing contemporary concert music through performance, audience engagement, and the nurturing of emerging artists with a passion for 21st-century music.” The organization will be holding its 2021 festival online from June 8 to July 1, consisting of panel discussions, performances, keynote addresses, master classes, and more; admission to all events is free with advance RSVP, but tickets are limited. The 2021 edition focuses on “Business & Entrepreneurship” June 8-10, “Social Justice & Activism” June 15-17, “Artistry & Musicality” June 22-24, and “Multidisciplinary Collaboration” June 29 – July 1. Among the highlights are “A Performative Rebirth with Seth Parker Woods” on June 8 at 7:30, “Chi-chi Nwanoku and the Creation of Chineke!” on nJune 15 at noon, “Festival Fellows in Concert” June 24 at 7:30, and the “Festival Finale with the Aizuri Quartet, Aaron Jay Kernis, Trevor New, S. Ama Wray, Derek Bermel, and the 2021 Composer/Choreographer Workshop” July 1 at 7:30.

VIRTUAL MUSEUM MILE FESTIVAL 2021

Who: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Neue Galerie New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, Museum of the City of New York, El Museo del Barrio, the Africa Center, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
What: Virtual arts festival
Where: Online (a few in-person events)
When: Tuesday, June 8, free, 9:00 am – 9:00 pm
Why: For more than forty years, on the second Tuesday of June, art lovers packed the cultural institutions on Fifth Ave., from the Met to El Museo del Barrio, filling the streets and lining up to experience special programs inside and outside for a few hours. With Covid-19 regulations still in place for theaters and museums, the 2021 Museum Mile Festival will be hybrid, with a few events happening in person but most accessible by streaming from home, over Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Everything is free, although some events require advance RSVP, but another bonus is that the festival lasts twelve hours, from nine in the morning to nine at night. Below are some of the highlights from each participating museum.

The Africa Center
“‘Home Is . . .” Series #2: Home Is Where Music Is,’” with Sampa the Great, Wunmi, Jupiter & Okwess, Daniel Dzidzonu, Georges Collinet, Eme Awa, noon
Discussion with Jessica B. Harris, curator of “African/American: Making the Nation’s Table,” and Pierre Thiam, executive chef and co-owner of Teranga, 5:00
Virtual contribution to the Legacy Quilt; child-friendly animation workshop led by artist Ezra Wube

Museum of the City of New York
“Photographing City Life: Live Session with Photographer Janette Beckman,” 4:40
“Curators from the Couch: Stettheimer Dollhouse Up Close,” with Sarah Henry and Simon Doonan, 5:30
“Your Hometown: A Virtual Conversation with Playwright Lynn Nottage,” 6:00
“When the Garden Was Eden: Remembering the 1970s New York Knicks,” with Bill Bradley, Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Bill Murray, and Harvey Araton, 7:00

The Jewish Museum
Lawrence Weiner talks about his career and All the Stars in the Sky Have the Same Face, on the facade of the museum; Rachel Weisz recites Louise Bourgeois’s own words on audio guide for “Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter”; Edmund de Waal and Adam Gopnik discuss de Waal’s latest book, Letters to Camondo; videos of poet Douglas Ridloff responding to the Jewish Museum collection in ASL; panel discussion about public art and equity in museums; family-friendly performances by Aaron Nigel Smith and Joanie Leeds; an interview with Rachel Feinstein about the exhibition “Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone”; discussion with artists Rachel Feinstein and Lisa Yuskavage, filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and curator Kelly Taxter about storytelling, gender, and identity-based art making; family-friendly performance by the Paper Bag Players at Home

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
“Design at Home: Design a Repeating Pattern”; “Rebellion in Design: Developing a Blueprint for the Future,” with Virgil Abloh, James Wines, and Oana Stănescu; virtual tour of “Contemporary Muslim Fashions”; “Studio Series: Quilting,” with William Daniels, 4:00 (RSVP required)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
“Summer Solstice” live virtual tour of works featuring the sun and light; an audio guide for “Off the Record” exhibition; “Spotlight” video series with Guggenheim Abu Dhabi collection artists; prerecorded conversation with curator Vivien Greene and scholar Maile Arvin as part of the Artwork Anthology series, about Gauguin’s In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Drop-in Drawing — “How to Draw The Met Using Perspective Drawing”; Storytime with the Met — You Can’t Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum; Silent Gallery Tour — the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing; Silent Gallery Tour — the Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts; MetTeens — “Little-Known Met”; #MetKids — “How Do You Dance in Armor?”; #MetKids — “How Did They Get All This Art into the Museum?”; Artist Interview — The Facade Commission: Carol Bove, The séances aren’t helping; “Conserving Degas,” with conservator Glenn Peterson

El Museo del Barrio
Virtual tour of “Estamos Bien — La Trienial 20/21” led by the curators; recorded interviews with participating artist Candida Alvarez; in-person outdoor performance by NYC-based Afro-Caribbean group San Simón at Central Park’s Harlem Meer at 6:00

Neue Galerie New York
Prerecorded lectures, virtual tours, and concerts

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS

Daphne Oram is one of the women pioneers of electronic music featured in Sisters with Transistors

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS (Lisa Rovner, 2020)
Metrograph Digital
June 3-9
metrograph.com
sisterswithtransistors.com

“This is the story of women who hear music in their heads, of radical sounds where there was once silence, of dreams enabled by technology,” Laurie Anderson says at the beginning of Lisa Rovner’s revelatory Sisters with Transistors, which is back by popular demand for a return engagement on Metrograph Digital. In the film, available June 3-9, Rovner highlights electronic musicians Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Wendy Carlos, trailblazers who deserve more recognition for their ingenuity and their influence on the music of today while blasting through gender stereotypes of the mid-twentieth century and beyond. “Technology is a tremendous liberator,” Spiegel notes. “It blows up power structures.”

In her feature-length debut, writer, director, and coproducer Rovner (Constellations) uses archival footage of Rockmore playing the Theremin with a string quartet in 1934, Derbyshire and Oram explaining how they constructed their unique arrangement of tape reels and computers at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s and ’60s, Ciani twisting nobs on a wire-laden setup at the Bonino Gallery in New York City in 1974 (and later performing on The David Letterman Show), Radigue talking about how she employed the sounds of airplanes to develop her electronic compositions, Carlos developing her own software and adjusting the synthesizer in her West Side studio, and Barron and her husband using circuit boards to create scores for avant-garde films as well as Forbidden Planet and the Doctor Who theme.

Revolutionary, antiwar, and queer composer Oliveros searches for inner peace through music. Amacher utilizes complex science to make new sounds. Amacher is shown collaborating with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. “She wanted to develop an extremely rigorous approach to listening, to activating sites, to thinking outside of the composition as it’s known,” composer Nadia Botello says about Amacher. “She didn’t want to push around dead white men’s notes.”

Rovner speaks with several of the artists in addition to such musicians as Rhys Chatham, Kim Gordon, Morton Subotnick, Holly Herndon, Charles Amirkhanian, Jean-Michel Jarre, and others who sing the praises of these pioneers. The Metrograph website takes a deep dive into the history of these women with a Q&A with Rovner; the essay “Sounding Out Electronic Music’s Female Pioneers” by Margaret Barton-Fumo; an interview with Anderson; a “Sound of Liberation” panel with Rovner, Spiegel, Ciani, Arushi Jain, Moor Mother, Gavilán Rayna Russom, and Madame Gandhi, moderated by Geeta Dayal; and a conversation about women in tech with Emmy Parker, LaFrae Sci, Suzi Analogue, Stephi Duckula, and moderator Alissa DeRubeis. In the end, it is the women composers themselves who best sum it all up.

“Technology is a natural extension of man; man has always played with tools. Man has always developed tools,” Carlos says in an old interview. “The machine doesn’t write the music; you tell the machine what to do. The machine is an extension of you.” And Spiegel, shown feeding pigeons on Staple St. in 2018, elucidates, “We were, in a way, trying to make a bit of a revolution, but I don’t think we would have put it in such grandiose terms. We were trying to put music back in touch with itself.”

MAYA LIN: GHOST FOREST

Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest will decompose in Madison Square Park through mid-November (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Madison Square Park Oval Lawn
Exhibition continues through November 14
madisonsquarepark.org
whatismissing.net

Postponed for a year because of the pandemic, Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest is up and dying a slow death in Madison Square Park. The exhibition shines a light on climate change, logging practices, environmental degradation, extreme deprivation, and other human interventions that are destroying the natural world. Ghost Forest consists of forty-nine forty-foot-tall Atlantic white cedars from the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. The bare trees, around eighty years old, are not technically dead yet, but they will wither away through November 14 as the grass and trees of the park turn green around them over the summer before fading as fall heads into winter. “Throughout the world, climate change is causing vast tracts of forested lands to die off,” Lin says in her artist’s statement. “They are being called ghost forests; they are being killed off by rising temperatures, extreme weather events that yield saltwater intrusion, forest fires, and insects whose populations are thriving in these warmer temperatures, and trees that are more susceptible to beetles due to being overstressed from these rising temperatures. In southwestern Colorado where my family and I live in the summer, these forests — killed off by beetles — are all around us. As I approached thinking about a sculptural installation for Madison Square Park, I knew I wanted to create something that would be intimately related to the park itself, the trees, and the state of the earth.”

The “gentle giants,” as Lin calls them, form a kind of twisting maze that visitors can walk through (except in the rain.) The bare trunks and branches evoke griefs large and small: It’s hard not to think of the isolation and loss of the past fourteen months of the Covid-19 crisis; in addition, Lin’s husband, photography collector and dealer Daniel Wolf, died of a heart attack in January at the age of sixty-five. The display was supposed to consist of fifty trees, but one didn’t survive the transport, another fatality. Lin is most well known for her Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; other earthworks and environmental installations by Lin include The Secret Life of Grasses at Storm King, Map of Memory: Hudson River Timeline at the Hudson River Museum, Seven Earth Mountain at Pier 94, A History of Water at the Orlando Museum of Art, and the 2011 short film Unchopping a Tree, which asks, “If deforestation were happening in your city, how quickly would you work to stop it?”

Forty-nine bare trees rise like doomed skyscrapers in Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Ghost Forest is part of Lin’s “What Is Missing?” project, an online global memorial where people can share memories of something from the natural world that has disappeared or is diminishing or discuss specific examples of ecological conservation and restoration. Be sure to listen to Ghost Forest Soundscape, thirteen minutes of sounds made by the gray fox, cougar, barred owl, American black bear, elk, harbor seal, bat, beaver, bottle nose dolphin, and wild turkey, a powerful reminder of living beings that once could be heard and seen in and around New York; in conjunction with Ghost Forest, there will also be a series of in-person and online talks. “We will be coordinating public programs that focus on nature-based solutions to climate change as well as highlighting the ecological history of Manhattan through a soundscape of species that were once common in the city,” Lin explains. “We are faced with an enormous ecological crisis — but I also feel that we have a chance to showcase what can be done to help protect species and significantly reduce the climate change emissions by changing our relationship to the land itself.” To counteract the project’s carbon footprint, Lin, the Natural Areas Conservancy, and the Madison Square Park Conservancy will be planting more than one thousand trees and shrubs across all five boroughs.

From June 1 to 11, the public is invited to answer the question “How has climate change altered your daily life?”; the responses will be posted on a reflection board at the north corner of the Oval Lawn as well as on social media. On June 4 at 9:00 am (free with advance RSVP), the park will host, on Zoom, its sixth annual public art symposium, “Greening Public Art,” highlighted by a keynote conversation with Lin, Rodale Institute board member Maria Rodale, Nature Conservancy in New York executive director Bill Ulfelder, and Perfect Earth Project founder Edwina von Gal, moderated by Andrew Revkin of the Earth Institute at Columbia. Other speakers include Una Chaudhuri, Marina Zurkow, Anita Fields, Nicholas Galanin, Allison Janae Hamilton, Tavares Strachan, and Lucia Pietroiusti and moderator Sarah Douglas. On June 15 at 6:00, the park and Fotografiska New York team up for an art talk with Gabriella Demczuk, who documents ghost forests across the United States; advance registration is required. On September 21 at 6:00 Fotografiska will host an art talk with Lin and Elizabeth Kolbert as part of Climate Week NYC, followed October 19 at 6:00 with Lin and von Gal discussing climate change with moderator Sarah Charlop-Powers. And on November 9 at 6:00, Fotografiska will livestream David Scott Kessler’s experimental film The Pine Barrens, with a live score by the Ruins of Friendship Orchestra. If only the world would listen.

In addition, Music on the Green is a series of live concerts with Carnegie Hall held on Wednesday nights within Ghost Forest; below is the full lineup:

Wednesday, July 7, 6:00
Music by Barber, Bartók, Copland, Caroline Shaw, others
Cort Roberts, horn
Adelya Nartadjieva, violin
Gergana Haralampieva, violin
Halam Kim, viola
Madeline Fayette, cello

Wednesday, July 14, 6:00
Music by Messiaen, Copland, Kaija Saariaho, Reena Esmail, others
Leo Sussman, flute
Wilden Dannenberg, horn
Jennifer Liu, violin
Halam Kim, viola
Madeline Fayette, cello

Wednesday, July 21, 6:00
Bach’s Goldberg Variations, India Gailey’s Mountainweeps, John Luther Adams’s Three High Places, others
Halam Kim, viola
TBD, violin
Arlen Hlusko, cello

Wednesday, July 28, 6:00
Andrea Casarrubios’s Speechless, Leven Zuelke’s At a Cemetery, and works by Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, and Ellington
Sae Hashimoto, percussion
Suliman Tekalli, violin
Ari Evan, cello

Wednesday, August 4, 6:00
Satie’s Gnossiennes, John Psathas’s Fragment, and works by Duke Ellington and Chick Corea
Ian Sullivan, vibraphone
Sae Hashimoto, marimba

Wednesday, August 11, 6:00
Hans Abrahamsen’s wind quintet Walden, Hannah Lash’s Leander and Hero, and works by Beach, Piazzolla, Still, others
Amir Farsi, flute
Stuart Breczinski, oboe
Yasmina Spiegelberg, clarinet
Nik Hooks, bassoon
Cort Roberts, horn