KCRW and Apple Original films invite you to a special reception and Live Concert Screening of The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse with the Wordless Music Orchestra.

Charlie Mackesy’s bestselling book comes to life in this beautifully animated film from NoneMore and Bad Robot Productions. Follow the unlikely bond between four friends as they explore the meaning of kindness, courage and hope. The film, featuring Mackesy’s distinctive illustrations brought to life in full color with beautiful hand-drawn animation, stars BAFTA Award winner Tom Hollander as The Mole, SAG Award winner Idris Elba as The Fox, Golden Globe Award winner Gabriel Byrne as The Horse, and newcomer Jude Coward Nicoll as The Boy.

Doors open at 830pm, music starts at 9pm.

Come join us as we welcome in 2023 by performing 3 beautiful, expansive pieces by a composer whose work and legacy has greatly influenced so many of us in the Los Angeles experimental music community - James Tenney.

Harmonium 1 / In a large, open space / Harmonium 7

Performers:

Christine Tavolacci & Eric KM Clark, co-directors of Southland Ensemble

Jennifer Bewerse, Natalie Brejcha, Joshua Gerowitz, Morgan Gerstmar, Heather Lockie, Michael Matsuno, William Roper, Cassia Streb, Marta Tiesenga, Dave Tranchina and Brian Walsh.

This event is made possible with support from #VaccinateAll58. Southland Ensemble stands in support of getting vaccinated and boosted against Covid-19. Please visit myturn.ca.gov for more info.

Join the Bent Frequency Duo (Jan Berry Baker, saxophone and Stuart Gerber, percussion) and friends for a night of music featuring George E. Lewis. The concert includes world premieres by George E. Lewis, emily koh, and Alvin Singleton.

For five decades, George E. Lewis has been at the forefront of the American New Music scene. Noted for his ferocious improvisations on trombone, early forays into computer music in the 1970s, and continued work in experimental music, Lewis has been a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, was named a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015, and a corresponding fellow in the British Academy in 2016.

emily koh (b. 1986) is a Singaporean composer+ based in Atlanta, Georgia whose music reimagines everyday experiences by sonically expounding tiny oft-forgotten details, and explores binary states such as extremities/boundaries and activity/stagnation. She especially enjoys collaborating with creatives of other specializations.

Brooklyn-born Alvin Singleton has been hailed as a leading voice of his generation. His compositions have been played by scores of ensembles, including the Boston Symphony, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, and the Kronos Quartet. His fresh voice has been praised for its forthrightness and distinctiveness. "Singleton," said the LA Times, "wastes no notes on empty rhetoric; this music speaks, even with grand pauses, an expansive idiom."

George E. Lewis, Tuning In (2022)

Alvin Singleton, Every Next Day (2022)

emily koh, hyd(e)r0sion (2022)

George E. Lewis, Emergent (2013)

George E. Lewis, Assemblage (2013)

George E. Lewis, Shadowgraph, 5  for creative orchestra (1977)

Support for this program is generously provided in part by The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, The Center for Musical Humanities, the Nelson Fund, the Dobrow Fund, Robin Kelley, the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, and the Department of African American Studies.

Unstuckness Practice is a music film and visual art paring that pairing featuring work by Sharon Chohi Kim and Hellen Jo, two women who use their art-making practices to understand themselves and reject stereotypes about who they are or who they can be.

Chohi’s Unstuckness Practice is a music film that reflects on her journey to reconnect with her body and voice after feeling feeling physically numb from sexual trauma and vocally stuck from years of trying to act and sound white while performing in a Eurocentric, predominantly white opera world. In her film, she takes the physical gestures she developed in her unstuckness practice — trembling and shaking to “unstick” her voice and body — and weaves them into a film piece that creates space for communal healing.

The mail art is Heatwave by Hellen Jo. The themes of her illustrations, paintings, and comics center on Asian American girlhood, grossness, and body horror, depicting menacing girls and solemn women in a repeated exploration of her ideal self: “In tandem with my art, I eventually morphed from scared, angry teenager into slightly braver, angry woman, and as I move closer in life to my 'true self,' I try to discover who that is in my work: a powerful teenager who is cold, ruthless, incredibly strong and doesn't give a fuck.”

Boston Court commissioned composer April Dawn Guthrie, choreographer Alexis Saenz, and playwright Matthew Paul Olmos to create short pieces in response to that question. Come see what they’ve created as we combine their music, dance, and monologue into one amazing performance.

PERFORMANCE TIMES

6:45pm 7:30pm 8:15pm 9:00pm

Performances last approximately 20 minutes.

Praxinoscope presents “Hours of the Day” — the latest installment in this quarterly event series — a group performance by artists of various disciplines and diverse artforms. Each Praxinoscope event features a curated selection of 12+ artists performing short works relating to a central theme — poetry, song, sound, video, comedy, plays and dance. Each performance presents a group artists whose work responds to an Open Call for Work: Video, Poetry, Performance Art, and Song.

Praxinoscope's selection of artists include: Rachel Whitfield, Saif Alsaegh, Xárene Eskandar, Jacqueline Young, Nina Sarnelle, D. Beveridge, Alisha Tejpal, Camille Ora-Nicole, Eneos Carka, Jennifer Bewerse, Cassia Streb, Nikki Ochoa, SoulStuf, Jessica Dillon, Karolina Lavergne, Kierunya Davis, Jason Rodriguez, Sabrina O'Reilly, Rayne, and Diosa Xochiquetzcóatl.

unSUNgs first live concert since the pandemic began is also our farewell.  We are privileged to welcome these incredible artists for our series finale:

Selections from Peace, a newly released album

Harriet Fraser, soprano

Selections from 12 Settings of Lorine Niedecker by Harrison Birtwistle

and thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg by Evan Johnson

Stephanie Aston, soprano

Jennifer Bewerse, cello

Selections from Inner Astronomy, a newly released album

Molly Pease, vocalist

Miller Wrenn, bass

New England Folk Songs by Steve Danyew

Natalie Mann, soprano

Tali Tadmor, piano

Over the past two years, communities have struggled to connect without sharing space. As we come back together, we want to take time to focus on what happens when we all share space together.

Performances of Jackson Mac Low’s Asymmetries (chance poems that can be played as music) are different every time. The poems themselves are nonsensical, and there’s no specific goal or correct outcome from each performance, but because people are gathered, listening, and relating, the sensation of meaning always emerges. As if by magic, meaning arises simply from events sharing time and space.

Community members are invited to participate in the performance, either as readers or observers. No professional experience is necessary; an interest in the work and desire to perform it is enough.

After a long time apart, we look forward to gathering and to creating meaning together. Those interested in participating in the performance can attend one or both of the coaching sessions that the Music Festival musicians will be attending, in preparation for Friday night’s performance. These sessions will be:

MONDAY, JUNE 20 7:30-8:30 pm and WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22 4:00-6:00pm

Both coaching sessions and the Friday night performance will be held at the Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church at 9 Ayer Road in Harvard, MA.

Synchromy presents two operas in one ticket at Boston Court Pasadena.

PROGRAM

Vera Ivanova: The Double

Ian Dicke: Roman

The Double by Vera Ivanova (libretto by Sarah LaBrie) questions how our outward depiction of ourselves impacts our perceptions of reality. The troubled hero of our story believes that his digital social profile, created by him, is acting independently in an attempt to take over his life. Ultimately, the audience is left asking if he really is losing his mind, or if he can see a reality we all have missed. Librettist Sarah LaBrie says of the script, “When Vera Ivanova approached me with this project, my first thought was that this story would offer an incredible opportunity to play with the concept of identity and the way it changes as our lives migrate increasingly online. Now, however, I’ve come to understand that the significance of The Double to our current cultural moment runs much deeper than that. In 2022, many of us are coming to terms with what it means to be a citizen of a country founded on a dream that clashes glaringly with the reality many of us confront.”

Roman, a multimedia opera in two acts by Ian Dicke, questions the morality of designing intelligent machines to exhibit human-like behaviors. Through a fictitious story about an AI assistant committing murder after being fed degenerate training data, this work explores the future legal ramifications of crimes committed by AI, the reach of male toxicity, the plight of virtual echo chambers and polarization, and the paradox of developing human-like computers to work in tandem with increasingly machine-like human workforces. Roman implores us to hold a mirror to our perceived values and calls an essential question: if we train autonomous AI with our concepts of morality, will the machines of the future follow our rules?

Synchromy presents two operas in one ticket at Boston Court Pasadena.

PROGRAM

Vera Ivanova: The Double

Ian Dicke: Roman

The Double by Vera Ivanova (libretto by Sarah LaBrie) questions how our outward depiction of ourselves impacts our perceptions of reality. The troubled hero of our story believes that his digital social profile, created by him, is acting independently in an attempt to take over his life. Ultimately, the audience is left asking if he really is losing his mind, or if he can see a reality we all have missed. Librettist Sarah LaBrie says of the script, “When Vera Ivanova approached me with this project, my first thought was that this story would offer an incredible opportunity to play with the concept of identity and the way it changes as our lives migrate increasingly online. Now, however, I’ve come to understand that the significance of The Double to our current cultural moment runs much deeper than that. In 2022, many of us are coming to terms with what it means to be a citizen of a country founded on a dream that clashes glaringly with the reality many of us confront.”

Roman, a multimedia opera in two acts by Ian Dicke, questions the morality of designing intelligent machines to exhibit human-like behaviors. Through a fictitious story about an AI assistant committing murder after being fed degenerate training data, this work explores the future legal ramifications of crimes committed by AI, the reach of male toxicity, the plight of virtual echo chambers and polarization, and the paradox of developing human-like computers to work in tandem with increasingly machine-like human workforces. Roman implores us to hold a mirror to our perceived values and calls an essential question: if we train autonomous AI with our concepts of morality, will the machines of the future follow our rules?