The Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can Present
Bang on a Can: Performance by Pauline Oliveros
Thursday, November 10, 2016 at 7:30pm
Scheuer Auditorium at The Jewish Museum | 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St | New York, NY
Tickets: $18 General; $15 Students and Seniors; $12 Jewish Museum
and Bang on a Can Members at www.thejewishmuseum.org
New York, NY – On Thursday, November 10, 2016 at 7:30pm, Bang on a Can and the Jewish Museum will present the second concert of their 2016-2017 concert season featuring seminal American composer Pauline Oliveros. Accompanying the Jewish Museum’s exhibition, Take Me (I’m Yours), the concert will feature Oliveros in The Sound of Meditation on V-Accordion, an instrument that produces both accordion and orchestral sounds. Like the exhibition, the concert also blurs the boundary between the performer and the audience by asking the listener to participate in the making of music.
Since the 1960s Pauline Oliveros has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. In the 1950s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. She is the recipient of the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, and serves as Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones – her primary instrument is the accordion, perhaps an unexpected visitor to the musical cutting edge. She is the founder of “Deep Listening,” which she describes as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. “Deep Listening is my life practice,” she explains, simply. Oliveros is the founder of the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, formerly the Pauline Oliveros Foundation.
Take Me (I’m Yours) at the Jewish Museum, on view through February 5, 2017, is an unconventional exhibition featuring artworks that visitors are encouraged to touch, participate in, and even take home. Forty-two international and intergenerational artists are featured, many of whom are creating new and site-specific works for the exhibition. In a traditional museum visit, people may experience art only by looking at the paintings, sculptures, or photographs on view. You are not usually allowed to touch the works, and certainly not able to take them home. Take Me (I’m Yours) aims to create a democratic space for all visitors to take ownership of artworks, and curate their personal art collections by subverting the usual politics of value, consumerism, and the museum experience. Visitors constantly transform the landscape of the galleries, bit by bit, through direct engagement.
The 2016-2017 season marks the third year of the Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can’s partnership, producing dynamic musical performances inspired by the Museum’s diverse slate of exhibitions. This season includes five programs, primarily in the Jewish Museum’s Scheuer Auditorium. The summer included a free outdoor performance by Mariachi Flor de Toloache at the June 14 Museum Mile Festival and a July 14 concert featuring clarinetist Don Byron. In addition to the Thursday, November 10 concert by Pauline Oliveros, the season will continue with a Thursday, February 16, 2017 concert by Florent Ghys/Bonjour, and a Thursday, April 27, 2017 concert by Bang on a Can All-Stars pianist Vicky Chow playing music by Tristan Perich.
Tickets for the November 10 program are $18 general public; $15 students and senior citizens; and $12 for Jewish Museum members and Bang on a Can list members, and include exhibition admission prior to the performance. Further program and ticket information is available by calling 212.423.3337 or at TheJewishMuseum.org/calendar. The Jewish Museum is located at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, NYC.
Support
Public Programming at the Jewish Museum is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About Bang on a Can
Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Founded by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, who curatored the first Marathon concert in 1987 and remain co-Artistic Directors to this day, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers; performs, presents, and records new work; develops new audiences; and educates the musicians of the future. “Bang on a Can plays “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come” (The New York Times). Current projects include the annual Bang on a Can Marathon; The People’s Commissioning Fund, a membership program to commission emerging composers; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, a professional development program for young musicians; Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can’s extreme street band; and Found Sound Nation, a musical outreach program partnering with the U.S. State Department to create OneBeat, a program that bridges the gulf between young American musicians and young musicians from developing countries. For more information, visit www.bangonacan.org.
About the Jewish Museum
Located on Museum Mile at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, the Jewish Museum is one of the world’s preeminent institutions devoted to exploring art and Jewish culture from ancient to contemporary, offering intellectually engaging, educational, and provocative exhibitions and programs for people of all ages and backgrounds. The Museum was established in 1904, when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary as the core of a museum collection. Today, the Museum maintains a collection of over 30,000 works of art, artifacts, and broadcast media reflecting global Jewish identity, and presents a diverse schedule of internationally acclaimed temporary exhibitions.
The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, NYC. Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am-5:45pm; Thursday, 11am-8pm; and Friday, 11am-4pm. Museum admission is $15.00 for adults, $12.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for visitors under 18 and Jewish Museum members. Admission is Pay What You Wish on Thursdays from 5pm-8pm and free on Saturdays. For information on the Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3200 or visit the website at www.thejewishmuseum.org.
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