Baritone Thomas Buckner presents his 31st annual concert premiering newly commissioned works. Program to include three new works by composer/performers, all of whom will also perform: Particle Bey by Earl Howard (synthesizer); Gold/Crack by Pauline Kim Harris (violin); and All Most the Blues by J D Parran (woodwinds). They will be joined by Conrad Harris (violin), Kyle Motl (bass), and Andrew Drury (percussion).
About the works:
Gold/Crack is a new large-scale composition by violinist/composer Pauline Kim Harris. Written specially for baritone Thomas Buckner and violin duo, String Noise, it is a trilogy that may be performed in single movements, in pairs or as a whole. The work is inspired by the Korean word “geum,” which means both “gold” and “crack,” evoking the belief that strength comes with imperfection by mending and rebuilding brokenness. Gold/Crack is also inspired by sculptor Yee Soo Kyung’s Translated Vase: a Moon Jar made from discarded fragments of other Moon Jars, held together with 24k gold leaf epoxy; and by a John Ashbury poem, Untitled. The text is interspersed throughout as a reflection of memory and echo of the most inner subconscious.
Particle Bey for bass, synthesizer and voice by Earl Howard is a structured improvisation where the structures are clearly defined, Particle Bey uses binary time (call and response), very slow measured time (where the distance between pulses is long enough to be forgotten), undulating time (flows and splatters), with live electronic processing by the composer.
All Most the Blues by JD Parran for baritone, electronics and live processing, winds, and percussion, features poetry by Michael Castro, a former poet laureate of St. Louis, Missouri. Castro’s words are set to music that combines and juxtaposes both composition and improvisation in order to express the organic, humanistic energy of the poetry.
The program will conclude with a spontaneous group improvisation including all of the evening’s performers.
About the artist:
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 Creshevsky, 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 Conversations With My Soul (Navona Records, 2021), a collection of new chamber works by acclaimed composer-pianist Bun-Ching Lam. Also released in 2021 was Voicescapes, a collaboration with Danish vocalist Randi Pontoppidan on Chant Records.
For the past 31 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.