The Interpretations Series 35th season continues Thursday April 10, 2025, 8:00 PM with a program of compositions and improvisations featuring Anthony Davis (piano), Earl Howard (saxophone and synthesizer), Gerry Hemingway (percussion) and Kyle Motl (bass). Reactivating their decades-long history of collaboration, Davis and Howard will lead this dynamic quartet, appearing as a group for the first time, in a wide-ranging evening of creative music. Freely moving between solos, duos, trios and the full quartet, the group will perform new compositions by Davis and Howard, as well as free and structured improvisations.
The concert will take place at Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, NY. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for students & seniors, available at Roulette.org and Interpretations.info.
About the artists:
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis is celebrated internationally for his operatic, orchestral, choral, and chamber works. Davis is best known for his eight operas, and he was the first composer to write in a new American genre: opera on a contemporary political subject. He uses music to address power structures in a way that creates awareness, empathy, and understanding. In 2020, Davis received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for The Central Park Five, which premiered at Long Beach Opera in 2019. The libretto by Richard Wesley is based on the true story of teenagers who were wrongfully convicted for the brutal rape of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989. Davis’s 1986 opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, based on the life of the civil rights leader, debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2023. Davis’s other operas include Amistad which chronicles the history of the Amistad mutiny; For Tania inspired by the abduction of Patricia Hearst, and Wakonda’s Dream.
Davis’s orchestral works have been performed by the Atlanta Symphony, Boston Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony, among others. His instrumental works include Violin Sonata, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its centennial; Jacob’s Ladder, a tribute to his mentor Jacob Druckman; Esu Variations, for the Atlanta Symphony; Happy Valley Blues, for the String Trio of New York; Maps, a violin concerto; Notes from the Underground, premiered by the American Composers Orchestra; and You Have the Right to Remain Silent, a concerto for clarinet and orchestra. Davis is also known for his cutting-edge virtuoso performances both as a solo pianist and as the leader of Episteme, a unique ensemble of disciplined interpreters and provocative improvisers in equal measure.
A graduate of Yale University, Davis currently holds the Cecil Lytle Endowed Chair in African American Music at the University of California, San Diego. In 2021, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The following year, he was honored with the Shadow and Act Award from the Ralph Ellison Foundation. In the 2023-24 season, OPERA America will induct Davis into its Hall of Fame.
Earl Howard has been performing his compositions in the United States and Europe for over fifty years. His recent works include music for live electronics, electronic tape music as well as music for electronics and instruments. Howard’s method of creating orchestrated sounds with electronics and adding live, improvisational performance creates a unique, densely layered composition. Howard has performed at numerous venues including Merkin Hall, the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, The Knitting Factory, Roulette, and Carnegie Recital Hall. In 2011 Earl Howard received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2004 his first sound installation was commissioned for the Tiffany Collection at the Queens Museum of Art. In the spring of 2003 Howard had a Regents Fellowship at UCSD. Howard received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. In 1998 Howard was the recipient of Harvard’s Fromm Foundation Commission. He graduated from California Institute of the Arts in Music Composition in 1974.
Howard’s compositions have been recorded by a number of musicians including Anthony Davis’ recording of Particle W, for piano and tape, released on the Gramavision label, and Gerry Hemingway’s recording of D.R. for Solo percussion” on the Auricle Record label. The recording, “Pele’s Tears” is from ten years of his electronic music on the Random Acoustics Label and “Fire Song” on Erstwhile Records with hyperpianist, Denman Maroney. “Strong Force” for ensemble and electronics was released on Mutable Music’s Label in the Spring of 2003. “Clepton” and “Granulary Modality” were recently released by New World Records.
Howard has also produced numerous soundtracks for some of the leading film and video artists including Nam June Paik, Mary Lucier, Rii Kanzaki, Bob Harris, and Bill Brand.
Kyle Motl is a bassist, composer, and improviser. His current projects include Treesearch, with violinist Keir GoGwilt, that brings together chamber music, jazz, and improvised excursions. Kyle also makes music in collaborative trios with Anthony Davis and Kjell Nordeson (Vertical Motion, 2023 Astral Spirits) and with Dan Clucas and Nathan Hubbard (Daydream and Halting, 2022 FMR). Upcoming recording projects include a collaborative chamber trio with Rocío Díaz de Cossío and José Fernando Solares and an extended take on the piano trio with Eli Wallace and Nick Neuberg. Other ongoing collaborations include work with musicians including Earl Howard, Carlos Dominguez, Niloufar Shiri, and Wilfrido Terrazas. Kyle has performed and/or recorded with many luminaries of creative music including Kidd Jordan, Roscoe Mitchell, Mary Halvorson, and Wadada Leo Smith. Kyle worked regularly with the Peter Kuhn Trio and Abbey Rader Quartet. Kyle holds a DMA from UC San Diego, where he studied with Mark Dresser and Anthony Davis, an MM from Florida International University, and a BM from Florida Atlantic University. His book, Bells Plucked From Air, sheds light on harmonic techniques for the double bass. Kyle is Assistant Professor of double bass and contemporary instrumental music at University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Gerry Hemingway has been creating and performing solo and ensemble music since 1974. He has led a number of quartet & quintets since the mid 80’s as well as being a member of a wide array of collaborative groups including BassDrumBone with Mark Helias & Ray Anderson, who celebrated thier 40th anniversary in 2017, Brew w/Reggie Workman & Miya Masaoka, a trio with Georg Graewe & Ernst Reijseger, the Swiss based WHO trio with Michel Wintsch and Baenz Oester, Tree Ear with Sebastian Strinning and Manuel Troller, as well as numerous duo projects with Izumi Kimura, Marilyn Crispell, Samuel Blaser, Thomas Lehn, John Butcher, Ellery Eskelin, Jin-Hi Kim, a o. Mr. Hemingway is a Guggenheim fellow and has received numerous commissions for chamber and orchestral works. He is well known for his eleven years in the Anthony Braxton Quartet, his ongoing participation in projects with Reggie Workman including the collective trio Brew, along with his work with some of the world’s most outstanding improvisers and composers including Cecil Taylor, Mark Dresser, Anthony Davis, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, Frank Gratkowski, Simon Nabatov and many others. He currently lives in Switzerland having joined the faculty of the Hochschule Luzern between 2009 and 2022.
—
Founded by baritone Thomas Buckner, The Interpretations series is a New York-based concert series focusing on the relationship between contemporary composers and their interpreters. Sometimes the interpreters are the composers themselves; more often, the series features performers who specialize in the interpretation of new music. Since its inception in 1989, Interpretations has featured leading figures in contemporary music and multimedia, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Robert Ashley, Anthony Braxton, Thomas Buckner, FLUX Quartet, Joseph Kubera, Annea Lockwood, and Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Ursula Oppens, and Morton Subotnick.
Interpretations began as a collaboration with Robert and Helene Browning and the World Music Institute, presenting concerts at Merkin Concert Hall, then at Roulette, at its Greene Street location in Soho. When Roulette moved to the current space in Brooklyn, Interpretations moved with it. Interpretations is thrilled to co-produce at Roulette, which has developed into a premiere venue for new and innovative music, with excellent acoustics and world-class technical facilities.
—
ROULETTE:
509 Atlantic Ave. Downtown Brooklyn
2, 3, 4, 5, C, G, D, M, N, R, B & Q trains & LIRR.
Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for students for students & seniors, available at Roulette.org and Interpretations.info. All concerts begin at 8pm unless otherwise noted.
