Corporeal Worlds: Music by Bethany Younge and Mauricio Kagel
SMO explores new and historical works of Music Theatre, presenting pieces that ask performers to move, speak, and break the fourth wall. C. Neil Parsons, a self-defined “hybrid artist” joins as soloist, director, and choreographer. Bethany Younge considers composing “an act of bodily knowing”; her new work for SMO celebrates the physicality of performance, and pairs with the dystopian humor of Mauicio Kagel’s iconic Finale. Frederic Rzewski’s Moonrise with Memories will feature Parsons on bass trombone, with text by Langston Hughes, and Younge’s Orbits fills the space in Town Hall’s Great Hall with roving musicians.
PROGRAM:
BETHANY YOUNGE Orbits for movement, flute, bass clarinet, trombone, and percussion extended by PVC pipe (2016)
FREDERIC RZEWSKI Moonrise with Memories (1971), featuring C. Neil Parsons, bass trombone soloist
BETHANY YOUNGE World Premiere (2024)
MAURICIO KAGEL Finale (1981)
ARTIST BIOS:
Bethany Younge is currently serving as the Technical Director of the music department at Dartmouth College and is ABD at Columbia University in New York in Music Composition. She has received a Master’s degree in Music Composition from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, The Netherlands and a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. She has studied composition closely with George Lewis, Zosha Di Castri, Seth Cluett, Yannis Kyriakides, Peter Adriaansz, Lewis Nielson, and Seung-Ah Oh.
Her works have been featured in the 2020 National Sawdust New Works Commission, the Long Beach Opera Songbook, the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, Resonant Bodies Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, The 16th International Young Composers Meeting, the Frequency Festival, Ear Taxi, and many other festivals. She has worked with many ensembles including JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, TILT Brass, KLANG, Ereprijs Orkestra, Fonema Consort, AndPlay, Chartreuse, Gyre Ensemble, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Mocrep, and others throughout Europe and the USA. She has been awarded the Stipend Prize at the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, the Kanter/Mivos Prize, the Barcelona Festival Mixtur Commission award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives award, a Fromm Commission award, and was nominated for the Gaudeamus award.
Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021) studied music privately with Charles Mackey in Springfield, Massachusetts as a child and studied composition with Walter Piston, counterpoint with Randall Thompson and orchestration with Claudio Spies at Harvard University from 1954–58. He studied composition with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions and the music of Richard Wagner with Oliver Strunk at Princeton University from 1958–60, where he also studied literature and philosophy from Greece. In addition, he studied composition privately with Luigi Dallapiccola in Rome in 1960.
As a pianist, he frequently performed with the flautist Severino Gazzelloni in the 1960s. He then co-founded with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum the improvisational and live electronic ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome in 1966 and performed with it from 1966–71. He was thereafter active as a pianist, primarily in performances of his own pieces and music by other contemporary composers.
He taught at the Conservatoire royal de musique in Liège from 1977–2003, where he was Professeur de Composition from 1983–2003. He gave lectures in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. Bio courtesy of Living Composers Project.
Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) is among the most distinctive composers of contemporary music. From the very beginning his name has been associated above all with music theater, the genre in which he has perhaps exerted the greatest impact. Besides his radical innovations in this area, however, he has also developed a highly personal aesthetic in his absolute music.
Kagel’s creative output has been enormous. It encompasses not only stage, orchestral and chamber music in an extremely wide range of instrumental settings, but also film scores, radio plays and essays. Throughout its broad spectrum, his music reveals a breach with any and all forms of academicism as well as close ties to tradition, especially to the German tradition.
Imagination, originality and humor are the hallmarks of this multimedia artist. With inexhaustible powers of invention, Kagel makes use of a very wide array of expressive devices which, although often caustic and provocative, are always placed in the service of musical discourse. Bio courtesy of LA Phil.
C. Neil Parsons has been performing for as long as he can remember, appearing in his first professional theater production at age three. As a bass trombonist, actor, director, dancer, and choreographer, Neil’s creative output runs the gamut of music, theatre, dance, and interdisciplinary productions. Before co-founding the hybrid arts ensemble The Fourth Wall in 2010, Neil spent nine seasons touring with the “musictelling” ensemble Tales & Scales. Neil has directed and collaborated on interdisciplinary works with such musical ensembles as Hinge, Nightingale Vocal Ensemble, Shakespeare’s Ear, Sputter Box, Strange Trace Opera Company, and numerous projects with flutist Zara Lawler. Neil is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he declared an individual major in Interdisciplinary Performance and Education, and earned his master’s degree in Contemporary Classical Music Performance at Boston Conservatory. Neil is an Assistant Professor in Boston Conservatory at Berklee’s Contemporary Theater BFA program, with additional teaching duties in the conservatory’s Dance and Music Divisions.