More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.

DAVID ALAN MILLER, CONDUCTOR | REGINA CARTER, VIOLIN | MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH, SPEAKER

Adolphus Hailstork: Symphony No. 4, “Survive”

David Schiff: Selections from Four Sisters

Daniel Roumain & Marc Bamuthi Joseph: Forgiveness, Spoken Word Concerto for Orchestra (world premiere)

WHAT IS CONVERGENCE? The Albany Symphony, long known for celebrating the breadth of American culture through new music, continues its community-building work with Convergence, a three-year collaborative project through which the Symphony, Capital Region communities, and nationally acclaimed artistic partners join together in an exploration of three Black American art forms. Funded by the Carl E. Touhey Foundation, Convergence will build community-wide awareness of our contemporary world through artistic inquiry and musical creation.

More information and tickets for the 2023 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.

DAVID ALAN MILLER, CONDUCTOR

Horacio Fernández: Unruly (world premiere)

Marie A. Douglas: The Candidate (world premiere)

Kyle Rivera: (new work) (world premiere)

Christian Quiñones: (new work) (world premiere)

Jack Frerer: TBA

Come join us for a special performance featuring the RPI Dance Club, Eighth Wonder, Gajjde Sher Bhangra, ASA We Dey Move Dance Team, RPI Rounak, and RPI Ballroom.

Want to tune in virtually? No problem: https://www.youtube.com/@rpi-tv

Performances by Flute Choir, Percussion Ensemble, Sax Ensemble, Not Quite Bluegrass, and Symphonic Band.

Please contact the Rensselaer Music Association form more information about this event.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will present a performance by two-time Grammy-winning percussionist Jack DeJohnette.

Over the course of his nearly six-decade career, Jack DeJohnette has established himself as one of the greatest drummers in the history of jazz. He has collaborated with icons including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, and many more, in styles as varied as hard bop, rhythm and blues, world music, and avante-garde. Modern Drummer magazine has declared him one of the five greatest living jazz drummers, saying, “[H]e seems to play the music of the spheres, like a savant channeling the rhythm gods from on high.”

In addition to his two Grammy awards, DeJohnette has received five Grammy nominations. In 2007 he was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame. He was also awarded a Jazz Master Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2012.

“Peerless as a drummer-percussionist/pianist and composer/improvisor, Mr. DeJohnette has always embodied a full musical presence in the moment in performance and recording, alongside a strong sense of looking forward, anticipating the future. His music is always full of fresh and unexpected surprises since his appearance on the NYC jazz scene in the late 60s, while still providing flowing-yet-solid rhythmic support for his musical partners who read like a Who’s Who of influential jazz artists,” said RPI Lecturer Ross Rice. “As the primary drummer for Miles Davis’ ground-breaking Bitches Brew, he showed how popular new rhythmic forms could influence and inform jazz music, breathing new energy into the genre, and he has continued to do so ever since, influencing countless musicians to follow. His ensemble performances are master classes in composition and spontaneous musical interplay at a high level, deeply satisfying on a soul and spiritual level, and are not to be missed.”

Accompanying DeJohnette at RPI will be Jerome Harris and Marvin Sewell.

Jerome Harris’ first major professional experience came as bassist for Sonny Rollins, and since then he has played both bass and guitar on six continents and over 60 recordings in genres including jazz, blues, folk, and gospel. Among his many collaborators are David Karkauer, Bill Frisell, Leni Stern, Martha Redbone, Amina Claudine Myers, and Ned Rothenberg. He has taught at Hampshire College, William Paterson University, and Lehman College of the City University of New York, and has published essays on jazz and individual musicians.

Marvin Sewell is a guitarist, composer, and producer fusing jazz, blues, funk, alternative, and world music. He began his career with Chicago musicians including Von Freeman, Billy Branch, and Big Time Sarah before moving to New York to play and tour with Herbie Hancock, Chaka Khan, Amy Mann, and as bandleader and musical director for multiple Grammy-winning artist Cassandra Wilson.

This performance is part of the Eleanore N. Fischbach Classical Concert Series and is hosted by the Rensselaer Union and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS).

For more information, please call (518) 276-6505 or email activities@rpi.edu.

The RPI Players spring musical is Heathers! Full of singing and dancing, this dark comedy depicts all the dangers of high school from hanging at a 711 to murdering the popular people.

more info: 

players.rpi.edu/heathers

In a project sponsored by the Flemish Government’s Department of Culture, Youth, and Media, composer-performer Winnie Huang brings new works by composers Kelly Sheehan and Timothy McCormack which explore the applications of machine learning, the nuance of timbre, and the possibilities for spatiality in employing EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array.

Only Breath, Words is a theatrical production about language and intimacy by Anna Craycroft, commissioned and produced by EMPAC.

Only Breath, Words is a performance without actors in which the voice is delivered by the theater itself, as its air-handling system “exhales” through flue pipe sculptures created by the artist. These instruments create coos, whirrs, hums, and moans while words and fragments of phrases flash and glow on grids of lights that are moved across the stage. Pushing at the limit of language’s capacity to transmit emotion and to articulate nuanced thoughts, these fragmentary idioms, instructions, and vernacular phrases suggest an elusive author, one whose meaning teeters between legibility and opacity.

The score for this first iteration of Only Breath, Words is composed by Sarah Hennies to generate a chorus of sounds. Hennies’ approach is informed by the dynamic nature of Craycroft’s instruments, in which each pipe can be played to produce a multitude of drones and noises, whose loudness, timbre, pitch, and quality are necessarily designed to react to the ever-changing flow of air produced by theater's ventilation system as it conditions the temperature and humidity of the space. Hennies' score results in a sequence of slow but incremental changes as the players attend as much to the movements of the instruments' unique components as to the tone the vibration produces.

The performance gives agency to the theater’s constitutive parts: its architectural features and technical infrastructure, the people necessary to operate it, and the very air that circulates through it. It dwells in the physical act of production. In this way, Only Breath, Words conjures theatrical allusions through the exchange of light, sound, and space and points back to the fundamental processes by which we, through the construct of the theater, seek to communicate.

Conceived as a performance and installation that activates and extends the specific architectural infrastructure of the theater, Only Breath, Words continues Craycroft’s ongoing dramaturgical approach to interdisciplinary collaboration. Craycroft's work frequently engages with and supports works by other artists, composers, writers, and performers through her sculptural installations and protocols for research and participation.

A four-year archival, research, and multi-genre storytelling project on the life journey of a Lyricist. PROPHET: The Order of the Lyricist, illuminates the distinctive practices, systems, philosophies, and political ideologies that have shaped Hip Hop’s Emcee/Lyricists.

Tracing the evolution of artist Mental from Emcee to Lyricist, 7NMS invites audiences to enter a world of mind power, bravery, self-determination, and triumph- facets of the artist's quest for self-realization.

PROPHET makes its own imaginative evening-length performance contribution to the scholarly, civic, and ancient bodies of radical Black expression. Light and moving-image visuals as well as multi-channel audio installation will accompany the live dance and vocal performances. Such environments layering multiple media are the company's signature aesthetic; previous work like Memoirs of a Unicorn featured a built multi-sited environment of sculpture, light, sound, movement, costume, and projection. PROPHET is an extension of this practice that acknowledges the Emcee and Lyricist’s role and presence more explicitly.

While taking its primary shape as a live performance at EMPAC, PROPHET will also manifest as an ethnographic memoir, an experimental film, and an album.

This work-in-progress performance is a culmination of two development residencies of 7NMS's multi-year live performance project, PROPHET. The project's residencies at EMPAC explores spatial audio, mobile set elements, and moving-image content.