Ed Rothstein to Host The New School's (UN)SILENT FILM NIGHT, 5/13

The New School's College of Performing Arts is pleased to welcome the public for the third edition of its (Un)Silent Film Night series, in which the College of Performing Arts Theater Orchestra will perform Jazz student Nathan Kamal's original score to Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece The Birds. The event will be hosted by Ed Rothstein, Critic at Large at The Wall Street Journal and Hitchcock devotee. This production follows November 2015's edition of (Un)Silent Film Night which was hosted by actor, clown, and comedian Bill Irwin. The inaugural event in April 2015, hosted by Matthew Broderick, drew a capacity crowd to the 800-plus-seat Tishman Auditorium at University Center.

The upcoming (Un)Silent Film Nightwill take place Friday, May 13, 2016 at 7pm at the Tishman Auditorium, 63 Fifth Avenue, Room U100, New York, NY 10003. Admission is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations required.

Hitchcock's 1963 horror film The Birds, the chilling tale of a series of unexplained and gruesome bird attacks on people in Bodega Bay, California, is critically acclaimed as one of the legend's greatest works. The film, described as "unflawed" by esteemed critic David Thomson, is renowned as a stunning example of Hitchcock's masterful application of psychological tension. Instead of a conventional score, Hitchcock used sparse source music and sound effects to emphasize deliberate silences.

In (Un)Silent Film Night, the College of Performing Arts Theater Orchestra-featuring students from both Mannes School of Music and The School of Jazz-will improvise a full score with Kamal's "musical sketches" as a guide to Hitchcock's originally scoreless classic film. Out of Kamal's respect for Hitchcock's vision, the rich "natural" sounds of the film serve as the starting point for the new score, and the spontaneous quality of the musicianship will fit with the spirit of Hitchcock's mammoth capacity for invention. The orchestra will use a broad sonic vocabulary ranging from lush chorale harmonic textures to extreme dissonance and extended techniques. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQW1ZLsEPA0

Richard Kessler, Executive Dean for the College of Performing Arts, said, "(Un)Silent Film Night demonstrates the potential that students and faculty are able to realize now that Mannes, the School of Jazz and the School of Drama have been brought together in our new College of Performing Arts. The program-like so many programs in the current professional arts landscape-brings together multiple art forms in a single production, and allows students to collaborate across disciplines."

Edward Rothstein, host of the event, is Critic at Large at The Wall Street Journal. He has also served as the cultural Critic at Large and the Chief Music Critic for The New York Times, and the Music Critic for The New Republic. As a music composer himself, Rothstein supports the theory that music and mathematics share common origins as discussed in his book Emblems of Mind. Rothstein is a Hitchcock aficionado.