National Sawdust's Digital Discovery Festival Announces More Upcoming Streaming Concerts

National Sawdust's physical doors are still closed but, thanks to a generous grant from the Alphadyne Foundation, the mission of providing artists the resources and support they need to create and present new work continues with the Digital Discovery Festival, featuring over 100 artists from May through August. All past and present Digital Discovery Festival events are accessible on the newly-constructed Live@NationalSawdust website, as well as on Facebook Live, entirely free of charge.

Since its inception in late April, the Festival has released several free-to-watch events each week, including at least one newly-released full-length Archival Concert, two 30-minute taped-from-the-artist's-home Discovery Performances that showcase emerging artists in concert, and a performance-based Masterclass with an established artist discussing their pandemic experience and their vision for the future. Following their premiere dates, all events are readily accessible on the newly-constructed Live@NationalSawdust website, as well as on Facebook Live. Both sources also house videos from all the previous week's events.

All participating Discovery and Masterclass artists are paid $1000 per performer for each 30-minute event and receive gifts of relevant audio-visual equipment and livestream training to better prepare them for the immediate realities and future of the post-COVID live music world. In keeping with National Sawdust's reputation for the highest-quality A/V experience in our concert hall, the venue's staff provides strong oversight for sound and lighting and commercial-level post-production finishing. No other American music venue is currently providing this level of artistic financial support and polished content.

Information about upcoming and already available events follows. National Sawdust is currently seeking media support for individual performances and for the entirety of the Digital Discovery Festival. Please contact JohnS@nationalsawdust.org to inquire about high-resolution artist and venue images, exclusive embeddable clips from aired events, and opportunities for artist and curator interviews.

National Sawdust's Digital Discovery Festival: Upcoming Events

Friday, July 17 at 1pm: Jennifer Walshe (Masterclass Concert)
Friday, July 31 at 1pm: Meredith Monk (Masterclass Concert)
Wednesday, August 12 at 6pm: Robert Wilson (Discovery Concert)

Friday, July 17 - First Airing at 1PM

JENNIFER WALSHE

Stream at Live@NationalSawdust
Join us for a Masterclass conversation-performance hosted by vocalist Helga Davis and composer and National Sawdust co-founder Paola Prestini who will be joined by the AI-inspired Irish composer Jennifer Walshe, exploring the topic of how our rapidly advancing technological future is poised to shift the way we listen to and create music. "The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years" (The Irish Times) and "Wild girl of Darmstadt" (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York; the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include Aisteach, a fictional history of avant-garde music in Ireland; EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT, a work for voice, string quartet and film commissioned by the Arditti Quartet; and TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, which has been touring to critical acclaim. ALL THE MANY PEOPLS, her second solo album, was released on Migro Records in May 2019. Walshe is currently Professor of Experimental Performance at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart.

Friday, July 31 - First Airing at 1PM

Meredith Monk

Stream at Live@NationalSawdust
Join us for a very special Masterclass conversation-performance hosted by vocalist Helga Davis and composer and National Sawdust co-founder Paola Prestini who will be joined by the iconic and virtuosic Meredith Monk. Monk is a composer/performer and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of our time, she is a pioneer in what is now called "extended vocal technique" and "interdisciplinary performance." Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound, discovering and weaving together new modes of perception. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words.

Wednesday, August 12 - First Airing at 6PM

Robert Wilson

Stream at Live@NationalSawdust
Join us for a Digital Discovery Festival special event with the celebrated playwright and stage director Robert Wilson. For over fifty years, Wilson has been on the vanguard of experimental stagework, building an awe-inspiring curriculum vitae that includes landmark artistic collaborations with Philip Glass, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg and Tom Waits. For this very special event, scheduled on the 18th anniversary of the passing of John Cage, Wilson will present an appreciation of the revolutionary composer with a solo performance of his famed "Lecture on Nothing." Born in Waco, Texas, Robert Wilson is among the world's foremost theater and visual artists. His works for the stage unconventionally integrate a wide variety of artistic media, including dance, movement, lighting, sculpture, music and text. His images are aesthetically striking and emotionally charged, and his productions have earned the acclaim of audiences and critics worldwide. Wilson founded the New York-based performance collective The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds in the mid-1960s, and developed his first signature works, including Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974-1975). With Philip Glass he wrote the seminal opera Einstein on the Beach (1976). Wilson's artistic collaborators include many writers and musicians such as Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, Jessye Norman and Anna Calvi. He has also left his imprint on masterworks such as Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Brecht/Weill's Threepenny Opera, Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande, Goethe's Faust, Homer's Odyssey, Jean de la Fontaine's Fables, Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Verdi's La Traviata and Sophocles' Oedipus. "[Robert Wilson is] a towering figure in the world of experimental theater and an explorer in the uses of time and space on stage" says The New York Times

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