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ETHEL Announces Winter/Spring 2015 Season
By: BWW News Desk Dec. 05, 2014
ETHEL, America's Groundbreaking Indie-Classical String Quartet, Announces Winter/Spring 2015 Season.
ETHEL?January-April 2015 (Schedule Subject to Change)
Jan 23: Documerica, West Lafayette, IN
Feb 5: Composer Portrait / Missy Mazzoli, New York City, NY
Feb 20-21: Documerica, Sarasota, FL
Feb 26: Music of the Sun, Lawrence, KS
Mar 4: Grace, Edinboro, PA
Mar 2-7: Ensemble-in-Residence at Denison University, Granville, OH Mar 7: Tutti Festival, Granville, OH
Mar 21: Ecstatic Music Festival, New York City, NY
Apr 9: Documerica, New Orleans, LA
Apr 17: Documerica, Los Angeles, CA
Apr 22-25: Ensemble-in-Residence at Denison University, Granville, OH
ETHEL's Documerica Tours Nationwide
Described by MinnPost.com as "passionate, exciting, emotional, provocative," ETHEL's Documerica is a transcendent reflection of our nation's collective soul that fuses vintage photography together with contemporary music for a landmark work. Inspired by the EPA's 1970's Project Documerica-a massive snapshot of America showcased in an astonishing trove of images from the EPA archive captured during the recession-plagued tumultuous 1970s-this piece is a musical meditation accompanied by big sky vistas, ghost towns, mountains, and slices of urban environments, that captures America's complicated relationship to its land. New music by the members of ETHEL, as well as by acclaimed composer Mary Ellen Childs, GRAMMY Award-winning jazz drummer Ulysses Owens, Jr., Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate (Chickasaw Nation), veteran-activist and blues maven James "Kimo" Williams, is paired with stunning visuals by renowned projection artist Deborah Johnson. Documerica received its world premiere at the 2013 BAM Next Wave Festival.
JAN 23: Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
FEB 20-21: Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL
APR 9: New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, LA APR 17: UCLA, Schoenberg Hall, Los Angeles, CA
Composer Portrait | Missy Mazzoli
Premiering a new work commissioned by ETHEL, this Portrait highlights Mazzoli's diverse works for strings, from solo pieces for cello and violin to works such as Harp and Altar, a love song to the Brooklyn Bridge that fuses string quartet with pre-recorded electronics and the poetry of Hart Crane. Versatile and dynamic, American composer Missy Mazzoli has been called "Brooklyn's post-millennial Mozart" (Time Out New York).
FEB 5: Miller Theatre, New York City, NY
2015 Ecstatic Music Festival
Ecstatic Music Festival features A New Sounds Live co-presentation hosted by WNYC's John Schaefer titled ETHEL, Kaki King + John King = TRIFECTA. Three of today's top
contemporary composer/performers join forces for a finely hued collaborative concert. It's a trio unlike any other - a combination of the effusive, white-hot power of ETHEL, raw, emotionally charged picking and pounding of guitarist Kaki King, and complex harmonies and structures of composer/guitarist/violist John King. This eclectic program includes world premieres by all three artists written both individually and collaboratively, as well as some existing pieces, peppered by guitars, dobros, banjos and ouds.
MAR 21: Ecstatic Music Festival, Kaufman Center, New York City, NY
2015 Tutti Festival // Ensemble-in-Residence at Denison University
As the 2014-15 Denison University Ensemble-in-Residence, ETHEL returns to campus from March 2-7, during which they will be the featured performers for the Tutti New Music Festival, and again from April 22-25. As the school's first Ensemble-in-Residence, ETHEL engages the entire campus and the greater community in an exploration of music and other academic disciplines. The quartet coaches and mentors students in the music department as well as engages in a series of interdisciplinary activities with the Dance, Environmental Studies, and Communications Departments, the Homestead, the Newark Granville Youth Symphony, and Kendal of Granville.
MAR 2-7: Ensemble-in-Residence activities
MAR 7: Featured performer at Denison's Tutti Festival APR 22-25: Ensemble-in-Residence activities
Resident Ensemble of The Met Museum's Balcony Bar
Marking the first time that a prominent musical group has been featured in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Balcony Bar, ETHEL performs there on a regular basis, sometimes with friends and collaborators, throughout the year. To enliven the Balcony Bar programming, the quartet also selects musical groups from ETHEL's expansive list of notable colleagues to perform when the group is on the road. This new programming initiative provides a variety of musical experiences to Met audiences delivered by a range of ensemble types and compositions. The Balcony Bar serves appetizers and cocktails on the second floor balcony overlooking the Great Hall. The performances, consisting of three sets between 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. every Friday and Saturday evening, are free with Museum admission. Complete Balcony Bar performance dates can be found at metmusem.org.
JAN 16-17: Met Balcony Bar, New York City, NY JAN 29-20: Met Balcony Bar, New York City, NY FEB 27-28: Met Balcony Bar, New York City, NY
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ETHEL in Concert
ETHEL continues to tour critically-acclaimed signature programs including: Music of the Sun featuring Native American flutist Robert Mirabal; and Grace showcasing ETHEL's arrangements of music by Ennio Morricone and Jeff Buckley.
FEB 26: Music of the Sun, Lied Center, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
MAR 4: Grace, Louis Cole Auditorium, Edinboro University, Edinboro, PA ____________________________________________________________________________
About ETHEL
Acclaimed as "unfailingly vital" (The New York Times), "brilliant," "downtown's reigning string quartet" (The New Yorker), and "one of the most exciting quartets around" (Strad Magazine), ETHEL invigorates the contemporary music scene with exuberance, intensity, imaginative programming, and exceptional artistry.
At the heart of ETHEL is a quest for a common creative expression that is forged in the celebration of community. As cultural and musical "pollinators," the quartet brings its collaborative discoveries to audiences through multi-dimensional musical repertoire and community engagement.
Always striving to demonstrate the unifying power of music, ETHEL has initiated innovative collaborations with an extraordinary community of international artists including David Byrne, Bang on a Can, Todd Rundgren, Carlo Mombelli, Ursula Oppens, Loudon Wainwright III, STEW, Ensemble Modern, Jill Sobule, Dean Osborne, Howard Levy, Simone Sou, Andrew Bird, Iva Bittova?, Colin Currie, Thomas Dolby, Jeff Peterson, Oleg Fateev, Stephen Gosling, Jake Shimabukuro, Polygraph Lounge and Vijay Iyer.
For ten consecutive years, ETHEL has served as the Ensemble-in-Residence at the Grand Canyon Music Festival's Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project. The group's ongoing dedication to working with indigenous people and music culminated in the 2010 release of Oshtali: Music for String Quartet (Thunderbird Records), the first commercial recording of American Indian student works.
ETHEL's debut eponymous CD was a Billboard Magazine "Best Recording of 2003." Its second CD,
Light, ranked #3 on Amazon.com's "Best of 2006" and #5 on WYNC's "Best of 2006 Listener Poll." The group's most recent CD, Heavy, was released in 2012 to great critical acclaim. ETHEL has appeared as a guest artist on many albums, including The Paha Sapa Give-Back by Jerome Kitzke, (Innova, 2014), Cold Blue Two (Cold Blue Music, 2012), Glow by Kaki King (Velour Recordings, 2012); Blue Moth by
Anna Clyne (Tzadik, 2012); A Map of the Floating City by Thomas Dolby (Redeye Label, 2012); The Duke by Joe Jackson (Razor & Tie, 2012); John the Revelator: A Mass for Six Voices by Phil Kline (Cantaloupe Music, 2008) with vocal group Lionheart; and the Grammy Award-winning Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman (Concord Records, 2009).
Over the past five years, ETHEL has premiered 100+ new works by 20th- and 21st-century composers including: Phil Kline's "SPACE" at the gala reopening of Alice Tully Hall; "RADIO" by Osvaldo Golijov at the debut of WNYC Radio's Jerome L. Greene Space; ETHEL's TruckStop®: The Beginning and ETHEL's Documerica at BAM's Next Wave Festival; ETHEL Fair: The Songwriters at opening night of Lincoln Center's Out of Doors; "WAIT FOR GREEN" with choreographer Annie-B Parson commissioned by Arts Brookfield; and "HonBiBaekSan" by Dohee Lee at Meet the Composer's 3-City Dash Festival.
ETHEL's HomeBaked series has commissioned and premiered works by emerging NYC composers Andy Akiho, Hannis Brown, Anna Clyne, Lainie Fefferman, Dan Friel, Judd Greenstein, Matt Marks, and Ulysses Owens Jr. to date. ETHEL has debuted original scores in combination with new choreography by Aleksandra Vrebalov/Dusan Tynek Dance Company and Son Lux/Gina Gibney Dance; and works by contemporary music luminaries such as Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, John Zorn, Evan Ziporyn, Steve Reich, John King, Raz Mesinai, John Luther Adams, JacobTV, Hafez Modirzadeh, David Lang, Kenji Bunch, Don Byron and Marcelo Zarvos.
Founded in 1998 and based in New York City, ETHEL is comprised of Ralph Farris (viola), Kip Jones (violin), Dorothy Lawson (cello) and Tema Watstein (violin).
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