Amphibian to Present NY Premiere of SUN SONGS: THREE MICRO-OPERAS, 3/7

Amphibian presents the New York premiere of Augusta Read Thomas' Sun Songs: Three Micro-Operas based on texts of Emily Dickinson featuring soprano Cyndie Berthézène and the Temple University Percussion Ensemble with video by John Gurrin. Gurrin's video tapestry for John Cage's String Quartet No. 1 was recently praised by The New Yorker's Alex Ross for its "deliquescing landscapes." This concert also features the world premiere of Matthew Greenbaum's surreal, ecstatic Headshot for video animation and electronic sound along with the New York premiere of AnDrew Taylor's On Coming Out and a piece by James Tenney. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's short film, Meshes of the Afternoon, will be screened.

Maya Deren/Alexander Hammid: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Matthew Greenbaum: Headshot WORLD PREMIERE!
James Tenney: Crystal Canon
AnDrew Taylor: On Coming Out NY PREMIERE!
Augusta Read Thomas: Sun Songs: Three Micro-Operas NY PREMIERE, Cyndie Berthézène, Soprano

Thursday, March 7, 2013 8pm
The Hi Art! Gallery
227 West 29th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues)
New York, NY
Admission: $15/$10 Students & Seniors
Subways: 1, 2, 3, A, C or E to 34th Street/Penn Station; B, D, F, M, N, Q or R to 34th Street/Herald Square

AMPHIBIAN, curated by the composer/video artist Matthew Greenbaum, provides a forum for new music and video art.

Augusta Read Thomas (born in 1964 in Glen Cove, New York) was the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1997 through 2006. In 2007, her ASTRAL CANTICLE was one of the two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Thomas has also been on the Board of Directors of the American Music Center (www.amc.net) since 2000, as well as on the boards and advisory boards of several chamber music groups. She was elected Chair of the Board of the American Music Center, a volunteer position that ran from 2005 to 2008.

Augusta is a passionate and devoted teacher. She is in very close touch with her students. Teaching is a natural extension of her creative process and of her avid enthusiasm for the music of others. She is a devoted listener to the music of others and as such has a broad and deep knowledge of the music of our time. For Augusta, working with students is a joy, a deeply felt commitment, and an integrated part of her creative existence.

Augusta was an assistant, then associate professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music from 1993- 2001, and from 2001 until 2006 was the Wyatt Professor of Music (Endowed Chair) at Northwestern University. She currently continues her involvement with Northwestern University by serving on the Dean's Music Advisory Board. In the summers she often teaches at the Tanglewood Music Center. Augusta was the Director of the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood in 2009. Frequently Ms. Thomas undertakes residencies in colleges, universities, and festivals across the country and in Europe. From time to time she teaches private composition lessons for advanced students. For 2009-2011 she taught and mentored 10 high school-aged composers in the state of Connecticut. Each composer had his or her new piece premiered by the New Haven Symphony in May 2011.

The American Academy of Arts And Letters (http://www.artsandletters.org) has elecTed Augusta Read Thomas to membership. She was inducted in May 2009. The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an Honor Society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers. The honor of election is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

The citation, given at her induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2009, reads as follows:

"Augusta Read Thomas's impressive body of works embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry. Championed by such luminaries as Barenboim, Rostropovich, Boulez, and Knussen, she Rose Early to the top of her profession. Later, as an influential teacher at Eastman, Northwestern and Tanglewood, chairperson of the American Music Center, and the Chicago Symphony's longest-serving resident composer, she has become one of the most recognizable and widely loved figures in American Music."

G. Schirmer, Inc. is the exclusive publisher of Thomas' music, and her discography includes 48 commercially recorded CDs. Please visit www.augustareadthomas.com/recordings.html for a complete list of the recordings.

Ms. Thomas lives in, and divides her time between, Chicago, IL, and Becket, MA.

Matthew Greenbaum was born in New York City in 1950. He studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky and holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Greenbaum's awards, fellowships and commissions include the Serge Koussevitzky Music Fund/Library of Congress, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Meet the Composer, the Fromm Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Penn Council on the Arts.

Performances of his works include the Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Leningrad Spring Festival, the Jakarta Festival (Indonesia), Hallische Musiktage, Ensemble SurPlus (Freiburg), Nuova Consonanza (Rome), Ensemble 21 (Odense), the Da Capo Chamber Players, Cygnus, Parnassus, Fred Sherry, Marc-André Hamelin,

David Holzman, Stephanie Griffin, the Momenta Quartet, Network for New Music, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Group for Contemporary Music, Orchestra 2001, Christopher Taylor and the Riverside Symphony and the Houston Symphony.

His works are published by Tunbridge Music and the American Composers Alliance. Recordings are available from Antes and CRI. An all-Greenbaum recording is available on the Centaur label.

Greenbaum is also a video animation artist. Works in this medium include ROPE AND CHASM for mezzo and video animation, an hour-long setting of excerpts from Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra; AUTOMAT for video animation/electronic music, and BITS AND PIECES, for tenor sax and video animation.

Dr. Greenbaum is a professor of composition at Temple University. For more information, visit www.matthewgreenbaum.com.