Peter Flint and friends play new trio music for accordion, cello, and woodwinds at

571Projects
551 West 21st Street, Unit 204A
New York, NY

Peter Flint, assisted by Avian Orchestra musicians Arash Amini (cello) and Alfonso Sturgeon (woodwinds), will premiere new music for his accordion trio at the intimate 571Projects gallery in Chelsea. Expect a quirky and engaging musical evening surrounded by edgy contemporary art as Peter puts his new-found accordion skills to the test and delves into new creative territory.

Purchase tickets now.

The River Peace is large-scale public participatory art installation by Thomas + Guinevere with the collaboration of composer John McDowell and presented by The Historic Distillery District in partnership with Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2010 and Le Labo. Saturday, October 2nd, 6:57pm to Sunrise.

The music, composed and directed by John McDowell, will be based on the principals of Indian Raga. Using this as a basis, but adapting to Western genres, musicians will collaborate on the workings and nuances of particular themes, memorize several brief segments and phrases and collaborate on their playing.

Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s concept and scope of Satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, The River Peace is a mass participatory sculptural movement and sound performance installation; a giant metaphoric river where the content is not water, but a mass human meditation and expression of peace.

It will take the form of a 1,500-foot long luminescent sculpture, stretching around and through the historic laneways in Toronto’s Distillery Historic District, which you are invited to help carry and move as a meditative expression while musicians and dancers create a mass orchestral and choreographic illusion of a river in constant flow – with everyone’s cell phones providing the installation’s luminosity.

The sculpture is made-up of 150 – 12ft light-weight telescopic poles/masts. Mallory Industries who make the poles, were also kind enough to cut and provide a longer 30″ version of a yard which will be attached to the top of the pole and to which will be secured (grommeted) the 1500 ft length of bubble-wrap through which the light from the public’s cell-phones will shine.

As the sculpture moves through The Distillery, an aerial perspective of The River Peace will be captured on video and projected onto the walls of Mill Street Rack House (a collaboration with Luminad and Rattail Films.)

(If you have a QR (Quick Response) reader installed on your phone, you can turn it into colour-shifting lighting instrument. A PDF menu of QR Codes will be available for download at www.thomasandguinevere.com starting September 30, so you can practice. The QR menu colour sequences will also be passed out on Nuit Blanche as well. But if if you can’t scan the codes, simple cell phone light is totally accepted.)

To see more details on how to participate or volunteer, please visit www.thomasandguinevere.com or  email [email protected]

New York’s Threefifty Duo has won a coveted space in CME Artist Services fall tour (Sep. 23 – Oct. 1) and will also be featured at the Lancaster Music Festival, October 8-10.

Now in its tenth consecutive year of putting on international showcases of original music spanning a multitude of genres, CME Artist Services presents two acts for their latest roots tour of some of the UK’s best small independent music venues. From Thursday Sept. 23rd through Sun. Oct. 1st the vocal and keyboard talent of precocious Vancouver based jazz artist Ali Milner, a 19-year-old from Canada is making her mark on the indie/jazz charts will be matched by New York’s award winning contemporary classical pair Threefifty Duo.

TOUR (all shows 9pm to 11pm unless otherwise stated):

Thur. 23rd Sept. White Hart (Atworth, SN12 8JR, 01225 702274)

Fri 24th Sept. Palladium Club (Bideford, EX39 2DE, 01237 478860)

Sat 25th Sept. Patriots MC (Crumlin, NP 114 PT, 01495 247178)

Sun 26th Sept (4pm) Coopers Arms (Pewsey, SN9 5BL, 01672 562495)

Mon 27th Sept. The Bell (Bath, BA1 5BW, 01225 460426)

Tues 28th Sept. The Sun (Lancaster, LA1 1ET, 01524 66006)

Thur 30th Sept. Penny Street Bridge Hotel (LA1 1XT, 01524 599 900)

Fri 1st Oct. Aspinall Arms (Mitton, BB7 9PQ, 01254 826223)

October 8-10 – see Lancaster Music Festival Schedule

Bassist Eleonore Oppenheim and sound artist Lesley Flanigan will perform as part of Music at First on Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 7:30pm. This new music series is held at First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, located at 124 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. Tickets are $10 at the door. Contact [email protected] for more info. Directions are at www.fpcbrooklyn.org.

MUSIC AT FIRST, curated by Wil Smith (composer who also serves as organist at First Presbyterian), occurs monthly, featuring two performers or ensembles per evening. A diverse mix of New York City’s best ensembles and performers, accessible to a wide audience of both community members and seasoned listeners, Music at First has been described by Steve Smith in The New York Times as a “vibrant, eclectic new-music series.” The second season opened earlier this fall with performances by Kyle Bobby Dunn and electric guitar quartet Dither. Future performers in the fall series will include pianist Isabelle O’Connell and Flutronix on November 5th; and a double bill of Phithia and Slow/Fast on December 3rd.

A tireless champion of new music, bassist ELEONORE OPPENHEIM is quickly gaining a reputation as an engaging soloist who has built a rich repertoire of solo pieces commissioned from a wide array of talented up-and-coming young composers. This program features solo bass with electronics — most pieces (composed by Florent Ghys, David Lang, Jenny Olivia Johnson, and Wil Smith) are electroacoustic and are written specifically for her. Equally at home in a variety of disparate genres, she has performed with the Philip Glass Ensemble, bandsemble Victoire, Signal Ensemble, Meredith Monk, the pioneering indie rock band the Instruments, Dan Zanes and Friends, and others. She has appeared at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Ravinia Festival, Spoleto Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Knitting Factory, the Barbican Centre, the Stone, and the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, to name a few. Eleonore was a Bang on a Can Fellow in 2006, and is an alumna of Juilliard and of the Yale School of Music.

Artist/vocalist LESLEY FLANIGAN sculpts electronic music by hand using the physicality of sound produced from her own handmade speaker feedback instruments and singing voice. Moving among a cluster of wires, speakers, and microphones, her music is a choreographed musical landscape of electric tones and rhythms resonating from noise, feedback, voice, and the actions of amplifying. In her first New York appearance after a European tour, she offers a special performance that highlights the reverberant architectural amplification of First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. Performing works from her album “Amplifications” and improvised solo voice pieces, her intimate concert will showcase the exquisite beauty of her voice layered among the feedback tones of her wooden speaker instruments.  Actively working within the experimental electronics and music scene of NYC, she collaborates and tours with R. Luke DuBois in Bioluminescence (for voice and video), the Loud Objects (live circuit construction), and Tristan Perich (soprano voice for “Lit” and “Untitled by Bernadette Mayer”). Her performance work has been presented internationally at theaters, museums, festivals and art spaces including the Guggenheim, Issue Project Room, Sonar (Barcelona, Chicago), Transitio MX (Mexico), and Bent (LA and NYC).

FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BROOKLYN (FPC) is committed to supporting the arts in the community, and has been noted by Lucid Culture blog as as “doing double duty as comfortable neighborhood hang and avant garde central for the budget conscious.”  FPC is an open and intentionally diverse congregation, by race, culture, age, theology, and sexual orientation. #

IKARUS CHAMBER PLAYERS: “L’HEURE BLEUE”

L’heure bleue, features the premiere of a fascinating, beautiful, and challenging duo for violin and cello by James Blachly that explores the foods, tastes, smells, and ambience of a summer evening as it fades into the late night and early morning, just as the summer fades into autumn.

Joining cellist Julia MacLaine for these concerts are pianist Ilya Kazantsev, her long-time duo partner, and Owen Dalby, a violinist whom she met while the two were members of Carnegie’s Ensemble ACJW and who plays with her in The Ikarus Chamber Players. Also on the program is Messiaen’s Theme and Variations for violin and piano, Debussy’s Sonate for cello and piano, and Ravel’s piano trio. The two performances, on Friday and Saturday September 17th and 18th and 8 PM, will be at the DUO Multicultural Arts Center, a charming, historic, and truly magical little theater on the Lower East Side. Tickets are $15 at www.smarttix.com. Wine and madeleines will be served!

(as listed in the New Yorker)

“The title of this concert by alumni of Carnegie Hall’s prestigious Ensemble ACJW refers to the “blue hour,” the time just before daybreak or nightfall. The venue, Duo Multicultural Art Center, has a tinge of blue as well: back in 1969, as the Fortune Theatre, it was used by Andy Warhol as a place to show gay porn films. (Joe Dallesandro was the projectionist.) Long since renovated and respectable, the Off Broadway spot hosts a concert featuring Francophone music by Messiaen, Debussy (the Sonata for Cello and Piano), Ravel (the Piano Trio), and James Blachly (the première of “La Fête de l’Été”).”