Ben Boretz and Frank Brickle

Las Americas en Concierto
with The Village Trip & Marsyas Productions
Music by Ben Boretz & Frank Brickle at Greenwich House Music School

featuring

pianist Beth Levin
violinist Pauline Kim Harris
Bowers Fader Duo
guitarist Pascaul Araujo
e-guitarist Kyle Miller
Bodies Electric - John Chang, Aiden Lyons, Pascual Araujo, William Anderson
pianist Steve Beck
guitarist Daniel Conant
pianist Joan Forsyth
Since her age twelve debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Beth Levin has been celebrated as a bold interpreter of challenging works, from the Romantic canon to leading modernist composers like David Del Tredici and Frank Brickle, both of whom have written works for her. The New York Times praised her “fire and originality”, while The New Yorker called her playing “revelatory”.

Benjamin Boretz
-- Partita for Piano
-- O for e-guitar
-- A Question, a Rose for violin solo
--2 musics for Lukas Foss
--Group Variations II

Frank Brickle
--Plague Pieces
--For Ben [Boretz]
--Catullus 101 for 2 guitars and voice
--Genius Loci for mandoin & guitar
--Midnight Round for e-guitar choir

Milton Babbitt
--Danci

Pascual Araujo
--Tri-harmonic

Babbitt, Boretz & Brickle have all lived a life in music that gradually and inexorably built a musical hermeneutics, wherein a musical perspective/orientation triumphs over the hermeneutics of suspicion (suspicion of words). In this perspective, musical experience is the model or basis for a broader approach to difficult normative questions -- grounding and value structuring. Brickle was a serious student of Ben's Metavariations and Babbitt was a very early and enthusiastic reader of it.

Benjamin Boretz (benjaminboretz.org) was born in 1934. He was one of the first composers to work with computer-synthesized sound (Group Variations II, 1970–72). In the late 1970s and 1980s he converged his compositional and pedagogical practices in a project of real-time improvisational music-making, culminating in the formation at Bard College of the music-learning program called Music Program Zero, which flourished until 1995. Much of the work of this project is posted on the website bejaminboretz.org under the title THE INNER STUDIO. Central to this project were a series of duo keyboard conversations with J. K. Randall, some of which are issued on OPEN SPACE CDs.

His writings include Meta-Variations, Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought (1970) which addresses the epistemological questions involved in the cognition and composition of music, and propounds a radically relativistic/individualistic/ontological reconstruction of the musical creative process. LANGUAGE, AS A MUSIC (1976) is a verbal-vocal composition that explores the originary qualities of music and language.

In 1962 Boretz co-founded (with Arthur Berger) the composers' magazine Perspectives of New Music. In 1988 he, Elaine Barkin and J. K. Randall founded Open Space (a composers’ cooperative for recordings, books, and scores). The Open Space Magazine was started in 1999 (with Mary Lee A. Roberts), and is currently edited with Dorota Czerner, Tildy Bayar, Jon Forshee, Dean Rosenthal, and Arthur Margolin. He was principal music critic for The Nation from 1962 to 1970. His texts and music from the 1950s to the present are published and recorded by OPEN SPACE.

Composer Frank Brickle has pursued an eccentric path to the music he is writing now. He was born, musically speaking, into High Modernism: at Princeton, his chief teacher and mentor was Milton Babbitt, and he worked long and hard to master the esoteric style and techniques of that milieu. Between then and now, however, he has worked even longer and harder to mould those same arcane techniques to the needs of a much wider range of styles, from high down to low, and much in between. Brickle has created over eighty-five compositions, and a number of arrangements and transcriptions, for a wide range of instrumental ensembles and media.

Many of his earlier pieces employ synthesized and processed sound. Over time, however, he has concentrated increasingly on writing for instruments and the voice, as he has come to treasure especially the unique moment when the performers have begun to be comfortable with the score and start making the music their own. And while his music has been evolving a great deal over more than four decades, he has attached much importance to continuity: Rather than rejecting 20th-century Modernism, he has devoted much effort to adapting and transforming its methods and techniques into a more personal, expansive, intimate, and inviting dialect.
Guitarist/composer Pascual Araujo lives in Queens New York. He studied guitar with William Anderson at Queens College. He is a freelance musican and a member of the NYC Classical Guitar Orchestra and the The Villate Trip Guitar Orchestra.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Greenwich House Music School, 46 Barrow Street, New York, United States