Wordless Music + Celebrate Brooklyn

Metropolis Ensemble will be opening for Deerhoof in Prospect Park on July 18, 2008, as part of the Wordless Music Series and Celebrate Brooklyn.

Metropolis Ensemble led by Artistic Director/Conductor Andrew Cyr and Wordless Music co-commissions The Rite: Remixed, a collaboration between three composers and live electronics producers, explodes the boundaries of live electro-classical music. Ryan Francis, Leo Leite, and Ricardo Romaneiro re-conceptualize the most revolutionary work of the 20th Century, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, through the lens of the latest sounds and technology from electronica. Combined with acoustic forces consisting of huge percussion and brass ensembles, 2 keyboards / 2 laptops, and electric bass, the remixed version will fuse a futuristic, rhythm-inspired sonic tableaux with a hyper-kinetic visual show.

The Metropolis Ensemble and The Rite: Remixed appears as part of the Wordless Music Series, which puts popular and classical artists together to tear down boundaries between performers and audiences of each. "At the moment, there is no more inventive music series in New York" (Alex Ross, The New Yorker).

The mercurial SF experimentalists Deerhoof, "the most creative band in indie rock today," (LA Weekly) forge a distinctive sound out of sophisticated improvisation, fierce dissonance, and weirdly catchy melodies.

Meet the Composer Gala

World-renowned soprano and leading new music muse Dawn Upshaw, and Meet the Composer Foundation have invited Metropolis Ensemble to perform the newly arranged Three Pieces from Piosenki by composer David Bruce at a gala dinner held in Upshaw's honor at the Manhattan Penthouse in New York City on May 28, 2008. The annual event organized by Meet the Composer honors a prominent American artist. The benefit committee includes Esa-Pekka Salonen, James Levine, Robert Spano, Osvaldo Golijov, John Adams, among others.

Upshaw was involved in the original Carnegie Hall commission of Piosenki, and has recently been championing Bruce's music, commissioning an opera from him for her students on the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard College, NY and scheduling performances of Piosenki herself in the fall. Other pieces selected for the event are by John Harbison and Tania Leon, both of whom will be in attendance.

More details about the gala...

Listen and learn about Piosenki...

The Sound Recyclers

During the second semester of Youth Works, Metropolis Ensemble's 40-week education program teaching music composition and creativity to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders at PS 11 School, Cristina Spinei has been concentrating our weekly lessons on rhythm. After learning about different rhythms and making our own percussion instruments, she thought it would be fun for the class to have a recording session.

Students performed rhythms that they composed and notated on instruments which they built themselves the week before. They constructed drums, shakers, and mallets out of everyday objects to better understand the various performance possibilities with percussion. One student even turned an ordinary drum into a maraca and added rubber bands to make it a "guitar." Everyone loved hearing their own music and performance on CD. At the end of the percussion solos, you will hear excerpts of The Sound Recyclers performing at their first "recording session."



Stay tuned for news about our year-end concert project this June at Youth Works, where Cristina will create an arrangement of the students' compositions to be premiered in a concert by the Metropolis Ensemble and offered to the entire PS 11 school community.

The Metropolis Ensemble would like to thank the van Otterloo Foundation for generously supporting our education initiatives, Youth Works and Wet Ink.

Ryan Francis: A Concerto Realized

This is part of our composer series on Ryan Francis. In this post, Ryan talks about his new piano concerto, the featured work in Metropolis Ensemble's upcoming concert Loop.

Composed concurrently to his Piano Etudes, Ryan Francis's Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra brings together two creative directions that he has been pursuing in his music. One is a post-minimalistic style driven by rhythmic relationships within a simple, diatonic harmonic scheme, exemplified by Remix for violin and piano. Straights of Anian represents the other, post-spectralist style, evoked through coloristic texture and less concerned with metric rhythm. In the Concerto, the solo piano and chamber ensemble engage in an intimate and dynamic dialogue, as in Luciano Berio's Points on the Curve to Find.



Music credits: Luciano Berio, Concerto II (Echoing Curves), Andre Lucchesini piano, Luciano Berio, London Symphony Orchestra; Red Seal; B000003GAZ. Ryan Francis, Remix, Wayne Lee violin, Daniel Spiegel piano. Ryan Francis, Straights of Anian, Pacific Orchestra. Ryan Francis, Digital Sustain for Piano, (MIDI rendering). Special thanks to Ania Dabrowski.