Wednesday, Mar. 29, 2023 • 11:30 a.m.
Weigel Auditorium
Columbus, OH
EIGHTH BLACKBIRD
Launched by six entrepreneurial Oberlin Conservatory undergraduates, this Chicago-based super-group has gained international recognition since winning the 1998 Concert Artists Guild Competition. The group has commissioned and premiered hundreds of works by composers including Viet Cuong, Bryce Dessner, Jennifer Higdon, Amy Beth Kirsten, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Pamela Z and Steve Reich, whose Double Sextet won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. A long-term relationship with Chicago’s Cedille Records has produced nine acclaimed recordings and four GRAMMY Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance, most recently in 2016 for Filament. Eighth Blackbird was named Music America’s 2017 Ensemble of the Year, were inaugural recipients of Chamber Music America’s Visionary Award and garnered the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. In 2017 they launched the Blackbird Creative Lab, a mentorship program for emerging artists. The name Eighth Blackbird derives from Wallace Stevens’s aphoristic poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.”.
Hailed as “one of the smartest, most dynamic ensembles on the planet” (Chicago Tribune), Eighth Blackbird [8BB] has been operating for 27 years, beginning in 1996 as a group of six undergraduates and continuing under the leadership of two founding members, Lisa Kaplan, Pianist | Executive Director, and Matthew Duvall, Percussionist | Artistic Director.
8BB is firmly entrenched in the fabric of creative music, cited as “a brand-name defined by adventure, vibrancy and quality” (Detroit Free Press).
Lina Andonovska, flutes
Zachary Good, clarinets
Maiani da Silva, violin
Laura Metcalf, cello
Matthew Duvall, percussion
Lisa Kaplan, piano
Eighth Blackbird is managed by Epstein Fox Performances LLC.
Lisa Kaplan is a Steinway Artist. Matthew Duvall proudly endorses Pearl Drums and Adams Musical Instruments, Vic Firth Sticks and Mallets, Zildjian Cymbals, and Black Swamp Percussion Accessories.
Accolades, premieres, recordings and more
Visit eighthblackbird.org
Convocation performance to be selected from the following:
Notes by Matthew Duvall
Viet Cuong: Electric Aroma (2017, arr. 2018)
The poet Pablo Picasso (yes, that Picasso) intrigued Viet with a line written in 1936:
10 october XXXVI (ii)
"...and if the weather is clear listen to the crack when in my chest breaks the perfume of the stick the arrow painted on the fan tossed on the bed the luminous alarmed panther sheen of her regard with an electric aroma, a most disagreeable noise spreading a dreadful odor of stars crushed underfoot"
— Pablo Picasso
Perhaps Viet thought to himself, “Well then, let's make disagreeable noises, shall we?" Imagining an electric aroma, he colors the instruments using extended techniques that sizzle and snap, such as tin foil in the vibraphone, metals buzzing on an upside-down snare drum, and wind players rudely playing multiple sounds simultaneously. Viet likes having fun. All of us are doing things the rules say we're not supposed to do.
Electric Aroma was commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting for the 2017 Blackbird Creative Laboratory, 8BB's professional development immersion.
Andy Ahiko: Erase (2011)
Andy is a synesthete and virtuoso. We commissioned erase and worked very closely with Andy to cultivate the work. During one of our rehearsals, Andy said that something was awry, but struggled to articulate it with words. So instead, he went to the piano and played the parts the way he imagined and then did the same with the percussion part. No words needed. Such a pure musician — thinking, feeling, and speaking through music as his language.
erase is a machine. The kind of machine we fear will overtake humans in the future. A machine growing its sounds, expressions, and very questionable intentions.
erase was commissioned for Eighth Blackbird by the American Composers Forum and MakeMusic, Inc.
Jonathan Bailey Holland: The Clarity of Cold Air (2013)
Jonathan (b. 1974) is elegant in everything he does. He and Matthew (the percussionist on the stage) have been friends since high school. It is a friendship that has lasted decades, in part because Jon writes extraordinarily beautiful music, and Eighth Blackbird loves to play it.
The Clarity of Cold Air is atmospheric. Pristine. It might be the most difficult work on this program because every sound is transparent, and nothing is wasted. We don’t often consider that extremely soft music is incredibly difficult. You may hear it as abstract ambience, or you may create a sublime narrative evocative of the title, or you can do as you prefer because listening to music isn’t anyone else’s experience. It’s yours.
Ned McGowan: The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures (2016)
It’s kinda hard to describe Ned. Composer, teacher, flutist, improviser and curator. But really an artist in a broadly encompassing conceptual scope. He’s known for rhythmic virtuosity and vitality. You’re as likely to find him in Bangalore as Rotterdam creating self-contained musical worlds through a process of cross-genre translation.
The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures is Ned’s aural imagining of Bosch’s super-weird “The Garden of Earthly Delights” interpolated through the metal band Meshuggah, south Indian Carnatic rhythms, Steve Reich, Colin Nancarrow, Frank Zappa, John Zorn and George Crumb.
Wut? Let’s just say that it’s all you, Ned. There is no comparison. It’s all you.
* Nerd alert: The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures has a recurring rhythmical spine composed of a series of groups with the lengths 7 7 5 5 5 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3. These groups are repeated, built upon and altered throughout, an influential rhythmic landscape on top of which much of the music travels. But wait, there’s more: the length of the groupings adds up to 60, which is neatly divisible by 3, 4 and 5 (plus a few other numbers), another source for composition material. Ultimately these factors result in a composition that gives the performers anxiety-induced heart palpitations.
The Garden of Iniquitous Creatures was commissioned for Eighth Blackbird by De Doelen Rotterdam.
Accolades, premieres, recordings and more
Accolades include:
Four Grammy Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance | The MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions | The Concert Artists Guild Competition Grand Prize | The Musical America Ensemble of the Year | The Chamber Music America Visionary Award | The APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards Performance of the Year.
In addition to chamber music performance, the members of 8BB value their roles as curators, educators, and mentors. Beginning exclusively as a chamber music ensemble, 8BB has expanded in recent years to represent numerous mission-driven initiatives.
In 2017, Eighth Blackbird inaugurated its boldest initiative yet: The Blackbird Creative Lab
The Blackbird Creative Lab [The Lab] is an inclusive two-week professional development immersion for performers and composers, and an ongoing community of practice for contemporary classical musicians and composers. The Lab fosters expansive artistic vision, collaboration, mentorship, and building a viable life as an artist. It continues its mission beyond the two-week immersion to find opportunities for its network of alumni to present in professional engagements. The Lab’s next iteration will be hosted in May 2023 at Yerkes Observatory in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
In 2020, 8BB introduced The Chicago Artists Workshop
The Chicago Artists Workshop [CAW] was conceived with the purpose of creating work for artists during a time when the performance industry was enormously threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic. When work for artists disappeared, CAW created paying livestream engagements for artists during the stoppage of 2020–2021. CAW continues as a presenting series in both live venues and livestream platforms. It is a determinedly cross-genre series defined not by genre or discipline, but by extraordinary caliber and creativity.
Additional Accolades Include:
Commissions and World Premieres of hundreds of works by established and emerging composers. In addition to traditional chamber music commissioning successes, 8BB has pioneered two particularly noteworthy genres in the classical chamber music field:
Fully Produced Theatrical Chamber Music Productions:
David Lang, Composition As Explanation | Amy Beth Kirsten, Columbine’s Paradise Theater | Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire | David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolff, Singing in the Dead of Night | Dan Truman, Olagon | Steve Mackey, Slide.
Chamber Ensemble Concertos:
Jennifer Higdon, On A Wire | Kinds of Kings, Nine Mothers | Viet Cuong, Vital Sines | David Schober, Concerto for Sextet and Orchestra.
An Extensive Recording Catalog
Round Nut Tool | Thirteen Ways | Divinum Mysterium | Strange Imaginary Animals | Lonely Motel | Meanwhile | Filament | Hand Eye | Olagón | When We Are Inhuman | Double Sextet | On A Wire / Q.E.D. | Singing in the Dead of Night.
Recent World Premieres
2022, Composition As Explanation, fully staged theatrical production. Composed by David Lang, with stage direction by Anne Bogart, and featuring text by Gertrude Stein.
2022, Nine Mothers, concerto for 8BB and orchestra. Commissioned by and premiered with The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Composed by Kinds of Kings, a collective of composers including Gemma Peacocke, Shelley Washington, and Maria Kaoutzani.
2022, Vital Sines, concerto for 8BB and Wind Ensemble. Commissioned by and premiered with the U.S. Navy Band. Composed by Blackbird Creative Lab alum, Viet Cuong.
2022, Metamold, composed by Bekah Simms. Commissioned by the Barlow Foundation.
Recent Releases
2019’s When We Are Inhuman (7d03d/Secretly Canadian), was a collaboration with The National’s Bryce Dessner and Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) that features new arrangements by Lisa Kaplan, who also co-produced the album with Dessner.
2020’s Singing in the Dead of Night (Cedille Records), written for Eighth Blackbird by Michael Gordon and Pulitzer Prize winners David Lang and Julia Wolfe, was described by Cleveland Classical as “propulsive, chaotic, and remarkably poignant.”
Long-Term Institutional Partnerships
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago | The University of Chicago | Northwestern University | The University of Cincinnati | The Curtis Institute of Music | The Interlochen Center for the Arts | The University of Richmond | The Ojai Music Festival
The name “Eighth Blackbird” derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens’s evocative, imagistic poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.”
Eighth Blackbird is managed by Epstein Fox Performances LLC.
Lisa Kaplan is a Steinway Artist. Matthew Duvall proudly endorses Pearl Drums and Adams Musical Instruments, Vic Firth Sticks and Mallets, Zildjian Cymbals, and Black Swamp Percussion Accessories.
— Matthew Duvall
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