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Friday. 7pm.

BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
2155 CENTER STREET BERKELEY 94704

HELLO, EVERYONE!

After Everything has a concert! This Week! Sarah Cahill has invited us to perform in her concert series Full, a concert which occurs each month on the night of the full moon at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
(Ticket included with price of admission. Seating is limited!)

I’m very excited to be working with a great roster of performers doing a wide variety of pieces, broadly divided into

THE SACRED & THE CELEBRATORY!

Flow my Tears by John Dowland, a renaissance lutenist who wrote gorgeous songs on a variety of subjects; this song/poem about sorrow and pain is one of his finest. “You shadows that in darkness dwell,/ learn to condemn the light/ Happy, happy they that in hell/ feel not the world’s despite”

A piece written by the up and coming wonderful Katie Balch–a composer I only recently discovered– a mini song cycle on a magnificent text by Rimbaud. Unusually set for voice and bass, this song exists in a world of magic and unreality, sometimes conveying a more vivid meaning than our own reality.  “I stretched ropes from bell tower to bell tower, garlands from window to window, chains of gold from star to star, and I dance”. It’s hard for me to read that and not smile for the joy of dancing and the power of imagination.

Another text-based work, with poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is from our very own Preben Antonsen. He has been speaking to me about this piece for a while- and when I first saw the score, I immediately understood why: it carries the sensibility of Schubert, affixed with a profound love of everyday magic.


Lou Harrison, a staple of After Everything since its inception, whose joyous sense of the world is absolutely encapsulated in this two movement suite for Flute and Percussion. The first, a mournful song, Ariadne Abandoned, followed immediately by The Triumph of Ariadne and Dionysos.  Another piece clearly in our celebratory strand, Charles Wourinen’s Turetzky Pieces. Written in the 60s for bassist Bertram Turetzky, the piece combines modernist language with a clownish, circus sensibility, with every other movement containing some sort of musical joke. When I listen to this piece, I feel like I am watching Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie, with everything wonderfully exaggerated.

Back on the sacred side: Maknongan, a solo double bass piece by Scelsi, a practicing Buddhist, who found religious beauty in the simplicity of a single note. Many of his pieces explore Buddhist concepts from that perspective. 


And lastly, Stay On It by Julius Eastman, a piece which perfectly combines both the Sacred and the Celebratory, as if the dance itself is a sacred ritual, inspiring everyone to new, feverish heights. The core theme is looped endlessly, with people adding their own licks and figures, creating a hodgepodge of sound and celebration., This piece takes inspiration from Eastman's roots in jazz, experimentalism, minimalism, and formalism. I encourage you to investigate Julius Eastman’s life and music-  it has been a truly rewarding experience for me personally.  

See you at the Museum!
                  –Matthew Cmiel

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