Light in Winter mixes music, art and science together in an explosive weekend for Ithaca New York January 28, 29, 30 2005
International performers will embrace an upstate NY winter again this year to take part in “Light in Winter”( www.lightinwinter.com), a three- day festival that celebrates the fusion of music, art and science, demanding its audience take in each performance with more than a shedding of overcoats. Last year’s audience sat enveloped in sight, sound and thought that stirred excitement and inspiration.
Light in Winter is the product of five years of planning, a partnership among the Ithaca community, Cornell University and Ithaca College that debuted last year to stunning success. Over 5,000 people attended performances at both college campuses, at the Historic State Theatre, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Museum of the Earth.
“This festival is an imaginative and exciting concept. It engages some of the most important intellectual and artistic resources of the Ithaca community, which is the foundation of Light in Winter,” says Founder and Artistic Director Barbara Mink. “Lectures by world-renowned scientists are exciting for any audience, but when they are paired with world-class musicians and artists, the result offers unexpected insights into new worlds of thought.”
The festival’s unique theme attracts performers from around the country who share an interest in collaboration. Light in Winter 2005 will feature Paul Winter and Manhattan Samba in a feast of Brazilian music, Carnival for the Rainforest. The Kronos Quartet will explore world music and thought with a discussion after the performance. The Dance of the Machines will feature a live performance of George Antheil’s controversial 1927 piece, Ballet Mecanique, played with the surrealist film by Fernand Leger for which it was originally written.. This scientific framework of machines and the geometry of motion will be explored further through an acrobatic dance performance that embodies the principles this work describes.
Subscription and individual tickets for the whole weekend are on sale now. Complete information on the program, calendar of events, tickets, area attractions, and photos from last year’s festival is available at www.lightinwinter.com
Kronos Quartet
For more than 30 years, the Kronos Quartet— David Harrington and John Sherba (violins), Hank Dutt (viola) and Jennifer Culp (cello)—has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet. In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential ensembles of our time, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 40 recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, collaborating with many of the world’s most eclectic composers and performers, and commissioning hundreds of works and arrangements for string quartet. Kronos’ work has also garnered numerous awards, including a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004) and “Musicians of the Year” (2003) from Musical America.
Kronos’ adventurous approach dates back to the ensemble’s origins. In 1973, David Harrington was inspired to form Kronos after hearing George Crumb’s Black Angels, a highly unorthodox, Vietnam War-inspired work featuring bowed water glasses, spoken word passages, and electronic effects. Kronos then went on to start to build a compellingly eclectic repertoire for string quartet, performing and recording works by 20th-century masters (BartĂłk, Shostakovich, Webern), contemporary composers (Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke), jazz legends (Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk), and artists from even farther afield (rock guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, Pakistani vocal master Pandit Pran Nath, avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn).
Integral to Kronos’ work is a series of long-running, in-depth collaborations with many of the world’s foremost composers. One of the quartet’s most frequent composer-collaborators is “Father of Minimalism” Terry Riley, whose work with Kronos includes the early Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector; Cadenza on the Night Plain and Salome Dances for Peace; and the recent Sun Rings, a multimedia, NASA-commissioned ode to the earth and its people, featuring celestial sounds and images gathered by the space agency. Kronos has also collaborated extensively with composers such as Philip Glass, recording his complete string quartets and scores to films like Mishima and Dracula (a restored edition of the Bela Lugosi classic); Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, whose works will be featured on a full-length Kronos CD release in 2005; Steve Reich, whose Kronos-recorded Different Trains earned a Grammy; Argentina’s Osvaldo Golijov, a MacArthur Fellow whose work with Kronos includes both composition and extensive arrangements for albums like Caravan and Nuevo; and many more. Kronos’ music has also featured prominently in other media, including film (Requiem for a Dream, 21 Grams, Heat, True Stories) and dance, with noted choreographers like Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp and the duo Eiko & Koma setting pieces to Kronos’ music.
The quartet spends five months of each year on tour, appearing in concert halls, clubs, and festivals around the world.
PAUL WINTER’s musical realm has long embraced the traditions of the world’s cultures, as well as the extraordinary voices of what he refers to as “the greater symphony of the Earth.” His concert tours and recording expeditions have taken him to thirty-seven countries and to wilderness areas on six continents, into which he has traveled on rafts, mules, dog sleds, horses, kayaks, sailboats, steamers, tug-boats and Land Rovers.
He has been involved in Ithaca’s Light in Winter since its inception, and has been a headlined performer with the festival since 2003. Paul’s journey started in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where he began playing drums, piano and clarinet after the age of five, and then fell in love with saxophone in the fourth grade.
At Northwestern University in Chicago Winter formed a jazz sextet, which won the 1961 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival and was signed to a contract with Columbia Records by the legendary producer John Hammond. In 1962 the Paul Winter Sextet was sent by the U.S. State Department on a six-month tour of twenty-three countries of Latin America. Brazil became a second home for Paul in the mid-’60s where he recorded several albums. Brazilian guitar, Afro-Brazilian percussion, and the symphonic music of Villa-Lobos inspired the aural-vision of the new ensemble he would call the Paul Winter Consort
Hearing the songs of humpback whales for the first time in 1968 further expanded Winter’s concept of a musical community. The haunting, bluesey communal celebration of a howling pack of wolves and the beautifully complex songs of the whales planted the seeds of ideas that blossomed on a number of Winter’s later albums. Winner of four Grammy Awards and six Grammy nominations, the timeless music of Living Music Records is usually recorded in Winter’s barn-studio surrounded by protected woodland, sometimes in natural acoustic spaces such as the Grand Canyon, and frequently beneath the vaults of the Cathedral of St John the Divine, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral where the Consort are artists-in-residence. It is here under the vast spans of the Cathedral that the Consort perform their major annual celebrations.
In recognition of his musical contributions to the environment, Winter has received a Global 500 Award from the United Nations, the Award of Excellence from the United Nations Environment Program, the Joseph Wood Krutch Medal for service to animals from the United States Humane Society, an honorary doctorate from Juniata College, Pennsylvania, and the Spirit of the City Award presented at New York’s Cathedral of St John the Divine.
September 29, 2004
Posted in: United States NorthEast