The weather looks a bit iffy tomorrow, but the rain should hold off just long enough for Metropolis Ensemble's 2nd annual outdoor musical extravaganza Biophony at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
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About the Artist
Alec Toku Whiting is a composer and improviser from Yokohama, Japan, currently based in Boston, Massachusetts. He makes music on the koto, electronic instruments, and the computer. His work results from the investigation and synthesis of intuitive structures and abstract formal processes in pursuit of a multiplicitous musical event. Alec has collaborated with musicians including Mark Fell, Wendy Eisenberg, Lina Tullgren, and Ted Reichman. His album with Lina Tullgren, "Unfamiliar Ceilings", was released on Astral Spirits in April 2022. More »
Bangsokol is the first major symphonic work that addresses the traumas of the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s.
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About the Artist
Andrew Lee was born in Winnipeg to Korean ancestry and currently lives and works in New York. His various activities encompasses sound, performance, video, drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. He writes, records and performs music as Holy Hum. More »
Travel back in time to experience any Flame Keeper's work. The most recent artists are at the bottom of this page.
About the Artist
Jonathan Starks is an active drummer, producer, and improviser based in Boston, MA. He plays drums in several bands, including the acclaimed Birthday Ass, and produces club adjacent soundscapes on his computer.
Travel back in time to experience any Flame Keeper's work. The most recent artists are at the bottom of this page.
About the Artist
Anna RG is an artist whose work moves outward from her immersion in communities of traditional music, and a decade of apprenticeships with elder masters of banjo and fiddle and ballads in rural Appalachia. Her eight year multimedia collaboration with ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle was heralded “a radical expansion of what folk songs are supposed to do” by the New Yorker, and culminated in a release by Smithsonian folkways of re-imagined New England ballads. Performance highlights include Carnegie Hall, Newport Folk Festival, Cafe Oto, Big Ears Festival, NPR’s Tiny Desk, Hirshhorn Museum, The BBC and The Stone, and residencies at the Smithsonian and the MacDowell Colony. As a fiddler, she has worked with musicians from a broad span of genres, from free improvisation to songs to Kentucky square dance bands -- including Glen Hansard, Henry Jamison, Timo Andres, Sarah Hennies, Susan Alcorn, Carlo Costa, Jim White, the Aizuri Quartet and Ellen Fullman. She is currently working on an MFA in Sculpture at Bard College, in addition to her daily work of care as an artist living with chronic illness. She is a proud member of RAMPD—Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities, and lives in Lenapehoking (Queens.) More »
What began as an attempt by Matthew Evan Taylor to collaborate with fellow musicians during the isolation of the pandemic ended up being a yearlong project that culminated in an evening performance at the Met.
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About the Artist
Jacob “NTHNL” Rudin is a classically trained composer and pianist turned multi-flutist, producer and sound-healing practitioner. Having created electronic and acoustic music in a wide variety of contexts since 2012, Jacob works in both the healing and contemporary music worlds, drawing on a rich sonic practice that involves experimental sound design, field recording, and virtuosic performances on a wide range of instruments. He currently lives in Queens, NY, where he teaches piano lessons, hosts regular soundbaths throughout the city and gigs with his band, NTHNL. More »
I learned that there are no two identical immigration stories, and they are always intertwined with all other things going on in life, things I just wouldn’t know without doing this project.
Travel back in time to experience any Flame Keeper's work. The most recent artists are at the bottom of this page.
About the Artist
Ted Reichman was born in Aroostook County, Maine in 1973. He began studying jazz piano at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School in 1987 and went on to study experimental music and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University with Alvin Lucier, Sumarsam, and his most important early mentor, Anthony Braxton. At Braxton’s urging, Reichman began playing accordion, the instrument that would become the basis of his work in music. After beginning his professional career with Braxton while still a student, Reichman moved to New York City where he worked with a panoply of musical greats in styles ranging from improvised music and jazz to rock and roll and various forms of Jewish music. In addition to his work with Braxton, which includes the first recordings and performances of “Ghost Trance Music,” he is best known for his ten-year-plus tenure with John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet. He also founded the music series at alt.coffee which would evolve into Tonic, one of the world’s most crucial venues for avant-garde music. He has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory for over ten years and spent four years as an Assistant Professor of Film Scoring at Berklee. He currently lives outside Boston where he records, produces and mixes records and composes music for films. Photo by Lisa Rinzler. More »
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About the Artist
Patrick Burke writes music for piano, film, orchestra, and chamber ensembles, including NOW Ensemble, which he co-founded in 2004. His music, while deeply spiritual, is also “glittering fun…at once very sophisticated and instantly accessible” (Third Coast Digest). Patrick likes to collaborate with musicians from other genres and traditions, as he did in the Independent Music Award-winning album Rounder Songs, which was co-composed with his wife, old-time musician and songwriter Emily Pinkerton. More »
Travel back in time to experience any Flame Keeper's work. The most recent artists are at the bottom of this page.
About the Artist
Geoff Pynn is a philosophy teacher, occasional church musician, and electronic music hobbyist in the Midwest. He started playing the piano at age five, guitar at 14, and ukulele at 42. An aesthetic gourmand, Geoff's compositions include minimalist piano loops, lo-fi ambient drones, mangled sample-based experimental noise, glitchy beats, shimmery blissed-out synth chorales, and bleep-and-bloop modular improvisations. His Flamekeepers contributions incorporate field recordings made in a local toy shop, samples of classic Italian giallo scores, AI-generated text-to-speech readings of ancient philosophy texts, sequenced tape hiss, piano, and a variety of inexpensive electronic instruments. More »
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About the Artist
Amelia Brey’s music has been described as possessing “haunting beauty” and “a deep, disquieting power” (National Sawdust Log). Her wind quintet, AR(i/e)AS, was the recipient of a BMI Student Composer Award; her orchestral work, Two, was premiered by the Juilliard Orchestra under the direction of Jeffrey Milarsky as a winner of the Juilliard Composers’ Orchestra Competition. Other accomplishments have included premieres by Ensemble Dal Niente, National Sawdust Ensemble, Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, and members of Ensemble Intercontemporain and the New York Philharmonic, in addition to commissions from Essential Voices USA, Metropolis Ensemble, and New York Virtuoso Singers. Brey serves as the Composition Coordinator for zFestival, a virtual new music summer course for composers, performers, and audio engineers, as well as the chief editor of the Charlotte New Music Opportunity Newsletter. Hailing from Tallahassee, Florida, Brey studied with Michael Slayton and Stan Link at Vanderbilt University as the Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Honor Scholar in Music; she is currently a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at the Juilliard School, where she studies with Robert Beaser. Her works are published by Hal Leonard and Harp Column Music. More »
Composer and saxophonist Matthew Evan Taylor's Life Returns is an evening-length composition that draws on African American, South Indian, and European musical practices.
Han Chen speaks with composer Hsu Chiayu, whose work blends Chinese and western techniques and bond over their shared experience as Taiwanese immigrants.
Travel back in time to experience any Flame Keeper's work. The most recent artists are at the bottom of this page.
About the Artist
Sequoia Sellinger is a composer and collaborative theater artist based in New York City. She is invested in new work that functions as a vehicle to reimagine the possibilities of what the world could be. She is a graduate of SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music where she studied classical composition under Laura Kaminsky and Du Yun. She has been a composer at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop and the New Dramatists Composer Librettist Studio. She is a member of Maestra and the Dramatists Guild. Recent works include: Earth First (Macdowell Fellowship), Impossible Green (The York Theatre), Silent Springs (BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop), History of Traitors According to Sydney (The Wild Project) and is currently being supported by the Shubert Organization’s Artistic Circle. and Gravity of Me Gone (Ars Nova). More »
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About the Artist
Larissa Maestro is a cellist, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and composer originally from Ithaca, New York. Her resume is broad and varied, a testament to her deep love of creation, expression, and collaboration. Since her arrival in Nashville, TN in 2007, Larissa has co-founded a community orchestra (The Nashville Concerto Orchestra), joyfully screamed 90s covers to thousands of people with My So-Called Band, started a Star Trek podcast (Into the Wormhole with Larissa and Lauren), created countless string arrangements for recordings and live performances, and appeared on stages big and small, in person and on network television. The list of artists with whom she has collaborated and/or performed is as diverse as her interests: Eminem, Margo Price, Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings, Mickey Guyton, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Jake Wesley Rogers, H.E.R. & Daniel Caesar, Toni Braxton, Cam, Brandi Carlile, and more. She is currently writing and recording a solo pop project that she has named MZTZA, and touring with 3x 2022 Grammy award nominee and magical human, Allison Russell.
As a composer, Larissa has used chamber music to express her rich inner world, relationship to her neurodivergence, and identity as a Filipinx woman. Her compositions have been performed by Julian Schwarz (cello), Patrick Dailey (countertenor), ALIAS Chamber Ensemble, Lockeland Strings, La Vie Quartet, The Nashville Concerto Orchestra, and members of the Nashville Symphony. Her first work for dance, Fortitudine, a collaboration with choreographer Mollie Sansone, premiered in February 2022 with the Nashville Ballet. More »
Credits
Matthew Evan Taylor, composition and saxophone
David Adewumi, trumpet
Developed and produced by Metropolis Ensemble
Founder/Artistic Director
Andrew Cyr
Videography
Sam Kann (MN)
Phong Tran (NY)
Editor: Christopher Botta
Juniper Creative LLC, Art
Commissioned and produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Live Arts
This program is made possible by the Adrienne Arsht Fund for Resilience through Art.
Matthew Evan Taylor: Postcards to The Met
Postcard 12: February 2022
Blog Post — Postcard 12
Postcard 12 was filmed in Chesterfield, MA.
May 10,2021 and 1 Rivington / Candice Madey Gallery
February 6, 2022
Matthew Evan Taylor didn’t want to end the Postcard series by just fading away. He wanted to send it off with a statement. So, for the final Postcard, written for Dave Adewumi, he chose to explore a feeling of confidence: The piece grows from a soft, lyrical opening into a groove that has an assured tone. Taylor describes the music as akin to emerging from winter’s hibernation and in the music’s boisterous melodies, you can feel the excitement for the warm months to come.
The score is primarily text-based—a technique Taylor has used for a couple of other Postcards, like Postcard 3. He also gave Adewumi a few pitch cells to use for his improvisation. Adewumi had used pitch cells before, but it had been a while. Because of this technique, playing the Postcard got Adewumi out of his shell improvisationally and encouraged him to try playing in new ways. He recorded the work in a large art gallery space, where there was quite a bit of reverberation, after only having listened to Taylor’s recording a couple of times. He wanted to maintain the feeling of a live improvisation, where you’re doing everything on the spot, even though it was a virtual collaboration.
Though this is the last Postcard in Taylor’s series, the project isn’t quite done yet: There will be a live performance of the full work, Life Returns, that Taylor’s been composing throughout the year on March 24 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And parts of the project will continue to live on in Taylor’s work: He’s continuing to use the techniques he explored through the series, like interlocking melodies and endurance, in new commissions.
Vanessa Ague
February 21, 2022
Program Notes
Postcard 12
To David –
Each day
we move
farther
away from the solstice,
the more the promise of light and life g r o w s.
It is our job to shake off the lethargy and introversion that served us well
~during the dark time~
and stroll confidently into the warmth, the green, and the cacophony of rebirth.
Featured
Watch recent Postcards
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About the Artist
From Hendersonville, TN. Writes Music. More »
Jakub Ciupinski, creator of Flame Keepers talks about the exploration of time and the intersection of music and technology during a pandemic.