American Primitive & Inventors of Genius Weekend

The Village, long home to many musical innovators, has always pushed the boundaries of arts, activism, and ideas. This year, The Village Trip is proud to welcome musical scholars and composers from twelve countries to give talks, demonstrations, lecture recitals and concerts touching on American Primitive and those "inventors of genius" who changed the conversation. Come be part of it.

Composers and musicologists from around the world gather to present their music and thoughts on the microtonality of American Primitive and other new directions, with attention to developments in Greenwich Village through visionaries like Cage, Harrison and Partch. Agustín Castilla-Ávila—a tireless advocate for composers around the world who are exploring new and old tuning systems, and President of the Ekmelic Society of Salzburg—will preside.

Grammy Award-winning guitarist John Schneider explores another side of the Greenwich Village music scene, looking at works by the intrepid Harry Partch and Lou Harrison and others and their engagement in world music and the "American Primitive”. Schneider's work is "of a caliber that kept this listener in a state of continuous astonishment" Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times.

Pianist Eliza Garth performs Sonatas and Interludes, John Cage’s 1947 masterpiece for prepared piano, a composition regarded as a formative piano work of the 20th Century. St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery is known and loved as a gathering place for innovative musicians, dancers, and poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Cage.

Kevin Gorman, praised for his “passion, technical facility and explosive tonality,” (Fanfare Magazine) is a champion of the piano music of maverick composer, poet, painter William Bland. He has performed and recorded Bland's epic cycle of piano sonatas for Bridge Records to great acclaim.

GuitarFest 24 expands on American Primitive, with the wildly inventive Ictus Novus, the Curtis Guitar Quartet, soprano Sharon Harms, and many of New York’s best guitarists. It features music by American Primitives John Fahey, and Julián Carrillo and works by Paul Lansky, Kyle Miller, David Amram, Agustín Castilla-Ávila, and Gary Philo, among others.

Celebrating ground-breaking composers Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives at 150 with the Hayley/Laufer duo’s stunning interpretation of the lushly expressionistic Book of the Hanging Gardens, and Ives’ violin and piano sonata. Plus Varied Trio and early keyboard music by unlikely Schoenberg students  Lou Harrison and John Cage. 

Renowned duo pianists Susan Grace and Steven Beck perform works by Lou Harrison, John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg, John Adams and Fred Lerdahl who, with linguist Ray Jackendoff, developed the Chomsky-inspired generative theory of tonal music, an endeavor inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s Norton Lectures, given at Harvard in 1973.