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.
“Those early days in the Village were great,” Bob Dylan told his biographer Robert Shelton around 1970, shortly after he had moved into his townhouse on MacDougal Street, trying to recreate the magic of the early 1960s, when there was “music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.”
Straighten your shades Daddy-o, Marc Catapano’s walking tour goes right through the heart of Beatnik Greenwich Village. Visit the hottest spots, where the Beatniks made the scene and meet some of its hippest characters, like Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock, Lenny Bruce, and Diane DiPrima. Be there or be square!
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.
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.
The music of Edward Kennedy Ellington and William Thomas Strayhorn has long been a staple of both the Great American Songbook and the jazz lexicon. This program of lovingly curated music contains some cherished classics, such as “Mood Indigo,” “Prelude to A Kiss,” and “Take The ‘A’ Train,” but also delves into some of the “deeper cuts” like “Star-Crossed Lovers,” “Absinthe (Lament for An Orchid),” and “Johnny Come Lately.”
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.
